Mother Daughter Me (34 page)

When I return to the car and see Zoë’s mocha in the cup holder, still three-quarters full, my heart lurches.

The next morning, Zoë sends me a text to say all is well and Rio is
soooooo amazing!!!
I find the scone from Starbucks still in my bag, slightly stale. I see that Zoë took a small bite out of it. I heat it up in the toaster oven and finish it off.

And then my mother calls.

“I’ve been reading the Wallerstein book,” she says. “I was reading it sitting propped up in bed and shaking. She draws the picture so well of what these kids were going through. It was painful, but I have a better idea of what I did to you and Sarah. And I’m very glad that I read it.”

I’m quiet.

“What I did to you two was immoral,” she says.

“Immoral?” I respond. “Mom, it was tragic. And it was confusing and damaging to your two girls. But I don’t think it was immoral.”

I hope she’s heard me, but she heads off on a slightly different tack. “The bearing witness you and Lia were talking about,” my mother says. “This could be what you were aiming at.”

“Yes,” I say softly. “It could be.”

“You have to understand that I was very young and very self-centered. I was very wild and a pain in the ass and I needed to grow up. But telling you I turned to jelly doesn’t begin to describe the drive home from that custody hearing. I was wailing, and these terrible waves of grief and loss would come up. And then we got back to Belmont and my mother said to me, ‘You have sinned.’ ”

Now I see how the notion of morality entered her head, not just this week but forty years ago. “Oh, Mom, she said that? I’m so sorry.”

This conversation isn’t only marking a change in my mother as she
realizes what Sarah and I had endured—but in me. I see more clearly than ever that as terrible a mother as she was, as much as she deserved to lose custody of us, she also loved us deeply. She has already paid the price for her terrifically inept parenting, in ways that I’m only now beginning to appreciate.

My mother’s reaction to the Wallerstein book has also got her thinking about Rochester and her marriage to my father. When she was considering leaving him, she tells me, she went to see a shrink. “I was worried that if I left, I’d fall apart, so I went to see the psychiatrist,” she says. “And at the end, he concluded I wouldn’t fall apart. But I did.” I make a sympathetic noise, a tiny “hmmmm,” just to let her know I’m listening. “I should have stayed,” she says. “I should never have left. I should have stayed married to Everett. It would have been so much better for you and Sarah.”

That could be true. But then there was the alcohol to consider. Somehow I doubt that staying with my father would have helped, for she was already drinking heavily when she was married to him, and there’s no reason to think that staying in the marriage would have changed anything. But there’s no need to point that out.

I’m grateful to her for reading the book and touched by the remorse she is expressing.

Gradually, our conversation transitions back to the present, and we move to my mother’s current situation. She couldn’t be happier in her new apartment. And she’s pleased to have jettisoned so many of her possessions, as she has friends facing unexpected health crises who are still living in their cluttered houses and would like to pare back but are too overwhelmed by now to do so. This is one of the lessons she has learned during this year’s journey, not through Provence, exactly, but through a more realistic representation of life.

And now she is being realistic about what lies in store. “When I really need care, it’s not going to be San Francisco Village. It’s going to be something more like Coventry Park,” she says, referring to the second place we saw the day we were out with the senior-placement specialist. I shudder at the thought of my mother living out her final years there, and I remind her of my email from a few days earlier. She tells me how
grateful she was to receive that email. “I can’t ask any of my friends to come and babysit me,” she says. “In the end, it’s a family thing.” Yes, indeed it is.

“All I ever wanted was for you to love me. And I love you so much.” Her voice trails off, and I know she’s waiting for me to say the same.

“I love you too,” I reply. Without ambivalence. I feel a wave of tenderness for the woman on the other end of the line a mile away. This woman, my mother, isn’t merely carving out a new life for herself; along the way she’s finding she can look her past mistakes square in the eye and express contrition in a way that also makes her daughter feel something approaching unburdened love, even pride.

I once heard that the way we let in emotional pain is like the eye’s response to light. When the brightness is too intense, the iris—the circular ring of muscle that surrounds the pupil—contracts to protect the eye. Then the iris muscle starts to relax, and as it does the pupil gradually opens, letting in a little more light at a time, until the iris stops constricting altogether. This is when we see our world for what it is.

———

A
LITTLE AFTER 8:00
A.M. ON A SATURDAY, THE HOME PHONE RINGS.
I see it’s my mother calling. It’s early in the day for her to call, but I’m eager to talk. I want to tell her about a TV series I’ve discovered and know she’ll like. I want to hear about the play reading she just did with a group from San Francisco Village and about her most recent trip to the ballet with her friend Betty. Our conversations these days are filled with effortless good cheer—minus any hint of subtext. I pick up the phone and give her my standard greeting: “Hihowareyou?”

She’s usually chirpy, but her tone is matter-of-fact.

“I just got off the phone with John. Sarah’s in the hospital.”

My sister’s husband, John, told my mother that Sarah developed stomach pain so severe that in the middle of the night she was taken by ambulance to the small community hospital in Greenfield, Massachusetts, near their home. John has reported to my mother that Sarah has an abdominal blockage of some kind and she’s in surgery. She might lose part of her intestine. It sounds as if Sarah could be headed for a colostomy, and John, my mother says, is very upset.

My mother has just told me the sum total of what she knows, which isn’t much but feels like a lot to take in. It leaves both of us with plenty of room for speculation. We cover a range of possibilities. We agree that
a colostomy, which we understand to be the worst-case scenario, would be a terrible thing for Sarah, for whom a mild cold occasions a week of bed rest.

I ask my mother to call me when she knows more and wait anxiously for Bob, who is coming over to take Zoë and me out to breakfast. When he arrives, I tell him.

As usual, Bob looks unfazed, even after I mention “intestinal blockage.”

“Has she had prior abdominal surgery?”

“No.”

“Then it’s unlikely that she would have a bowel obstruction.” I’m confused. How could Bob know this but John, who is there with Sarah, doesn’t?

“So what do you think it is?”

He shrugs. “I have no idea.”

Bob uses the news to teach Zoë about the causes of bowel obstruction, which irritates me. Once we get home, I call my mother again. She’s just spoken with John, who told her they’re now having trouble getting blood flow to Sarah’s organs. My mother says she needs to get out of her apartment and go for a walk.

For the first time that morning, Bob has a frown of concern. Of course, he’s been taking it in all along. He heard bad belly pain and emergency surgery. And now, when he hears low blood flow, he concludes that sepsis, perhaps overwhelming septic shock, has set in. He says he’s guessing her intestine is perforated and there are bacteria in her bloodstream. His next words are “abdominal catastrophe.” Unlike most medical jargon, this phrase’s implication is exactly as it sounds.

Bob has seated himself at the dining room table and begins typing on my computer. He tells me he’s emailing a colleague who works at the hospital’s main branch in Springfield, to see if the friend might help expedite Sarah’s transfer to the larger hospital, where the level of care might be better for someone this sick. He’s taking control; I’m relieved and grateful.

“You should call the ICU,” Bob says.

When I identify myself to Jean, the ICU nurse, there’s a pause. I
don’t like it. Then she says haltingly, “Have you spoken with her husband?”

“No.” I say. My heart is racing. I know exactly where I am. I am in the gulf of time—two seconds, maybe three—between the words I know are coming and the words themselves.

“Katie, your sister is dying.”

Bob stands in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. I hand him the phone. I have no use for this phone.

I sink into a corner on the floor of the dining room and hug my knees to my chest. Bob is two feet from me, the phone to his ear, nodding. He isn’t saying much. Or maybe he is, and I’m not hearing it. Bob and Zoë are both near me, and Bob is trying to wrap his arms around the awkward, sobbing bundle I’ve become on the floor.

I have to find my mother. I call her cellphone, and she answers right away.

“Mom, I’m coming to get you. Where are you?” I’m crying and wish I wasn’t. If I’m crying, she’ll worry.

“I’m out walking,” she says. Her tone is unsteady. How much of this is she absorbing? “But I’ll walk back to my building.”

“I’ll be there soon. I’m coming right now. Stay out front. I’m coming to get you.”

I can’t find my shoes. Or my handbag. Or my keys. My keys were right here, just a minute ago.

“We’re coming with you,” Zoë says, and Bob nods. Bob drives. We pass the very same buildings we pass every day, but now everything looks different. Why is that?

We find my mother pacing back and forth in front of her apartment building, her face obscured by her hat. She is waving her arms. At no one. We park across the street and I start to get out of the car.

“Do you want us to come with you?” Bob asks. Or maybe Zoë asks this.

“No.”

I walk across the street to my mother. She looks up at me. “Have you heard something?” I put my arms around her. She seems smaller than usual. “She’s dying,” I say. “You’re coming home with us.”

When we get back to the apartment, my mother and I sit down on the couch and I call the same ICU nurse I had spoken with an hour earlier. “Kathy,” she says. She gets my name wrong, which shouldn’t faze me, but, bizarrely, it does. I want to correct her, but there’s no time. “Kathy, I’m sorry, but your sister died a few minutes ago.”

I look over at my mother, who is looking at me. She keeps opening her mouth but no words come out. Just small, pitiful sounds from the back of her throat.

I have only one question for Jean the nurse. “Was she in pain?”

No, she says, she never woke up. Even after they removed the anesthesia, she didn’t regain consciousness. The last time she knew anything at all was just before they put her under for the surgery.

At some point, the nurse gives me the name and pager number of the surgeon who operated on Sarah.

Bob calls the surgeon’s pager, and within thirty minutes the surgeon calls back. Bob introduces himself as an internist in San Francisco, and my husband. I appreciate the white lie he offers in the name of securing his spot among Sarah’s kin. Bob places the handset on the coffee table and puts it on speaker. The man whose voice was probably the last my frightened sister heard now lets out a long, low whistle. Unaware that three other people are listening, he says to Bob, “Can you believe that?”

Bob asks him to describe what he found, and within seconds they’re talking doc to doc, in staccato shorthand. When Sarah (“a healthy fifty-five-year-old woman with no previous history”) came in, she had severe pain, with AMS (altered mental status), leukocytosis (raised white-blood-cell count), and an acutely tender abdomen. The “films” showed distended loops of bowel, so when he “went in,” he’d expected to find a bowel obstruction. Instead, he saw that the bowel was a dusky blue, evidence of widespread ischemia (low blood supply), with no apparent cause. While I can’t comprehend the words I’m hearing, I can make out the gist of the clinical scenario. But one doesn’t have to be a doctor to hear the tone of the surgeon’s voice: I can tell he’s mystified and still rattled. And so is Bob.

During the surgery, Sarah’s blood pressure dropped so low that the surgeon decided to close her up and get her to the ICU to be stabilized. Her abdomen, the surgeon tells Bob, was so swollen he couldn’t close
her entirely—when she reached the ICU, her loops of bowel were extruding through her gaping abdominal incision. It’s a gruesome image.

“I saw calcification in her pancreas, indicating chronic pancreatitis,” the surgeon says.

“Yes, she had an EtOH history,” Bob says. He tells me later that this is code for “alcoholic.” Doctors use the euphemism—drawn from the chemical formula for alcohol—routinely, especially in the presence of patients and their family members. Bob hangs up, explains how rare this scenario—a dead bowel with no obvious underlying cause like a blood clot or severe heart failure—is, and also says that the surgeon sounded competent. “I don’t think he missed anything,” he says, by way of reassuring us.

There is nothing more to do. I stay close to my mother, and Zoë stays close to both of us. Now my daughter has another sudden death to come to grips with. For years, sudden death has been pacing in ever-smaller circles around us, inching its way toward the nucleus of our family. She tells me later that she feels as if it is closing in on the two of us, stalking us with a menacing patience.

Over the next fog-filled hour, my mother and I leave messages for John. We call my mother’s sister, and Bob’s colleague from Springfield calls. Bob thanks him but says it’s too late, no transfer is needed after all. John finally calls my mother’s cellphone. She asks him about an autopsy, and I gather from what I’m hearing that he doesn’t want one. I understand what he’s feeling. How could he ever forgive himself if he discovered she might have lived if he had gotten her to the hospital a few hours sooner? Bob tells us he doubts it would have made a difference. By the time Sarah was in acute pain, her bowel was already dying, and so was she.