The End of Eve (14 page)

I sat up in the equipale, tried to smooth my tutu. “She fired hospice?”
Who fires hospice? Hospice is free. When you don't want
to see them, you just don't open the door.
I must have been silent for a long minute.

“Ariel?” the intake/exit nurse tried. “Are you all right, dear? May I be frank with you, Ariel?”

“Frank?”

Sol poked her head in from the back room, whispered, “Coffee?”

I nodded.
Please.

“Yes, dear,” the hospice lady was saying. “You want to be conscious as your mother declines, don't you?”

I wasn't sure I wanted to be conscious, but I said, “Sure.”

“Well, my little Ariel,” the nurse started, her voice all sing-song. “I've been in this conscious dying business for a long time and I'll tell you that most people, when they're dying, want to pull everyone they love in close and just hug ‘em tight. But there is a notable minority of people who need to be alone. It may well be that your mother will die alone, Ariel. I think you would be wise to prepare yourself for that possibility. Six weeks or one year from now, a worker or a delivery person or a neighbor will knock on your mother's door and your mother won't answer the door. That worker or delivery person or neighbor will smell that distinct odor of death and they will call the police and your mother will have died. You'll get a call from the police. I think you would be very wise to prepare yourself for that call.”

I didn't ask the fuzzy hospice lady with her sing-songy voice how one might prepare oneself for that call. I just said, “Oh.” I said, “Well, thanks.” I said, “Take care.”

Sol brought me coffee in a red mug. “Is everything all right?”

“It's fine.”

WE PUT A
note on the shop door that said, “By appointment only.” Sol would sell the candles and make house calls. I'd wake in the predawn and train-commute to the university to teach the college kids how to invent improbable stories. On those still dark mornings as I walked along the tracks to the train station, I
told myself that I didn't have a mother anymore. But I still flinched every time my cellphone buzzed. The call I didn't know how to prepare for. The smell of death.

“You did your best,” someone on Facebook said.

But had I?

Done my best?

I felt like a failure.

LATE AFTERNOONS, THE
train home from Albuquerque barreled through desolate reservation after desolate reservation and a voice over the loudspeaker announced that we weren't allowed to take pictures of what was left of Native land.

NIGHTS HOME AT
the shop we cooked on the old camping stove we grabbed from my mother's backyard.

What was I doing here?

Living with my mother had been its own nightmare, but in that duplex that wasn't a duplex anymore, at least Sol and I had been united in our oppression. Our problem was my mother and whatever piece of furniture she was screaming for Sol to move. Now I was the only one for Sol to glare at. She lingered at the mime school until she had to pick Maxito up from preschool. She announced that she would no longer accept money for veterinary services, that she would only work for trade – it was a matter of principle and pet health.

I rolled my eyes. “Chicken eggs and free massages aren't going to cut it as your family contribution.”

But Sol didn't like when I talked to her that way. She crossed her arms and stomped her feet and didn't say anything. I hated the silence, so I went and bought her a piece of cake from the Chocolate Maven and I said I was sorry and I leaned into her and she patted me on the back and kissed me on the head and whispered, “It's all right.”

I crept into the front of the shop to grade papers, lit a Baba Yaga candle.

SATURDAY MORNING MY
cellphone buzzed with a local number I didn't recognize.

Could it be the cops already? Had someone reported the smell of death?

“Hello?”

“Is this Ariel Gore?” The voice was deep with the softest Texas twang.

“Yes?” I felt a stabbing pain behind my chest bone.

But it wasn't the police. “Ms. Gore? I'm a family mediator and attorney here in Santa Fe. I specialize in child abuse and neglect. I'm calling about Maximilian.”

Lump like a piece of hot coal in my throat. My first terror, of course, is that something has happened to him, but I glance back and he's right there on the red couch laughing at
Bell, Book and Candle
, a bunny mug full of hot cocoa on the table in front of him. But maybe something had happened to him we didn't know about? “Yes?”

“I'm calling on behalf of your mother,” the voice said. “She's worried about Maximilian.”

I swallowed hard, took a good breath and let it go. “He's doing well,” I said. “He's well taken care of.” I glanced over at him. His perfect skin. His steady smile.

“All right,” the voice said. “Well, your mother would like to have visitation with Maximilian once a week. She would like you to bring him to the house to do art. She would not like you to bring Sol. She would like you to go to the house alone with Maximilian.”

I felt nauseous, but I didn't want to give this guy anything. I knew enough about family mediators and family court attorneys. I'd spent seven years in a protracted custody and visitation battle with Maia's dad back in California. She was grown now and he was long dead, but I still woke some nights in the cold sweat terror of that courtroom. No, you don't give these guys anything. I said, “I'll have to think about that.”

He didn't say anything. I put a Nina Simone
CD
on the
player behind the counter. Maybe Nina Simone could walk me through this. But as soon as Nina Simone started in, Sol appeared and pressed eject, put Johnny Cash on instead. “Well,” the voice on the phone said. “It's within your mother's rights to file suit for legal visitation. If she's concerned about her grandson's well-being, we will of course feel obligated to make a report to Protective Services about abuse or neglect. I understand that you don't have immediate access to a full bathroom ...”

I didn't think the voice was finished talking, but I was finished listening. “I see,” is all I said. I clicked the phone off, closed my eyes, and for the first time I prayed, “God, please just let her die already.”

LIVE WITH ME
for a year. Then you may ask questions.
That's what my oracle had said. But Sol was the one who picked up the phone in the front of the shop when it rang later that morning, and Sol didn't ask any questions. All I heard her say was, “Eve, don't ever call here again.”

Book Three

Underground

17.

Blindfold

“
YOUR PROBLEM IS THAT YOU DON
'
T TRUST ANYBODY,
” the girl in Albuquerque said as she fastened the blindfold over my eyes.

I didn't think that was my problem exactly, but I was going along with it because she was cute and the way she'd always flirted with me on the commuter train made me feel like everything that was wrong with me and Sol was just wrong with Sol.

I'd missed the 5:34 evening train on purpose because I'd glanced behind me and knew she was going to miss it. We were at the bottom of the cement stairs on Central Avenue, cold wind against my face.

The girl in Albuquerque. Girl/woman. She must have been at least 35, but she dressed like a skater boy in her baggy jeans and faded black T-shirt. I wanted to know her name. She had coffee-colored skin, wore silver stud earrings, her eyebrows plucked into thin arches.

That's all I asked – her name – and she didn't answer me and that's when she pulled out the blindfold and said, “May I?” and turned me around and told me what she thought my problem was. Trust. Not trusting anybody.

Now the girl in Albuquerque was pushing me down Central Avenue and I was blind-tripping forward. She turned me against the wind and then turned me around, pushed my back against a cold brick wall and nudged the blindfold off and
leaned in to kiss me, her breath hot on my cheek. She had the prettiest brown eyes.

“I can't,” I whispered.

“Can't?” she raised those thin eyebrows. “You think I didn't just see you miss that train on purpose?”

It hadn't occurred to me that she might have seen me. Trust. “I have a girlfriend who wouldn't like it.”

The girl in Albuquerque smiled at me. Her teeth were bright white and crooked. “And does your girlfriend still kiss you?”

I wished I was 21 or a bigger liar or somehow otherwise only partially responsible for my actions – for what might happen on a windy night in an alleyway in Albuquerque. I wished it badly.

The girl in Albuquerque was still close to me, still held me against the bricks. “Your girlfriend just owns you like that? Outright? It's a waste.” She pushed me just a little harder against the wall. “I'm stronger than you,” she whispered.

I glanced at the curve of her bicep. “I can see that.”

“But I can take no for an answer.”

And I said, “Thank you.”

But now the girl in Albuquerque looked like she might cry. Thin, arched eyebrows. She said, “Why you got to thank somebody for acting right?”

I didn't say anything.

“Don't ever do that again. Thank me for doing something sweet for you.” She let go of me. “Don't ever thank anybody for acting right.”

“Okay.”

She stared at me for a long time. “Promise.”

And I said, “All right. I promise.”

The wind and the bricks. All that cold felt like elation and I didn't know what it meant, but something in my life had broken open. I trusted the girl in Albuquerque completely.

Strangers in alleyways had never really been my problem.

I GOT HOME
to the shop late. The smell of onions and garlic frying on the camping stove. Maxito already asleep. Sol had made vegan tacos with Soyrizo and kept them warm.

She lit a candle.

“I got paid,” I told her. Enough to cover first, last and deposit on a cheap rental.

I knew it wasn't illegal or neglectful to have a kid and share a bathroom with a bunch of Buddhists, but days in the shop had become all anxiety, waiting to see if Protective Services would come and investigate, waiting for a process server to appear with family court papers. Or maybe it would be my mother in the doorway waving her giant kitchen knife.

I would have just as soon moved back to Portland, but Sol wouldn't hear of it. “The only good that's come of all this is we got to New Mexico,” she whined.

So I sat with my plate of Soyrizo tacos, scrolled through rentals on Craigslist. Apartments in Santa Fe, houses in Albuquerque, trailers in the old mining town out Highway 14 and this:
Rural and private.
Click. A little adobe with its iron gate and turquoise-painted window sills. Nine hundred dollars a month. Twenty minutes out of town. A third of an acre. Room for the trailer and a trampoline and chickens if we wanted them. A place to hide and mend. A place to make macaroni and cheese and green chile stew. I already knew we would live there.

Saturday morning we drove out to the place, south on the freeway and a mile down the kind of road no one would drive down unless they lived there. Inside the house was all thick walls and tiles, vigas and skylights.
Yes, thanks, we'll take it.
I handed over my first month's visiting professor's pay.

I CHANGED MY
phone number and texted Leslie:
If you talk to Mom, tell her I got a job at Lewis and Clark and moved back to Portland.

I updated my Facebook profile to show that I lived in Los Angeles.

When our acid-dropping live/work landlord asked where we were going, I told him, “New York.”

I felt like a fugitive on the lam.

Was I really doing all this to avoid my 90-pound dying mother?

Well, yes. Yes I was.

18.

A Place to Hide

I
'
D UNLOADED A COUPLE OF BOXES AT OUR NEW LITTLE
adobe when a tall tie-dyed fellow in a cowboy hat sauntered into our yard wanting to know where I'd come from and why.

“Just need to lay low for a while,” I told him.

He nodded. Evidently, that was the right answer around here. “I live up the road,” he said. “You can call me Tex.” He had an underground bunker, he said, “For when the shit hits the fan.” He scratched his beard. “I have a kind of a sixth sense about people. I can tell if somebody's friend or foe and you're friend, I can sense that, so you just scramble on up to my place and I'll hide you in my bunker if it comes to that.” He winked at me. “Just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not comin' after you.”