Few Kinds of Wrong (17 page)

“I would have done it already, you know, but your dad had to see this. He had to see it all. That's what I figured when I saw this. The stress has been slowly killing your mother and he couldn't see it.

“Now, we'll just need a mop and bucket and a cloth. Where does your mom keep them?”

“I don't know.”

Maisie blinked at me, her eyes going to the floor, then back to me. I realized that she expected I should know that information. And suddenly I wished I did.

“Well, let's look, hey?”

By the time Mom and Dad came home, everything was cleared away. The sink, cabinets, counter and floor were sparkling, the knife locked away in a cabinet downstairs. Nan was awake.

“Dear Saviour, what happened?” Nan asked when she saw Mom with twenty-one stitches, looking like a female version of Frankenstein.

“Accident. Don't worry about it. I'll be fine now.”Mom looked to the window. “We'll all be fine.”

Her words wiped the concerned look off Nan's face and replaced it with a smile. “Good,” Nan said. “Long as we're all good.”

I looked away from her happy face.

The hospital at three in the morning is a surprisingly busy place. Again, there are smokers outside, although fewer than there were during my last evening visit here. The IVs and nightgowns of the evening smokers have been replaced by the black eyes and bandaged hands of the late-night ones. The smoking seems more furious, less about relieving a need than about relieving a tension, their draws deeper, the cigarette ends glowing red.

Jamie has driven me here in silence. He heard the news from Mom. He passed it on, had tried to soften it.

The emergency room nurse tells us Nan is in exam room 2 and that only family can go in.

Jamie rubs my shoulder. “I'll be here until you come out,” he says. I turn and hug him. The surprised look of pleasure on his face after the simple action makes me follow it with a bigger, longer hug, the pressure of his arms around me hurting my side but making me feel that maybe everything could be okay.

I hear Nan before I open the door. The voice doesn't sound like Nan. It doesn't really even sound like a person at all. It's a loud moan, devoid of its humanity.

I stand outside exam room 2 for at least a minute, listening to this sound and wondering what is behind it, what altered form of Nan is inside and what will I do with it once I go in.

Nan has been so transformed in the past ten years. She was a plump woman who baked cookies and told me to “put out” to a guy so I could give up being a mechanic and get married. She believed chocolate could cure anything life could throw at you and that man never walked on the moon. She would tell me stories about growing up and what Dad was like as a boy, and she loved to sing, her music the only part of her that consistently clung on through her dementia. That happy, carefree, satisfied, complicated lady left when Pop Collins' heart stopped beating, late at night on the sofa where Nan found his cold body the next morning.

“I pressed my breast against him,” Nan once told us, with tear-filled eyes. “Foolish, I suppose. I thought I could make his heart beat again with the help of mine. I tried to share my heart with him, just like I shared it all those years. And he took it with him. I've only half a heart left now without him.

Wasting away to the thin, frail Nan who started to forget small things like paying the light bill, then the names of loved ones, then onto sitting behind the steering wheel of her Chevy Impala when she was driving me to a family dinner at Swiss Chalet and asking me how she was supposed to start the car. Names, faces, recipes, knitting, gardening, history, laughs, games, all followed. All but music.

Then the Nan who lived with us, the one who kept us awake at night, who broke things, who knocked down the cans Mom set up outside her door to alert us that Nan had left her room, and who blocked up the toilet with Mom's new towels.

Then Nan in the Seniors' Home. The one who had resigned herself to die once Pop had, but who, in a rare moment of lucidity, told us the day she entered the home that this was the place she would die.

“I'll go to the garden here,” she said that day.

Nan's view of death had always been a garden. “If there's no God, the garden will just be dirt, but if He's up there, it will be full of the most beautiful flowers, full of life everywhere, and I'll smile the biggest smile.”

“And what if you go to hell, Nan?” I asked her every time she told me this.

“Weeds, my dear, all weeds and the devil will make me pull them forever.”

Then the Nan who was the time machine. The blessed sanctuary where I could find relief from pain. The sound inside exam room number 2 makes me fear that sanctuary is gone forever.

Even when I turn the handle to the door I hold it there in my hand for seconds, knowing this line is about to be crossed and that I'll never be able to unsee what I'm about to see.

I push open the door and they stand next to Nan's bed: Henrietta, Chuck, Mom, and Bryce.

For a second I'm filled with anger that Bryce is here, in our space. He is not immediate family. Not any family in the strictest definition. I'm about to say exactly
that when a renewed moan brings my eyes to Nan.

Her face is drawn and slack at once. Her lips don't move in the moan, one hand flails frantically, trying to communicate something and getting nowhere. I haven't seen a face so changed since the time I watched Dad's change from alive to dead, that grey, chalky look that replaced a ruddy healthy glow.

The mask Nan wears is horrifying because of the sounds, but mostly the desperation in her eyes. There is a wild, terrified person needing to understand what is happening.

I walk straight to her. “Nan, you've had a stroke and they're going to help you here.” The moans become louder, her movements more pronounced, her left arm grabbing my hand in a fierce grip. “Nan, it's okay,” I shout over her sounds. “We'll make sure you're okay.”

“I don't think she knows who we are,” Bryce says and the fearful look in her eyes and terrified sounds make sense.

“Mrs. Collins,” I say, my experience telling me exactly what to do, “you're in a hospital and the doctors will be here soon. You'll be fine. You can't talk right now but we're here for you.”

I watch her relax, eyes calm as the moaning stops.

“Aunt Henrietta, can I talk to you outside?”

Henrietta looks from me to Mom, to her husband. “Why?” she asks.

“Outside, please. I don't think Mrs. Collins needs to hear us.”

“Oh for God's sake, why can't you talk to me?” Mom says. “Will everything have to go through Henrietta now? Are you eight years old?”

Her words sting and their impact is shocking. She said this in front of Aunt Henrietta. A woman Mom felt judged her through every second of her marriage to Dad.

Henrietta looks at Chuck with her bottom lip turned down and eyes wide in a gesture of “Well now, what have we here?”

I walk out. “Aunt Henrietta, please come out here,” I say as I exit the room.

Mom rips open the door behind me and stands in front of me, legs apart and hand on hip.

“Why is Bryce in there?” I point at the room door.

“Why wouldn't he be? Your father isn't here so—”

“What? So, he replaces Dad everywhere? First in your bed and now in there with Nan.”

“Your grandmother has had a stroke. Like it or not, we're here as a family, and like it or not, that still includes Bryce. He was always family. You've said it yourself a million times.”

“Before he fucked my mother.”

For the first time in my life, I feel the sting of a slap on my cheek. I stand in stunned silence.

When I look at Mom I expect something akin to guilt or surprise on her face but see hurt and defiance instead.

“Don't you dare speak like that about me,” she says, oblivious to the other people in the hallway who are staring at us. “You don't get to judge me. You have no idea.”

“He's Dad's best friend.”My voice breaks with hot raspy tears.

Mom grabs my arm and pushes me toward the all-too-familiar family room where a man is sitting but says, “Excuse me,” then leaves when we enter. Mom, who would normally apologize for being lumpy if someone walked over her, does not respond, “Oh, that's okay, we'll leave,” as I expect, but says, “Thank you.”

“He was Dad's best friend,” Mom says. “Was. Your father is dead, Jennifer, and I am not. I don't know why you can't accept that or why you seem so angry at me. Everyone tiptoes around you and tries to make you happy, despite your constant sadness. I cried for him too, you know. I grieved and I mourned. And so did Bryce. But while we were holding each other up, struggling through to get better and come out stronger and more supportive, you have just angrily clung to your grief, like proof of how much you loved him. Even Aunt Henrietta talks about it. We all try to work around you and deal with you with kid gloves. And you choose to judge us. All the time. No one has as much pain as you. Well, I slept with his shirt for weeks. I cooked his dinner for two months and put it in the oven until I'd throw it out the next morning and cry about it. I miss him too.” Tears are streaming and it's difficult even to understand her words now. “You were never alone in this. You just chose not to see the rest of us.”

I have no words. Maybe I could have gotten through this easier. Maybe I needed to share it. But I pushed everyone aside and they all know it. I just stare at her and blink.

“I.”

She waits but no words come after “I.”

“The word is ‘we.' Everyone around you wants to help you and to hold you but it's this ‘I' that gets in the way. It's ‘we.' We. Not you against us. We against everything, whatever it is.”

Mom paces around the room, clutching her fist to her chest. “Oh God, I've been waiting to say this. I should have said it sooner but I didn't know how to get through all of this.” She points to me, to the space around me.

“You said you were never happy with him. So how the hell can you be so sad about him dying? He was just out of the way. You were just waiting for the joy, weren't you? You put it on his headstone, for God's sake.”

“What?”

“Who puts anything about joy on a headstone? He was dead and you were looking for joy. Because you never loved him.”

“Is that what you think?” She shakes her head. “I didn't say I didn't love him. He. And you. Were my life. Now I just want my life to include me.”

“Well, why didn't you leave him? Or why didn't you stay away when you did leave? Why did you come back?” Finally the question I have waited so many years to ask is out there. “Because.” She pauses. “He told me about you.”

“What about me?” I ask.

“He came to Nan Philpott's and told me how you couldn't stop crying. How you wouldn't eat or sleep. I came back for you. I'd do anything for you. Every night, when I'd call and pray that you would talk to me and you wouldn't, it killed me. I would have done anything just to talk to you again. So I came back.”

I inhale, trying to catch all the air I feel is leaving me. My hand goes to my mouth. “Dad told you that?”

She nods, tears still falling, maybe for a different reason now, all the anger gone to some loving place.

“Then you were never happy because of me? You stayed there and … for me?”

“Not just for you. For … I don't know. It doesn't matter why. I came back. And I did love your father. Maybe not the way you think I should have, but I did.”

“But I was … Thank you.”

“Oh, Jennifer. I've been wanting you to be happy, waiting for you to be happy.” Her eyes don't move from my face. “I wanted that verse on your father's headstone for you, my love. You were so lost in sadness. I wanted you to see that the sadness would end one day.”

She touches the side of my face and wipes my tears away. “I don't know how to make you whole again.”

“Me either,” I whisper.

13

D
AD AND
I were watching
The Cosby
Show
. Claire Huxtable had her arms around a young Rudy, dispensing motherly love and advice. An ache started in my stomach and rose to my chest, making it uncomfortable to breathe. I had always taken my mother's hugs for granted, as much a part of her as not hugging or kissing
was a part of Dad. Suddenly, Mom being gone and the absence of the potential for a hug overwhelmed me. I walked over to Dad and sat next to him on the couch.

“Yes?” He sat up straighter as he spoke. “Want a drink?”

“No.” My arms went around his thick neck. I felt him straighten up even more, tensing beneath my touch.

“I love you, Daddy.” As a child, I had said the words often but never while in an embrace. Usually reserved for bedtimes, the words were usually followed by a pat on the head and a smile. Occasionally, a “me too.”

“You must be getting tired, little one,” he said, first patting my back a little then pulling back so my hands came apart. I let my arm drop away. This was not the hug I needed.

“Mommy said she'd call when she got to Nanny Philpott's. Why didn't she call?”

He shrugged and looked away. “I don't know. Maybe she forgot.”

Maybe she forgot.
Three simple words said while Dad looked away. Said offhandedly. An offered suggestion. A possibility. But how could I forget them or forgive them?

My kind, loving mother could forget me so effortlessly while the man who showed me how to turn a wrench and how to wash my greasy hands sat next to me. Did not forget me. Stayed. Until he died, when suddenly he left me alone with someone who could forget me with ease, left me without that hug I'd craved that night and every moment since, no matter how many times my mother held me.

At least that was what I thought. Up until this moment when more words changed everything. She had called. She had dialled the numbers and asked for me, pleaded for me. Where had I been when he refused her? Refused me? Was I just watching TV or playing with my Hot Wheels cars or drawing the picture I remember drawing? The one where I tried out the look of our family without Mom in it. What simple task had I been doing while he changed our relationship forever? Did he pause to think better of hurting us both? I know him enough to know the answer. He was not a pausing man. Something was broken in his life and he sought to fix it with whatever tools he had: a wife, a small child, aching hearts.