Washing the Dead (41 page)

“When did they take her?” The hall felt stuffy, and I was having trouble breathing.

“Just before you got here. Could be a while.”

I wanted to see her now.

“Go stretch your legs a bit,” Neil offered. “Nothing you can do in an empty room.”

“Can I get you something?” I asked.

“Nope, I’m fine.” He didn’t look fine. His eyes were tired and puffy, and he was frowning.

Sam and I found Dawn waiting in the lounge around the corner. We sat down across from her. She’d brought us coffee and a Styrofoam plate with a slab of pumpkin raisin bread. “We’ve got a baker in our unit,” she said.

“You’re a sweetheart, Dawn.” I didn’t have much of an appetite, but Sam popped a piece of the bread into his mouth.

“So how’s Lili doing?” she asked.

Her comment washed over me at first, but then it registered. “You just saw her last night.”

Dawn looked at us both. “No. We were down in Kenosha having an early Thanksgiving dinner with my brother.”

Sam clenched his jaw, and the tiny muscles around his mouth moved under his skin.

“What did you mean when you told me that Megan said Lili wasn’t herself?” I asked.

“Well, I think she’s been hanging around with some girls who push the envelope a little more.” Dawn was not the type of mother to stick her nose in other parents’ business, which made her observation more reliable.

“Don’t get Barbara started on Taylor Miller,” Sam said, trying to lighten the conversation.

“Look, let me go and see if I can do some recon on your mom.” Dawn excused herself with the skill and experience of someone who knew to leave a family alone to digest bad news.

I dug my nails into the lip of the Styrofoam plate, making waves of half moons. “Pushing the envelope. I don’t like the sound of that. And Lili lied to us again.”

“We’ll talk to her.” Sam flashed the smile that went with his comforting tone while he dusted crumbs from his sweater.

I looked toward my mother’s room and back at Sam. I wanted him gone as I only had one other time in our marriage, during Lili’s sonogram. I wanted him to leave me to face the mess and glory of my past. I understood my mother’s drive to retreat from all of us and sit in the mikveh, alone and in silence.

I slid my chair close to his. “Sam, honey, thank you for being here.”

“Of course.” He put his arm around my shoulder.

I rested my head against his chest. “But I need to do this solo.”

Dawn came hurrying toward us. “They’re bringing your mom up right now.”

He pulled me toward him, and the arm of the chair dug into my waist.

“Go back to Deerfield Sam, please,” I whispered.

“But Lili’s fine with my parents, and you need me here.” He looked frightened, a rarity for Sam.

“Drive safe.” I caressed his cheek. I was hurting him, but I couldn’t think about that now. I got up and walked toward my mother’s room, away from Sam and the befuddled look I could feel on his face.

I stood next to Neil as two nurses wheeled my mother into her room. Long tubes streamed from her nose, and her body occupied a sliver of the mattress. Jenny had colored her hair with the proper auburn rinse, but the veins beneath her translucent skin resembled roads on a city map.

Neil and I zoned out in front of back-to-back episodes of a reality show about hoarders. After a few hours, the nurses told us to go home. My mother was sleeping comfortably, and her condition wouldn’t change overnight.

Neil offered me a lift, but I sent him on his way and took a cab. I phoned Sam. I could hear the sadness in his voice when we talked about trivial things like the traffic just south of Racine and Mrs. Hirsh’s newest dietary issues.

“You’re hurt,” I said.

“I’m supposed to be your rock.” I could hear CNN blaring in
the background.

“I need to be my rock for a while.”

“Lili just came upstairs, why don’t you say hello,” he said and put Lili on the phone.

“Hi, Mom”

Her voice was warm, and I had no intention of confronting her about the ice cream lie, but the cab was approaching Kopp’s, the site of her fictitious custard run. I peered at the marquee that posted the new flavor of the week.

“I’m just driving by Kopp’s, and guess what! This week’s flavor is actually
not
Cranberry Medley. It’s pumpkin! How about that?” I couldn’t rein in my sarcasm.

“I knew you’d throw a hissy fit if I told you I was going out with Taylor and Amanda,” she muttered.

“Well, you were right. You’re grounded.”

She hung up.

I redialed Sam. “Your daughter just hung up on me.”

“I’m going to talk to her about that, believe me.”

“Listen, the cab is in the driveway. I’ll call you in a few,” I said wearily.

The cabdriver, an older man with a European accent I couldn’t identify, pulled up to my house. I handed him a fifty-dollar bill, and he looked at me with such sympathy in his tired eyes. “Kids, husbands,” he said. “They make you crazy.”

“Sure do. Keep the change.”

The house was cold and empty. I heated up a can of minestrone and called Sam back.

“Are we okay, Barbara?”

I thought of my mother lying in that hospital bed, sick and alone, and Sam sitting in his childhood bedroom, CNN blaring, alone, while Lili was likely texting manically in the room across the hall, alone. And me, freezing in our ice-cold happy nest. Alone. And for now, I couldn’t see how it could be any other way. “Nothing feels okay to me right now.”

“I love you,” he said feebly.

“I love you too.” Before he could reassure me that we’d all be just fine, I wished him good night and hung up.

I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I dreamed of the mikveh. Through a haze of smoke, I could make out my mother sitting on a chair, her wrist delicate and lightly freckled, half covered by the tattered cuff of her blue coat, her fingers pinching a lit cigarette.

I woke up early the next morning and showered quickly. Soon the roads would be busy with shoppers, but for now nobody else was driving. The sky was gray, and it was snowing lightly. I phoned Neil from my car to tell him that I’d be at the hospital shortly and drove straight to the Shabbos goy’s nursery.

He set down a tree he was planting and walked toward me. “Is your mother okay?”

“Her heart is failing.”

“Where is she?”

“St. Mary’s.” I pulled out my checkbook and scribbled my cell number on a deposit slip.

He looked around the lot. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“So I haven’t scared you off?”

“I don’t scare easily.” He smiled.

“My mother told me that you were a part of her childhood,” I said.

“Is that all?”

“I think that’s all she was capable of telling me.”

“I’ll tell you what you want to know, but not this second.” He pulled his collar up around his neck. “At the hospital.”

I felt such a strong wave of relief that I almost cried.

When I arrived at the hospital, Neil was already sitting in my mother’s room. “What took you so long?” he asked.

“I had to make a stop.” I handed him a Starbucks grande.

“Thanks. The hospital joe tastes like battery acid. Since when did you start drinking coffee?”

“About a month ago, and now I’m addicted.” I took a gulp of
my latte. “How is she?”

“Still zonked out.”

Just then my mother opened her eyes and turned her head toward me. “Barbara,” she said, as though speaking my name demanded all her strength.

“Hi, Mom.” I kissed her forehead. Her skin felt papery against my lips. “You feeling better this morning?”

She nodded weakly and stared at the television while I stared at her. I was that little girl curled up on the chaise longue, waiting for my mother to wake up, wondering what I could possibly do to rouse her. She dozed off again, and Neil and I watched an ESPN highlights special and talked about trivial things such as Tiger Woods’ fall from grace and Aaron Rodgers’ last game. I checked the door every few seconds for signs of the Shabbos goy, but a watched pot truly doesn’t boil. Maybe he wasn’t going to show.

I went downstairs to call Sam, but he didn’t answer. I bought a bag of Fritos, Neil’s favorite, and went back upstairs. Neil was waiting for me outside my mother’s room. “Before you go in, I need to tell you something.”

He was scaring me. “What? What?”

“Mom has a visitor. I wanted to prepare you.”

“I know who it is.”

Neil looked down at his shoes. “I don’t think you do.”

“How do you think he knew where to find her?” I asked and stepped past him into the room.

The Shabbos goy was sitting with his back toward me, his lumber coat slung over his chair. I sat down on the other side of the bed. Now he was not the bogeyman in the blue Dodge, he was an old man watching a woman he loved slip away. My father had worshiped my mother, and if he were alive, he would be sitting in that chair next to her withering body, but he wasn’t. We listened to the faint sound of her breathing and the periodic buzzer preceding the opening of the heavy locked doors to the critical care wing. Words would come later.

Neil sat down next to the Shabbos goy and patted him on the
shoulder as if he were an old friend. They’d played hours of basketball in the Schines’ driveway, something that never had interested my father. Neil had muted the television, and I pointed to a weather map on the screen. “Looks like a cold snap is coming our way.”

“Looks like it,” Andy said politely.

“It was nice of you to come,” I said. It seemed both strange and natural to be sitting here with him.

“She was my best friend,” he said simply.

Neil and I looked at each other. “How did you two become best friends?” I asked.

“My father was the groundskeeper at the mansion.” His eyes grew foggy. “I grew up in the carriage house.”

My mouth opened, but no sound came out. Neil seemed shocked too. “The Schines’ mansion?” he said.

The Shabbos goy told his story, and we spoke to each other over my mother’s body, as if she were a table at Pandl’s upon which a waitress would arrive and plunk down a German pancake. He spoke steadily and without interruption, as I had during my Mexican lunch with Simone, and although he hadn’t been smoking pot and drinking margaritas, I suspected he was just as tired from shouldering too many secrets. He said that when my uncle Norman died, my grandfather’s heart went bad, and he died of a massive heart attack.

“Bad heart.” I pointed to the monitor above my mom’s bed. “But where were you when she had her first breakdown, when the Schines found her?” I asked, avoiding mention of the abortion.

He took my mother’s hand. “Up at Oshkosh at college. I stuck around for a while, but she asked me to leave after your grandfather’s funeral.”

My mother fluttered her eyes, and the Shabbos goy leaned toward her.

“She’s been doing that all day,” Neil said, reminding us all to not get our hopes up.

I waited for my mother to move again even if it didn’t mean
anything, and then she opened her green eyes and looked at us all with a clarity I hadn’t seen since Neil moved her to Milwaukee.

“Andy,” she murmured. “You’re my best friend too.”

“How ya feeling, Junie?”

“Did you bring Norman?”

“Not today,” he said softly.

“Hi, Mom,” Neil and I said at the same time.

“You’re all here.” She smiled peacefully as her eyes traveled to each of us, and then they lost focus and she closed them.

Wait, don’t go, I wanted to say, but she fell back into slumber.

The Shabbos goy extended his hand, and I took it. “Thank you, Andy.” His proper name came through my lips like a faint breeze. We stayed like that for a minute, our arms forming a bridge across my mother’s body.

Neil left the room to make a few phone calls, and I was alone with Andy. Since I had accepted the invitation to wash Mrs. Kessler’s body, I felt like I’d fallen back down the rabbit hole, and now it seemed that Andy was standing at the bottom, arms outstretched, waiting to catch me.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” I was looking at his ringless finger.

“Sure.”

“Did you ever marry?”

“Yup, but it didn’t last long,” he said matter-of-factly.

I didn’t ask for the details. He didn’t need to tell me that his heart belonged to my mother. “I’m sorry.”

“So it goes. What else did you want to know about your mom?”

I wanted to know everything. I asked him about the fancy balls my mother had once described to me.

“Come again?” he said.

“At the mansion, when my mom was a little girl.”

“By the time she was born, the Depression had hit, and there were no parties.”

“But my grandfather was very wealthy, wasn’t he?”

“He was. He manufactured shoes, made a lot of money in the First World War, socked it away in gold.”