Home Free (18 page)

“Your nose is running a little,” I point out.

“Oh it always runs now,”she says. “It's going to win all the races.” We go down the hall, to the windows and the sitting nook. The light sometimes hurts her eyes, but today there is a soft February light, with clouds in a blue sky—puffy, perfect Simpsons-cartoon clouds. Two streets over, the suburban development stops and there are real trees, even a few tall white pines. Scraps of the old rural Burlington are still visible here. I babble inanities about the weather, the traffic, the houses in the area.

“Look at those beautiful clouds in the sky,” my mother says. I wasn't sure she could see them.

“Yes, they are beautiful.”

Then I talked about Brian's mother, who is 91. Doing well, but plagued by chronic back pain. Having to spend half her days in bed now.

“Well, it's the same for all of us,”my mother opines, “it's just old age. We're on the edge.”

“That's right. Nobody gets out of here alive.”

“We all come to the same bitter end,” she said with a proud little toss of her head.

“Well, you know, it could be quite pleasant. You might be sleeping and one minute you're dreaming and next minute, whoosh, you're outta here.”

“Let's hope.”

At 7 p.m., when I make my nightly call to my mother, it feels like I'm lowering a rope and a bucket down a well—I never know if she'll manage to bring the receiver to her ear. Often, the staff has already settled her for the night. They raise the bars on the sides of the bed. This means she's not always within reach of the phone on the night table beside her. Rolling over, stretching her arm, lifting the receiver—it's all epic for her. So whenever I call, I let it ring seven, eight, nine times. Often, if she gets the phone out of the cradle, she will drop it. A period of noisy fumbling and laboured breathing follows, as she hauls the thing up by the cord. I feel a vicarious surge of pride when she gets the receiver to her ear, like a parent watching her child perform on the parallel bars.

“Thanks for calling,” she always makes a point of saying, before we hang up. “Have a good night,”I always say, both of us well aware of mornings that might not arrive.

But there are nights when the phone is too far away and she has to lie there and let it ring. Or the phone drops and she can't retrieve it, so it stays off the hook, the dial tone droning,my line engaged. The staff will be busy or chatting down in the common room,their charges finally tucked away for the night. If the phone isn't off the hook, I hang up, wait, and try again in 10 minutes. But on some nights the phone is near enough, and her hand finds it.

I hear her speak into the receiver in a wavering but strong voice that is no longer sure who or what will greet her.

“Hello?”

The Broken Year

I
T WAS MID-OCTOBER, still warm, with that gold late-afternoon light. Too beautiful a day to drive, I decided when I stepped outside with my car keys. Besides, the bike would be faster. I was hurrying to a yoga class, part of my new regime. The rat race of relaxing! I could still make it, I thought, if I didn't go back inside the house to get my helmet and panniers. Twinge of guilt over that. Then I slung my workout bag over the handlebars and set off.

As I spun along Carlton Street in high gear my mind spun along too, toggling between life and work—not a great leap in my case.
What if, what if, and then, and then
. . . Distracted, I only noticed the glitter of broken glass in my path at the last minute. Ride through it or around? I swerved. That must have been when the cloth bag swung over into the spokes of the front wheel; in any case, something sent me flying over the handlebars until my face hit the pavement. I felt the right lens of my glasses press, press into my eye socket and braced for it to shatter. Amazingly, it didn't.

Now I'm really going to be late
, I thought.

I tried to get up, but my right arm in the sleeve of my black jacket wouldn't move. Oh well, let it rest there. I rolled over and lay in a Corpse Pose. Street yoga. A dark-haired man in a navy blazer stepped off the curb and knelt beside me.

“Don't move,” he said, “you'll be okay.” He flipped open his phone and called 911, as pedestrians gawked.

Another good citizen extracted a key from my pocket and locked my bunged-up bicycle to a post.

“I'll stay with you 'til the ambulance comes,” said the Samaritan, who had a deep voice and a professional manner, as if he tended to falling cyclists on a regular basis. (He turned out to be the general manager of Fran's restaurant.) He called Brian and left an impeccable message, even though I knew that my husband was at a meeting,with his phone turned off. Lying there with cars detouring around me, I felt surprisingly comfortable and relaxed—the genius of shock.

I tend to agree with Freud that there are no pure accidents. They're more likely to happen when the under-brain is wrestling with some problem. Later,when I replayed the accident in my mind, there was a moment in mid-air when a supercilious voice in my head said,“Yes! This makes perfect sense.”My fall felt like a choreographed expression of the off-kilter state I had been in for some time. The surrender of flying through the air made me realize how tightly I had been holding on to everything. Trying not to let go.

The funny thing was that I thought I had already weathered the letting-go phase of motherhood when Casey went off to college. He seemed so independent, earning his own money, yet we were still in touch, etc. But it turned out that the genuine pulling apart was only underway now, when he was 24. The numeral doesn't really matter; it could be 14 or 29. And for me the letting go was tapping into some old, broken places.

The summer and the push-pull with Casey at the cottage had been difficult. I wasn't sure whether he was going through ordinary early-twenties angst—the kind I went through and thought I wouldn't survive—or something more fixable that I ought to fix. I began waking up every day at 6 a.m., with the same tape-loop running in my head:
Am I being too hands off or too meddling?
Should I email him the names of a counsellor/antidepressant/naturopath/
indie record producer, or would that just bug his ass?

The Mother Tapes, wobbly and stretched from being played over and over.

Brian was getting pretty tired of the tapes too, which he heard second-hand, at 7 a.m. After all, it wasn't as if Casey was trapped in an SUV that had just plunged off a bridge. He was not playing Second Life in a mouldy basement room or pursuing an obsessive email relationship with a 42-year-old bipolar schoolteacher in Georgia. He was just working through a difficult romance, wondering how to make a living with a B.A. in history and figuring out what he needed (or didn't need) from his parents. Growing up, in other words.

But he was taking things hard and had a cough he couldn't shake. (“No resilience,” said the textbook voice in my head.) It was his voice on the phone, gallant, trying not to complain, that spun me down.

So I mailed him some vitamin D. I ordered him a full-spectrum desk lamp, for Seasonal Affective Disorder (“You are a funny person,” he emailed,when this sizable appliance arrived at his door). I had thought that at my age I would be looking back on the bygone, roiling emotions of family life in crone-like tranquillity. Instead, here I was still hovering, like a new mom in the ICU.

Maybe the neural circuits that fire up when you have a baby never entirely fizzle out, I thought; the mysterious symbiosis that makes a mother wake up full seconds before her newborn even starts to cry falls dormant as he grows up—but can still be roused, years later,
in extremis
. The phone rings, you have a sinking premonition it's your sister with bad news, and it turns out to be true. The soldier's mother sits bolt upright in the middle of the night, knowing something is wrong. Not so unusual. Why else would we send prayers to people, if we didn't think they reached them?

“That's crazy,”Brian observed crisply when I ventured this theory. Our tolerance for nutty behaviour is high in this household, but “hearing voices” or “channelling moods” is not acceptable.

The more pedestrian explanation was that I was not, in fact, a marvellously sensitive satellite dish of a mother. Instead, as my son pried himself out of the family bosom, I was having a wave of separation anxiety (my specialty) and projecting my own panic about what would become of me onto him. His reasonable concerns about his future were stirring up old, irrational fears in me—ones I hadn't dealt with yet.

My problem, not his.

So a friend recommended a therapist, a mother of grown kids herself. The year before, I'd already done some cognitive-behavioural counselling, a bunch of “strategies” that help keep your thoughts from swerving over into the worry ditch. Which was useful too. I was doing some meditation (although the nasal New England inflections of the voice on my meditation tape could be profoundly irritating. . . . “
As best you can, focus on the breath at
your nostrils . . .
”). I was going to yoga. Sandbagging the levees all round to keep the flood waters at bay. I knew my levels of self-involvement were dangerously high, but
not
thinking through all this wasn't the answer either. I had to “work with the murk.”

I cradled my limp right arm with my left, like a sleeping cat. The paramedics arrived and sat me up in the ambulance; they seemed a trifle bored by this middle-aged, helmetless woman who had managed to fall off her bike without even touching a car. One arm of my glasses was broken (not a good look), a cut on my brow was bleeding, there was a gash on my calf. They asked me which hospital I wanted to go to.

“Isn't St. Mike's the best place for trauma?”I said brightly, hoping to engage their professional side. It was also three blocks away. Off we sped.

The ER of St. Michael's Hospital is indeed a trauma centre that also deals with the inner-city cases, the smashed-up drunks and the mentally precarious. A whole crew was milling about the waiting room when I joined them. The paramedics fetched some ice for my elbow. I was in pain by this point and feeling sick but on the whole impressed by my sang-froid; my old habit of rehearsing worst-case scenarios really comes into its own in these situations.

I left another message for Brian, then called a friend, Janet, and asked her if she felt like hanging out in ER for the next five or six hours. I could have a concussion and I didn't trust my judgment; if they recommended the Whipple Procedure (an operation that basically removes all your internal organs, then puts them back in again), I wanted some backup.

All the nurses and doctors on duty that evening, I noticed,were unusually good-looking. Had I wandered onto the set of a medical sitcom by accident? At last my name was called, and I was wheeled away to be X-rayed. Then a handsome young doctor (or actor?) ushered me into a cubicle. Janet arrived, then Brian. Brian was jolly and not overly concerned, until he looked at my elbow.

“Oh, that doesn't look right,” he murmured, blanching.

I inspected it; the elbow was bulbous and lavender-coloured, a Popeye elbow. He helped me shed my jeans so the doctor could clean up my leg. Then I was given a couple Percocets and a prognosis: I had fractured three bones in my elbow and would need surgery, which might involve “some plates and pins.” I would regain the use of my arm, although perhaps not full mobility. Would I like to book into St. Mike's and wait for surgery—there was a bed available— or go home and mull over my options?

As full of medical opinions as I was, I knew nothing about elbows. There was also a good chance that a surgeon at this hospital would look like Robert Downey Jr.; everyone else did. So I admitted myself and was wheeled off to an older wing of the hospital, gloomy as a 19th-century asylum. The operation would take place as soon as they could schedule a surgeon, they said, which might take a few days.

When I arrived at my room I saw an older woman with a wild corona of white hair sitting on the edge of her bed. She was holding onto her knees and talking, her robe agape. Oh dear, I thought, my roommate. I was in too much pain to be social, but she spoke to me anyway. When I pulled the privacy curtains across, she went on talking, softly and steadily.

Her name was Gwen. She had diabetes, a deep foot wound, something implanted in her upper arm, and she was almost blind. But she was very upbeat. I never did figure out what she was in for. By that time, it was close to midnight. Brian went home, and I fell into a Percocet sleep.

Sometime during the night I woke up. I noticed that Gwen had turned herself around and was sleeping with her head at the foot of the bed, facing the door, which was open. The light from the hall shone on my bed. I closed the door.

“Please, leave it open,” Gwen said in a little voice. I did. The next morning, she apologized.

“It's because of the camps, you know, I always need to know where the door is when I sleep.”

As I waited for word about my surgery, I heard her story. My roommate was one of only 17 child survivors of Buchenwald. Her father had been murdered when she was five, and her mother was mostly absent, working as a doctor in the Red Army. After leaving the camps, a British patron had sent her to good schools in England, and eventually she came to Canada, where her young husband promptly left her with their two small sons. She got a job in a bank, became a stock trader, invested well in gold, and eventually was able to buy a house and a bit of land—enough to give away a few acres to a young mother in a similar plight. Then she earned a PhD,writing her thesis about the Depression and the 1929 crash.

I wondered why no one was phoning or visiting her. I was slightly skeptical of her saga. Where was her family? “My sons are working in Australia and the Antarctic now,” she said, “but I don't want to call and get them worried.”

The following night, one of the last things she told me through the curtain before we went to sleep was that she had also lost a three-year-old daughter to leukemia.