Husk (10 page)

“Who is that?”

I inhaled slowly. “It's me, Mom. Sheldon.”

I sat still in the darkness, not daring to turn on the light.

I loathed this place.

Ubiquitous off-white walls that defied the laws of physics, absorbing light rather than reflecting, plunging the rooms into impenetrable gloom. Hanging sheets surrounding each bed, provided to furnish patients with the barest illusion of privacy. Twenty-year-old television down the hall, always on, always tuned to the weather channel, informing sorrowful visitors that while their personal realities were slowly cancering away from the inside out, there was a warm front preparing to hit Edmonton and Puerto Rico was absolutely lovely that time of year. Plastered sincerity of the nursing staff, repeating the same words to family members since the beginning of recorded
RN
time.
There is nothing we can do anymore. She's slipping. The best we can do is to keep her comfortable and safe.
You could smell the lamentations for the dead that permeated the wood and brick, no matter how many layers of fresh paint were applied, how much bleach sprayed about to combat germs that were going to kill us all anyway. The perfume of misery wafted throughout the ward, clinging to all who walked through with the tenacity of a sad-sack relative who needed money, bequeathing visitors formless nightmares when they returned to the safety of their homes. Misery and desolation, layered with a patina of forgetfulness.

Mom's breathing was harsh, ragged and moist, like an old quilt damp with mildew being slowly ripped apart. Her body, never big to begin with, looked smaller, like it had begun wasting away, melding itself with the mattress and sheets through osmosis. She rarely left the bed anymore, and the nurses had just about given up trying to convince her to walk even to the washroom. Her complexion, once her best feature, as unblemished as polished ivory, now a companion to the room, pallid and uninspired. Her dentures floated in a glass beside her bed, her toothless mouth a cavernous gouge in her face.

We looked more alike now than we ever had in life.

She stared at me from her bed, squinting. “Is that you, Sheldon?”

“Yes, Mom.”

She moaned at the sound and lay back against the mattress. She placed her hands palms down on her chest, covering the tiny wooden cross that had hung from a dull silver chain about her neck since before Dad had passed.

I was visiting well outside prescribed visiting hours, as the nurse had tersely informed me when I tried to sneak in unnoticed. Not an easy accomplishment when your knees refuse to bend without cracking, and your ankles refuse your commands to walk on tiptoe. I kept a scarf wrapped around the lower half as my face as I stopped at the nurse's station, a toque pulled low over my forehead and a pair of ski goggles over my eyes. I took in a breath and emitted a full vocalization of my intentions to visit my beloved mother, and Nurse Luckless vanished into unconsciousness, panic frozen on her face.

Mom's roommate N. Nowlan (his name designation on his chart — sometimes, when you're bored enough, you'll read anything you can) would not have appreciated my efforts at silence, having been in a coma long before Mom moved in next door. The seesaw rasp of his ventilator and the intermittent submarine
pings
of whatever else was hooked up to him would cover any noise I would make. N. Nowlan had never had a visitor, not once had I seen anyone other than a bored nurse even look at him with anything other than muted disinterest.

Not for the first time I marveled that we put down animals for having broken limbs, that my mother had my dog euthanized for shedding too much in his old age, yet we keep people alive through machinery long past sensibility. What was the point of preserving loved ones as living taxidermy other than sentimentality and fear and guilt? I wasn't any different; Mom's mind had been unhurriedly deflating for years, it was only through some ill-defined sense of responsibility that I had exhausted my savings to keep her in a level of comfort she'd never recognize. And here I was, beyond death, yet still umbilicaled to this shriveled husk by a spiritual cord that nourished me with nothing save self-condemnation.

A pang of hunger nipped at my insides. I looked at the desiccated shell in the next bed longingly, a gourmand at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Would anyone miss him? Would anyone even notice if I took just a nibble? Could this be a source of easy food, coma patients and the like?
The thought nauseated me, but not as much as it would have the week before. I was clearly going to have to continue my existence for a few more months at the bare minimum, and there would have to be a feasible menu. I tabled the notion for later review — whatever was happening, had happened, to me, it was still too early in the process to begin sketching out my meal plan.

“How are you?” she asked me.

“Fine, Mom. Relatively.” This promised to be a rarity. Actual comprehension. Perhaps we could have a conversation without the need for guises. Over the past year, I had pretended to be her brother Everett, her father, her mailman, her classmate from junior high. I hadn't been myself with Mom in a very long time. Or ever, come to think of it. Even as a toddler I was guarded against her, knowing that she and I had deep character divisions, knowing that it was up to me to take on a guise and make her happy. “It's been . . . interesting of late. I've actually got some news. Good news.”

“My Sheldon,” she slurred. “My little Menno-knight. Always by my side.”

The old pet name brought a smile to my lips. She called me that after Dad passed, spelling it out for me so I knew how special an appellation it was. A knight was a brave soldier, she said, someone who would always protect his loved ones. Later, when I was older, less tolerant of her passive-aggressive smothering, I grew to hate it. I would amend it to myself, Sheldon, the Menno-not. Now I cherished the memory, distorted though it was, and took on the role of loving son once more. “That's me.”

“How have you been?”

“Oh, fine.”

“Was school all right today? Did you learn anything?”

“Math was tough today,” I decided. “Had a test. Aced it.”

“Good boy. So smart.” She stroked my cheek with the back of her hand. “So handsome.”

“Aw, Mom.”

“Any pretty girls you'd like to tell me about?” I squirmed in my chair. “Look at you. So shy. You'll like girls soon, you know. You don't think you will, but all that changes. Soon, you'll look at girls and can't imagine a life without them. All knights do.”

“Jeez . . .”

Her eyes drifted off. “I've been lonely, waiting for you.”

I braced myself, sensing a shift, the fading from one memory to another. “Sorry, I had to work.”

“We all have excuses, don't we?” This was said to herself, talking to me without noticing me. “Everyone has excuses, no one ever takes the blame. That's the way it is.” Her eyes focused on me briefly, flitting with contempt, before looking away, her sight already fuzzed over with memory. “I always worry about Sheldon.”

“Goddammit.”

“Don't blaspheme, Roland, you know how that upsets me.”

I was suddenly glad I lacked the ability to inadvertently vocalize a sigh. Not that she'd remember the slight. Mom's memory had been getting steadily worse as delirium clearcut her brain, carving off large chunks of her past. She'd had good days, especially when she first arrived. She understood the nature of her surroundings, the purpose of my visits. Our conversations then were not all that different from talks we'd had over the previous thirty years. Mom was an insular creature, always focused on her own self and how the world outside continually failed to live up to her exacting expectations. Chats were drastically one-sided affairs, and I often mused that I was not at all necessary to the dialogue, as her running commentary included her perceived responses from my end.

“You know Margaret Evans, down the street. She has that house with the fence, the one that should have been painted green. Her daughter, Felicia, you went to school with her, she was a year or two behind you, you know her, hee hee, she's now a doctor, something to do with the eyes, an—” and here Mom would consult her notepad to freshen her memory “ophthalmologist, isn't that something. Well you could have never predicted that, she was always a mean child, she pushed over our fence once — I'm sure it was her — but she's rich now, so there you go.”

Many times I pitied the poor people who crossed her path — librarians, cashiers, mail carriers, food court service personnel, grocers, Jehovah's Witnesses, the homeless — as she would launch into her structureless stream of consciousness without hesitation, assuming the person unlucky enough to cross in front of her eyesight was already a participant in her nomadic tête-à-têtes, knew of the people she mentioned, summarily agreed with her assertions. Her lapse into dementia was thus so subtle a process that it went nigh unnoticed by me until the day she prepared a mighty Thanksgiving feast of turkey, mashed potatoes, squash, corn, and apple pie, all for me and my decades-dead father, all on July 17th.

So at first our visits were actually comforting in their inanity, and I convinced myself that her condition, while severe enough to merit a move to a home, was as bad as it could get. She'd berate me for not visiting enough, and then switch topics to whatever she had seen that day on the news. She'd ramble on while I sat next to her, holding her hand and reading scripts, memorizing lines, or channel surfing. It was inconvenient, but tolerable. Quickly this changed, and each visit became the first in a good long while. She'd claim through angry sheets of tears that I hadn't been around enough, even though I had visited two days previous. Then she began to smile when I came around, glad to see me, how had I been, but it was a front, politely covering up the fact that she had no idea who in the world I could be. The talks at this point invariably swirled around bizarre delusions that festered beneath her surface. Fears of persecution ran rampant through her few remaining neurons. Asians were destroying the free market system. Her sister Carrie stole her favorite teacup. Her neighbor Mr. Wallis poisoned her cat, she was sure of it and she'd confront him on it the next time she saw him. Mr. Wallis was a
WWII
veteran who had retired and passed away long before we had ever gotten a pet, a beagle named Cooper that mom had never cared for but was the totality of my world for years after Dad's accident.

Accompanying these imagined persecutions were lengthy sermons on her concept of God as indefinable cloud of wrath, scourge of evildoers, fornicators, homosexuals, and actors. Each visit was a front row seat to the very worst in human prejudices, a ticket to a terrifying Baptist revival, a marathon viewing of Fox News. Her diatribes were so predictable I could mouth silently along, lip-synching to the righteous arbiter of morality. Karaoke hatred.

And still, I welcomed her insanity as a long-overdue form of freedom. No longer did I have to hide my lovers under the guise of “acting partners.” Mom's lunacy set me free of her chains, at least hypothetically. And very soon, the nurses told me, her memory would be sanded down to a smooth plane of nothingness, at which point we'd have “the talk” to discuss her move to the tenth floor, the floor of the walking dead, the ward of the tattered ambulatory cadaver, where residents freely roamed the halls, bare of feet, clad in old nightgowns and
PJ
s, muttering softly to themselves about past triumphs and woes in never-known glossolalic languages until a passing Samaritan found a few precious minutes to guide them back to their rooms.

Maybe I should check myself in.

“Sorry, dear,” I replied, taking on Dad's role. “It's been a long day. At the office.”

“No excuse,” she muttered. “What if Shelley heard that kind of language coming from his father? Can you imagine how damaging that could be?”

“I'll watch my tongue, dear.”

“Such a good boy.” She played with her crucifix for a few moments, intent on making it dance across her chest. “I don't think he likes girls, Roland,” she said offhandedly. “Not one bit. A bit of a sissy, that one.”

My mouth went drier. “What makes you say that?”

“Oh, a mother knows.” She smiled to herself, suddenly a young woman. “He hides it, but I can tell. Thinks I don't notice when his
friends
come over. Oh, they're just from my class, that's what he tells me. Lying to his mother. Shameful.”

“You've known? All this time?”

“I didn't want to admit it to myself. And think of the scandal! Do you think I could show my face in church again? No, better he hide it in shame, alone.”

“Couldn't you have just . . .” I struggled with the words. “Couldn't you. Accept him?”

“Certainly not! We don't just pick and choose which sins we ignore. If he would just tell me the truth, we could go seek help.”

Knowing it to be an impossibility, the veins in my head nonetheless began to throb. “Maybe he's just. Afraid of what you would say.”

“Oh, how can you say that? I love him, Roland. I just want his soul to be safe. He could always tell me anything. I'd forgive him, I know I would. And together, we'd walk out of the darkness.” Her words spiked with barbs. “It's all your fault, anyway. Don't think you've ever fooled me.”

I stayed silent, uncertain how to end the topic. Not sure if I should.

“With your trips out of town. You know.”

“Trips?”

“When was the last time we had sex?”

Oh, God. I leaned in. “Hon, what are you. Saying? What trips?”

“You think I didn't know? I thought you'd stop when we married. I guess I'm the fool, aren't I? A few kind words, too much wine, and there you go, forty years of denial. What a joke I am.”

“Stop what? What trips? Where did I go?”

“I hired a detective to follow you!”