“Ma?”
Sometimes she answered. Sometimes she didn’t.
“Ma, I don’t know how to handle this.”
“Yes, you do.”
Immediate and clear. An answer unlike the not-answers she used to give me when I was a child.
“You’re already handling it,” she said, “even if you don’t know you are.”
“Handling it how? Driving down to visit you? Watching Jeopardy! with you? Talking to Annabelle and Eli? Hanging on to Sunshine and Brown? Reading to you from the seagull book?”
“Yes.”
“‘Yes’? That’s all you got? A one-syllable answer?”
“Yes.”
Then she was gone. You could feel when someone was with you and you could feel it when they left. Three yesses in a row. If my mother said I was handling it, then maybe I was. Maybe this was what handling something—something huge and overwhelming, something with no way in and no way out—felt like.
Maybe Sunshine was right, and the day would come that I wrote about my mother. Things that I remembered about her, things that were caught inside me, trapped and wanting a way out. Maybe I would sit here on the porch, with a notebook and a pen, and build a house for my mother. It would be a house for me and her, a house with plenty of wood for the winter, cupboards filled with jars and cans, Dog curled up with his stuffed monkey, a place where we could live forever. When my mother thought I wasn’t there she would lie down on the floor and listen to Len. She would read her seagull book for the thousandth time. She would think about the dreams she had for her life, the dreams I never knew she had. Dreams that I still didn’t know about, because I never asked. She would tell me about Eli, maybe, or maybe she would keep the memory of him for herself alone. When Leonard Cohen sang “Hallelujah” she might start to cry. She might play that one song over and over again, because she was alone, and who would know? Who would care?
My mother might think that she was alone. But she would be wrong. I would be with her, watching over her, in that house made of words.
* * *
It was a morning of sun so anemic that I kept glancing at the sky through the window, thinking it was about to storm, but no. Just early winter in upstate New York. My mother and I were sitting on the Green Room couch, me massaging her hands, one finger joint at a time. This had been a recent discovery and so far it was working. Every time she was bewildered or agitated or asking the same question over and over again, that brain-fog look of confusion on her face, I would take her hand in mine and say, “Let’s sit down, Ma. Let me work the knots out.” And she would sit down and I would begin, one finger joint at a time, softly and gently, in hopes of avoiding pain for her. At this stage, we could not tell if something was hurting, and she herself didn’t always know.
Or that was the way it seemed. How strange not to know if you were hurting, not to know if something was pressing on a nerve or a swollen joint or a bruise. But once, months before, something didn’t feel quite right and I looked down to see my fingers kneading a purple-green bruise on her forearm. “Oh, Ma,” I said, “I’m so sorry. That must hurt like hell. How’d you get that bruise?” But she just looked down at it in mild interest, as if her arm and its bruise belonged to a stranger.
And the cold. She was always cold, or so it seemed, a condition that had persisted for months now, despite the layers and layers of clothes she would keep putting on even after an aide or Sylvia or I persuaded them off. Multiple socks. Her winter coat. A radish hat made for her by Sunshine. I had come upon my mother huddled on her bed under three blankets, propped on all sides by pillows. “Ma? It’s eighty-six degrees in here, according to the thermostat. Aren’t you hot?” Face pink and hair damp with sweat, she would shake her head no and pull the blankets closer. It seemed impossible that she could be cold, but then who was I to say what was possible and impossible for my mother? Who was I to decide for her? Her world, which might be part of this world but also might not, might be a world filled with chill.
“Ma, I’m going to run to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”
Down the hall I went, to the bathroom that I thought of as my bathroom, as our bathroom, with “our” being everyone who walked through the doors of this place to visit someone who lived here and then walked on out again to go elsewhere, an else not here, a place called home. This bathroom had handicap rails but was used only by visitors, those like me who strode in and locked the door and did our business and flushed the toilet and washed our hands and glanced in the mirror and strode back down the hall to our parent or grandparent or sister or brother or aunt or uncle or wife or husband. It took me three minutes total.
But when I turned the hall corner, there was Sylvia, standing next to the Green Room doorframe, her hand half covering her mouth.
“Sylvia?”
Panic in my voice, soft, controlled panic because it behooved no one to panic at full volume in the place where my mother lived now. She didn’t turn her head, but her other hand reached toward me, fingers spread in a warning that meant Shhh, that meant No need to panic. So I slowed and approached the way a pioneer girl might have done if she were trying to walk like an Indian guide in the woods, if she were trying to leave no trace of her presence, nothing to give herself away. I stood opposite Sylvia and pressed myself against the wall, angling my head to see what she was looking at, which was my mother, my small, thin mother, with Eli Chamberlain’s arms around her. He was rocking her back and forth, there on the green couch in the Green Room, with his face pressed against her dark hair and his eyes closed.
There are times in life when you come across something—a piece of music or a passage from a book or words spoken by a person you love—and something in you responds in an instant, physical way. Your throat swells almost shut, tears spring out of your eyes, your heart draws in on itself in a way that somehow makes it feel bigger. Or broken. Maybe they’re the same thing.
The both of us stood, Sylvia and I, one on either side of the doorway to the Green Room, watching someone who was not me and who loved my mother in a way that was nothing like the way I loved her now or ever, gather her in and hold her close.
And she let him.
* * *
The ship was in Trebek’s capable hands and we let him guide it through the calm harbor of the first round. Brown and Sunshine were on one side of Tamar, Chris on the other, and me? On the floor, propped against Chris’s legs. Their voices floated in looping, lazy curves in the air just above my head. Winter this and Winter that, Sunshine and Brown telling Chris more stories of back in college, how they used to come drag me out of the piano practice room and haul me downtown for beer and pool.
“How many times you think we’ve taught Winter to play pool, Brown?”