Magnetism Read online

  It is now that my mother’s death hits me. That not only will there be things that have to be done, but it’ll be up to me to do everything – but now, no one to tell me I’m doing it wrong. She always wanted me to move to live near her and I didn’t want to. We spent a lot of time together anyway, and I won’t consider that she might not have died if I’d been nearer.

  When we’re called to stand in line in order of boarding assignment, I watch the same woman struggle with her carry-on bag until a young guy helps her. I’m a ‘D’ – two letters behind – so she boards before me and I pass her aisle seat on the way to find my own near the back of the plane. She is settling herself in and I see that she’s looking at her magazine again.

  This is a direct flight, less than three hours. They probably won’t even bother with snacks. I find my seat and, though I’m squashed between two big college students, no one bothers me. I pretend to read the paper and cry silently.

  My old lady has left the plane and is gone before I get off. Gus meets me, we hug awkwardly and he drives me straight to Mom’s house. When we get out of his car he apologises about the yard; the grass is overgrown. He explains that he didn’t get round to doing it in the morning as he’d planned. When there was no reply to the doorbell, he went around the back and looked in the windows because the dog was barking like crazy. He saw her in the den, on the floor. ‘I had to break a window and climb through. But it’s okay, I’ve secured it with some wood. You’ll be safe. When the paramedics got here they went in the front door.’

  ‘But it was too late?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, and I imagine this elderly man peering in, and then having to climb through my mother’s ranch house window, finding her dead and then phoning for an ambulance. It must have been awful.

  ‘I’m glad it was you. She likes you.’

  ‘Well, your mom is something else.’ Then he corrects this. ‘Was,’ he says, ‘Terrible stuff when she was a kid, but God, she sure rose above it and had quite a life, didn’t she? She sure was something else.’

  ‘Sure,’ I echo. I don’t really know what he’s talking about, but it’s nice that he liked her so much.

  We are at the front door. He pulls out her meagre bunch of keys with the rabbit foot keychain. The sight of the keys starts me off crying again, but Gus doesn’t notice. I follow him into the house. The lights are off. He switches them on and the house lights up. Everything is dingy and dirty; she can’t have dusted for months. It wasn’t like this when I was last here.

  ‘There’s no real mess,’ he says as I continue to follow him past the open door to the living room and through to the den. ‘It was all … well, no mess. Oh, and I took the dog to be boarded. They’ll keep it there until you decide what you want to do. Poor thing was barking and barking like mad, real upset he was, but I know you’re allergic. I didn’t want you ill, so I got them to come and collect it. Phone number is in the kitchen. She’d used them before. She told me.’ He points and I look around the room. ‘See, there’s no real mess. That’s a blessing.’

  The allergy is a falsehood and his comments about this room, too, are untrue. There is no blood on the carpet, but the room is far from clean – there are used mugs and plates, and piles of papers on the surfaces. It is a total mess.

  It turns out that I don’t have to decide on the funeral director. While he puts on some water for coffee Gus tells me he’s taken care of that as well. ‘I used this guy for the wife on a recommendation, and he’ll do you proud too, don’t you worry,’ he says. ‘Your mom,’ he says, ‘has already been moved to their premises.’

  Although I’m grateful, I seem to have lost the power of speech. I keep expecting Mom to arrive home any moment and ask what the hell we’re doing because my mother is like a tornado – the biggest person in any situation. All my life she’s whipped in without warning and changed the landscape and I’ve repeatedly been swept up and along in whatever unpredictable direction she takes. Surely she wouldn’t leave me and little old Gus in charge. She never lets anyone else deal with the big stuff. This is some sort of mistake, or joke. ‘I can’t believe it,’ I say. ‘What is she thinking?’

  ‘I know.’ He nods slowly, then again more slowly, and finally, almost imperceptibly, he moves his head once more.

  After another few minutes of sitting in silence completely still and looking at the space on the floor where the small couch and coffee table have been shoved aside – presumably where they attended to her – Gus leans forward to drag himself up to standing. He puts his hand on my shoulder and says softly, ‘Well, I’ll be getting on, and let you get some rest.’

  I’m suddenly terrified at being here in her house alone. I try to sound conversational. I remember he’s a widower and that his wife’s name was Nora. ‘How long has Nora been gone? Tell me about her. I’m sorry I don’t know much about you, Gus.’

  ‘We were married for forty-three years. The Lord works in mysterious ways and he decided to take her before me.’ He pauses. ‘Listen, honey, do you want me to pray with you?’ He is asking me tentatively and when I shake my head he appears relieved. Then he says, ‘I can send my pastor around, if you like. Maybe tomorrow?’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. He passes me the bent-up card from the funeral director and suggests I phone them in the morning to arrange an appointment. ‘Hard,’ he says, ‘being an only child. But at least there won’t be any arguments. Lots of stuff gets thrown up at these times. My kids were hardly speaking to each other after Nora passed. I had to referee.’

  I desperately want him to stay. ‘I didn’t even know you had children.’

  ‘Not nearby. One in Maine and the other, the girl, in California.’

  ‘I should have lived closer to Mom.’

  ‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘I was always saying that kids doing their own thing was the best way, and your mom agreed.’ Now he says, again, that he’s really got to be going.

  I try, ‘I guess you must miss your wife a lot? It must be lonely at times.’ Gus doesn’t bother to respond, and thinking of attempting to seduce this nice old man just to keep him in my dead mother’s house is as ridiculous an idea as any I’ve had this year. I should be ashamed of myself.

  Finally, I decide I can’t kidnap him so there’s no avoiding it. I’ve got to let him go. I see him to the front door and we say goodbye and then I go down along the corridor to the room that she told me, whenever I came to visit, was mine. I don’t want to look into any of the other rooms. I don’t want to see this place without her in it because I will see her everywhere and she is nowhere now.

  ‘My’ room appears to have become Mom’s store room – there are stacks of boxes against the walls. The sheets on the bed seem clean. Even if they weren’t I wouldn’t care. I don’t wash. I don’t unpack anything. I strip off my clothes and climb beneath the covers, exhausted.

  It’s still pitch black outside when I wake, just gone four a.m. Perhaps the time difference accounts for some of the sudden, dreadful surge of energy that sweeps through me now, but not for all of it. I have to do something. What I really need to be is Superman, flying around and around the world, turning back time to before she went and died.

  2011

  The Blind Sentinel

  My mother has been broken in a car crash – a leg and ribs – and the two of us are in the guest bedroom where there is room for a mattress on the floor beside the bed. This is where I’m lying now, listening to the steady snoring above me and wondering when she will drive again, and whether she should drive again. I’ve told her she’ll feel better in the morning, but that’s probably a lie.

  I think about the road kill I see by the side of the highway back home. ‘No one plans accidents,’ someone in the waiting area at the hospital said earlier. ‘They wouldn’t be accidents if they were planned.’

  Dan, her neighbour opposite, was a big help. I could never have moved this mattress from ‘my room’ in here on my own. He was the one who suggested we sleep in the guest room, once he’d had
a look at her overcrowded bedroom. Her last boyfriend supposedly slept in here when he was with her, but I won’t think about that now – I’ll never sleep if I think about Philip.

  Mom is lucky to have Dan nearby, but then she’s always been a lucky person – a lucky person who’s never had any idea how lucky she is. Like Mr Magoo, going through life unwittingly escaping mishap and leaving mayhem in his wake, that’s exactly how she is. She could have been killed today, but, instead of realising the close call, she’s snoring away and I’m lying here unable to sleep.

  My body is exhausted but my mind is wired tight. I know I won’t sleep because it has been so stressful. By the time I got from the airport to the hospital the dust storm was long gone, but everyone was still talking about it and I was trying to put together fragments of information to figure out what happened. On the news before we finally bedded down tonight, we learned that there were tons of other car accidents across Phoenix. That’s why it was so busy in the ER.

  I can hear her dog breathing heavily in the hallway outside. He scratched the door for a while, but finally gave up because I wasn’t about to let him in and I won’t relent. He needs to know who is boss. He’s been getting away with too much for too long.

  I can’t believe how boring it is lying awake listening to someone fast asleep without a care. I wish I’d left the curtains open because some street light in here would be good. Perhaps I could use a flashlight to read or something – she must have a flashlight somewhere – but I don’t want to risk waking her up by rooting around in the drawers. I decide to count sheep.

  I’m somewhere after sixty when she whispers my name and I’m pulled up from the airy no-man’s land between wakefulness and sleep – and momentarily startled to find myself on the floor beside her bed. Then I can feel a rush of energy and I’m wide-wide awake again.

  I wear contacts, but I can’t sleep in them and I am as blind as a bat, so I always put my glasses under the pillow. I grab them now and push them on to my face. ‘Mom? Mom, are you okay?’

  ‘I think I should take something,’ she says all breathy and childish, sounding like a drunk Marilyn Monroe, ‘Please let me have Poopy. I wish you’d let him in.’

  ‘No.’ Though I’m only whispering, I try to sound firm. Simple statements. ‘You don’t need anything. They gave you a bunch of Vicodin and a shot at the hospital. The dog is already asleep. You’ve got cuts and stitches. It’s unhygienic. He can’t come in. He’s okay out there. He’s fast asleep. Just go back to sleep yourself.’

  Then, on cue, the stupid animal starts to whimper and scratch on the hall carpet outside the door again. She should never have got a dog. When we talked about it on the phone she said she was thinking about getting one because she was lonely, that she wouldn’t be lonely if only I moved closer, but, if I wouldn’t live near, then she was going to get a dog.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a job.’

  ‘Then I’m down to the pound tomorrow.’

  And I laughed. ‘You know you have to walk it and clean up shit if you have a dog. You’ll never do that. Dog poop has to be picked up and, besides that, they are helpless and need looking after. Have you thought about that? You’d have to take care of it.’

  But the very next day she did as she said she would and picked up a miniature poodle. She chose a neurotic dog that also craps a lot, probably just to prove me wrong.

  ‘I haven’t been able to sleep at all,’ she says now.

  I raise my voice trying to cover up the scraping and snuffling sounds the dog is making outside the door, before she might notice them. ‘Well, you did a pretty good imitation of sleeping. You were asleep.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I was faking. I was just tired of listening to you droning on and on. I wanted you to relax because I know you need your sleep. You can’t sleep while you’re talking. You know, honey, sometimes you just need to shut up. You should learn that.’

  ‘Why would you think I could relax? You could have been killed.’ I don’t want to scare her, but perhaps she should think about what happened. ‘I don’t want to scare you, but perhaps you should think about what happened,’ I say. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. She hadn’t put the headlights on, and, the police also said she was talking on her cell phone. ‘Killed, Mom. You could be dead now. D. E. A. D. and then there would we be?’

  ‘Well, I guess that it wouldn’t be my problem,’ she says quietly.

  She still hasn’t adequately explained what she was doing out near interstate seventeen. When the police asked about it at the hospital, she was evasive and then the doctor told them to stop questioning her. He made excuses, saying that she’d had a shock and that really elderly people often don’t immediately recall the details after an accident and that we must all be patient.

  ‘She’s early seventies,’ I said, ‘that’s hardly really elderly, nowadays.’

  She piped up from the stretcher, ‘Hey, doc, I’ve had some work done. Is my face still okay? I can’t afford to get another lift done.’

  Here in the dark, she says, ‘I’m not dead and don’t worry about me, honey. I’m a very strong person. This is no big deal. I’ll be fine. I’ll be good as before in a jiff. Don’t sweat it. You’ll get yourself all worked up.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ I say, ‘I am sweating it. I am oozing sweat with worry about you. I am soaked with sweat from all this crap. And I’m exhausted. You need to rest. Try to go back to sleep.’ Again, I mean to sound like I’m in charge, that I am now the mom talking to the kid but, unfortunately, coming from the floor it loses all possible impact.

  ‘So, go on and get me my meds. I need something to help me sleep. Fetch me my Ambien.’

  ‘No, Mom.’

  ‘You are not a doctor. You’re not even a nurse. Or a nurse’s aid.’

  It’s two-thirty in the morning local time, because Phoenix opts out of daylight savings. Four-thirty a.m. back in Oklahoma City. I sit up, then I stand up and feel suddenly lightheaded. It’s pitch black and I can hardly make her out on the bed. ‘Do you want the Elavil? How about that?’ This is a new prescription for her and I think it’ll be okay with the Vicodin and it’s also a whole bunch better than Ambien, which she shouldn’t ever take because she sleep-eats when she takes it. People can choke on food if they don’t know they’re eating. Mom has devoured whole bags of candy, boxes of chocolate, bags of nuts and entire punnets of fruit in her sleep. On more than one occasion she’s woken to find her sheets stained, packaging detritus scattered around the bed, and a trail of spilt food leading along to the kitchen and the open refrigerator door.

  At the hospital she didn’t tell them about the Ambien, or the rest of her stash. She’s always had good insurance from Dad’s benefits and it’s rare she has to do a co-pay, so every single prescription gets filled and she never, ever throws drugs out. She has several gallon-size Ziploc bags stuffed full of vials with labelled prescriptions from various doctors she falls in, and out, with. Even if out of date by years, they’re still secreted away, just in case.

  Earlier at the hospital, when I interrupted the doctor’s questions to list for him all the current meds she takes regularly, and those old prescription drugs I’m sure she takes on occasion, she waved me to shut up. She said, ‘My daughter has problems. I can speak for myself.’ In front of him she told me to go and get myself a coffee. ‘Scram,’ she said. He looked embarrassed and shrugged and I walked out. Later he told me to be patient with her. I should have told him to try fifty-one years with someone like her.

  She says now, ‘No. I want the Ambien. Go get my pills. Under the vanity unit. I’ll only take a half. Take the edge off it.’

  I guess she won’t be able to get up to get anything to eat and because I’m too tired to argue any more I say, ‘Shut your eyes. I’ve got to put the light on.’

  ‘Don’t put the light on.’

  ‘I have to put the light on. Make sure you’re taking the right thing.’

  ‘Don’t put the goddamn light on. I know which one
s by feel,’ she says. ‘I have the super-senses of a blind person.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’ I stride across the room and punch the light switch and blink. The room looks smaller in the bright light. It’s dusty, faded. She’s smaller too. I can see she’s annoyed but she can’t stop me: she can’t get up.

  ‘I need to get word to Philip. He’d want to know I’ve been hurt. I’m sure he’ll be concerned. He would care. He wouldn’t treat me like this.’

  ‘Forget it. It’s been more than ten years. You think that freeloader would take better care of you than me? I could remind you. He was gone like the wind.’

  ‘You could find him. You’re very resourceful. We both know how resourceful you can be when you want.’

  She doesn’t really want him. This is a strategy – her feeble attempt to make me feel disposable. She thinks that, if she threatens Philip, I’ll be more agreeable. I nearly feel sorry for her, because their relationship ended badly and if she thinks he’s an option she must be feeling desperate. She wouldn’t be able to find him again after all this time anyway. I will say nothing.

  In the hall, the animal is wagging its tail and begins sniffing around my ankles. He’s a dangerous trip hazard and she’s stupid for thinking she’s going to be able to keep him. She should never have got him. Sooner or later he’s going to be unwanted and neglected. But there’s no telling her anything. Being around my mother is like trying to fly a kite in a storm. She will always do what she wants and she is inherently reckless not only with herself, but with everyone else. She doesn’t keep a calendar for recording appointments. She won’t make plans ahead of time. She loves surprises and surprising people, including herself. She won’t be tied down to anything and that’s why I know she’ll get pissed off with this animal before long, and put it down, and then we’ll have to pretend that he just died.