“Be still,” she says, “be still,” but she says it quietly this time, as if I am a baby she is trying to get to sleep.
I want Betty to go to sleep now, just get a little rest, a little calm, a quiet hour or so, but at 1 a.m., I hear her moving. I have fallen asleep and she, apparently, has finished her book. I walk her into her bedroom and make sure she is okay. I rub moisturizer onto her face and Lubriderm onto her legs, which flake with dryness. She makes her whimpering noises, mutters to herself. It seems as though to her I am not there at all. I am touching her, but she does not notice. She is alone.
“Don’t fall,” she says to herself. “Don’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall.” She is more upset now than before. The scrim has been torn away. She is unable to summon the part of her that covers all her fear. I stay until she is still. I sit in the corner after bringing her an extra half of Xanax, which she takes. But she still ignores me. She does not see me. No one is here but her. Suddenly she yells out, “Someone has to make the coffee. I forgot.”
. . .
Heading back to the kitchen to make the coffee, I pass my old room, which my father made into an office after he retired. On the shelves above his desk there are hundreds and hundreds of seashells, polished, but a little dusty now. In the corner there is my old stereo, bought with birthday money.
There is a scene I remember that always sums up my last moments of living with my parents in the house my father built. During my last year in high school, my last months truly at home, there was a song on the radio called “Second Avenue,” a ballad I liked. I wanted the album and asked Betty to find it on a day she was going into St. Louis to take Mammy to the eye doctor’s. It was ten o’clock or so before my mother got home. She looked exhausted, worried about Mammy, sitting at the kitchen table in front of something cold.
I adjourned to my room to listen to the music with my headphones on. I played the record over and over, even after my parents went to bed. That night, for some reason, I found myself singing along to “Second Avenue.” I did not imagine anyone listening and couldn’t hear myself because of the headphones, but my parents, next door, were apparently still awake.
An hour or so after they turned in, they opened my door and stood together, looking in, smiling, looking happy, amused. “We heard the sweetest voice,” said my mother, hair in some disarray, despite the use of her satinlike Beauty Sleep pillow. “You’re probably going to be a rock star,” my father added, his bare chest just beginning to show the contours of an older man, “but tonight you have to get to bed. Go to sleep now. Go to sleep.”
That night I loved them so much.
22
It is Labor Day, late morning. The neighbors have left for the Lake of the Ozarks or Table Rock to fish and ski. They have gone to cook out and laugh with family and friends. We have nowhere special to go. My mother is standing at her window, watching the sky. Quietly she announces, after a few minutes, that it is raining. The Midwest’s worst drought since the 1930s has finally broken. The weatherman has gotten it right. He has predicted rain all over the state and now it is here.
I come to stand with her by the window. She seems relieved, as if the fate of all the world depended on this rain falling from the sky, as if this was just her rain, something sent to bring her peace.
. . .
Yesterday, I found myself at our church, the First Christian Church, Disciples of Christ. I believed it would be open; there is a prayer room, a refuge for people. I thought of all those I have known in this church, in this town, who might have come here in times of trouble. All the people who have come to ask for help and gone.
The church was not open. Everything was locked up, so I sat on the step by the side door and said, out loud, to whoever was listening, “Help Betty, please help Betty. Please give her health, and happiness, and peace. Daddy, John Hickey, get your asses in gear.”
As I sat on the step, so many things came rushing back to me, so many days, and words, and scenes. Through the years of watching my mother there are a few things I have come to understand.