Tea Cups & Tiger Claws (22 page)

That was it.
Veronica had seen enough. The freaky-deaky meter had gone berserk and it was time to bug out. She looked to the left, saw the double doors still open, and ran for them. She flew past the Fuzz-Heads, didn’t pay her respects to Queen Wannabe on the wall, and furiously scanned the wood paneling for an elevator button. She found nothing, but just as the panic started to rise, the bell chimed, the paneling parted, the elevator door opened, and there stood Old-Man-Scarface, staring at the ground. She scrambled in.

“Going down?” he asked.

“No shit! And fast!” she said as she anxiously watched the doors close. “I’m sure not staying around this freak joint anymore.”

“Yes Ma’am,” he said calmly, unconcerned with her agitated state.

She nervously squeezed her hands together. The elevator took an eternity to rattle down to the bottom. When the doors finally opened, she blew past the old man, into the paneled hallway, and out the glass door, where she saw the fat man’s skuzz bucket. She flung open the passenger door and jumped in.

“
Aunt Dorthea my ass!” she blurted, out of breath. “She’s up there in a rocking chair like the old lady from Psycho; staring at my home; with two freaky guards, holding guns, who look like they just got kicked out of a marching band; and a creepy picture of herself dressed up like a queen with a crown and a cape and a big corn cob up her ass; and the stupidest, most lame, most bogus elevator that has ever been invented in the whole wide world! And you didn’t tell me any of this! You lied to me!”

“I did not,” said the man calmly. “I told you that your aunt cares about you and wants to help. That’s what I said.”

“You tricked me so that I’d forget that she murdered her father…and drank his blood…and stuff like that.”

He smiled calmly, like he’d just seen a pretty sunset.

“Is that it?” she said. “You’re just going to sit there and smile after what you did to me?”

“Hysteria and rational conversation don’t mix, but I’ll be happy to talk with you when you calm down.”

“Calm down? Forget it! I don’t want to talk to you anyway. You’re grody and I don’t like you.
The first time I saw you smile like a retarded beaver, I knew I didn’t like you. Now take me home right now.”

Tubbs
put the car into gear and drove her home.

After school a week later, Veronica opened the door of her brand new Camaro Z28 and found a glossy, purple bag resting on the driver’s seat. Inside she found a four finger bag of weed and note with a phone number on it.

If regret fell from the sky like hail or 737 landing gear or a pestilence of frogs, we could call it an “act of God” and feel better about ourselves. If we inherited it from shadowy relatives, we could call it a family skeleton and stuff it in a closet. It wouldn’t be regret at all. If it grew out of nowhere like a toe fungus, we could call it a “condition” and take some measure of pride from our blameless suffering. But that’s not how it works. Regret is manmade and latches onto whoever made it, the more shameful the regret, the tighter the grip. Sarah Evans knew this as well as anyone.

For many months
Sarah had paid little attention to her mom’s tired and unhealthy appearance. Some mothers wear pretty hats or colorful scarves. Her mom wore worry. From head to toe. So when she became rundown and started taking afternoon naps, Sarah thought that maybe she’d been worrying a little more than usual. She’d never cared for Grant Wynnethorpe. He drove a Porsche, wore gold chains, and pretty much owned the world—all the things Mom hated in a man—not to mention that he’d been specially chosen for Sarah by Aunt Judith. And he went to Harvard, which meant that, with Sarah at Radcliffe, the couple saw a great deal of each other—without supervision. Mom worried about these things, when not worrying about old things, like the sad incident with Mack, and the way Aunt Judith had pushed her weight around, and the disappointing way in which Sarah had gone along with the whole thing. Sarah told herself that the pain on her mom’s face didn’t really mean anything, except that, in her mom’s eyes, maybe Sarah had somehow chosen the wrong path.

And when
her mom didn’t bounce back a few months later, it made sense because Sarah and Grant had just become engaged. Aunt Judith, who’d urged Sarah to accept the proposal, threw a huge party in honor of the engagement, attended by judges, congressmen, and two senators, including Grant’s father, who arrived by police escort. Mom made a brief, stone-faced appearance and then went home to worry.

When the summer of
1970 came to an end, and Sarah looked back from the boarding stairs of the Massachusetts bound airplane, which she’d be taking back to her senior year at Radcliffe, she saw a mother who looked older and frailer than ever before. She needed to start taking better care of herself, thought Sarah. Now that the whirlwind surrounding the engagement announcement had blown over, and now that three thousand miles would once again be separating Mom from her favorite object of worry, she’d be able to do just that.

This wishful thinking
might’ve been tolerable if not for yet another regret: Sarah didn’t go home for Christmas that year, but instead spent it with Grant and his family at their cabin in Park City, Utah.

By the time
Sarah finally saw her mom again, in June of 1971, she had turned bone-skinny, had yellow skin, and looked too weak to stand. Almost unrecognizable. If Sarah hadn’t seen Mr. Theo, who’d driven her mom in the limousine to pick up Sarah from the airport, and who stood next to her behind the arrival gate, she would’ve walked right past her. She wore only pack mule dresses, the kind that worked hard and stayed in service until they dropped dead, but at least they had always fit. Sarah couldn’t say that for the baggy thing that greeted her that day at the airport, or for the ever-present orange sweater, a natural disaster in its own right, which drooped lifelessly from her bony shoulders. After greeting her mother with a nothing of a hug, and without saying so much as “How are you?” or “I missed you” or “It’s nice to see you,” Sarah blurted out, “Mother! What is going on? You look terrible!” When her mom smiled and didn’t get offended, and when Sarah saw the strange look on Mr. Theo’s face, she knew something had happened. Before getting a chance to say anything else, Mr. Theo discreetly slipped a note into her hand, which Sarah indiscreetly unfolded and quickly read. It said, “My darling Sarah, don’t question your mother. I’ll explain everything as soon as you get home. Please do as I say. All my love, Aunt Judith.”

“What is this?” asked
Sarah.

“I don’t know
, dear. I guess your aunt has something to tell you.”

Sarah
saw a wave of sadness start to wash over her mom’s face. She decided to ease up and do as the note said.

Uncle Bill used to say nobody ever got hit by a train
when they saw it coming a mile away. He said it to people who worried about the future: business people, old people, politicians, mom. Sarah had always thought it made sense but had also wondered about the poor soul who saw the train coming but got hit anyway. Now she knew. On the drive home, she held her mother’s hand and tried her best to hide the mounting fear. Sarah saw the oncoming train and had the distinct understanding that she wouldn’t be getting out of the way. She thought about the scary note from Aunt Judith. She looked past her mom’s weak smile and saw a haggard, resigned face. She made sense out of the fatigue that had lately been coming through the line during their regular phone conversations, as well as the uncharacteristic way that both her mom and aunt had begged out of attending her graduation. She thought back to the previous summer and recognized the warning signs that she hadn’t recognized before. And when she got home and slipped away to make the phone call, she recognized her aunt’s sad, defeated voice even though her aunt had never sounded like that in her entire life. And when she told Sarah to come up to Sunny Slope Manor that very minute, and refused to say anything else over the phone, it made all the sense in the world.

Her mom
had pancreatic cancer that had spread to her liver, lymph nodes, and lungs. That’s what Aunt Judith had to say. From the quiet comfort of her sitting room sofa, surrounded by hundreds of homey knickknacks, picked up from vacations and outings and all kinds of special occasions, each one a testament to family and good times and a bright future, Aunt Judith told Sarah that her mom had inoperable cancer. She said it gently, quietly, slowly, leaning in closely, covering Sarah’s hands with her own. The train had hit. Sarah hadn’t gotten out of the way.

After a few minutes, when the first rush of tears had evened to a steady flow,
Sarah noticed that Aunt Judith had her head down and seemed to be avoiding eye contact, like she had other things to say.

“What
is it? Tell me,” said Sarah.

“
She doesn’t have very long. The doctors say six months...or less.”

Later on,
during a period of red-eyed numbness, Aunt Judith shared some other details. She said that even though her mom’s health had been steadily deteriorating, she had refused to go to the doctor until the day when Aunt Judith and Mr. Theo showed up at her house and gave her no choice. She also said that after getting the news, her mom had, in her peculiarly timid way, made only one request: in exchange for allowing herself to be dragged by her sister from one cancer specialist to another in a vain search for even a glimmer of hope, Mom had extracted a pledge that Aunt Judith would be the one to break the news to Sarah. That explained the note and her mom’s calm reticence. The two sisters had also agreed that nothing would be said until Sarah had finished finals and had come home with her diploma, which actually followed the bad news by only a matter of a few weeks.

Six months and a pile of regrets
, that’s what remained after Sarah’s meeting with Aunt Judith. The pleasure and sense of accomplishment at having graduated didn’t exist. The joy and excitement of an upcoming wedding had vanished. And the regrets didn’t look all that great either because she didn’t have any time to wallow in them. They had to wait. The six months came first. Mom came first.

Of course
the time went by way too fast but in some ways it didn’t. During those days, for the first time since age six or seven, Sarah lived her life with both feet in her own house, instead of one foot in the house and the other in Aunt Judith’s waiting limousine. For the first time, since before she even knew what it meant to have a wandering eye, her eyes didn’t wander up to Sunny Slope Manor. And neither did her heart. It belonged to her mom, the one who had lived a quiet and devoted life. For five and a half months Sarah lived that same quiet and devoted existence, right beside her mom, and she reveled in every second of it.

Their lives together felt different, especially the way they talked
. When Mom brought up God, Sarah didn’t roll her eyes and die of boredom. She listened with the sincerity that her mom deserved, that she’d earned from a lifetime of selfless devotion. And, for the same reasons, Sarah answered her mom’s questions with a new kind of honesty. She said that she believed in God but that she also had doubts. Doubts because of all the people who said they believed in the same God but seemed to show it in conflicting ways; people like her very own pious mother, compared to the impious Aunt Judith who nonetheless still made professions of faith, compared to some skid row wino who cries repentant tears at the mission, but never seems to get enough of God’s strength to stop doing the things for which he needs to repent. Sarah shared these doubts, and others, and to her surprise, Mom’s ears didn’t catch on fire from the heresy. She just smiled and said, “Well, that means I need to keep praying for you. And if I can do it after I die, I’ll keep praying for you then, too.”

This new way of talking didn’t start and stop with just
Sarah. The gentle honesty also seemed to rub off on her mom, along with some occasional boldness, too. One day, out of the blue, she said, “Sarah, do you love Mack?”

Without giving it a second thought
Sarah said, “Yes, Mom, I do. Even after all this time, I still love him.”

“Do you love Grant?”

“Of course I do. That’s a silly thing to ask.”

“Your words say one thing but your eyes say another.”

“Oh. I see. And is this eyeball reading something you’ve been practicing for very long?”

“I’m just saying.”

“Mother. I wouldn’t be marrying him if I didn’t love him. Now stop being ridiculous.”

With that little dustup the
conversation ended. Strangely, her mom didn’t seem to care that Sarah’s feathers had been ruffled, not in the slightest. No apology got offered, which was very much unlike her apologetic mom. And then five minutes later she happily offered to take Sarah shopping for a wedding dress…so Sarah could properly marry the man who, according to the clairvoyant eyeball reader, she didn’t even love. Sarah declined the offer. Besides her mom’s schizophrenic attitude about the whole thing, Sarah didn’t care to talk about anything related to the wedding, or to even think about it, because she knew her mom wouldn’t be there to share it.

Only on
e other conversation proved to be too much for their newfound openness: the one where Sarah apologized for the thousand little ways in which she had made her mom feel like second fiddle to Aunt Judith. The same eyes that through the years had continuously admired Aunt Judith’s beauty and style had also repelled at the sight of the one who truly deserved to be admired—no matter how she dressed or wore her hair. The same ears that had eagerly listened to Aunt Judith’s worldly advice had often turned a deaf ear to the advice of a caring mother. Sarah saw this shame quite clearly. Unfortunately her mom didn’t. At least that was what she said. “Don’t be silly, dear. You never did any such thing. You’ve never been anything but a wonderful, loving daughter. Now you stop troubling yourself.” She refused to see it, which took away some of the sting, but still left the regret very much intact.

Sarah
’s mom died on November thirtieth, three months after her fifty-fifth birthday, two weeks shy of the six month prognosis. By the time of her death, she’d been bedridden for three weeks in her little living room, on a special hospital bed that Aunt Judith had arranged. Those last days proved to be the hardest and most depressing for Sarah, harder even than her actual death, because by this time, what was left of her body had been rendered almost useless, and the severity of the constant pain seemed to be growing daily and sometimes hourly. Apart from some hand-holding and occasional snippets of semi-coherent conversation, she didn’t have much of a life. Then the morphine drip started, the respirator mask went over her face, and Sarah’s mom all but disappeared. Unconscious and lost in a morphine fog, unable to breathe without a machine, she stopped living but she didn’t die. She suffered loss of life, according to any sane definition of the word, but not the peace which comes only through actual death. With that peaceful hope lingering somewhere nearby, all Sarah could do was pray. She prayed for it to all be over. Not for miracles, or signs, or one last heartfelt conversation. Just a peaceful death. She wanted nothing else.

Given her mom’s
fondness for doing the exact opposite of what all the bossy people in life told her to do, perhaps Sarah should’ve expected the unexpected.

On the night of
her death, when the doctor said that she’d be gone within a matter of hours, Sarah and Aunt Judith took turns watching over her. They held her hand, soothed her forehead with a damp cloth, and whispered things into her ear. As Sarah ministered in this way, she suddenly heard her mom’s voice quite clearly, though not clearly enough to make out the words. She leaned in and tried to understand. Aunt Judith got up from the nearby couch where she’d been resting. The muffled words kept flowing. Then Mom raised her hand and fumbled with the respirator mask. Aunt Judith leaned over the bed. Sarah removed the mask, put her face close to her mom’s, and said, “It’s ok Mom. I’m here. Your Sarah is right here. And so is Aunt Judith. She’s right here too.” Mom turned her head, stared into her daughter’s eyes, and said in a quiet, clear voice, “Listen to me Sarah. Even in a storm you can walk with God. Even in a storm.” And then she closed her eyes and stopped breathing. Sarah quickly slipped the respirator mask back over her mouth and nose, but nothing happened.