Pieces of My Mother (3 page)

Snow falls, dusting the roadways and tall evergreens surrounding Seattle. It's close to midnight by the time I pull into the gravel driveway at my mom's house in Olympia. It's a two-story farmhouse set off a rural road outside town. A pack of dogs all bark in unison and greet me with bodies and tails wagging.

My aunt Joanna—an eccentric, lovely, and smart shrink who is intensely fascinated with botany and probably one of the most well-traveled people I know—appears in the front doorway. The creases around her mouth deepen into a smile of empathy. We hug. Of all the people who could be here, I'm most grateful for her presence. And I feel for her.

When my mom dies, my aunt will have lost all of her immediate family. Their brother, David, was killed in an avalanche along with six other boys when he was fifteen in one of the most tragic climbing accidents of the century. Their mother (my grandmother Joan) drank herself to death within five years of the accident. My grandfather died some years later from lung cancer. Now, Joanna will watch her only sister die from the same alcohol-related complications as their mother.

“Why don't you pop in the bedroom and see your mom?” my aunt suggests.

“How is she?”

“She's been asleep all day, but she smiled when I belted out a song we used to sing as kids.”

I don't feel prepared to see my mom. I'm still trying to keep my emotions intact, and I'm uncertain where to gather fortitude right now. Maybe leaving my family on Christmas wasn't the right thing to do. Then I remind myself why I'm here and how quickly she could go.

The hardwood floor squeaks beneath my feet as I enter the room where my mom is sleeping. She is a heap of blankets. A mop of sandy hair frames her face and open mouth. Her skin is yellow gray. The folds around her eyes are as delicate as crepe paper.

Where is my beautiful mother?

My mind retreats to another day when she was a Katherine Hepburn look-alike with her intense blue eyes, swept-up hair, and taut cheekbones. I recall her confident gaze in the mirror as she painted a line of frosty blue shadow across her lids—the strap of her red camisole dangling from her shoulder. Her arms were strong then from riding horses, tending gardens, or pushing dairy cows aside on the farm where she worked one summer.

I sit next to her on the edge of the bed, keeping my voice low. “Hi, Mom. It's me, Melissa. Merry Christmas.”

She opens one eye at me, the other sealed shut. Her eye, a pale blue marble, lingers on me a bit longer, and then she makes a shallow, primitive sound from her throat. Uncertain of how to help, I call out for my aunt.

She rushes in and lifts a cup of water with a thick straw to my mother's dry lips. Her mouth can barely work around the straw, and most of the water travels into the crease of her neck.

“Melissa is here to see you. She's right here, you know,” my aunt attempts to explain.

No response.

“Hi, Mom, it's me.” I wait. “It's me,” I say again, and now I feel like a needy puppy jumping up and down, trying to get her attention. She doesn't recognize me.

“She's pretty heavily medicated,” my aunt says gently. “Maybe she'll come around in the morning.”

My mom doesn't recognize my face or my voice. I tell myself it's okay, even though it's not. What matters is that I've made it to Olympia. She's still alive and just as mysterious as ever.

• • •

I drag my suitcase upstairs to the office bedroom in my mom's house. There is a small bed, an old oak desk, a few hundred books, and an assortment of shells, torn butterfly wings, and small animal skulls. I sit at her work space, swivel around in the chair, and feel a rush of hopelessness in being surrounded by these bits and pieces of a life collected—a life I never really knew—and all the books she's loved.

Years ago, in an attempt to understand her, I began to put all my thoughts down in lined notebooks. Back home, I have forty-seven spiral notebooks stuffed underneath my desk. Every page circles back to my mom leaving—then and now. It's not healthy, I know. It's affecting who I am as a mother. Half of me wanders in the past, and the other half overcompensates by striving to be the perfect mother—the one who will never leave.

When I first began to fill the notebooks, I was only attempting to understand my mom's leaving. But memory is as random as the wildflowers that grew behind our yellow house—a purple lupine here, a patch of California poppies there, a circle of yellow buttercups—and hidden among them, the slivers of broken glass that sliced our feet open. I was searching for the memories that could rescue me. I believed that if I could dig up the goodness in the things that haunted me, there was a chance that I could save my mom, my brothers, my dad, myself. Now I think that if I can just get the words right on the page, maybe I can keep her alive.

When I've looked at those notebooks, it has crossed my mind more than once that I may have some kind of mental imbalance. I've read that a particular temporal-lobe tumor can bring on hypergraphia, which causes an intense and obsessive need to write. I watch for obsessive behaviors in myself because addiction bleeds from almost every branch of our family tree.

As I look around my mother's office room, I wonder about the things she has collected and chosen to keep over the years. Beneath her desk is a sturdy metal filing cabinet. I slide the file drawer open. It has the mechanics and heaviness of what I imagine a morgue drawer to be like. The scent of paper and dust flies out of the drawer, as it would from an old book that has been closed for a very long time. I feel guilty about looking in her personal files but can't resist my compulsive need for information. Anything that will help me understand the mother of mine who is downstairs dying.

My fingers move carefully through the files, respectfully, as I have learned from handling old and rare books in my job. I am mindful of their fragile bindings, the brittle paper, and the sometimes uneven deckle edges.

My mom's distinct handwriting—a spirited mixture of cursive and print—is scrawled across the tabs of every folder. Something about her handwriting makes me cry. As I move my hand across the file folders, the skin on my head suddenly feels taut. I raise my hand and feel along my scalp for the raised bumps of skin where the stitches went in so long ago. The day she finally came back to visit when I was five years old.

My mom hits the brakes too hard, too fast. My head flies forward into the black dashboard, but I am too stunned to cry out.

“Goddamn it!” she yells.

“What? What happened, Mom?” Jamie calls from the backseat.

“Jesus fucking Christmas, lady!” screams my mom out the window, waving a cigarette in her right hand. The ashes land in a soft clump on my knee.

“Did you hit her car, Mom?” Eden pipes up.

“No, but Jesus, I should have! She stopped for no good reason that I can see.”

I reach up under my hair where I feel something stinging. Eden pops up behind me from the backseat and sees the blood when I pull my fingers away.

“Ahhhh…Melissa is bleeding!” he yells.

My mom turns to me, her bright blue eyes opening wide. “Oh my God, are you all right, honey? Where's the blood coming from?” Her dangly earrings sway back and forth and shimmer like silver fish. I feel dizzy.

“Where are all those goddamn napkins we got from Doggie Diner?” she yells to my brothers as she yanks the car over to the curb on Nineteenth Avenue and turns it off.

Jamie pulls out a handful of white napkins that he and Eden have stuffed into the crack between the seats. I don't want the Doggie Diner napkins to get wrecked. We got them special to save, and now the red dog head on the napkin is going to be ruined.

I look in the small, round mirror outside my window. My blond hair is smeared with bright blood the color of cherry cider. Dad is not going to be happy about this. This is the first visit that we have had with my mom since I turned five. This is a very, very important day.

When Dad told me just yesterday that Mom was coming to take us to the San Francisco Zoo, I knew right away we had to be good. This was the day she could change her mind and come back to live with us. Maybe that's what she was going to tell us at the zoo—that she couldn't stand being away anymore and that she missed us too much.

But things didn't go very well at the zoo. When we got there, the gorillas started throwing their poop through the fence at us. After that, Jamie and Eden behaved very badly and fought like monkeys. Jamie got caught shooting a rubber band at the rhinos. He said he did it because rhinos have tough skin and wouldn't feel it. Then Eden had a fit when the seagulls stole his pink popcorn square and my mom didn't have money to get him a new one. I wanted him to stop his crying because it was making Mom smoke a lot of cigarettes. We left early because she said the way we were acting embarrassed her. Eden threw his arms around her legs and screamed for her to let us stay longer. She yelled and called him a crybaby.

I keep the napkins pressed to my head as we drive to the hospital. Eden and Jamie are so quiet in the backseat that it scares me. I look back at them, the wind blowing their hair in all directions, and I wish I knew what they were thinking. I wish we could go back to Doggie Diner, before the zoo, get more red dog napkins, eat more hot dogs with fancy mustard, and start the day all over—but I have a feeling our mom isn't going to take us to Doggie Diner ever again.

When we arrive at the hospital, a nurse with crooked lipstick looks in my eyes and talks very slowly to me like I am a pet dog about to run away. She tells me that I will need stitches, but only a few.

“Mom, please, I don't want stitches,” I plead. She puts her hand on mine and promises me it will be okay.

When the doctor arrives, my mom proudly tells him that I haven't cried once since this happened.

“That's a good slice. She's very brave,” the doctor says.

My mom smiles at him and then at me. I don't like the words “good slice.”

“Do you know the song about Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, Melissa?” the nurse asks me in her slow voice. I nod.

“Okay, you're going to sing that song while the doctor puts the stitches in, and it's going to be over very quick,” she says.

I don't feel like singing; it's not even Christmastime. The nurse presses her hand, slippery with lotion, against my cheek to keep my head from moving.

“Sing,” she says.

“Rudolph the red-nose…”

That's as far as I get. I feel the needle going into my skin and then the tugging of the thread. It's not okay to be sewed into, and I hate the nurse for telling me to sing a stupid Christmas song.

“Sing,” she says again. And then the tears won't stop.

“Hold still,” the doctor whispers.

I want to kick them for telling me it wouldn't hurt. It does. Five stitches. Tight, black thread. I feel every one of them go in and tug the broken skin back together. The doctor thinks he can just sew me up and it's all fixed. But it doesn't work that way. He cannot sew the giant hole in this day back together.

When we finally scramble back into my mom's blue car parked in the lot, she lights a cigarette, then slides a silver flask with her grandfather's initials out from underneath her seat.

“Why do you drink that stuff? It's bad for you, Mom,” says Jamie. Jamie knows because he's tasted it before. He says it tastes worse than cough medicine.

“No, it's good for me on days like this. Believe me, it's goddamn good. Your dad is going to have a fit when he sees those stitches in Melissa's head.”

I steal a sideways glance at my mom. I am looking for something in her face that tells me she is going to come back and stay with us, but I can't tell.

When we pull up alongside our house, Dad's waiting in the front yard for us. Jamie and Eden and I stay in the car as we watch our mom get out and stand in the driveway. As she talks to our dad, her body sways in the breeze and her eyes search the ground as if she's lost something. They start arguing.

“It wasn't my fault…”

“It's never your fault,” he says. “Get out of the car, kids.”

We don't move, terrified to make things worse.

My dad confronts her: “Have you been
drinking
?”

“No,” she shouts. I get lost in the argument's details but remember the last thing Mom says to him: “
One
at a time. I can't do all three kids, you understand? If you want me to show up—then
one
at a time.”

The skin on my head stings, expands, then feels like it might rip open any second.

I look at Eden and then at Jamie and then at myself in the small mirror. Eden is cranking his pinky finger into his ear, searching for wax. Jamie spits a loogie onto the sidewalk. I lift my hand to feel the knots of black thread.

One at a time. How will she decide which one of us to pick?

The sound of rain wakes me on my first morning at my mom's house in Olympia. It's not a hard or heavy downpour, but the kind of intermittent rain that sounds like someone is tapping at the window.

I pull on an oversized sweater I picked up at Goodwill and packed at the last minute. As I descend the stairs, I wonder if my mother will recognize me today or if I will ever hear her voice again.

Outside the kitchen window, I see my aunt tossing compost scraps to the chickens and ducks. They scramble over moldy fruit rinds, burnt toast, and bruised apples. My mom's husband, Kim, has brewed a pot of coffee and is already headed out the driveway with a truck full of Washington apples to be sold at the local farmers market. They married thirteen years ago. The wedding took place here in Olympia, out in their garden, when I was three weeks pregnant with my son Dominic.

Kim is the strong, silent type. Smart, kind, and able to conceal his emotions. The opposite of my father, who always wore his opinions and emotions on the tip of his Irish nose. Since my mom has been sick, I've witnessed Kim's affection for her. He stirs the cream and sugar into her coffee just the way she likes it. I've seen him enough over the past year and watched his large, callused hands feeding her spoonfuls of Cream of Wheat and gifting her with exquisite pieces of jewelry and tin boxes of licorice pastilles. I'm thankful for this.

Alone, I walk into my mom's room on the first floor and sit down next to her. I watch her breathe in and out as she sleeps. Her hands move slightly, rubbing the edge of a blanket between her fingers like babies sometimes do. Her fingers look as if they are dreaming.

I love her hands in this moment. They bring me back to the early days of standing over my newborn baby boy in complete awe. I would often put my fingers near his lips to make sure he was still breathing. I needed to be there every time he opened his eyes from a nap. If I heard a cry coming from his crib, I would sprint into his room certain he was filled with panic—panic and fear that his mother had abandoned him.

Whenever I went to the basement to fold laundry during his nap time, I couldn't stay more than a few minutes without running back upstairs to check on him. I had to be physically there as soon as he woke. I'd stand over his sleeping body, my hand on his chest, and assure him, “It's okay. I'm here. I'm here, sweet boy.”

“I'm
here
,” I whisper now to my mom as she sleeps.

A brown speckled hen from the yard suddenly trots through the open door of the bedroom, its yellow toenails clacking across the hardwood floor. It's one of the many chickens that roam the property. I stand up to open the door wider and shoo the hen out. But the chicken skids sideways against the television stand and drops a gray and white splatter of shit at the foot of the bed. I try to corner the stray girl, but she starts flapping her clipped wings and crashes into the closet mirror.

My mom stirs, and I watch a genuine smile form across her dry lips. She's always loved to be surrounded by chickens. Me too.