Five Days Left (25 page)

Mara

At two thirty in the morning, Mara gave up the pretense of waiting for sleep to come and slid out of bed. In the doorway, she turned back to regard her husband. A bit of moonlight shone through a gap in the blinds, illuminating a strip of Tom’s sleeping form. Another contented slumber after another lovely session in bed together—that was one thing she hadn’t stopped being able to do.

He had to be a little suspicious about that, she thought. Not since their thirties, twenties maybe, had she been this assertive. She took in the rest of the bed; the sheets were a tangled mess and her pillow was missing. He didn’t seem to have been pretending. But then, when someone’s eyes were closed, they could be thinking anything. She turned quickly, picking her way carefully through the dark living room to Laks’s room. The girl had thrown her covers off and they lay in a heap on the floor. Mara covered her and reached to the foot of the bed for BunnyBunny, the large white stuffed rabbit Laks had slept with every night since she was two. She must have kicked it away with the sheets. Mara lifted the furry toy to her face, pressed it close and breathed in deeply. Morning body.

With BunnyBunny tucked under one arm, Mara tiptoed around the room, running her free hand over everything she could reach—the
smooth wood of the gliding chair, the cold ceramic piggy bank on the bookshelf, the silver-framed picture of infant Laks in proud Pori’s lap. She traced her fingers slowly over the edges of everything, trying to commit the contents of her daughter’s room to memory.

Her throat closed when she saw the music box Tom had brought home a week after they returned from Hyderabad. “I have a little girl,” he announced to Mara, “and every little girl needs a music box.” Mara longed to pick up the box, feel the weight of it in her hands, but she didn’t trust herself not to send it crashing to the floor. She slid a palm over the smooth surface of the lid, hearing its melody in her head. “Beautiful Dreamer.”

She lifted a small ball cap from its hook beside the closet and ran her finger along the embroidered red
R
. The cap was a prized souvenir from the Rangers game Pori and Neerja had taken their granddaughter to one weekend. Smiling, Mara thought about 2boys and MotorCity and their ongoing debate about the Tigers and Yankees. She wondered what they thought of the Rangers. She would ask them tomorrow, if she remembered.

She held the inside of the cap to her face and inhaled, then returned it to its hook and opened the closet. The door creaked and she turned to the bed quickly, worried, but the sleeping form didn’t stir. Mara looked from side to side, a burglar checking to see if neighbors were watching, then stepped into the closet, closed the door behind her and pulled the thin chain to switch on the light.

The mayhem on the closet floor made her suck in a breath and let it out in a noiseless laugh. Ever organized, she had set up a system of plastic bins in the closet and trained her daughter to store her toys in an orderly fashion. Each container was meant to hold a different category of toys: dollhouse furniture, puzzles, Barbies, dress-up clothes, plastic kitchen utensils. But Mara hadn’t supervised a room-cleaning day in a long time, and the potpourri of toys in each bin defied any single category or unifying theme. Barbies were folded into plastic pots for the kitchen. A
miniature cradle held a handful of puzzle pieces. Inside a purple dress-up purse was a collection of pocket-sized soft plastic dolls.

An old doll stroller held, of all things, schoolwork, and Mara shook her head as she leafed through it. There were counting worksheets, a classroom newsletter, crumpled bits of artwork whose glitter had long since trickled off and now lined the bottom of the stroller. A colored folder caught Mara’s eye and she lifted it out. “Poems—by Lakshmi Nichols—Kindergarten.” Laks had talked about their poetry unit and had shown some barely legible and largely nonsensical poems to her parents. It was an ambitious project, Tom commented, teaching poetry to kids who could barely read or write on their own.

Mara flipped through the first few pages, taking in the careful printing, pressed so hard in some places the letters went through the page. She could picture Laks taking her time to make each letter perfect and she felt a pang of sadness. She didn’t want her daughter to be as intense as she was. Maybe she should arrange for Laks to spend time each week with Harry. The thought made her throat burn.

“Mara?”

Her heart thudded to a temporary halt as the door opened and a drowsy Tom stood in the opening in boxer shorts, his head cocked to one side. “Love?” Tom whispered. “What on earth—?”

“Oh. Um, hi,” Mara whispered back, struggling for an explanation as to why she would be in her daughter’s closet in the middle of the night. “I, uh . . . couldn’t sleep . . . and I thought maybe I . . . could get a head start cleaning in here. I was going to do it on Sunday morning when she’s at my parents’. Get rid of some things while she’s not here to protest, you know? And I thought I’d come in and see what lay ahead—”

“At three in the morning?” He leaned into the closet. “Are you—? Why are you crying?”

She slid fingers over her cheeks to erase her tears. “Oh, it’s nothing. I—”

He pointed to the folder in her hand. “What?”

She held it out to him.

“Oh, I remember this,” he said, still speaking softly. He flipped to the last page and held it up to her.

A Haiku by Lakshmi Nichols

No one is as strong.

My mom will never give up.

I’m a proud daughter
.

He nodded, as though agreeing with the sentiment in the poem. “Nice portrait,” he whispered, pointing. There was a picture beside the haiku: Laks and Mara, holding hands, Mara a female Popeye with giant, bulging muscles. “Good haiku, too,” he added. “I always loved that one.”

“You’ve read this before? I found the folder in the stroller she’s using as a filing cabinet.”

He shrugged. “I helped her work on it. Although mostly I counted syllables and fixed spelling. ‘Daughter’ was d-o-t-r for the first few drafts, until I convinced her my way was correct. The idea was all hers, though. You were . . . I don’t know where you were that night. Out with Those Ladies, maybe? She had to do a haiku about a characteristic—you know, honesty or strength or loyalty. She settled on strength, and I asked her what she thought of when she thought of strength. She didn’t even think, she immediately said, ‘Mama.’”

Mara sniffed and dragged the sleeve of her robe across her face. “She thought of me for strength?”

Tom knit his brows together. “Who else would she think of?”

“Oh, I don’t know . . .
you
? The marathon man who logs twenty miles before breakfast and can still chase her around the yard all afternoon?”

“Pffft. Not the same kind of strength. Nothing I’ve ever done is the same kind of strength. You don’t know that?” He tilted his head toward the bed. “Your ‘proud daughter’ over there is smart enough to know it.”

“She’s not so proud anymore. Not after the fiasco at school.”

“She’ll get over it. Remember how embarrassed you were of your parents’ accent? ‘Mortified’ is how you described it, as I recall. And how long did that last? Not even a school year, right? And then you decided ‘different’ didn’t mean anything but different.”

“This is a little worse than a thick Indian accent.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s being embarrassed by your parents. Accent for you. Public drunkenness for me. Huntington’s for Laks. It’s all the same. We all go through it, we all get over it.” He held a hand out to her. “Come to bed.”

Saturday, April 9

ONE DAY
LEFT

Mara

When Mara walked into the family room early Saturday morning, she found her five-year-old curled on the couch, staring catatonically at the TV.

“Good morning, sweetie,” Mara said.

Laks, engrossed, didn’t respond. Shaking her head, Mara regarded the girl and wondered if Tom was right: Was Mara’s condition no heavier an albatross for Laks than Pori and Neerja’s accent had been for Mara, or Tom’s parents’ alcoholism had been for him? Lying on the couch, ignoring her mother in favor of the asinine show on TV, Laks certainly seemed like any other child in America.

If her mother hung around, and got sicker by the year, or even the month, there would be disadvantages to Laks’s life, the same as there were in the lives of every other child in the country. Every other child on this very street, for that matter. Right now, down the block and throughout Plano and in every state, kids were lying on couches, engrossed in cartoons while their parents yelled at each other, or one of them moved out. While their older brothers moved home, having flunked out of college, or their teenage sisters confessed to being pregnant. Did Laks’s particular disadvantages really stack up so much higher than every other child’s?

Mara took one last look at her daughter and sat at the table, peeling the sticky note from the bottom of her laptop. She could continue this debate while she attended to her task list. There was no harm in getting through the rest of the items, even if she decided to abort the mission.

She put a fingertip on one of the items not yet struck through: letters to Tom and Laks. It was the perfect chance for her to finalize them. Tom was running and wouldn’t return for another hour. It appeared the walls could fall down around her daughter and she would remain glued to the screen.

Mara clicked open the letters, reminding herself she was permitted to scan them only. She had no time this morning for the kind of wholesale rewrites she had done so many times the last few nights. She still needed to get herself ready to meet Those Ladies for lunch, feed Laks breakfast and supervise her getting ready for dance class. The ponytail alone—a requirement of the teacher—could take thirty minutes of negotiating and rearranging. And anyway, she would never be satisfied with the letters, no matter how many more times she revised them. How do you sum up the contents of your heart in a single document?

She read each letter twice and re-saved them. She would print them tomorrow, put each in its own envelope and set them on Tom’s pillow after he left for his run. She would leave a third envelope for him, too—the list of helpful tips she’d compiled to assist him in the task of raising their daughter. She opened that list now, scanning it to see if there was anything she had left out.

She had added a section about the promise Those Ladies had made, letting him know he could punt any subject he wanted to Steph or Gina. She’d also added a paragraph about how she’d been warning her parents for several weeks that once Laks was in first grade, Mara thought it best for the child to attend after-school care until Tom could pick her up on the way home from work.

It would allow the girl a chance to socialize more, Mara had told them. But what she really wanted was to make it easier for Tom to
extricate her parents from his daily life, in case their constant presence was too painful. She knew they would insist on resuming their afternoon babysitting, and she knew he would never be able to tell them no. Unless they all knew it was one of Mara’s last wishes.

And she’d added a line or two telling him she’d paid her Neiman’s balance and canceled the account, so he needn’t worry about it. She didn’t want to think about him opening the statement, reading down the list of her last purchases. She’d canceled everything else she could think of, too—law school mailings, catalogs, anything that might show up at the house with her name on it.

Finally, on a separate page he could throw out if it angered him, she had written down the names and numbers of some Unitarian ministers who would perform a memorial service, even for someone who had never set foot in the place. Even for a family who would make no promises they would ever attend a service again. For all the lack of connection to the church Tom claimed, she wouldn’t be shocked if he wanted a real funeral service. It was about ritual, perhaps, more than belief. And there wasn’t a ritual older than gathering people together to say a few words about the dead.

Even if the words Tom wanted to say were “Fuck you.” She read over the list of names, unsure. Was it fair, providing these names and numbers? Once he considered the idea, she knew he wouldn’t be able to ignore it. And if there was a service, he wouldn’t be able to say “Fuck you.” Not out loud, anyway. Out loud, he would be forced to say nice things about her. He would make himself talk about all the good things she had done, for him and for Laks, before she had done this terrible thing.

He would have to nod and smile and agree with her parents and Those Ladies and others who came that yes, it was a dreadful thing to do to a child, to a husband, to such caring parents and friends, but really, who were any of them to judge? How could they ever truly know what she had gone through? Who were any of them to say they wouldn’t have at least considered the same thing?

And he would, in saying those things out loud, nodding as others said them, have to allow to himself that maybe some of them were true. He might still whisper, “Fuck you, Mara,” when he was alone in their room, or driving to work, exhausted by the demands of juggling a career and a child on his own. But the funeral service would have planted the seeds of empathy and understanding, and now and then, she hoped, those seeds would sprout and rise up through the curse words. Maybe those seeds would never be enough to crowd out all of the resentment and bitterness. But maybe they would be enough to push away some.

“Mama!” Laks was peeking over the arm of the couch, looking like she’d discovered a pony standing in the kitchen.

Mara laughed, and swiveled around to face her daughter. “Yes. Mama. Mama who said good morning to you thirty minutes ago and has been sitting here, five feet away, ever since.” She smiled and shook her head. “You and those cartoons.”

“Watch with me!” Laks scrambled to a sitting position and patted the couch beside her. “Mama, watch with me!”

Was there a worse form of torture for a parent than half an hour of SpongeBob’s maniacal laugh? Mara glanced at her laptop, scrambling for one of her stock excuses for why she couldn’t possibly spare the time, why sitting in front of mindless cartoons would have to wait for another day.

What other day?

“I’d love to.”

She sat carefully beside the girl, leaving a few inches between them. Since the library incident, she’d been more self-conscious about her body, especially in front of her daughter. But Laks inched toward Mara until the space she had so carefully left was gone, and then tipped over sideways from the waist so her upper body lay across her mother’s lap, her cheek on her mother’s knee. Mara stroked her daughter’s hair with her left hand and with her right she traced small circles on the fabric of the girl’s pajamas, above her bony hip.

Laks wiggled, pressing her body tightly into her mother’s lap. Two little hands reached out to grab Mara’s right, bringing it into the girl’s chest and clutching it tightly. She wiggled once more to reposition herself, then lay still and let out a long, contented sigh. Mara let out a similar sigh and the girl giggled.

Mara had been wondering how to say goodbye to Laks, deliberating over what she could say or do that would be significant enough to bring meaning to the child later, but not momentous enough to make her worry now. She felt the hot sting of tears as she realized: this was it. Tom would drive Laks to Mara’s parents’ house after dance class, while Mara was at lunch with Those Ladies. This was goodbye.

The closest box of tissues was on the table, out of reach, so she let the tears flow and counted on the girl being so engrossed in the ridiculous cartoon she wouldn’t notice. Her right hand was trapped, and she couldn’t bring herself to stop her left from stroking Laks’s hair, so she turned to wipe her nose on her own shoulder. As she turned, her laptop came into view and it struck her that she knew exactly what 2boys would say if he could see her now, and if he knew everything she hadn’t been telling: “On the upside, this is the last thirty minutes you’ll ever have to spend watching SpongeBob.”

Mara let out a strangled half sob, half laugh at the thought, and Laks, who was already laughing at the screen, laughed harder.