The Cool Part of His Pillow

Chapter 2: A Seismic Event-3

“You’ve got a floodlight out over there.”

This is the first full sentence my mother says to me, in our small white gazebo, after she’s asked that we go outside to be alone.

“Not being critical,” she adds hastily.

Like me, my mother is a stickler. What’s wrong needs righting. Too bad my life can’t be stood back on its feet.

“Remind me to get pictures this trip,” Mom says. “I’m always bragging how it’s like Kensington Palace.” I can almost hear the clucking of her friends. She chides herself aloud. “God, that sounded awful, like I’m sightseeing.”

She then waits for me to break the seal. I do.

“I’m not so foolish to think that things like this don’t happen to people like me. Someone goes first and never the way you’d like. But now?”

“No one can answer that.”

“He was forty-five!”

“Linger, like your father? Going to our lockbox for living wills, withholding life-sustaining measures, comfort care only, that’s better?”

I toss my wadded Kleenex into a planter. “Apples and oranges.”

She nods. “Dad was sick. We prepared. But then you finally enact that cardiopulmonary clause, the Do Not Resuscitate, DNR, and everyone assures you he’s in a vegetative state, it’s the right thing to do, it will be over in a day, maybe a couple. Two weeks pass. You can’t exactly say, ‘Never mind, this isn’t working, let’s try to make him better again.’ That apple, it’s still death. And the orange is still—”

“Death. Forget prepare. I don’t even get to see Andy, Mom.” I rock, holding my kneecaps, then shoving my hands under my arms. “He was so ripped apart they can’t even make him presentable. Their exact words were ‘Reconstruction will constitute a challenge.’”

“It’s the body he used.”

“It’s the body I knew! I didn’t touch his aura, I touched the shell it inhabited every day! Now he’s not recognizable as human! And they outright disposed of Noel and Gertie. Disposed!” I take the hand she offers me, squeezing her fingers. The dry skin around her many rings easily shifts. I’m beginning to lose it. “What happened in that car in those few seconds? Did he throw himself on Gertie and Noel or did they pile on to protect him—”

“They were together. That’s what counts.”

I lose it. “Or was it just noise and darkness and death?”

She brings her hands up against my eyes. “Don’t dwell.”

“Keep those there forever, Mom. I don’t want to see life without Andy and my beautiful puppets.”

“You were quite a team. I loved watching you two wash and dry dishes, stepping over your dogs underfoot.” I cry for a while until she releases her hands to offer, “Your duck is still here.”

We watch the mallard fold into repose nearby.

She asks of the jumbled pool area, “Did you do all that?”

“Sure did.”

Mom plucks my tissue from the planter. “Times like this, I go back to something your Grandma Lola harped on. At any given time, she warned me and your aunt, ‘Girls, hell is never more than a half mile away.’”

“Which meant?”

“Which meant h*******t is just around the corner. Sunbathers can get caught up in a tornado. A semi loses a wheel as a kid with a new driver’s license goes to pass it. Go out looking for the end of a rainbow and there might be only a Port-A-Let. ‘Good people and bad people, they all look the same,’ she’d tell us.”

“Not the affirming homilies one typically hears at a mother’s knee.” I shudder. It’s one of those sound bites that provide a glimmer into what my mom’s miserable upbringing was like.

“Just be careful of the what-ifs,” she warns. “You’ll pummel yourself about the long work hours when you could’ve been with him. The office parties of his you refused to go to. The things that were too much trouble will now seem no trouble at all. And then there are the things you shouldn’t have done. Do not go down that path.” She pauses. “Now this is your mom talking, but I resent your special day is forever tainted.”

“Forever ruined, Mom. I guess it could be worse. He could’ve been killed on Christmas Day.”

I realize what I’ve said, but like a bad discard in gin rummy, it’s too late to reel it in. At seventy-nine, my grandmother, Lola, had night-walked sometime between the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of December. Frantic employees at her assisted living facility, which specialized in memory care—ironic, since they’d forgotten to lock her door from the outside—discovered her missing. On Christmas afternoon, she was found frozen in a ravine.

“You forget about your Grandma?” Mom asks immediately. I admit yes and I put my head on her shoulder to demonstrate how sorry I am. I touch her synthetic hair, which feels like a blend of lint and rubber bands.

“Why the wig?”

She pulls away. “Leave it to you. It look phony?”

I pretend tucking something behind her neck. “Not after I hide the care tag.”

“Funny boy. I didn’t have time for the salon. I had a one-hour fifteen-hundred-dollar flight to catch.”

“That’s outrageous!”

“The airlines suck. Olivia and Teddy’s were worse yet.”

My sister Olivia is two years my senior. She’s windblown on the calmest days and does not—can not—think in a linear way. She’s a little like Stevie Nicks. With the layered lace, shawls, and cameos, it takes Olivia an eternity to get ready and present herself. Godot will show up faster. At least her marriage to Ted, about the sturdiest man I have ever known, put a splint on a lot of her insecurities.

“I’ll reimburse you all,” I promise.

My mother has never even slightly let me help, not that she needs it. When I decided to add flooring and carpeting to the gallery, I offered her a consulting fee. She said “no” to even that. “Always replace tacking strips and give your installers periodic drug tests. There. No charge.” Even the occasional luxury I have forced upon her, like a mink shrug, embarrassed her. So it’s not a surprise that she boxes my ears.

“Pipe down. I put theirs on my Visa. I told them to leave 9A Nosepierce behind to catch up on miso soup and pregnancy scares.”

She is sighing, which she often does, about Olivia’s daughter Nina, which is pronounced like the numeral nine with an ugh. The hard “I” and the “ugh” infuriated Mom. “Livvie, kids will call her Nine-ugh v****a!” They did. She embraced it and now signs everything 9A. “My only grandchild, the suite,” Mom grouses. Nina is anti-everything, including herself, probably in response to her mother’s otherworldliness. Now twenty-six, she’s still at home, in her fourth year of a fourteen-month data entry curriculum at a vocational school.

“Is Nina mastering keyboard skills one row at a time?” Mom demanded of my sister, who herself has been office temping for years and has the same commitment aversion.

“She enjoys learning,” Olivia replied.

“Almost as much as delaying responsibility. Nina’s never even had a W-2,” was Mom’s parting shot.

Now, she tells me, “They’re due in at ten-something and I said you could line up somebody to pick them up.”

“For sure.”

She slips her arm through mine. “Good. Let’s head in.”