WIDOW (18 page)

She didn't want to call Son. He was working.

What a wonderfully devoted man he was and so brilliant! They had even given him an award for his mysteries, but he wouldn't leave her to go to New York City for the ceremony. They shipped the little ceramic bust of Edgar Allen Poe to him in a carton of Styrofoam wriggles that spilled out all over the floor of her bedroom when he lifted it out for her to see. It was a funny looking statue, but Son was inordinately proud of it, explaining what an honor this prize was in his genre. Genre. A beautiful word that made her think of French silks and Paris nights.

She hadn't seen the award since. She wondered if he put it on the shelf in his office. She never went in there. Son needed his privacy to write. She'd never invade his sanctum or interfere with his creative life.

She drew her legs onto the coverlet and lay back, sighing with pain. She could hold her water a little longer. She'd wait until Son came in to see about her before asking to be taken to the toilet.

She could do it. She had done it before. With only one or two mistakes. Out of how many times? Dozens. Hundreds. She always waited patiently when she could manage it.

She had wanted to be a writer one time, when she was younger. Somewhere in the attic she had old spiral notebooks full of her little stories. She remembered writing them when Son was small. Deep in the night after she had finished the house chores and her child slept, she hauled out a notebook and wrote about an older time, a time that had never existed for her. She thought she might have some writing talent. But of course she had also wanted to be an actress, play opposite Valentino in the silent movies. Have him bend her back and kiss her passionately on the screen.

Dreams. They were lovely things because they caused no harm. It wasn't depressing to her that she had had to work in business and make a living for her and Son. She wasn't unhappy her dreams never came true. They had for Son, and that made up for everything, for every sacrifice and lost opportunity.

She had shown her stories to Son when he first began writing. He was kind (he was her son!), but she could tell her rambling, old-fashioned prose fell short for his tastes. They were soft flowery pieces about girls in gingham dresses picking daisies in the fields outside little rural towns, about families, big families with lots of children, and parents who loved one another. They were silly old things and she shouldn't have showed such flawed work to a talented son. What was he supposed to say?

When she read his books—he never let her see them until they were published, their pages smelling crisply of new paper and their jackets splashed with bright, vibrant colors—she was taken by his imagination. When copies of the first novel came in the mail—a box of them—and she read the first chapter, she knew what she called “writing” was a far different thing from what writing really was. Son took you into new places, inside his detective's head, and he made you believe in that world so that time hung suspended.

She, certainly, had never been able to do something like that with her own pitiful scribblings.

Oh, she had led such a charmed life. It was true her husband, Son's father, was temperamental and she never understood him, but once she was out of that situation, everything had been lovely. Even when she had to hold down two jobs and pay for babysitters, she thought her life touched by magic to have a child at home waiting for her, looking up to her. Loving her.

She poured all her love into him, every ounce of it she possessed, and when he put his little arms around her neck and kissed her cheek, she nearly swooned with a mother's joy that filled her heart and overflowed to warm every corner of her being.

He was always a good boy. Never once a problem with him. Other mothers confided how their children wet the bed even into their teen years, or how they ran away from home, or took up pot smoking or some other horrible drug. Or they got pregnant or impregnated their teenaged girlfriends, became thieves, hustlers, liars and frauds. But Son made her proud. He brought home top grades. He had a paper route by the time he was nine. He attended the university and found a way to make his mark upon the world.

He listened to her.

He loved her back.

A grunt of satisfaction left her lips before she caught it. Why was it as she grew old and weak that she remembered the far past so much better than the near past? She couldn't be making it rosier than it was, could she? Just so she'd have good memories to keep her company? What an odd thought. She wished she didn't have these odd thoughts that set her off balance. Of course she hadn't embroidered the past! She'd had a wonderful life, just like that old Christmas movie said, the one with James Stewart, it was a wonderful life.

She heard Rush Limbaugh squealing from the radio. He must have been tapping the microphone because it snagged her attention. That Rush. She had to smile. He knew how to entertain, that's for sure. She didn't agree with the politics he spouted, but she suspected he didn't mean them anyway. He was playing a little game, though sometimes she thought he might really be a mean-spirited kind of person. But his little game made him famous.

Like her son.

And weren't all types of entertainment game-playing? Books, movies, television, and radio?

Now that was a question that could keep her mind engaged for another thirty minutes or so.

She tightened her legs, hoping to hold her bladder in check a while longer. She felt her tissue-thin skin wrinkle into folds as she did this, but didn't mind it. She was at home in the old body, as useless as it had become to her. After all, it was the only one she had, and she had lived in it for more than eighty years. Eight long decades and more.

If she had learned about playfulness and games maybe her writing would have blossomed the way Son's had. All she had wanted to set down to paper was an idyllic time and place and family. Wildflowers in fields nodding their heads in the breeze. Mama and Papa in the kitchen bringing dinner to the table for their many children. And those children! Their ruddy faces, hair the color of new copper, laughing like glass chimes tinkling in the wind.

Ah . . .

To have her body back now. To be able to rule it and make it obey. To have her fingers flexible enough to hold a pencil and a pad of paper. For it was certain she had lost her chance to star in silent films . . .

She had to pee!

“Son!”

Oh gawd. She hadn't wanted to do that.

“Son! Hurry!”

Or that.

He came into the room with his hair all mussed, a sheaf of typewritten pages in his hand. “What is it?”

“I think I wet myself,” she said in a small embarrassed voice.

“You should have called me earlier, Mother.”

She turned her face on the pillow to avoid seeing the disappointment and revulsion creeping into his eyes.

He was not quite the little boy she remembered. But he was good all the same. And she was a selfish old dolt with hot urine leaking from between her thighs.

She wished she might die.

~*~

He helped her take the gown off, pulling it over her head, keeping his stare firmly on the bedclothes behind her so as not to have to witness her shrunken body. He handed her the house coat, let her stand on her own and close it before leading her by the arm down the hall to the bathroom.

While she attended herself inside, he went back to her room and stripped the wet sheets from the bed, flinging them on the floor around his feet. He had to wipe down the plastic cover on the mattress with Lysol and dry it with a clean towel before putting on fresh sheets and arranging the many pillows and the cover.

He grabbed up the soiled sheets in his arms and hurried with them to the laundry room. He started the washing machine and dumped in Tide and a cup of Clorox before throwing in the sheets.

He slammed down the lid of the machine; stood with both hands flat on it, feeling the agitator swish the water back and forth. The strong bleach smell filled his nostrils and made his eyes water.

“I'm ready, Son.”

He heard her. He deliberately didn't make a move her way. Not yet. She needed a little punishment for this stunt.

“Son?”

Maybe she'd try to get back to the room on her own, fall down and break a hip. Oh yeah. Then he'd really have extra work to do.

He broke from the machine and went to the hall. She stood with her eyes downcast. He took her arm. At the bedside he helped her onto the mattress. He thought he could still smell urine. Did it permeate plastic eventually? Christ. Maybe the room smelled of it, the entire house, and he just didn't know, having gotten used to it. That would be loathsome.

“I won't do it again,” she said.

“It was just an accident. You changed my diapers. I don't see why I can't help you out now.”

He saw his words had moved her. She was about to cry. “Come on, Mother, it's nothing. How about a glass of iced tea? Would you like that?”

She nodded.

He bent down and kissed her cheek. “I'll just be a minute.”

Once he had her settled and happy again, he made for the study where his work waited. The cursor beat like a miniature heart on the screen. He was filching a scene from Lloyd C. Douglas. Douglas had written, “One afternoon in latter August, within a few minutes of the closing hour, a young chap was shown into my cramped cubicle with his left hand bound in a dirty rag.”

Son had rewritten it so that it read, “Late August, about to leave the clinic, a boy came into my narrow office, his left hand wrapped in a dirty bandage.”

It was tedious to refine and update the old writers he stole from, but he hadn't any alternative. There wasn't a chance in a million that he could think up ideas of his own and write them to completion. It fairly boggled his mind to think no one in publishing or in his audience had caught him yet. If they ever did, he would be disgraced and never published again.

The thought frightened him. How would he live then? Who would pay the bills?

He heard the washing machine change over to a rinse cycle and it made him think of the sheets, soaking with her old hot piss. Maybe she deserved to have a disgraced son. To know how fraudulent he was. She placed entirely too much stock in his “creativity.” She thought he was a rare bird, when in truth he was nothing but a raven pecking at the eyes of men who had truly been artists.

Vexed by these thoughts about himself, he turned from the computer to fetch his mother's tea.

In his office again he took the newspaper lying on the center table. He shook it open and sat down in his desk chair. He carefully combed through the reports, looking for an interesting and unsolved death.

In a two-inch column toward the back of the news section, he found mention of a body washed down the Kemah channel. Shrimpers coming in from the bay had seen it floating and brought it on board. There was a knife wound in the man's back. Police said the victim had been out on parole for sexual assault. It sounded as if the guy had a rap sheet a yard long.

Well, he wasn't on parole any more. Someone had yanked it and sent him to hell. It might be something to keep an eye on.

But one body meant nothing.

When was there going to be some excitement in this city? The last serial murders had been two years before, a psychiatrist who had been into the sadomasochistic scene, taking down wealthy married ladies who led secret lesbian lives. Now that had been worthwhile. Three of the older bisexual rich bitches had succumbed in his hands while the psychiatrist lost his innocent plea and wound up on Death Row in Huntsville Correctional Unit.

Son chuckled to himself then looked around to make sure his mother had not crept to his doorway and heard him. If she ever did that . . .

He folded the paper carefully and put it away. He twisted around in the chair to face the monitor. He took up the book by Douglas and reread the scene he must update.

Soon he had it clearly in mind and put into modern language on the screen. His editor was going to love it. That Douglas—boy, he sure knew how to write.

 

Sixteen

 

Mitchell banged his knee on the corner of his desk as he came from the lieutenant's office. He grunted and swore.

Detective Jerry Dodge, “Dod,” glanced up from where he sat at his own desk facing Mitchell's and said, “Bad news?”

“Shit, isn't it always?” He dropped into the chair and rubbed at the knee.

“The contract hit or the gay bashing?”

“You're behind, Dod. We caught the contract hit. He was paid by the son-in-law, old story. Trial will be coming up in a coupla months.”

“Then Boss is pushing on the gay bashing.” Dod took off his wire-framed spectacles and wiped them clean with a napkin he'd brought to the office with donuts.

“He's got the Gay Rights' Committee on his ass. They bite him, he bites me. Another old story.”

“That contract hit. I never even knew we solved it. You think I ought to see if we can put up one of those blackboards with the open and closed cases on it, the way they did on Homicide?”

“The way they did on what? What blackboard?” The phone rang. Mitchell grabbed it, said, “Detective Samson.” He listened a bit then he said, exasperated, “I did too fill in the file number. What? Hey, find it yourself then. It can't be that hard, can it?” He paused, listening. “You want me to look it up and call you back? You want me to waste the city taxpayers' time that way for real?” He frowned hard. “All right, damnit, find it. I swear it's on my report, though, you just aren't looking in the right place.” He slammed down the receiver.

“I told you your typing stinks.”

Mitchell shook his head. “It's not my typing, it's those morons who enter all the data in the computers. They can't read fucking English. Where do they get them, Saudi Arabia?”