The End of Eve (19 page)

Florescent light and the smell of disinfectant.

“I can't, Mom.”

Her face crumpled. “I'm begging you, Tiniest. I'll die of boredom in this place. They'll turn on the
television
and it won't be Anderson Cooper. It will be some idiotic thing. Some ... reality cops.”

I could feel my heart contract in my chest, but
no. I was going on a date. I wasn't going to the bookstore.
Maybe my date
would be hot and easy or maybe it would be strained and awkward – I didn't care – my mother was not going to be the one to ruin it for me. “I'll go and see if I have anything in my car,” I offered. My car was a disaster heap of Christmas cards and overdue bills and clothes and toys. Surely there would be a book in there somewhere.

Tile hall, elevator, tile steps, glass doors, asphalt.

Nothing in the back seat.

I dug through the trunk, finally found a hardback some publishing company had sent as a review copy a long time ago.
Free From Lies.
I squinted at the subtitle,
Discovering Your True Needs.
Who knew what it was about?

My mother was asleep when I stepped back into her room, so I left the book on her bedside table and pocketed her red-ink shopping list.

THE CHEF TEXTED
directions to her house. She lived on a busy street, driveway exposed, so I parked around the corner. I didn't need anyone in this small town whispering about where they'd seen my car. I carried a basket of fresh eggs down the block and up the walkway to her door.

The chef. She was cuter than her profile picture, had a shy swagger, gray hair and blue eyes. She invited me in, offered me a glass of wine.

I thought her house seemed too clean, but I wrote it off to the recent death.

We wore the same black engineer boots, sat on her leather couch.

IN MY MEMORY,
I told the chef about my mother.

In her memory, I did not.

I
'
D BEEN READING
about the “cognitive deficits” caused by stress and grief. That the two of us could carry on a conversation
is, apparently, impressive. The fact that neither of us would later remember what we'd said is, it turns out, perfectly normal.

I REMEMBER SHE
showed me the African violets she'd had inked on her upper arm the day after her father's funeral. Just the black outlines and gray shading so far. The skin around it had just started to peel. She said she liked the physical and tangible pain of that. Death and tattoos.

But when we stepped into the studio on Topeka Street maybe an hour later, all the artists were booked up.

It would just be a red chile night.

Enchiladas at the mall.

I remember a table by the window.

I remember I touched the chef's arm.

I remember comparing exes to make sure we had at least three degrees of separation.

I remember that I laughed.

NEXT MORNING I
woke alone on my cowboy bedroll in my little adobe, wasn't so cold.

I'd agreed to meet the chef back at the tattoo shop just before noon. We arrived wearing the same brown Frye harness boots and she blushed at that, watched over a low wall as a boy with a butterfly on his face etched stars into my skin. Each black outline and each gold shading hurt in just the right ways, deep and hungry. I wanted to scar myself like this with talismans. I wanted to ward off all the hard things that hadn't happened yet. I wanted to remember these cold days; remember how it felt to be cut like this, to ache and to bruise, to peel and tend the wound, to heal.

26.

What We All Call Love

ASPHALT, GLASS DOORS, TILE STEPS, ELEVATOR, TILE
hall.

“Tiniest,” my mother cried from the crisp white sheets of her hospital bed. She held up the hard cover review copy of Free
from Lies
. “
Why
did you have this book in your car? I will
pay
for the therapy. I will
go
to the therapy with you. If you were abused like this, I'll do
anything.
”

My face must have flushed. I looked down at my brown harness boots. “I haven't read that book,” I admitted. “It was ... a review copy. What is it?”

“Oh God,” my mother sighed. Her tattooed eyeliner looked strange now that she didn't wear any other makeup. “Oh, thank
God.
Tiniest, this book is heaven-sent. It's the single most important book ever written. It's by Alice Miller.
I
was abused, Tiniest.” She lifted her hand weakly, pointed to her chest. “Do you know that?
I
was abused. I'm so glad you weren't abused.”

I set down the grocery bag from Healthy Wealthy. Didn't clarify that I'd only said I hadn't read the book.

“This is why I have cancer,” my mother cried. “I have lung cancer because I was abused and I didn't have enough time to get free.”

I sat down in the pink-cushioned chair by her bed. “I'm sorry.”

THOSE FIRST DAYS
in the hospital my mother wept easily.

In the mornings I brought her organic quinoa salad and senna tea.

She complimented me on my good looks, read passages aloud from the pages
of Free From Lies.
She liked the chapter that began with a scene from “Mommie Dearest.” Christina Crawford at her mother's deathbed, tears in her eyes. “I've always loved you,” the daughter said. “You've suffered so much, but now you are freed of those sufferings.”

I tried not to laugh, thinking about the wire hanger scene and my mother in her facemask reenacting it when I was a kid. But I knew she didn't think it was funny now.

She read Alice Miller's analysis: “This scene pinpoints the tragedy of abused children. Their own sufferings count for nothing.”

My fresh tattoos still stung.

The hissing sound of my mother's oxygen machine.

“
My
suffering,” my mother cried, “it counted for
nothing
, Tiniest.” She steadied herself, kept reading about the abused children: “They have so completely internalized the determination of the parents and society to ignore what they have been through that they can only feel compassion for their parents, never for the children they themselves were. This is what we all call love.” My mother flinched, pressed the button on her morphine pump. “Waiting for love is not love,” she whispered, the book shaking in her hand now. “Waiting for love is not love, even if we always call it that.” One of her machines started beeping and she squinted at me. “Do you understand, Ariel?”

I didn't say anything. Of course I understood. My heart ached for the child my mother once was. But my compassion had these bruised and angry edges. I thought,
seriously? You have the nerve to complain to me?
Part of me just wanted to rip all the tubes out of her body and watch her die in slow agony.

“Yes,” I finally said. “I understand.”

AFTERNOONS UNDER THOSE
fluorescent lights, we met with oncologists and social workers.

My mother had finally agreed to Western medical treatment because one doctor promised he could relieve her pain by shrinking the tumor at the back of her neck with radiation, but now another doctor admitted that the tumor had been the only thing holding her spine up. Her thoracic vertebrae had collapsed. She'd need more morphine.

“I have a lot of work to do,” she whispered. “I just need to get back to where I was at Thanksgiving. I can get better, can't I?”

The oncologist stood at the foot of her bed, nodding. “Yes, perhaps.”

But when I approached him in the hallway later and said, “talk to me,” he closed the file he held, cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses. “Your mother's cancer is unusually slow-growing,” he said softly. “At this rate she could easily live for five more years. But with metastases to the spine – the worst-case scenario?”

I looked down at my boots, then back at him. “Hit me.”

“One vertebrae collapses at a time. You're looking at complete paralysis within six months. She'll need round-the-clock care at home and obviously you need to talk to her social worker, but off the record I don't think Medicare will cover it.” He motioned with his chin to someone and the social worker appeared as if she'd been waiting for the cue.

She stuck out her hand. “I'm Melissa,” she chirped. She wore a purple angora sweater. “Your mother might be eligible for Casa Que Pasa. It's a ... facility. There's certainly no guarantee she'd be eligible, with Medicare and in her condition it's unlikely, but we can get started on the paperwork?”

“I don't know.” If the exposé I'd read about Casa Que Pasa in the local weekly newspaper could be believed, even Joan Crawford didn't deserve to end up there. The patients sat around in dirty adult diapers as lawsuits alleging negligence piled up. Patients who'd fallen, breaking legs or femurs, were just put back
in bed – no X-rays and no treatment. The health department had cited the place for improperly administering medication and for failing to protect residents from abuse. The article went on and on. Casa Que Pasa was maybe the worst in New Mexico and New Mexico was maybe the worst in the country and, no, I shook my head, “My mother isn't going to Casa Que Pasa.”

I crept back into her room, sat next to her until she opened her eyes. “What do you want to have happen? When they release you?”

She shook her head. “They can't release me.”

Her new roommate wretched and coughed alone on the other side of the curtain, cried, “you eat it” to no one I could see.

My mother grimaced in the curtain's direction.

“Technically, you're just here to finish this round of radiation,” I tried to explain. “And they actually want to stop the radiation. Eventually they'll release you. I need to know if you've thought about what you want.”

My mother didn't answer me. She closed her eyes. “Nothing is secret,” she whispered. “Nothing is secret anymore, Tiniest.”

EVENINGS WHEN MAXITO
was with Sol, the chef texted me the names of unfamiliar restaurants. We showed up in the same Doc Martens we'd dug out from the backs of our closets. She started adding to the end of her texts:
Which boots are you wearing?

I ordered breakfast at night.

In a booth at Tortilla Flats, she leaned across the table, and offered to kill my mother. “You know,” she said, “if it comes to that.”

I knew I liked her then.

My friends on Facebook were “sending love and light,” but I needed a darker kind of tenderness.

We made out in the parking lot under the stars and the neon lights. Her skin.

“I like this part,” I whispered.

“Which part?”

The part when we weren't yet lovers, but we might be. The part when I dreamed of her voice. The part before the hurt set in.

ASPHALT, GLASS DOORS,
tile steps, elevator, tile hall.

Two weeks in the hospital and my mother didn't cry so easily anymore. She just seemed high. She grabbed at my hands. “Your rings are sparkly,” she said, “tell me about your day, Tiniest. Tell me everything.”

I didn't want to tell her about the chef, didn't want to admit I didn't have Maxito full time, didn't want to give her anything she could use against me when she made some miraculous recovery. Instead, I showed her Facebook pictures of Leslie with her new boyfriend in Portland.

“He looks like a wonderful man,” my mother sighed, then shook her head, winced at the pain of shaking her head.

When the woman wearing the Jesus T-shirt came in, offering the roommate behind the curtain communion, my mother protested. “I want communion.”

The woman startled. “I'm sorry dear. I didn't have you listed as Catholic.” Still, she approached my mother's bedside, placed the wafer on my mother's tongue and began, “Lord, I am not worthy ...”

My mother bit down fast, “I
am
worthy,” she spat. “I totally deserve this wafer.”

The woman in the Jesus T-Shirt stepped back, wide-eyed, sputtered something about a healing soul as she backed out of the room.

My mother shook her head, shook it slowly so as not to hurt herself. “I mean, could they at least
try
to make you feel good? Can you guess what they gave me for dinner last night? What was in between the two slices of Wonder bread? In a
hospital?
”

“Processed meat?”

“Yes, processed meat. In a
hospital.
And then they say I'm not worthy?”

“It's just a Catholic thing, Mom, the traditional Catholics – they say that to everyone.”

But she kept shaking her head. “Processed meat. In a
hospital.
”

MAXITO AND I
cruised through the aisles of Healthy Wealthy. He'd learned to decipher food labels, knew he was only allowed ten grams of sugar at a sitting. He pointed right and then left, granola bars and cheddar cheese, bread and lettuce.