The End of Eve (21 page)

My mother beamed. “
The Maltese Falcon
is only the greatest screenplay ever written.”

I sat down next to her hospice bed, showed her the calendar so far. Leslie would fly in tomorrow evening. Matea, the night nurse, would be here every night at least through the week. Others would come soon. So many people loved her. So many people wanted to come.

My mother stared at me. “You're not going to leave me again, are you, Tiniest?”

The last blue light of evening through the window.

“I won't be here all the time,” I admitted. “I'm going to keep my rental. But you'll never be alone. We're making sure you'll never be alone.”

My mother nodded. “Okay.” She sounded afraid. “I don't want to be a burden.” She'd never seemed to mind causing a cyclone of chaos, but there was no glamour in burden. “I should have just blown my brains out,” she whispered, too quiet for the nurse-women to hear.

As they arranged pills and pains patches, I ducked into the kitchen to put on a pot of water for tea.

Matea appeared next to me. “Your mother,” she said. “She's Frida Kahlo.”

My heart swelled with hope.
Yes. Please let my mother stay charming.
“She'd be flattered that you think so,” I said. “She's certainly a big Frida fan.”

Just then my phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from the chef:
Do you need me to kill your mother yet?

I texted back:
Not yet.

She texted again:
Have you eaten?

I tried to remember. Had I eaten? I hadn't eaten anything that day. Had I eaten anything the day before? I didn't think so. But the hunger was growing on me. I liked the odd comfort of this
empty feeling. I didn't know if I wanted to eat. But I knew I wanted the chef.

She was flying to Connecticut in a couple of days to clean out her dad's apartment, to take care of his “affairs,” as they say.

I texted back:
Meet you in an hour?

The ridiculousness of it wasn't lost on me. The mother/ daughter/caregiver who couldn't feed herself.

My mother slept, the low hiss of her oxygen machine.

The palliative care nurse gathered her things to leave. “Everything's going to be all right, darling,” she said to me.

Matea would call my cell with any news.

I wrote her a check for six hundred dollars for the first three nights, couldn't stop saying “thank you.”

I packed up Maxito and his pirate Legos, headed over to Sol's place to leave him for the night. “Is Nonna sick?” he wanted to know. He hadn't seen her, had been playing in the living room, but he was learning to overhear things now.

“Yes, baby,” I said. “She's sick. She might die.”

Maxito nodded, serious. “One of my chickens died.”

“Yes. That was sad.”

And he nodded again. “That was so sad.”

The chef texted:
Pot stickers at Yummy Café? Or I could cook for you here.

I felt needy. Uncomfortable in my neediness. It had been exactly one month since her father's death and the chef was worrying about what to feed me. But it struck me as maybe part of my damage, too, the way I dreaded being considered. Maybe I would try an experiment: I would proceed as if being a little bit needy wasn't the worst thing.

If waiting for love wasn't love, maybe love was something different all together than that complicated/elusive thing I'd been trained to wait for. Maybe it was simpler, too. Just some small thing we could use. Like a broken piece of glass, some string. Like an order of pot stickers late at night. Like vegetable broth with bok choi at Yummy Café.

Like a kiss in the chef's gravel driveway and “do you want to come in?”

Like the truth that her question had no double meaning. I could say yes or no without unforeseen consequences.

Like a book of matches.

Like a salted caramel in her palm.

29.

Light
and Other Scattered Words

MY MOTHER DIDN
'
T WANT A BIBLE IN HER ROOM. SHE
didn't want
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
She didn't want Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She was getting better, dammit, and all this talk about God and science and the afterlife was bumming her out.

Where was Leslie, anyway?

“Here's Leslie.”

My sister arrived wearing all white.

I picked her up at the shuttle stop near the train station, stopped with her at Healthy Wealthy for a bouquet of white flowers.

“Leslie,” my mother hummed, but then she kind of hissed at her: “Took you long enough.” She clung to her morphine pump, smirked even as she hissed.

Leslie smiled. “You thought I'd come faster? Knowing the loving welcome I might expect?”

“I have to pee,” my mother sighed. “You have to help me get up to pee.”

Leslie untangled the tubes, lifted our mother out of bed and into the bathroom. She stepped just outside the bathroom door, chose the moment to say, “you know, Mom, I got an email from your lawyer. Did you really intend to leave this house to your maid's daughter in Mexico and not to me and Ariel?”

“Oh God,” my mother groaned. “I must have been really
mad when I did that. What if I die right here on the toilet before I have a chance to change it?”

“Like Elvis?” Leslie laughed.

“Not funny!” my mother shrieked.

I left them to it.

I had paperwork to attend to. Medical powers of attorney and financial powers of attorney. The man at the bank teared up when I pushed the notarized papers across his desk. “I'm gonna miss her,” he said. “You know, sometimes on a slow day, we all just sit around waiting for her to come in and stir up some shit.”

It seemed an odd tribute, but what could I say? “I can only imagine.”

The banker at the next desk straightened his bright blue tie, looked sad. “Did she ever try to get you fired, man? She tried to get me fired three or four times.”

My banker nodded. “Three or four times at least.”

“Well, guys,” I said. “I'm glad you appreciated her.”

I took a mint candy from the bowl. And as I stuffed all the notarized papers back into my turquoise purse, a word fell out: “Light.”

I
'
D BEEN CARRYING
all these words around for the last few weeks. Just words on strips of paper. Like cookie fortunes except each paper strip contained just one word.

I'd been dropping them here and there. Not on purpose. Just when I reached into my purse for my lipstick or a few pennies. A word would catch, slip out, fall to the floor.

I started noticing the words here and there. Like a trail of breadcrumbs. Or evidence I'd been someplace before.

The word “monkey” on the chef's dining room table.

I pointed to the word. “Monkey?”

She shrugged. “I don't know where it came from.”

I didn't confess that the word was mine.

SEE, I HADN
'
T
been writing through any of this. Wouldn't start writing until summer. I wondered what it meant: A writer who didn't write, walking around with little slips of paper in her purse, scattering words like wildflower seeds, hoping for the best.

One of my first memoir teachers, Floyd Salas back in California, said we could all write stories to convey our single human heart/soul to another human heart/soul and, in doing so, break us both out of our isolation.

But these word-seeds seemed lonely.

“Airplane” taped to the bathroom mirror in my little adobe south of town. I'd been meaning to write a story about a trip I took once, alone. About a time when the world felt expansive.

“Stung” in the grocery store aisle near the shelf with all those fancy bottles of mustard where I stood for so long, trying to decide between the spicy green chile and the organic Dijon.

“Radio” next to my mother's hospice bed.

IN THE KITCHEN
of the former duplex, Leslie cooked the things my mother had cooked for us as babies – mashed carrots with parsley and butter, leek and potato soup, banana smoothies. She fed my mother with a tiny silver spoon, filled the freezer with baggies of prepared food to last a couple of weeks. She packed up to leave now, but her son would come next.

In the dim light of the living room, we met with the director of Milagro Home Care. She'd cared for her adult son when he was bed-bound before his death, started her nonprofit. She could send caregivers whenever we needed them. Could we pay twelve dollars an hour? Yes. My mother had a little savings left. We had the social security, too. We could sell the Prius for maybe ten thousand dollars. We could pull this off for a few months.

“It's of course best for our caregivers if you can pay them,” she said softly, “but just so you know, if your mother does live a long time, we won't stop coming just because you've run out of money.”

I cringed, wanted to assure the woman that we would always figure out how to pay the caregivers, but I remembered my new experiment-to proceed as if a little bit needy wasn't the worst thing. And I said, “thank you.”

LESLIE'S TEENAGE SON,
Leo, arrived wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, his hair grown out long after a winter spent camping at Mt. Shasta. He sat with his grandmother in the half-light of her room.

I headed out to meet Carter Quark for a beer at Tomasita's, waited there for the priest from California.

The chef texted Carter from Connecticut as we ordered a second round:
Behave yourself, CQ.

We laughed at that. I said, “Maybe I'm the one who needs to behave herself.” And we laughed harder. Laughed until we cried.

We were waiting for a priest, I'd said, so I guess Carter imagined some Catholic in black. He raised his eyebrows when Carol the new-age earth mama from California stepped in with her cane and flowing cottons.

THE PRIEST AND
Leo took turns at my mother's bedside, feeding her and rubbing her feet, taking her to the bathroom.

The lead hospice nurse had frizzy blonde hair with dark roots, came every day to change the bandage on my mother's bed sore. She filled the pill boxes, checked the battery on the morphine pump.

Another hospice worker came on Tuesdays and Fridays, bathed my mother with sponges.

I read the caregiver logs in the mornings. Nights of vomiting and pain. Daily notes that said, “Eve is anxious.” Weekly notes that said, “When her friend Moe Hawk visits, she becomes agitated, throws up when Moe Hawk leaves.”

“Mom?”

She sat propped in her hospice bed, typing something on her computer.

“Who's Moe Hawk?”

“Oh,” my mother sighed. “She's a mental case. She's a white woman who thinks she's Native American.”

“Do you want her to keep visiting?”

My mother looked up. “Moe Hawk yells at me. She says I'm not allowed to say I'm dying or I'll die. She says you're all just waiting for me to die. She makes me eat too much.”

“We don't have to let her in, Mom.”

But my mother shook her head. “Moe Hawk's a mental case, Ariel. You can't fault someone for being a mental case.”

THE HOSPICE SOCIAL
worker wore a Hawaiian shirt, stood in the kitchen and handed me a list of funeral homes and cremation services. I'd have to pick one, she said, make arrangements before I left town to teach my writing workshop.

“Do you think she'll die in the next couple of days?” I asked the social worker, but she just shrugged.

It seemed crass to make plans for my mother's remains when she was still alive, but I did as I was told, made the calls from my cellphone in the driveway, acted like I was managing. Cremations in Santa Fe cost two to three thousand dollars, but there was a service in Albuquerque where they only charged one thousand. And they could pick up her body here in Santa Fe.
Was it tacky to choose a cut-rate cremation service?
Everything seemed wrong.

A text message from the hospice nurse:
Is it true that Moe Hawk is your mother's sister and authorized to terminate all caregivers?

I texted back:
Absolutely not. I have no idea where she came from. My mother says she's a mental case. Let's get word to everyone not to leave my mother alone with Moe Hawk.

THE CHEF POSTED
pictures on Facebook. She'd found her dead mother's chemo wig in her dead father's apartment, put it on and started drinking whiskey, taking photos and posting them. Photo after photo.

I texted her:
Come home. You're losing it.

And she did. Flew home a day early. Knocked on the door of my little adobe just before midnight on Valentine's Day, said “be mine?”