ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 2 страница

She went to college and earned straight As.

Sometimes I hugged her exuberantly when I saw her on campus; other times I sailed on by, as if she were no one to me at all.

We were both seniors in college when we learned she had cancer. By then we weren’t at St. Thomas anymore. We’d both transferred to the University of Minnesota after that first year—she to the Duluth campus, I to the one in Minneapolis—and, much to our amusement, we shared a major. She was double majoring in women’s studies and history, I in women’s studies and English. At night, we’d talk for an hour on the phone. I was married by then, to a good man named Paul. I’d married him in the woods on our land, wearing a white satin and lace dress my mother had sewn.

After she got sick, I folded my life down. I told Paul not to count on me. I would have to come and go according to my mother’s needs. I wanted to quit school, but my mother ordered me not to, begging me, no matter what happened, to get my degree. She herself took what she called a break. She only needed to complete a couple more classes to graduate, and she would, she told me. She would get her BA if it killed her, she said, and we laughed and then looked at each other darkly. She’d do the work from her bed. She’d tell me what to type and I’d type it. She would be strong enough to start in on those last two classes soon, she absolutely knew. I stayed in school, though I convinced my professors to allow me to be in class only two days each week. As soon as those two days were over, I raced home to be with my mother. Unlike Leif and Karen, who could hardly bear to be in our mother’s presence once she got sick, I couldn’t bear to be away from her. Plus, I was needed. Eddie was with her when he could be, but he had to work. Someone had to pay the bills.

I cooked food that my mother tried to eat, but rarely could she eat. She’d think she was hungry and then she’d sit like a prisoner staring down at the food on her plate. “It looks good,” she’d say. “I think I’ll be able to eat it later.”

I scrubbed the floors. I took everything from the cupboards and put new paper down. My mother slept and moaned and counted and swallowed her pills. On good days she sat in a chair and talked to me.

There was nothing much to say. She’d been so transparent and effusive and I so inquisitive that we’d already covered everything. I knew that her love for me was vaster than the ten thousand things and also the ten thousand things beyond that. I knew the names of the horses she had loved as a girl: Pal and Buddy and Bacchus. I knew she’d lost her virginity at seventeen with a boy named Mike. I knew how she met my father the next year and what he seemed like to her on their first few dates. How, when she’d broken the news of her unwed teen pregnancy to her parents, her father had dropped a spoon. I knew she loathed going to confession and also the very things that she’d confessed. Cursing and sassing off to her mom, bitching about having to set the table while her much younger sister played. Wearing dresses out the door on her way to school and then changing into the jeans she’d stashed in her bag. All through my childhood and adolescence I’d asked and asked, making her describe those scenes and more, wanting to know who said what and how, what she’d felt inside while it was going on, where so-and-so stood and what time of day it was. And she’d told me, with reluctance or relish, laughing and asking why on earth I wanted to know. I wanted to know. I couldn’t explain.

But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.

It wasn’t long that I had to go back and forth between Minneapolis and home. A little more than a month. The idea that my mother would live a year quickly became a sad dream. We’d gone to the Mayo Clinic on February 12. By the third of March, she had to go to the hospital in Duluth, seventy miles away, because she was in so much pain. As she dressed to go, she found that she couldn’t put on her own socks and she called me into her room and asked me to help. She sat on the bed and I got down on my knees before her. I had never put socks on another person, and it was harder than I thought it would be. They wouldn’t slide over her skin. They went on crooked. I became furious with my mother, as if she were purposely holding her foot in a way that made it impossible for me. She sat back, leaning on her hands on the bed, her eyes closed. I could hear her breathing deeply, slowly.

“God damn it,” I said. “Help me.”

My mother looked down at me and didn’t say a word for several moments.

“Honey,” she said eventually, gazing at me, her hand reaching to stroke the top of my head. It was a word she used often throughout my childhood, delivered in a highly specific tone. This is not the way I wanted it to be, that single honey said, but it was the way it was. It was this very acceptance of suffering that annoyed me most about my mom, her unending optimism and cheer.

“Let’s go,” I said after I’d wrestled her shoes on.

Her movements were slow and thick as she put on her coat. She held on to the walls as she made her way through the house, her two beloved dogs following her as she went, pushing their noses into her hands and thighs. I watched the way she patted their heads. I didn’t have a prayer anymore. The words fuck them were two dry pills in my mouth.

“Bye, darlings,” she said to the dogs. “Bye, house,” she said as she followed me out the door.

It hadn’t occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I’d made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O’Keeffe I’d once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away.

On her first day in the hospital, a nurse offered my mother morphine, but she refused. “Morphine is what they give to dying people,” she said. “Morphine means there’s no hope.”

But she held out against it for only one day. She slept and woke, talked and laughed. She cried from the pain. I camped out during the days with her and Eddie took the nights. Leif and Karen stayed away, making excuses that I found inexplicable and infuriating, though their absence didn’t seem to bother my mom. She was preoccupied with nothing but eradicating her pain, an impossible task in the spaces of time between the doses of morphine. We could never get the pillows right. One afternoon, a doctor I’d never seen came into the room and explained that my mother was actively dying.

“But it’s only been a month,” I said indignantly. “The other doctor told us a year.”

He made no reply. He was young, perhaps thirty. He stood next to my mother, a gentle hairy hand slung into his pocket, looking down at her in the bed. “From this point on, our only concern is that she’s comfortable.”

Comfortable, and yet the nurses tried to give her as little morphine as they could. One of the nurses was a man, and I could see the outline of his penis through his tight white nurse’s trousers. I wanted desperately to pull him into the small bathroom beyond the foot of my mother’s bed and offer myself up to him, to do anything at all if he would help us. And also I wanted to take pleasure from him, to feel the weight of his body against me, to feel his mouth in my hair and hear him say my name to me over and over again, to force him to acknowledge me, to make this matter to him, to crush his heart with mercy for us.

When my mother asked him for more morphine, she asked for it in a way that I have never heard anyone ask for anything. A mad dog. He did not look at her when she asked him this, but at his wristwatch. He held the same expression on his face regardless of the answer. Sometimes he gave it to her without a word, and sometimes he told her no in a voice as soft as his penis in his pants. My mother begged and whimpered then. She cried and her tears fell in the wrong direction. Not down over the light of her cheeks to the corners of her mouth, but away from the edges of her eyes to her ears and into the nest of her hair on the bed.

She didn’t live a year. She didn’t live to October or August or May. She lived forty-nine days after the first doctor in Duluth told her she had cancer; thirty-four after the one at the Mayo Clinic did. But each day was an eternity, one stacked up on the other, a cold clarity inside of a deep haze.

Leif didn’t come to visit her. Karen came once after I’d insisted she must. I was in heartbroken and enraged disbelief. “I don’t like seeing her this way,” my sister would offer weakly when we spoke, and then burst into tears. I couldn’t speak to my brother—where he was during those weeks was a mystery to Eddie and me. One friend told us he was staying with a girl named Sue in St. Cloud. Another spotted him ice fishing on Sheriff Lake. I didn’t have time to do much about it, consumed as I was each day at my mother’s side, holding plastic pans for her to retch into, adjusting the impossible pillows again and again, hoisting her up and onto the potty chair the nurses had propped near her bed, cajoling her to eat a bite of food that she’d vomit up ten minutes later. Mostly, I watched her sleep, the hardest task of all, to see her in repose, her face still pinched with pain. Each time she moved, the IV tubes that dangled all around her swayed and my heart raced, afraid she’d disturb the needles that attached the tubes to her swollen wrists and hands.

“How are you feeling?” I’d coo hopefully when she woke, reaching through the tubes to smooth her flattened hair into place.

“Oh, honey,” was all she could say most times. And then she’d look away.

I roamed the hospital hallways while my mother slept, my eyes darting into other people’s rooms as I passed their open doors, catching glimpses of old men with bad coughs and purpled flesh, women with bandages around their fat knees.

“How are you doing?” the nurses would ask me in melancholy tones.

“We’re holding up,” I’d say, as if I were a we.

But it was just me. My husband, Paul, did everything he could to make me feel less alone. He was still the kind and tender man I’d fallen for a few years before, the one I’d loved so fiercely I’d shocked everyone by marrying just shy of twenty, but once my mother started dying, something inside of me was dead to Paul, no matter what he did or said. Still, I called him each day from the pay phone in the hospital during the long afternoons, or back at my mom and Eddie’s house in the evenings. We’d have long conversations during which I’d weep and tell him everything and he would cry with me and try to make it all just a tiny bit more okay, but his words rang hollow. It was almost as if I couldn’t hear them at all. What did he know about losing anything? His parents were still alive and happily married to each other. My connection with him and his gloriously unfractured life only seemed to increase my pain. It wasn’t his fault. Being with him felt unbearable, but being with anyone else did too. The only person I could bear to be with was the most unbearable person of all: my mother.

In the mornings, I would sit near her bed and try to read to her. I had two books: The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, and The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty. These were books we’d read in college, books we loved. So I started in, but I could not go on. Each word I spoke erased itself in the air.

It was the same when I tried to pray. I prayed fervently, rabidly, to God, any god, to a god I could not identify or find. I cursed my mother, who’d not given me any religious education. Resentful of her own repressive Catholic upbringing, she’d avoided church altogether in her adult life, and now she was dying and I didn’t even have God. I prayed to the whole wide universe and hoped that God would be in it, listening to me. I prayed and prayed, and then I faltered. Not because I couldn’t find God, but because suddenly I absolutely did: God was there, I realized, and God had no intention of making things happen or not, of saving my mother’s life. God was not a granter of wishes. God was a ruthless bitch.

The last couple of days of her life, my mother was not so much high as down under. She was on a morphine drip by then, a clear bag of liquid flowing slowly down a tube that was taped to her wrist. When she woke, she’d say, “Oh, oh.” Or she’d let out a sad gulp of air. She’d look at me, and there would be a flash of love. Other times she’d roll back into sleep as if I were not there. Sometimes when my mother woke she did not know where she was. She demanded an enchilada and then some applesauce. She believed that all the animals she’d ever loved were in the room with her—and there had been a lot. She’d say, “That horse darn near stepped on me,” and look around for it accusingly, or her hands would move to stroke an invisible cat that lay at her hip. During this time I wanted my mother to say to me that I had been the best daughter in the world. I did not want to want this, but I did, inexplicably, as if I had a great fever that could be cooled only by those words. I went so far as to ask her directly, “Have I been the best daughter in the world?”

She said yes, I had, of course.

But this was not enough. I wanted those words to knit together in my mother’s mind and for them to be delivered, fresh, to me.

I was ravenous for love.

My mother died fast but not all of a sudden. A slow-burning fire when flames disappear to smoke and then smoke to air. She didn’t have time to get skinny. She was altered but still fleshy when she died, the body of a woman among the living. She had her hair too, brown and brittle and frayed from being in bed for weeks.

From the room where she died I could see the great Lake Superior out her window. The biggest lake in the world, and the coldest too. To see it, I had to work. I pressed my face sideways, hard, against the glass, and I’d catch a slice of it going on forever into the horizon.

“A room with a view!” my mother exclaimed, though she was too weak to rise and see the lake herself. And then more quietly she said: “All of my life I’ve waited for a room with a view.”

She wanted to die sitting up, so I took all the pillows I could get my hands on and made a backrest for her. I wanted to take her from the hospital and prop her in a field of yarrow to die. I covered her with a quilt that I had brought from home, one she’d sewn herself out of pieces of our old clothing.

“Get that out of here,” she growled savagely, and then kicked her legs like a swimmer to make it go away.

I watched my mother. Outside the sun glinted off the sidewalks and the icy edges of the snow. It was Saint Patrick’s Day, and the nurses brought her a square block of green Jell-O that sat quivering on the table beside her. It would turn out to be the last full day of her life, and for most of it she held her eyes still and open, neither sleeping nor waking, intermittently lucid and hallucinatory.

That evening I left her, though I didn’t want to. The nurses and doctors had told Eddie and me that this was it. I took that to mean she would die in a couple of weeks. I believed that people with cancer lingered. Karen and Paul would be driving up together from Minneapolis the next morning and my mother’s parents were due from Alabama in a couple of days, but Leif was still nowhere to be found. Eddie and I had called Leif’s friends and the parents of his friends, leaving pleading messages, asking him to call, but he hadn’t called. I decided to leave the hospital for one night so I could find him and bring him to the hospital once and for all.

“I’ll be back in the morning,” I said to my mother. I looked over at Eddie, half lying on the little vinyl couch. “I’ll come back with Leif.”

When she heard his name, she opened her eyes: blue and blazing, the same as they’d always been. In all this, they hadn’t changed.

“How can you not be mad at him?” I asked her bitterly for perhaps the tenth time.

“You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip,” she’d usually say. Or, “Cheryl, he’s only eighteen.” But this time she just gazed at me and said, “Honey,” the same as she had when I’d gotten angry about her socks. The same as she’d always done when she’d seen me suffer because I wanted something to be different than it was and she was trying to convince me with that single word that I must accept things as they were.

“We’ll all be together tomorrow,” I said. “And then we’ll all stay here with you, okay? None of us will leave.” I reached through the tubes that were draped all around her and stroked her shoulder. “I love you,” I said, bending to kiss her cheek, though she fended me off, in too much pain to endure even a kiss.

“Love,” she whispered, too weak to say the I and you. “Love,” she said again as I left her room.

I rode the elevator and went out to the cold street and walked along the sidewalk. I passed a bar packed with people I could see through a big plate-glass window. They were all wearing shiny green paper hats and green shirts and green suspenders and drinking green beer. A man inside met my eye and pointed at me drunkenly, his face breaking into silent laughter.

I drove home and fed the horses and hens and got on the phone, the dogs gratefully licking my hands, our cat nudging his way onto my lap. I called everyone who might know where my brother was. He was drinking a lot, some said. Yes, it was true, said others, he’d been hanging out with a girl from St. Cloud named Sue. At midnight the phone rang and I told him that this was it.

I wanted to scream at him when he walked in the door a half hour later, to shake him and rage and accuse, but when I saw him, all I could do was hold him and cry. He seemed so old to me that night, and so very young too. For the first time, I saw that he’d become a man and yet also I could see what a little boy he was. My little boy, the one I’d half mothered all of my life, having no choice but to help my mom all those times she’d been away at work. Karen and I were three years apart, but we’d been raised as if we were practically twins, the two of us equally in charge of Leif as kids.

“I can’t do this,” he kept repeating through his tears. “I can’t live without Mom. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

“We have to,” I replied, though I couldn’t believe it myself. We lay together in his single bed talking and crying into the wee hours until, side by side, we drifted off to sleep.

I woke a few hours later and, before waking Leif, fed the animals and loaded bags full of food we could eat during our vigil at the hospital. By eight o’clock we were on our way to Duluth, my brother driving our mother’s car too fast while U2’s Joshua Tree blasted out of the speakers. We listened intently to the music without talking, the low sun cutting brightly into the snow on the sides of the road.

When we reached our mother’s room at the hospital, we saw a sign on her closed door instructing us to check in at the nurse’s station before entering. This was a new thing, but I assumed it was only a procedural matter. A nurse approached us in the hallway as we walked toward the station, and before I spoke she said, “We have ice on her eyes. She wanted to donate her corneas, so we need to keep the ice—”

“What?” I said with such intensity that she jumped.

I didn’t wait for an answer. I ran to my mother’s room, my brother right behind me. When I opened the door, Eddie stood and came for us with his arms outstretched, but I swerved away and dove for my mom. Her arms lay waxen at her sides, yellow and white and black and blue, the needles and tubes removed. Her eyes were covered by two surgical gloves packed with ice, their fat fingers lolling clownishly across her face. When I grabbed her, the gloves slid off. Bouncing onto the bed, then onto the floor.

I howled and howled and howled, rooting my face into her body like an animal. She’d been dead an hour. Her limbs had cooled, but her belly was still an island of warm. I pressed my face into the warmth and howled some more.

I dreamed of her incessantly. In the dreams I was always with her when she died. It was me who would kill her. Again and again and again. She commanded me to do it, and each time I would get down on my knees and cry, begging her not to make me, but she would not relent, and each time, like a good daughter, I ultimately complied. I tied her to a tree in our front yard and poured gasoline over her head, then lit her on fire. I made her run down the dirt road that passed by the house we’d built and then ran her over with my truck. I dragged her body, caught on a jagged piece of metal underneath, until it came loose, and then I put my truck in reverse and ran her over again. I took a miniature baseball bat and beat her to death with it, slow and hard and sad. I forced her into a hole I’d dug and kicked dirt and stones on top of her and buried her alive. These dreams were not surreal. They took place in plain, ordinary light. They were the documentary films of my subconscious and felt as real to me as life. My truck was really my truck; our front yard was our actual front yard; the miniature baseball bat sat in our closet among the umbrellas.

I didn’t wake from these dreams crying. I woke shrieking. Paul grabbed me and held me until I was quiet. He wetted a washcloth with cool water and put it over my face. But those wet washcloths couldn’t wash the dreams of my mother away.

Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.

It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again. To be the woman my mother raised. To remember how she said honey and picture her particular gaze. I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn’t know where I was going until I got there.

It was a place called the Bridge of the Gods.

SPLITTING

If I had to draw a map of those four-plus years to illustrate the time between the day of my mother’s death and the day I began my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, the map would be a confusion of lines in all directions, like a crackling Fourth of July sparkler with Minnesota at its inevitable center. To Texas and back. To New York City and back. To New Mexico and Arizona and Nevada and California and Oregon and back. To Wyoming and back. To Portland, Oregon, and back. To Portland and back again. And again. But those lines wouldn’t tell the story. The map would illuminate all the places I ran to, but not all the ways I tried to stay. It wouldn’t show you how in the months after my mother died, I attempted—and failed—to fill in for her in an effort to keep my family together. Or how I’d struggled to save my marriage, even while I was dooming it with my lies. It would only seem like that rough star, its every bright line shooting out.

By the time I arrived in the town of Mojave, California, on the night before I began hiking the PCT, I’d shot out of Minnesota for the last time. I’d even told my mother that, not that she could hear. I’d sat in the flowerbed in the woods on our land, where Eddie, Paul, my siblings, and I had mixed her ashes in with the dirt and laid a tombstone, and explained to her that I wasn’t going to be around to tend her grave anymore. Which meant that no one would. I finally had no choice but to leave her grave to go back to the weeds and blown-down tree branches and fallen pinecones. To snow and whatever the ants and deer and black bears and ground wasps wanted to do with her. I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I’d surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn’t have imagined and wouldn’t have guessed. My words came out low and steadfast. I was so sad it felt as if someone were choking me, and yet it seemed my whole life depended on my getting those words out. She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn’t there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I’d put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me.

The next day I left Minnesota forever. I was going to hike the PCT.

It was the first week of June. I drove to Portland in my 1979 Chevy Luv pickup truck loaded with a dozen boxes filled with dehydrated food and backpacking supplies. I’d spent the previous weeks compiling them, addressing each box to myself at places I’d never been, stops along the PCT with evocative names like Echo Lake and Soda Springs, Burney Falls and Seiad Valley. I left my truck and the boxes with my friend Lisa in Portland—she’d be mailing the boxes to me throughout the summer—and boarded a plane to Los Angeles, then caught a ride to Mojave with the brother of a friend.

We pulled into town in the early evening, the sun dipping into the Tehachapi Mountains a dozen miles behind us to the west. Mountains I’d be hiking the next day. The town of Mojave is at an altitude of nearly 2,800 feet, though it felt to me as if I were at the bottom of something instead, the signs for gas stations, restaurants, and motels rising higher than the highest tree.

“You can stop here,” I said to the man who’d driven me from LA, gesturing to an old-style neon sign that said WHITE’S MOTEL with the word TELEVISION blazing yellow above it and VACANCY in pink beneath. By the worn look of the building, I guessed it was the cheapest place in town. Perfect for me.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said once we’d pulled into the lot.

“You’re welcome,” he said, and looked at me. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yes,” I replied with false confidence. “I’ve traveled alone a lot.” I got out with my backpack and two oversized plastic department store bags full of things. I’d meant to take everything from the bags and fit it into my backpack before leaving Portland, but I hadn’t had the time. I’d brought the bags here instead. I’d get everything together in my room.

“Good luck,” said the man.

I watched him drive away. The hot air tasted like dust, the dry wind whipping my hair into my eyes. The parking lot was a field of tiny white pebbles cemented into place; the motel, a long row of doors and windows shuttered by shabby curtains. I slung my backpack over my shoulders and gathered the bags. It seemed strange to have only these things. I felt suddenly exposed, less exuberant than I had thought I would. I’d spent the past six months imagining this moment, but now that it was here—now that I was only a dozen miles from the PCT itself—it seemed less vivid than it had in my imaginings, as if I were in a dream, my every thought liquid slow, propelled by will rather than instinct. Go inside, I had to tell myself before I could move toward the motel office. Ask for a room.

“It’s eighteen dollars,” said the old woman who stood behind the counter. With rude emphasis, she looked past me, out the glass door through which I’d entered moments before. “Unless you’ve got a companion. It’s more for two.”

“I don’t have a companion,” I said, and blushed—it was only when I was telling the truth that I felt as if I were lying. “That guy was just dropping me off.”

“It’s eighteen dollars for now, then,” she replied, “but if a companion joins you, you’ll have to pay more.”

“A companion won’t be joining me,” I said evenly. I pulled a twenty-dollar bill from the pocket of my shorts and slid it across the counter to her. She took my money and handed me two dollars and a card to fill out with a pen attached to a bead chain. “I’m on foot, so I can’t do the car section,” I said, gesturing to the form. I smiled, but she didn’t smile back. “Also—I don’t really have an address. I’m traveling, so I—”

“Write down the address you’ll be returning to,” she said.

“See, that’s the thing. I’m not sure where I’ll live afterwards because—”

“Your folks, then,” she barked. “Wherever home is.”

“Okay,” I said, and wrote Eddie’s address, though in truth my connection to Eddie in the four years since my mother died had become so pained and distant I couldn’t rightly consider him my stepfather anymore. I had no “home,” even though the house we built still stood. Leif and Karen and I were inextricably bound as siblings, but we spoke and saw one another rarely, our lives profoundly different. Paul and I had finalized our divorce the month before, after a harrowing yearlong separation. I had beloved friends whom I sometimes referred to as family, but our commitments to each other were informal and intermittent, more familial in word than in deed. Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. But it turned out that it didn’t matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.

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