Trash (29 page)

Jo twisted around in her chair. “You are such a suck-ass,” she said.

Arlene’s cheeks flushed. “You don’t have to be mean.”

“I can’t even say his name. You call him Daddy.” Jo shook her head. “Daddy.”

“He’s the only father I’ve ever known.” Arlene’s face was becoming a brighter and brighter pink. She fumbled with her cigarette case, then shoved it into her bag. “And I don’t see any reason to make this thing any worse.”

“Worse?” Jo twisted further in her chair. She leaned over and put her hand on Arlene’s forearm. “Tell me the truth,” she said. “Didn’t you ever just want to kill the son of a bitch?”

Arlene jerked her arm free, but Jo caught the belt of her dress. “He an’t got shit. He an’t gonna give you no money, and he can’t hurt you no more. You don’t have to suck up to him. You could tell him to go to hell.”

Arlene slapped Jo’s hand away and grabbed her bag. “Don’t you tell me what to do.” She looked over at me as if daring me to say something. “Don’t you tell me nothing.”

Jo dropped back in her seat and lifted her hands in mock surrender. “Me, you can say no to. Him, you run after like some little brokenhearted puppy.”

“Don’t, don’t . . .” For a moment it was as if Arlene were going to say something. The look on her face reminded me of the night she had screamed and kicked. Do it, I wanted to say. Do it. But whatever Arlene wanted to say, she swallowed.

“Just don’t!” She was out the door in a rush.

I took a drink of cold coffee and watched Jo. Her eyes were red-veined and her hair hung limp. She shook her head. “I hate her, I swear I do,” she said.

I looked away. “None of us have ever much liked each other,” I said.

Jo lit another cigarette and rubbed under her eyes. “You an’t that bad.” She pulled out a Kleenex, dampened it with a little of my black coffee, and wiped carefully under each eye. “Not now anyway. You were mean as a snake when you were little.”

“That was you.”

Jo’s hand stopped. An angry glare came into her eyes, but instead of shouting, she laughed. I hesitated and she pushed her hair back and laughed some more.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose it was. Yeah.” She nodded, the laughter softening to a smile. “You just stayed gone all the time.”

“Saved my life.” I laced my fingers together on the table, remembering all those interminable black nights, Jo pinching me awake and the two of us hauling Arlene into the backyard to hide behind the garage. Bleak days, shame omnipresent as fear, and by the time I was twelve, I stayed gone every minute I could.

“You were the smart one.” Jo looked toward the door. I watched how her eyes focused on the jamb where his hand had rested.

“You were smart, I was fast, and Arlene learned to suck ass so hard she swallowed her own soul.”

I kept quiet. There was nothing to say to that.

 

“I dreamed you killed him.” Mama’s voice was rough, shaped around the tube in her nose.

“How?” I kept my voice impartial, relaxed. This was not what I wanted to talk about, but it was easier when Mama talked. I hated the hours when she just lay there staring up at the ceiling with awful anticipation on her face.

“All kinds of ways.” Mama waved the hand that wasn’t strapped down for the IV. She looked over at me slyly.

“You know I used to dream about it all the time. Dreamed it for years. Mostly it was you, but sometimes Jo would do it. Every once in a while it would be Arlene.”

She paused, closed her eyes, and breathed for a while.

“I’d wake up just terrified, but sometimes almost glad. Relieved to have it over and done, I think. Bad times I would get up and walk around awhile, remind myself what was real, what wasn’t. Listen to him snore awhile, then go make sure you girls were all right.”

She looked at me with dulled eyes. I couldn’t think what to say.

“Don’t do it,” she whispered.

I wanted to laugh, but didn’t. I watched Mama’s shadowy face. Her expression stunned me. Her mouth was drawn up in a big painful smile, not at all sincere.

 

“Did you want to kill him?”

I turned away from the black window, expecting Jo. But it was Arlene, her eyes huge with smeared mascara.

“Sure,” I told her. “Still do.”

She nodded and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

“But you won’t.”

“Probably not.”

We stood still. I waited.

“I didn’t think like that.” She spoke slowly. “Like you and Jo. You two were always fighting. I felt like I had to be the peace-maker. And I . . .” She paused, bringing her hands up in the air as if she were lifting something.

“I just didn’t want to be a hateful person. I wanted it to be all right. I wanted us all to love each other.” She dropped her hands. “Now you just hate me. You and Jo, you hate me worse than him.”

“No.” I spoke in a whisper. “Never. It’s hard sometimes to believe, I know. But I love you. Always have. Even when you made me so mad.”

She looked at me. When she spoke, her voice was tiny. “I used to dream about it,” she whispered. “Not killing him, but him dying. Him being dead.”

I smiled at her. “Easier that way,” I said.

Arlene nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.”

 

That evening Mavis stopped me in the hall. She had a stack of papers in one hand and an expression that bordered on outrage. “This an’t been signed,” she said. Her hand shook the papers. I looked at them as she stepped in close to me. She pulled one off the bottom.

“This is from Mrs. Crawford, that woman was in the room next to your mama. Look at this. Look at it close.”

The printing was dark and bold.
“Do not resuscitate.” “No extraordinary measures to be taken.”

I looked up at Mavis, and she shook her head at me. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean. You been on this road a long time. You know what’s coming, and your mother needs you to take care of it.”

She pressed a sheaf of forms into my hand. “You go in there and take another good long look at your mother, and then you get these papers done right.”

 

Later that evening I was holding a damp washrag to my eyes over the little sink in the entry to Mama’s room. I could hear Mama whispering to Jo on the other side of the curtain around the bed.

“What do you think happens after death?” Mama asked. Her voice was hoarse.

I brought the rag down to cover my mouth.

“Oh hell, Mama,” Jo said. “I don’t know.”

“No, tell me.”

There was a long pause. Then Jo gave a harsh sigh and said it again. “Oh hell.” Her chair slid forward on the linoleum floor. “You know what I really think?” Her voice was a careful whisper. “I’ll tell you the truth, Mama. But don’t you laugh. I think you come back as a dog.”

I heard Mama’s indrawn breath.

“I said don’t laugh. I’m telling you what I really believe.”

I lifted my head. Jo sounded so sincere. I could almost feel Mama leaning toward her.

“What I think is, if you were good to the people in your life, well then, you come back as a big dog. And . . .” Jo paused and tapped a finger on the bedframe. “If you were some evil son of a bitch, then you gonna come back some nasty little Pekingese.”

Jo laughed then, a quick bark of a laugh. Mama joined in weakly. Then they were giggling together. “A Pekingese,” Mama said. “Oh yes.”

I put my forehead against the mirror over the sink and listened. It was good to hear. When they settled down, I started to step past the curtain. But then Mama spoke and I paused. Her voice was soft, but firm.

“I just want to go to sleep,” she said. “Just sleep. I never want to wake up again.”

 

The next morning, Mama could not move her legs. She could barely breathe. There was a pain in her side, she said. Sweat shone on her forehead when she tried to talk. The blisters on her mouth had spread to her chin.

“I’m afraid.” She gripped my hand so tightly I could feel the bones of my fingers rubbing together.

“I know,” I told her. “But I’m here. I won’t go anywhere. I’ll stay right here.”

 

Jo came in the afternoon. The doctor had already come and gone, leaving Mama’s left arm bound to a plastic frame and that tiny machine pumping more morphine. Mama seemed to be floating, only coming to the surface now and then. Every time her eyes opened, she jerked as if she had just realized she was still alive.

“What did he say?” Jo demanded. I could barely look at her.

“It was a stroke.” I cleared my throat. I spoke carefully, softly. “A little one in the night. He thinks there will be more, lots more. One of them might kill her, but it might not. She might go on a long time. They don’t know.”

I watched Jo’s right hand search her jacket pockets until she found the pack of cigarettes. She put one in her mouth, but didn’t light it. She just looked at me while I looked back at her.

“We have to make some decisions,” I said. Jo nodded.

“I don’t want them to . . .” She lifted her hands and shook them. Her eyes were glittering in the fluorescent lighting. “To hurt her.”

“Yeah.” I nodded gratefully. I could never have fought Jo if she had disagreed with me. “I told them we didn’t want them to do anything.”

“Anything?” Jo’s eyes beamed into mine like searchlights. I nodded again. I pulled out the forms Mavis had given me.

“We’ll have to get Jack to sign these.”

Jo took the papers and looked through them. “Isn’t that the way it always is?” Her voice was sour and strained. The cigarette was still clenched between her teeth. “Isn’t that just the way it always is?”

 

“Mama’s pissed herself,” Arlene told me when I came back from dinner. I was surprised to see her. Her hair was pushed behind her ears and her face scrubbed clean. She was sponging Mama’s hips and thighs. Mama’s face was red. Her eyes were closed. Arlene’s expression was unreadable. I picked up the towel by Mama’s feet and wiped behind Arlene’s sponge. Jo came in, dragging an extra chair. Arlene did not look up, she just shifted Mama’s left leg and carefully sponged the furry mat of Mama’s mound.

“Jo talked to me.” Arlene’s voice was low. Without mascara she seemed young again, her cheeks pearly in the frosty light that outlined the bed. Behind me, Jo positioned the chair and sat down heavily. There was a pause while the two of them looked at each other. Then Mama opened her eyes, and we all turned to her. The white of her left eye was bloody and the pupil an enormous black hole.

“Baby?” Mama whispered. I reached for her free hand. “Baby?” she kept whispering. “Baby?” Her voice was thin and raspy. Her thumb was working the pump, but it seemed to have lost its ability to help. Her good eye was wide and terrified. Arlene made a sound in her throat. Jo stood up. None of us said a thing. The door opened behind me. Jack’s face was pale and too close. His left hand clutched a big greasy bag.

“Honey?” Jack said. “Honey?”

I looked away, my throat closing up. Jo’s hands clamped down on the foot of the bed. Arlene’s hands curled into fists at her waist. I looked at her. She looked at me and then over to Jo.

“Honey?” Jack said again. His voice sounded high and cracked, like a young boy too scared to believe what he was seeing. Arlene’s pupils were almost as big as Mama’s. I saw her tongue pressing her teeth, her lips pulled thin with strain. She saw me looking at her, shook her head, and stepped back from the bed.

“Daddy,” she said softly. “Daddy, we have to talk.”

Arlene took Jack’s arm and led him to the door. He let her take him out of the room.

I looked over at Jo. Her hands were wringing the bar at the foot of the bed like a wet towel. She continued to do it as the door swung closed behind Arlene and Jack. She continued even as Mama’s mouth opened and closed and opened again.

Mama was whimpering. “Ba . . . ba . . . ba . . . ba . . . ba . . . ba.”

I took Mama’s hand and held it tight, then stood there watching Jo doing the only thing she could do, blistering the skin off her palms.

When Arlene came back, her face was gray, but her mouth had smoothed out.

“He signed it,” she said.

She stepped around me and took her place on the other side of the bed. Jo dropped her head forward. I let my breath out slowly. Mama’s hand in mine was loose. Her mouth had gone slack, though it seemed to quiver now and then, and when it did I felt the movement in her fingers.

Across from me Arlene put her right hand on Mama’s shoulder. She didn’t flinch when Mama’s bloody left eye rolled to the side. The good eye stared straight up, wide with profound terror. Arlene began a soft humming then, as if she were starting some lullaby. Mama’s terrified eye blinked and then blinked again. In the depths of that pupil I seemed to see little starbursts, tiny desperate explosions of light.

Arlene’s hum never paused. She ran her hand down and took Mama’s fingers into her own. Slowly, some of the terror in Mama’s face eased. The straining muscles of her neck softened. Arlene’s hum dropped to a lower register. It resounded off the top of her hollow throat like an oboe or a French horn shaped entirely of flesh. No, I thought. Arlene is what she has always wanted to be, the one we dare not hate. I wanted Arlene’s song to go on forever. I wanted to be part of it. I leaned forward and opened my mouth, but the sound that came out of me was ugly and fell back into my throat. Arlene never even looked over at me. She kept her eyes on Mama’s bloody pupil.