The Rules of Inheritance (14 page)

I don't think to call nonemergency. I just dial 911.

 

Within five minutes what seems like an army of paramedics has filled the room.

 

My father and I try to explain that it's not really an emergency, that his legs just aren't working.

 

Ma'am, please step out of the way, one of the paramedics says as he wraps a blood-pressure cuff around my father's arm. Another one places an oxygen mask over my father's face. He is saying something but I can't hear him through the mask.

 

I back toward the bathroom, watching the whole thing unfold, tears dripping down my face.

 

I've had enough of this, I think. I don't want to do this anymore.

 

I want my mom.

 

I want anyone.

 

Someone help me, please.

 

I try to follow the ambulance to the hospital but I lose them on the highway.

 

When I finally get there, I park as quickly as I can and enter through a door labeled “Emergency Services.”

 

My father was just admitted, I say. He came in an ambulance.

 

The woman behind the counter takes my name, tells me to take a seat.

 

By the time I am led through the swinging doors, it is to an old, familiar scene.

 

My father lies in a hospital bed. Tubes snake their way from his nose. Machines beep softly around the bedside. A curtain is pulled loosely around the bed, barely hiding another patient on the other side.

 

Dad?

 

His eyes are closed.

 

Dad?

 

He opens them, gives me a watery grin.

 

You found me.

 

I sit down on the edge of his bed. I'm crying. I've sat on the edge of my father's bed like this a hundred times.

 

It's going to be okay, sweetie. I just need to get back on my feet.

 

You're not going to die, are you, Dad?

 

No, sweetie. Not yet, I don't think.

 

Promise?

 

I can't promise that, sweetheart.

 

Promise, I say again anyway.

 

He squeezes my hand and says nothing.

Anger surfaces once you are feeling safe enough to know you will probably survive whatever comes.

1997, I'M EIGHTEEN.

I
'M LYING IN BED in my old room in Atlanta. I listen to a car drive slowly down the street. A lawn mower whirs in the distance. My mother is dead.

 

It will be months and months, possibly even years, before this isn't the first thing I think about when I wake up.

 

My mother is dead.

 

She has been dead for three days.

 

My mother has been dead for three days.

 

I say it out loud over and over as I lie there.

 

My body feels warm and heavy, and I lie still beneath the comforter, replaying the last three days in my head, trying to decipher if any of it's real.

 

After my father's 3:00 a.m. phone call to Christopher's uncle's house in New Jersey, announcing that my mother was gone, I had stumbled back to bed, curling beneath the covers like a wounded animal.

 

Christopher stood in the doorway for a moment. The house was quiet again. It was still dark out. He crossed the room then and climbed into bed, pulling me to him like a child. My shoulder blades jutted out like little wings, pressing into his chest, and I was conscious of the thin T-shirt I was wearing, of my bare legs.

 

Tell me about her, he said.

 

And I did.

 

I told him about her blond hair and her laugh. I told him bits and pieces of what I knew about her life in New York. I told him about the day she met my father, about the funny blue suit he was wearing.

 

After a while I could tell that Christopher had fallen asleep. His breathing was soft and shallow, his arms limp and heavy around me. I watched the light creep into the sky beyond the windows. My mother was dead.

 

Minutes passed, maybe an hour. Then Christopher jerked, his whole body flinching, startling me, and waking him.

 

I dreamed about a dead fish, he said thickly. Rotting and putrid.

 

I pushed out of his embrace, sat up on the side of the bed.

 

I'm sorry, I said without turning around. And I was.

 

I apologized one more time on my way out the door, this time to Christopher's uncle, who looked at me with such pity that I felt guilty for burdening him with it, and then I got in my car and drove the last few hours to DC.

 

When I got there, my father handed me a sleeping pill, the first of many during the next few weeks, and I fell into a muddied sleep in the guest room upstairs.

 

My mother was dead.

 

Hers was not the kind of death that threw people into frenzied action. This was not an emergency. It was not unexpected. Those of us involved moved with measured intention. No one looked at their watch or busied themselves with forms or urgent phone calls.

 

The thing was done.

MY FATHER AND I left the next day for Atlanta.

 

Yesterday. Could that really have been yesterday?

 

At a gas station in North Carolina my father quietly asked me to go inside and get two cups of ice. Back at the car he opened the trunk and filled each cup from a bottle of scotch he had hidden there, amidst the suitcases and the plastic bags filled with my mother's things from the hospital.

 

In the car he handed me one of the cups, and then we eased back onto the highway. We drove like that, each of us sipping carefully. I'd never had scotch, and the taste was strong and bitter. Each swallow left me breathless.

 

By the time we got to Atlanta it was late. As we pulled up the steep, cracked driveway I stared at the old, white house on the hill. We'd only lived here for a few years. It was a rental, the best we could do after we moved back from Florida, my parents' medical bills taking priority over long-term housing.

 

My dad parked in the carport, and after he switched off the ignition both of us remained in our seats for a moment longer, listening to the ticks of the cooling engine. Finally one of us moved, maybe him, and we eased our way out of the car and up the steps to the back door. Neither of us had been in the house in months.

 

My mother's purse sat on her desk, from the last time she had set it down. I let my fingers brush its leather as I passed by, floating into the house like a ghost.

 

I moved slowly through room after room. Each one more still than the last.

 

In the kitchen I stood staring at my reflection in the window above the sink. Ghost.

 

A plant on the windowsill was dry, and I ran the little pot under the tap. I opened the refrigerator and stared into its mostly empty contents. Half-drunk bottles of juice and condiments with crusted caps were scattered across the shelves. I opened the freezer door too, peering in at the sauces and stocks my mother kept stored there. Sheets of cold, like apparitions, wafted down at me.

 

I could hear my father in another part of the house, opening and closing doors. A muffled hush had fallen over everything.

 

 

I made my way to the back of the house and stood in her bedroom, the light from the hallway casting a glow into the darkness there. A nightgown lay draped over a little couch by the window. A book sat propped open on her nightstand. I touched each object lightly, my ghost fingerprints leaving a trail of dampened, white smudges behind me.

 

Eventually we found our way to the living room, both of us sinking down onto the couch cushions. My father lit a cigarette, and I stared at him in shock—my mother never would have let us smoke in the house—and then I realized that it didn't matter anymore, and I lit one too.

 

We exhaled long, thin streams toward the ceiling. There was nothing to say. There would be nothing to say for a long time.

 

At the top of the stairs, before going to bed, my father pressed a little blue pill into my hand.

 

To help you sleep, he said.

 

I swallowed it without water and went downstairs to my old room in the basement. Slept that dreamless sleep.

 

My first three days without a mother.

 

And now, day four. I make my way upstairs.

 

My father has kept the coffee pot hot for me and it ticks in the corner. I stand at the kitchen window and inspect the plant I watered last night. It shows little improvement.

 

I pour a cup of coffee and join my father at the coffee table in the living room. He is holding the phone in one hand and slowly turning the pages of my mother's address book with the other.

 

I watch as he dials a number.

 

Gail? Hi, this is Gerry Smith.

 

There is a pause as the woman on the other end says something.

 

No, no, that's why I'm calling. Sally . . . she . . . she . . .

 

His voice stops, starts, cracks. He shakes his head and thrusts the phone at me.

 

Hello? I say into the receiver.

 

There is crying on the other end. Then a woman clears her throat. I can't remember a Gail. Maybe it's someone from my mother's art group.

 

Hi, I say. This is Sally's daughter.

 

She passed away two days ago.

 

The words come easily. They have no taste at all.

 

After that I make all the calls. My father runs his finger down the pages of the address book and dials the number before handing me the phone. I marvel at how easy it is.

 

Hi, Ann? This is Claire, Sally Smith's daughter.

 

Sometimes they begin crying before I even tell them. They have been waiting for this call.

 

Sometimes I have to say it.

 

This is Claire, Sally Smith's daughter. I'm calling to tell you that she passed away two days ago.

 

My mother is gone. She died two days ago. My mother died on Tuesday. My mother passed away this week. She died on Tuesday. My mother is dead.

 

Oh, Claire.

 

They say this over and over. Oh, Claire.

 

They tell me what an incredible woman she was. They tell me what a good friend she was. How beautiful she was. How much she loved me. How proud of me she was.

 

I feel nothing.

 

My mother is dead. My mother died.

MY BEST FRIEND, LIZ, arrives from Spain the next day. She's been studying abroad for the last few months and we've been friends since we went to Montessori. The very length of our shared history makes her the closest thing I have to a sister.