The End of Eve (18 page)

So it was Thanksgiving afternoon and we set out from our little adobe, took the back roads into the Ortiz Mountain range, headed south and west on that winding desert highway into the glare of the November sun.

Maia wore a tight black dress with a fur collar, stiletto heels. She pushed a Black Keys
CD
into the player.

“Do you think Nonna will show up?” I asked her.

“Oh, she'll show up,” Maia hummed.

“Who's Nonna?” Maxito asked form the back seat.

I looked at him in the rearview.

He tugged at his clip-on bow tie.

“She's your grandmother, honey. Maybe you'll remember her when you see her.”

We rolled into Madrid, that Old West town half a parody of itself. The Mine Shaft's parking lot full of hogs and trucks and
VW
vans. The bar spilled over with bikers and cowboys and hippies. All leather jackets and cowboy boots and the smell of flowers and patchouli. I recognized the white girl with dreadlocks who'd come into the candle shop to warn me that Sol was leaving notes for Bipa at the mime school. My skittish single mom neighbor huddled with her kids at a table near the fireplace, avoided eye contact with anyone.

We grabbed a long wooden table in the corner.

No band played, so a dozen preschoolers had taken over the raised back corner of the bar, squealing as they stage-dived.

Maxito sidled up to join them, stood shy on the periphery at first, then jumped in and lead the gang until he limped back to the table, flushed and worn-out.

We didn't have to wonder after my mother for long.

“Nonna!” Maia yelled.

Gray dress and red lipstick. She floated in on the arm of a six-foot-five black man who she introduced first to the bartender and then to all of us as “my son the surgeon” despite their obvious lack of physical resemblance.

“No Ronaldo?” Maia mouthed.

My mother rolled her eyes. “I suppose he's with his wife.” She looked me up and down. “Happy Thanksgiving. Have you lost weight?”

Maxito kept his eyes on his grandmother as she moved back and forth through the crowd.

The cowboys in their tight jeans and turquoise belt buckles glanced up at her from their seats at the bar when she passed. She flirted and danced with them, Dixie Chicks and Rascal Flatts singing through the speakers, wood floorboards creaking. My mother laughed.

THE SURGEON NUDGED
me as we waited in the potluck line for turkey and greens. “I hope you know she's leaving
everything
to me.”

I picked up a dinner roll, spread it with Earth Balance, nudged him back and winked. “I hope you know there isn't anything to leave.”

The surgeon frowned as he piled his plate with mashed potatoes, poured the vegan gravy.

I hadn't had a drink since Sol left – sought the clarity of sobriety – but I was ready for a beer. I set my plate on the bar and ordered a pint of Dead Canary Ale.

Maia had finally turned 21, but nobody asked her for an
ID
when she shouldered up next to me and asked for a Bloody Mary.

“
HOW DO YOU
like the Native Arts College?” the surgeon asked Abra's friend at the long table.

The girl shook her blonde locks. “The Native people are very racist against whites.”

“I can imagine,” the surgeon scratched his chin, like he took her seriously. “Those racist Native Americans. That's been going on for hundreds of years.”

Abra laughed at that, but the blonde girl nodded like she'd finally found someone who understood her pain.

Maia smirked as she cut into her smoked turkey. “This might be more similar to the original Thanksgiving than anything I've ever experienced.”

Family and strangers sharing a meal; toothy smiles as if we weren't all in it for the kill.

A PAUL SIMON
song started through the speakers and my mother glided back to our table. “I love this place,” she sighed, and she put her arm around the surgeon. “You're such a dear man to bring your mother here for her
last
Thanksgiving.”

Maxito stared at her, then glanced at Maia, at the surgeon, at Abra and at Abra's friend, and then at me, his four-year-old heart/mind taking it all in. “I like turkey,” he said softly as he stuck his fork into the pile of meat on his paper plate. “I just really like turkey.”

Maia lifted her Bloody Mary and shrugged. “Let's not even list what we're thankful for this year.”

Book Four

The Feasts of Baba Yaga

25.

Marked Women

“
OH, DARLING,
”
THE VOICE THAT ANSWERED MY MOTHER
'
S
landline had a British accent. “I've just rung the ambulance.”

Cold January morning and I sat sipping black coffee on the porch of my little adobe. “Ambulance?”

“Yes, darling. I'm your Mum's palliative care nurse. We're just taking her to the hospital to get her pain under control.”

Palliative care nurse.
I scooted the words around in my brain. “From hospice?”

“No, darling,” the voice said. “Your Mum got herself booted from hospice again.”

I pulled a blanket around my shoulders, stared at the round-top mountain I could see from my porch. I was alone in the house for now – Maxito off with Sol for a few days, Maia back in Los Angeles, Abra not yet home from winter break.

I
'
D SPENT DECEMBER
house sitting for a friend in Portland. Took Maia and Maxito to the
Nutcracker
ballet.

Hot Wheels and Lego sets and a tattoo gift certificate under the tree.

At Oddball Studios off Clinton Street, Maia got a portrait of Gammie as a 1940s pin-up. “Your great grandmother was a pin-up?” The tattoo artist with an anchor inked on his neck seemed impressed when Maia unfurled the old picture from
The Los Angeles Times.
Gammie sitting arched-back on the sand
in her bathing suit, coy smile up to the camera, with the caption “Beauty on the Beach.”

I'd emailed back and forth with my mother a few times from Portland, told her I could help her out on Wednesdays when I got back to New Mexico. I figured I could handle Wednesdays. One day a week. And the first Wednesday had gone well enough. When I got there she was screaming at some worker in the entryway and he scurried off with his hammer muttering, “your mother's a witch.”

But my mother shook her head. “That guy had ego problems.”

I gave her a quick hug and she flinched when I touched her shoulder.

She wore a loose black sweater, pointed to the lightbulbs in the kitchen that needed changing.

The kitchen. A six-burner commercial gas stove, rustic faux-finished cabinets, antiqued metal and mahogany counters, a deep farmhouse sink. When I stood on the stepladder I didn't worry that she might push me. She seemed too weak for that kind of thing now.

I took her shopping list to Healthy Wealthy, bought organic chanterelle mushrooms and mint citrus tea.

When I got back, she asked about Maxito, said, “All right, thanks, Tiniest. I'll see you next week.”

NOW IT WAS
Wednesday again and I held the phone to my cold ear.

“Don't worry, darling,” the voice said. “We'll get your mum settled in and you can come along and meet us at the hospital later this afternoon.”

“I can come now,” I offered. It wasn't that I felt any pressing need to rush to my mother's bedside, it was that I had a date with a cute chef I'd been flirting with on Facebook and I didn't want to get held up at the hospital. I mean, I'd gotten my legs waxed. That's what I was thinking:
I just got my legs waxed.

“No, darling,” the palliative care nurse said. “You'll meet us at Christus Saint Vincent's Hospital later this afternoon.”

I thought to argue, but the voice sounded like somebody's good mother, so I said, “All right,” and I hung up thinking,
Please, God, my mother's already ruined my life. Don't let her wreck my date.

The cute chef on Facebook was a friend of a friend. She'd just buried her father, said she only wanted red chile and new tattoos. I'd told her I agreed that death and chile and tattoos were an excellent combination, but I didn't tell her I knew anything about dying parents.

I messaged her from my cold porch now:
Collecting new reasons to get tattooed by the minute.
I wanted stars on my hips.

She didn't ask for further explanation and I didn't offer any. She just messaged back:
Still on for 5 o'clock, I hope?

I hoped so, too.

INSIDE, I TOOK
a random book from the shelf.
In Quest of Candle-lighters
by Kenneth Patchen. I ran my hand across the black and white cover, asked:
What now?
I opened to a random page and read this: “My God I can smell death all around me.” I shook my head, wanted to shake it off.
What kind of an oracle was that?
I wanted to try again, turned the page and read instead, “right now I insist that right now some beautiful girl is sitting on the bank of a river with a copy of this book in her hands and right now she has a rose in her hair.”

Yes. This could be my new oracle.

There would be an end to all this death someday. Fast forward and
right now some beautiful girl is sitting on the bank of a river with a copy of this book and right now she has a rose in her hair.

I PULLED INTO
the parking lot of the hospital on the hill at 3:30 that afternoon. The buildings were adobe-brown like all the buildings in Santa Fe.

The sound of my boots on asphalt, automatic sliding glass door, boots on tile.

Inside, all white walls and low ceilings, paintings of desert rocks and Native women. Santa Fe paintings.

The man who sat behind glass wrote my mother's room number on a card for me. Lay people with “volunteer” badges pinned to their chests shuffled through the hallways carrying clipboards and offering communion to some of the patients.

An old man in a baseball hat gave me a brochure with the word “healing” above a crucifix.

I thanked him, stepped into the elevator, opened the brochure.
Good news! Jesus has already borne your sickness, so you don't have to!

A right turn down the hall, then right again. I didn't think much of it all. I'd been to see my mother in plenty of hospital rooms back in Portland. But when I peered around the doorframe into her room, the sight of her made my breath catch.

She sat propped in a chair, her eyes closed, head back and mouth open. Surrounded by machines that beeped and glowed. An oxygen tube in her nose.

I stepped back from the doorway to steady my breath. What had I expected, anyway? The mother of my childhood? Dark 1970s perm? Defined biceps, still strong enough to leave a mark when she hit me?

I crept into the room, quiet as I could, but she opened her eyes right away and smiled. “Tiniest?”

I set the healing brochure on her bedside table. “You better be careful,” I warned her. “There's a whole lot of Jesus up in this place.”

She laughed, kind of shrugged but then didn't shrug – winced at the shrugging. “I got no problem with Jesus,” she said. She had black radiation tattoos inked across her chest. There was the alternate beeping of the heart monitor and the morphine pump. The sound of the oxygen machine. “Ariel?” she said suddenly. “You look gorgeous.”

I gestured toward her morphine pump. “I bet everybody looks pretty good when you're on all those drugs.”

She smiled, but tears welled in her eyes. “Tiniest?” She sighed. “You came back to me.”

I sat down on a cushioned pink chair in the corner of the room, scooted closer to her. “I only came because I heard you were going to be on your best behavior from now on.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I must have been on a
lot
of drugs if I told anyone
that
.”

And I had to laugh.

I knew my mother was impossible, and worse. But some part of me had always liked her.

NURSES AND ATTENDANTS
shuffled in and out of the room, adjusted the machines and brought white bread sandwiches and plastic cups of red Jello.

My mother scowled at the trays. “Can you imagine serving this to someone in a
hospital?
Give me a piece of paper. I have a shopping list for you.”

I kept my eye on the wall clock as she wrote her list in red ink. “I have to go in a few minutes,” I told her. “I can bring you the food tomorrow.”

“Go?” She looked panicked, wrote faster.

“I have to pick up Maxito,” I lied.

Tears rushed down her cheeks. “I need a book, Tiniest. You can't leave me here without a book.
Please.
I need you to go to the bookstore for me.”