The End of Eve (25 page)

But Lara led me into my mother's room. She lay there on her back, mouth open. I watched her chest. Her breath. Life or death. She was a skeleton in her purple T-shirt and silk leopard-print robe. The hiss of oxygen. The rise and fall. She was alive.

I sat down next to her. Sat there for a long time.

Lara sat next to me, said, “I've been doing this work for years. This is your mother's day.”

I didn't want to argue with a professional, but I said, “my mother will surprise you.” Then I doubted myself. Maybe I was just jaded to death dates. “Should we put on some music?”

Lara put on a CD. Buddhist chanting. The heart sutra. She turned the volume down to a whisper. And the two of us just sat there, kept sitting:

All things are empty:

Nothing is born, nothing dies,

nothing is pure, nothing is stained,

nothing increases and nothing decreases.

So, in emptiness, there is no body ...

I THOUGHT AB
OUT
Gammie. No one sat with her as she died. She lived alone. Ninety-one years old. She just got up in the
middle of the night to pour herself a glass of milk and bourbon and she fell down. I missed her, my Gammie. Wanted to call her now. Ask her what I should do:

There is no ignorance,

and no end to ignorance.

There is no old age and death,

and no end to old age and death.

There is no suffering, no cause of suffering...

MY MOTHER OPENED
her eyes and jerked up, stared at the two of us siting there. The whisper of the heart sutra, the hiss of oxygen. “What? Did you think I was dead? I want an omelet.” She shook her head and cackled. “Someone make me a fucking omelet.”

I CRACKED EGGS
in my mother's kitchen, whispered to Lara, “What were the signs? That made you think she would die today?”

Lara chopped herbs. “The lights flickered,” she said softly.

I thought about that.
Was she kidding?
“The lights flickered at my little place south of town, too,” I said. “There's actually a blizzard.” I flipped the omelet.

34.

Moveable Feasts

“
TINIEST,
”
MY MOTHER STARTED WHEN I STEPPED INTO
her room. “Matea tells me it's Passover. We have to prepare a Seder. The leg of lamb. All the dishes. The bitter herb. Maxito can ask the questions.”

I shook my head, set a cup of herbal tea on her bedside table. “First of all, Mom, we're not Jewish. And anyway it's too late to do a Seder.” We sometimes celebrated Passover when I was a kid, but it was already past 6 p.m. and we didn't have any matzo. “Listen,” I said. “Easter's in a couple of days. Let's do Easter. The chef wants to cook for you again. Anything you crave. Traditional or not.”

“Okay,” my mother smiled. “Sit down with me. We'll make the menu.”

MY MOTHER WANTED
leg of lamb with mint jelly and gravy. She wanted red wine, some good pairing.
Did the chef know about wine pairings?
Of course. My mother wanted fancy ginger ale.
Had I tried Q Ginger Ale?
No, but I'd get it. She wanted salad, rosemary potatoes, roasted asparagus, carrot cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.

“What else should we have, Tiniest?”

“I think it sounds perfect,” I said. “We can get a plane ticket for Leslie to come too.”

My mother brightened. “And Maia?”

Maia had already missed too many Monday classes with
her weekend visits. “She has midterms,” I said. “She'll come again soon.”

“And Maxito?”

“Yes. Maxito.”

“We'll make him an Easter basket,” she smiled, tears in her eyes. “With real flowers.” She pressed her morphine button.

“Yes. Let's.”

THE CHEF AND
I made the grocery list and pushed through the aisles of Healthy Wealthy. Early afternoon on Easter and we stood in the chef's little kitchen organizing ingredients. I recognized the nurse Matea's number on my cellphone. She worked for both hospice and Milagro Home Care now. “Hello?”

“Are you in town, Ariel?”

“Yes?”

“You should come up to the house,” Matea said. “You should come now.”

I swallowed hard. “What's up?”

But Matea just said, “Your mother isn't doing that well.”

4/8/12

8:00 a.m. Eve woke happy, washed up in bathroom, ate toast & fruit & yogurt with tea. Had her meds.

10:00 a.m. Matea arrived to change the dressing on the bedsore, new sores starting where adhesive is. Matea went for more bandages. Eve sat for an hour at breakfast. New red patches began to appear. Will encourage her to sit only for short periods.

11:25 a.m. Eve is happy, animated, wants to get up and check the guest room to make sure it's ready and clean for Leslie.

THE CHEF FOLLOWED
me into my mother's kitchen, set down the bags from Healthy Wealthy.

Matea stood with a woman I'd never seen before, started crying. “Ariel,” she said. “I'm so sorry.”

The new woman started crying, too. She was thin, with
desert-colored hair. “I tried to resuscitate her. I know she was
DNR
, but it's
Easter.
She was so looking forward to her feast.”

I glanced out the window. All those living crows had taken flight. I wondered how deep we'd have to dig to reach well water, wondered that just then for no reason.

What does it mean for life to bear witness to death?

I stepped into my mother's room alone.

She wore her silk leopard-print robe. Lay there as if asleep, mouth slightly open, some peaceful portrait of herself. And even I couldn't help but notice then that she was beautiful.

I sat in the chair next to her hospice bed, sat there with her for just a few minutes, thought to take her hand and then didn't. “Well,” I finally said to her, “I think we did all right in the end, don't you? Behaved in a way we can be
sorta
proud of? I mean. You built a beautiful kitchen. And I didn't kill you.”

MY MOTHER
'
S CROW
watched silent from the wall as Matea and the new woman washed her body.

I stood for a long time in her closet, forgetting and remembering my task: to pick out the clean white Mexican cottons she would wear to the incinerator.

The women dressed her, placed a red glass heart on her chest and flowers by her arms. They wrapped her head and jaw in a white scarf to keep her mouth closed, turned the heat down in the room to ward off the smell of death.

The undertaker would come for her body in the morning.

THE CHEF UNWRAPPED
the leg of lamb, peeled russet potatoes, cut asparagus.

I crept in and out of my mother's room, bringing white candles, half-expecting to notice the subtle rise and fall of her chest, half-expecting her to sit up suddenly and demand an omelet. But the sunlight waned into evening as it does, and my mother's skin looked only paler, her body ever still.

IN THE CUSTOM
kitchen, the chef sprinkled rosemary on the potatoes, tossed radicchio in lemon-mustard dressing, melted butter, opened the wine.

Leslie landed at the Albuquerque airport, would catch a shuttle.

Abra crossed the Colorado border on her way home from Spring break.

Maia cried on the phone, made plane reservations for the following weekend.

I left a message for Sol not to bring Maxito after all.

AND I SET
the table with my Gammie's silver, set a place for my mother, too, poured her a glass of red Zinfandel, let the chair sit empty the way we used to at our un-Jewish Seders – a place for the prophet Elijah, should he happen to stop by.

35.

Kitchen World

THE CHEF STUDIED THE NOTES IN MY MOTHER
'
S OAXACAN
cookbooks, ad-libbed the menu for the memorial spread: Mole chichilo with chicken and chayote squash, pork and guajillo chile tamales, black bean and cotija cheese tamales, fresh tortillas, cabbage and serrano salad, arroz verde, calabacitas.

We'd only given ourselves a week to pull together a service. We had to get to work.

The chef roasted and seeded and soaked the ancho chiles, the mulato, the casacabel, the pasilla negro, the chile de arbol, the guajillo, the costeño, and the New Mexico red.

We taught Maxito to peel garlic and he stood on his little stepping stool, concentrating hard as he slipped the skin off each clove.

The chef helped him press cooked tomatoes and tomatillos though a strainer, separating the skins and seeds from the juice and pulp.

Maxito said, “I see. We like this part. We don't like that part.”

We posted pictures on Facebook and my friend China commented:
Life is so hard sometimes. But you all really know how to live. You get together. You cook.

I wasn't sure we knew how to live, but maybe we were learning; withstanding this time of learning. We were getting together, cooking, taking respite from the big world of death and meanness in this smaller kitchen-world where things made
sense, where if we gathered the right ingredients and had the patience, things turned out the way we thought they would.

LILIES ARRIVED FROM
relatives and friends and I lined them up along the walls of the house, vase after vase.

The chef soaked beans, cooked the chile base, the pork.

Leo had been camping with some friends outside of Truth or Consequences, so Leslie borrowed a car and headed south to retrieve him. They'd stop at the cut-rate cremation service in Albuquerque on their way back, pick up my mother's ashes.

Abra ordained herself online and paged through The Bible and
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
and Mary Oliver poetry collections looking for the passages she would read aloud at the service.

My mother had left no instructions, so we made it all up as we went along. Improvising this death.

I STOOD IN
line at Healthy Wealthy, a dozen bottles of wine and compostable wine glasses made of corn on the conveyor belt.

“I know what you're doing!” a henna redhead squealed when she saw my haul. “You're having an art opening!”

“Guess again,” I mumbled.

“A reception?” she chirped.

“Try again.”

ON MY WAY
to the copy shop to make memorial programs I noticed a homemade poster glued to a utility box. “St. Henry Miller of Words,” it read. A black-ink portrait of the old guy and the quote, “The one thing we can never give enough of is love ... and the only thing we never give enough of is love.”

Henry Miller. Maybe Eve was with him by now.

THE MILAGRO CAREGIVER
Octavio appeared in the open doorway. “I came by to pickup my check,” he said, then scanned all those white bouquets. “I guess I missed something.”

“Yes,” I told him. “She died on Easter.”

Octavio nodded, quiet. His skin was pockmarked. “Who killed her?”

I shrugged. “I think she just died. I think her heart gave out.”

Octavio scratched his chin. “She was asking everyone to kill her. Someone must have killed her.”

I wrote a check, held it out to him.

“Who killed her?” He asked again.

But I shook my head. “Octavio, not every question cries out to be answered.”

YOU KNOW, IN
that old Russian story Vasilisa the Wise, Baba Yaga doesn't kidnap the girl. Vasilisa goes to the witch's house voluntarily – no idea what she's getting into, but she does go voluntarily. She goes seeking light.

Vasilisa knows enough to know that not every question needs to be asked, that not every question has a good answer. And Vasilisa walks out of Baba Yaga's place completely unscathed. She walks out carrying the light that will burn through all the complicated violence she's been taught to call love.

OCTAVIO TOOK THE
check from me, handed me a folded piece of paper in exchange. “Eve was asking for ‘Tiniest' a couple of days ago but I couldn't reach you on your cell. Your mom said she had to dictate the last scene of her memoir to you. So, you know, I wrote down what she said. If you want it.”

I took the piece of paper from him, stashed it behind a lily vase on the fireplace mantle as he walked away.

“
MAMA?
”
MAXITO PRESSED
a straw into his blue juice box.

“Where did all the crows go?”

“I don't know,” I said. “They flew away.”