Theft (15 page)

But all these images go away when I hear Mom rousing in her bedroom. I hear the bed creaking, and I know she's awake and writhing to get out of it, and I have to go in there and help her. I
really
want
to go in and help her, but I can't bring myself to move. I've never felt anything like this before. Like my willpower will not let me do what I want to do, the fear, or whatever it is, it overwhelms me. It has more power than my own mind. I sit there on the couch, as stiff and immobile as Mom. I can't breathe regularly for all the extra pounding my heart thinks it has to do. I tell it to be quiet. It keeps punching my chest like a pissed-off boxer.

Pretty soon I'm just mad, not sad anymore, and then I can finally stand up. Soon as I stand, though, the madness goes away because I have made my way back to Mom and she is in bed and trying to get herself out of bed, and she can't. My mother can't get her own self out of bed. There are medications that could make her better, but we cannot afford them. “No one lives forever,” Dad said to me once, explaining the situation, as if explaining would make me feel better about it and not just make me more pissed off.

Now and again, Dad gets enough insurance coverage from work that Mom can get some doctor help, and things are better for a little bit. But the insurance runs out fast, Dad says, and then he loses that job because he takes on a third job that makes him so tired, and when he's home we do things like drive all over the state of Colorado on what we call a
scavenger hunt
for medications. The pharmacy companies give free samples to doctors, and if we can get the doctors to donate their free sample pills to us, we can sometimes bridge the gaps in between insurances and Dad's jobs, and Mom's disease gets better, for a while. But it's not a perfect set up, like Dad says, not a good situation overall.

I can see it's not perfect when I look at Mom. She is fading away. She is twig-thin and brittle and even her head is veiny, and it frightens me. She looks like a baby bird before it has feathers, her head too heavy for her neck to hold up, her bony wings laying useless at her side. I love her, and she scares me.

I know I have to buck up; it's on me this week while Dad and Zeb are hunting. Her care is on me. I take a deep breath, and I walk over to the bed, where Mom is now. We've put chairs all around it so she can't fall out at night, and I move one of those chairs and sit down next to her. “Ready to get up?” I ask.

“Oh, yes,” she says. Her voice is soft, not because she is feeling gentle, but because her voice is shrinking away.

I help Mom from the bed, into one of the wooden chairs, and then into the wheelchair where she spends her days now. Her body has folded in two, like a wilted sunflower in a vase, that heavy head on that weak stem, and she can't straighten it up. So I have to prop pillows on both sides of her to keep her halfway upright. But her neck is still wilted so she looks at me sideways all the time. I look at her and feel weak. I don't wonder if she knows she's dying. I wonder if she knows I know she is dying. It's unspoken between us, and I think it's something she thinks I shouldn't know—like not knowing Zeb smokes cigarettes, not knowing about sex, not knowing about Zeb's stealing. It's been too long now that he's said he was stealing to help her. His theft hasn't helped a goddamn thing, and he keeps at it, and it's like he's addicted and he can't stop, and I'm old enough now to make my own decisions and I have quit going with him. I made up my mind firm about that because whatever he's stealing has not made a goddamn difference, because this is my mother, and even if I don't want her to be sick, she is. Nothing you can take or give to someone else makes one bit of difference. That's what I know.

It's a month before Christmas, and in school they asked us to go through a bunch of catalogues and cut out pictures of things we want to give or get as gifts. But I can't understand it. All this stuff—it comes and goes, and there's nothing in those catalogues that you can own. I learned that from stealing with Zeb for sure, but I can't say
that
to the teacher. Can't say, “Everything in this catalogue goes away. Just leave your window open a tiny crack one night. You'll see.”

What I want is not in her slick little catalogue. I want my mom back. She's alive with me now, and already I can't remember who she was before Parkinson's wilted her. Give me that back in the fucking Sears catalogue.

I wheel Mom out into the living room, and I put on the TV for her.
Days of Our Lives
is on, but it's about people killing and stealing and dying, so I turn the channel. We settle on reruns of
Alice
, a show she used to like, but she stares at the TV blankly. It's different than Dad staring at the TV because Dad looks like he has too much in his head and he's trying to erase it. Mom looks like she has thoughts brimming over, too, but she can't say them aloud anymore. They escape her. She is too tired to speak them.

“Maybe we could take a nap,” she says. She's been up about an hour now, but I understand her wanting to take a nap because even though we haven't done anything, I'm exhausted.

It takes another hour or so to get her back into bed, but this time I stay there with her. I take a book she's been trying to read but hasn't gotten too far in. “Want me to read it to you?” I ask.

She says yes. I snuggle up next to her and read about five pages of
The Way to Rainy Mountain
before we both fall asleep.

WHEN WE WAKE, THE window is bright blue, the sky pressing against it, and the sun melts the snow so fast that when I sit by the tiny opening in the window, I can hear crystals of snow popping in the sudden heat. “Let's go outside,” I say aloud, though I meant to just think it to myself, but Mom says, “Good idea. Let's.”

I can feel myself jittering inside because it's what I want to do, but I'm scared.

“It's okay,” she says, as if giving me permission to go out and play, or something.

“It is?”

She says, “Yes. We can go outside.”

I don't waste any time. I just start gathering our winter clothes before she changes her mind. I take Mom's red hat from the closet. “The other one,” she says.

“What?”

“The striped hat. One you gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago.” Her voice sounds almost strong. Parkinson's goes up and down in a body, some good days, some bad, but this is
Mom's first good day in a long time. It has never felt so good to do something so simple as taking a hat from a closet. I slap it against my thigh to dust it off. She asks me for the warm boots she used to wear, too, and I scramble to the far back corner of the closet to find those. With her clothes all laid out, I sit her up on the bed and her fingers grasp my neck so hard as I'm dressing her that my neck feels like clay taking the imprint of her hand, and I'm still jittery with hope. It takes me a good twenty minutes to get her shoes on because her feet are so stiff and she can't muscle her way into the boots, but I'm happy the whole time I'm doing it, and Mom is too. When I take a shirt out of the closet and it has a big stain mapped out across it, because
all
her clothes are stained by now—no way to keep them clean the way she writhes as she eats—she says, “I like that stain. It's modern art.” I haven't heard her try for a joke in so long that I crack up hard at this one, and we both keep laughing way too long, and we fold into each other and wipe tears from our eyes and laugh again and again.

Pretty soon she's dressed, and I'm pulling her wheelchair backwards, out the front door, and pushing it across the snowy front yard. “Oh look at this sky!” she says, because it is an excellent sky today, bluer because of the fresh white snow outlining the houses, the trees, the fence, the sharp blue horizon across the snowy field. Her face turns upward to feel the sun's rays, and she opens her arms wide, and they flop there like a rag doll's. They make me laugh because she looks funny and beautiful all at once. Her wool hat has covered up her veiny head, and I remember what she looked like before she was sick, her reddish hair falling to her shoulders, her beautiful, uncrooked smile on her lipsticked lips.

I push her wheelchair down the dirt road, and I see the faces of our neighbors peering out their windows at us, staring. The ones who had their drapes closed part them just enough to peek out, and the ones who had them open look out real fast, then close the drapes so they can't see us anymore. Since Mom is in front of me and she can't see what I'm doing, I raise a middle finger to the starers, hold it up there for a good long time before they can get to the drawcord and close us out.

When we get to the edge of the field, we look at the old house for a while, then I start to turn the chair around. “Let's keep going,” Mom says.

“We're at the end of the street,” I tell her, and she asks me why I can't hold the barbed-wire fence down.

“With your foot,” she says, “And pull this stupid chair and me over it, into the field. Can't you?”

I know I should not be out here like this with Mom, but I don't care. I'm used to the feeling of doing something wrong, but usually there's nothing good at the end of it. This time, it feels right. I wonder for a second if I am healing Mom, like Dad wanted me to, some magic happening that I can't understand. She's better than I've seen her in a long time, and she has always told me I can make anything happen if I want it bad enough.

When I step on the sagging barbed wire and the rotten fence posts bend inward on both sides, I feel like a cartoon character, like those fence posts are made of steal and I am bending them so my mom can cross into the field. I pull her over the wire, and she raises her hands as high as she can, like a victorious boxer, and she sighs, a good sigh, like she's home. The grasses that were tall in summer are folded down over the mud like a blanket now, and it's easier to push her chair here.

“Look!” she says, and she can't point, but I follow her eyes. In the gathering of blue spruce trees that used to outline the border of Mom's childhood backyard there's a flock of bluebirds. They look like the blue light that twinkles off of white snow, but bigger, and brighter, and alive. “Mountain bluebirds,” Mom says.

“I've never seen them before,” I tell her.

“Only a few migrators left this time of year. Now that you've seen them, you'll see them this summer. They'll be even brighter blue then.” She says this calmly and certainly. The birds flash like gems in the snow, and then, in one gust, like a bright blue wind, they rise up from the trees and fly above the frozen pond, then disappear out of sight. I'm so distracted by the birds that I push Mom's chair into a dip, and it begins to fall, and it takes all my strength to keep her from toppling over. It leaves me shaken, and
I tell her we should go back now, and she says, “No.” She says, “Take me over there.” She tries to point.

I'm getting cold and more afraid. “Where?”

“Can we go one more time to the house?”

One more time? We've never been to the house together before, and I want to go, but for some reason, my teeth start chattering. “It's getting toward evening, Mom.”

“It's barely even afternoon,” she says.

“And it's hard pushing this wheelchair.”

“It's harder sitting in it.”

“So let's go back then.”

And that's when she says, “I feel so good today. I feel like I could walk.”

“You do?”

“Let me hold onto you,” she says. She concentrates and arranges her feet carefully and then puts all her weight on my hands and shoulders. She stands.

I see that I've grown to be the same height as Mom. I've never known this before, and it makes me feel like we
can
do this—together. She can walk, with me. “Want to walk to the house?” I ask. It's less than a football field away from us.

She says, “Yes,” but her lips are pulled taut with the effort she makes to take each step. Still, she is stepping. We walk together. Nothing matters but this. I'm not cold anymore, and my mom and I walk to the house where she lived when she was my age. The rotted doorway is open, as it always is, and we step inside.

There's a quiet here now. It's almost like the walls are standing again and the roof is nailed back into place, not sagging. Things echo. I walk with Mom over to the rickety rocking chair. I use all my muscles to lower her into the chair, and when she lets go, I feel light again.

Maybe if she felt better she'd tell me stories of her life in this house. But she is quiet. And I am quiet. I remember all the photographs she has shown me of this place when she lived here, anyway. I can see her in it when she was a kid, can hear her voice
back then, and it sounds a lot like mine. The stories of her life find me here, on this land. They know Mom. They know me.