Christmas, Present (6 page)

“And furthermore, with all this, there’s no time for me, for us. I want to hold you, forever. I want to tell you all the things I’ve thought about, when I see you

making dinner, how sexy it is to me that you know where everything is, how you sing when you fold the laundry, always the same song, did you know that?”

“I didn’t,” Laura replied suddenly. “What is it?” “It’s ‘Hey, Big Spender,’ ” Elliott said, nearly laugh-

ing. “That’s what it is.”

“Huh,” Laura said, her eyes welling, as she took Elliott’s arm. “It probably looks like I care about you less than I do about all these others. I know I’m wheel- ing from one thing to another . . . but Elliott, it’s not that I love you less, I love you
more
. I guess I expect you to be another me, part of me. To understand more. I . . . I was going to ask you if you wanted to make love—it wouldn’t hurt me, and it would be our last chance.” Elliott winced, caught his breath. “I knew you’d react that way, sweetie. I understand. It probably would be too . . . appalling. Like making love to a—”

“No, not that! Not at all. But I . . . couldn’t, Laura,” Elliott told her. “I would be afraid to hurt you. What I wanted was to be alone. Hold you . . . to sleep. No more rushing around.”

“And, Ell . . . we have time. But now we’ll have to

wait before we talk anymore,” Laura said, with a sig- nificant and patently phony brightening of her eyes as she glimpsed her daughters, huddled at the doorway, Amelia still in her Clifford pajamas. Miranda, exquis- itely turned out in camel and taupe Saturday elegance, stepped into the opening behind the girls.

“She wouldn’t change,” Miranda apologized to Elliott, gesturing at Amelia, then leaning down to kiss his cheek. He hoped his mother-in-law did not notice how he flinched. She kissed Laura’s cheek and said, “I wrestled with her for thirty minutes.” How inappro- priate Miranda must have felt dragging a rumpled child in pajamas into a hospital, Laura mused.

Amelia would not cross the room to her mother’s bed. Annie hung back, as well. It was Rory who cried, “Mommy!” and flung herself on top of Laura.

“Don’t!” Elliott cried, as Rory froze.

“It’s okay, Ell,” Laura told him. “She can’t hurt me. It’s okay, Rory, Rory, morning glory, sun queen of the balance beam. This is so terrible, if I had a million bucks, I would give it away if you didn’t have to see me like this.”

“You don’t have a million bucks,” Rory said. “You don’t look sick, Mommy.”

“But I am, honey,” Laura said slowly. “It doesn’t show. It’s inside.”

“Like cancer?”

“Sort of, but no.” Laura sighed, thinking she was possibly the only person in the entire United States tonight who actually wished she
did
have cancer. “Hand me that sticky paper, honey, will you?” Laura asked Rory. “I don’t want to forget everything.” She printed,
Coat moisturizer for dog all gone. Cleaning to be picked up at Cantorini’s. Save one of my rings for each of the girls— my grandmother’s for Annie. Find a grief group, one for each age. Ask the woman I know, Paula Miles, at Hospice.
The impossibility of compressing an entire lifetime of routines and assumptions so instinc- tive they were like swallowing, not something she had to remind herself to do, was like describing the color orange to a person blind from birth. But had they been struck and killed in the tunnel, somehow all of them would have grown up. Laura’s sister Angela was

their legal guardian. But of course, they’d no need of a guardian.

They had a father. She’d grown up.

She’d had a mother.

Hastily, she scribbled:
Find daycare provider IN HOME. Advertise through the college. Emphasize child- development training with children who have problems.
She could think of no other thing to add except,
Do this no matter what it costs, for a minimum two years.

Laura finally put down her pen and asked, “Do you want me to talk to all three of you alone, without Daddy and Grandmother? Or each one at a time?”

“All together,” said Rory, beckoning to Amelia, who stuck her thumb in the corner of her mouth and shook her head violently. She stuck out one of her red Clifford slippers, new since St. Nicholas Day, for Laura to see. Laura smiled and pointed.

“Well, if my vote matters at all to anyone, I would like to talk to you alone without them,” said Annie, gesturing at her sisters and her father. Glancing her up

and down, Laura was heartsick to see that Annie had chosen to wear a skirt and blouse and had French- braided her hair. Rehearsing for a funeral, she thought. “Okay, well, that’s okay, right?” Laura asked the room at large, noticing that the sun, in a piercingly clear sky, was on the horizon. Despite the snow, there

would be stars tonight.

Elliott obediently scooped Amelia up and led Rory out. After a moment, Miranda followed.

Annie sat down across from Laura in the straight chair. There was only one, and it looked as comfort- able as a barstool. “Why don’t you come here and sit beside me?”

“Obvious reasons,” Annie said, curling her lip.

“I don’t smell or have anything catching,” Laura snapped.

“I mean I would obviously cry.” “Oh.”

“And that wouldn’t get anything cleared up.” “Do we have to clear things up?”

“Yes, a couple,” Annie said. She has made her own

list, Laura thought, blinking furiously, pretending to fluff her pillow.

“To begin with, I was the one who stole the twenty dollars; I’m sorry I called you a bitch in the letter, which was from me; and I’m going to have my period soon. I smoked a cigarette at Justine’s. I bit Amelia just last night because she hit me with her lousy makeup bag and I have a huge welt on my head.”

“Well, I know all those things,” Laura replied, try- ing to keep her voice even. “Not that you bit Amelia. That’s a little over the top. But it shows you’re a good person that you wanted to tell me. As for your period, well, just use my things. They’re under the bathroom sink. Put the pad in your underpants. I always liked the pads because they don’t hurt or get stuck, even if they are messier, and don’t believe anybody who says you can’t swim or exercise or anything . . .”

“I meant, you
won’t
be there with me! Nice!” Annie

hissed.

“Do you think I picked this time to die?”

“It really sucks. How can your mother do two hun-

dred crunches a day and then die in eight hours?” Laura shrugged. “I’m not doing it voluntarily.” “Dad says there is a surgery.”

“I’d be mental. Not just mental. I’d have to be fed with a tube. I wouldn’t know who you were.”

“How do you know?” Annie asked, clenching her fists with their violent purple-and-glitter tips. “How do you know what you’d know? Don’t you think you kind of owe it to us to try
something
instead of just lay- ing there in a nice Christmas jacket and dying?”

“Anna Lee,” Laura said sternly, “I heard what the doctor said, and he said it would be useless. On top of that, you would come to hate me.”

“I hate you for not doing it! How do you like that?” “Not much.”

“I hate you for being so selfish you don’t even think of Daddy or the poor baby. She won’t even remember you!” Annie screeched.

“Do you want her to remember me as a thing that had to be turned over in bed for her sores and fed through a hole in her stomach? Because that’s how it would be, Annie. I’m not lying. I don’t want to say

that to you, but that’s how it would be. You have to help the baby remember me, Anna Lee. You have to help her.”

“Thanks a lot! I suppose I have to be the big grown- up now like you did when your father died, because Dad is going to be this huge limp psycho, and I’m going to have to take care of Rory and the baby and totally have no life of my own! Thanks!”

Until now, Laura had not regarded her family his- tory as particularly tragic. Too late, she saw it for the disjointed thing it had been. “I don’t expect that! Dad will take care of you, and Grandmother . . .”

“Oh,
Grandmother
! She’s
so
sweet!”

“Well, I think this will change her. It changes peo- ple,” Laura said stoutly. “Anyhow, Anna Lee, don’t you feel even a little sorry for
me
that I have to leave
you
? I’m the one in this dumb bed, after all. I’m the one who got stuck in the Big Dig, when I should have come here right away . . .”

“Could they have done anything if you had come sooner?” Annie’s face was suddenly a child’s again, as if the sun had shouldered its way from behind a threat-

ening cumulonimbus. A child’s face, helplessly broken open by hope.

“No, absolutely, honey. No, it would have made no difference at all.” Laura tried to soothe her.

“You should sue the city!” “For having a lousy old car?”

“For keeping the ambulance from getting there faster! People do it all the time. They sue for everything!” “Anna, please . . . ,” Laura pleaded. “You have every right to be angry with me, but I wish you wouldn’t do this now, because you’ll hate that you did it later and

that will make you feel lousy . . .”

“Which brings me to another thing,” Annie said. Laura wished she had a watch. She feared Annie was using up her allotted time. Everyone had to have a piece of time. There was her mother to think of, and Elliott, her siblings.

“What else?” she asked.

“I want to change my name,” Annie told her. “I want to be named after you.”

“Laura? I don’t think Anna Laura sounds too . . . it doesn’t go together.”

“No,
Annie
Laurie. I happen to know that’s what you wanted to name me. But
Dad
wanted to name me after that stupid song, about the cherry tree and the little old farmhouse, and you gave in, like you always do.” Annie’s fury was fearsome. In her ignorance, Laura had believed this reaction would take years to unveil itself.

“Well, I don’t always give in, but you’re right.” Though practically geriatric by the standards of their crowd when they married, Elliott had insisted on naming Anna after a stupid Al Kooper song, simply because he had worn out the album playing the bass organ riff over and over. “You can change your name if you want. You don’t even have to go to court. You just change it. Start by changing your school papers. I will love your being named after me.”

“Because that was my baby song, you know!” Annie said, standing up, her stocky little frame a pillar of rage. “You sang it to me. For love of Anneee Lauree, I would lay me
doon and dee
!”

“You remember that, my darling, darling?”

“Yeah, I remember,” Annie said, turning to stalk from the room, shouting, “Next!”

“Wait!” Laura called, sitting up. “Let me touch you, Annie. Not for you. For me.” Annie, dragging her feet, crossed the floor and held out her hand. Laura kissed her still-a-child’s palm and before closing Annie’s fin- gers, whispered, “Look at your lifeline, Annie, long and strong! Gosh, you’ll be an old babe! And how many lovers cross your heart line, one coming up pretty soon!” Annie’s lips twitched. Oh, St. Anne, Laura prayed, help me not to break and beg. Help me be the mother you were. “Annie, you’re my heart. Annie, forgive me.” She looked up at her daughter, whose eyes were fixed on the rising sun. “You can send Rory now,” Laura whispered, releasing Annie’s hand, grateful to see she held it still gently closed. Annie stood by the bed, so erect her back was nearly arched, straight as a cadet, and stared out the window.

“The sun is coming up, finally,” Annie said, “and it’s not snowing so much. Probably won’t have a white Christmas.”

She did not look down at her mother; but neither did she move.

* * *

I

n the quiet room, where other people only wept or slept, Elliott offered his mother-in-law

a cup of coffee. He peered into the pot. Even to his indifferent nose, it smelled burnt.

“I think I should make a new batch,” Elliott told her, “but there doesn’t seem to be any coffee or filters.” “I’d rather have tea,” Miranda told him. Elliott

rifled a grubby little basket. He found tea bags. “Hot water from the tap?” he asked brightly.

“No,
Elliott
. Just take plain water and run it through

the coffee machine once to clean it out, then do it again so it boils. Wouldn’t
you
rather have tea also?” Miranda asked him. “It’s calming.” She tried to pull Amelia up onto her lap, but Amelia, who sat bobbing her thumb in her mouth and staring catatonically at two four- legged cartoon creatures—both vaguely shaped like tel- evisions, who seemed to alternate between bashing each other with kitchenware and dancing in circles—kicked both her stout legs like pistons, until Miranda, with a nearly inaudible cluck of her tongue, let her go.

Elliott heard the tiny criticism, though, and noted it.

He found himself watching the cartoon creatures, which had now stuck themselves together with some kind of glue, butt to butt.

“I think we can pour it now,” Miranda told him with a slight cough. “I am parched.”

As he handed her a paper cup with a rolled lip, Elliott noticed that Miranda, in addition to carefully spraying and brushing back her expensively cut hair, had applied tiny, barely visible lines of paint between her lower lashes. How, he thought, could a woman on the way to her daughter’s deathbed summon the pres- ence of mind to apply the most elaborate of makeup tricks, the kind meant, he supposed, to fool the eye for black-tie occasions? And dress so carefully, her stock- ings matching her low-heeled shoes, her shoes match- ing her bag?

Was this simply how Miranda managed not to fly to bits?

“I thought,” he began, and stopped. “You thought,” she prompted him.

Elliott pulled Amelia onto his lap. She lay back against him. “I want a water,” Amelia said.

Elliott let Amelia sip some of his lukewarm, sugary tea.

“Won’t that keep her up?”

“She’s not going to go to sleep anyhow.” Elliott shrugged.

“I want a pee wee,” Amelia said. Elliott took Amelia into the antiseptic washroom, with its high high seat. “I don’t want to get on that. It will die me,” she said. “You won’t fall in. Daddy will hold you,” Elliott