Part 8 (1/2)

Hoping Hollywood wisdom will soothe her, I observe, ”Bette Davis said getting old ain't for sissies.”

”That's for d.a.m.n sure. I'm not scared of dying. I'm scared of living on and on, wasting Candy's time, wasting your money and winding up in a hospital with tubes stuck in every hole of my body. Promise me that won't happen, Quinn.”

”Be sure you write a living will.”

”I don't need to put it down on paper for you to know what to do.”

I resist a third gla.s.s of whiskey. My vision is already shaky. The fluorescent fox eyes I thought I saw in the garden turn out to be my eyes mirrored in the conservatory door.

”I'd pull the plug on myself,” she says. ”But then they wouldn't pay off my insurance policy, and I'd go to h.e.l.l.”

”Don't say that. Don't even think it.”

”That's what Candy tells me. But she's got her lover boy, and I'm all alone. Yesterday, I found a snapshot of you as a little kid and I felt ... I don't know. Like I told Candy, 'Who are you? Where did you come from?'”

”You told Candy you didn't know where she came from?”

”No, I was saying where'd you come from?”

”Well, if you don't know, Mom ...” I laugh uncomfortably. ”... who does? Did you find me under a rock?”

”I mean, you've gone so far and done so much, it's hard to believe you belong to me. After we looked at the pictures,” she says, ”Candy went off to meet Leonard, and I stayed there and finished my cigarette.”

”You still smoke?”

”Why not? You afraid it's bad for my health?”

”You could fall asleep and burn the house down.”

”So what? Maybe if I burn here, I won't burn in the other place.” She dredges in a ragged breath. ”Anyway, Candy left, and I rested my eyes. Don't worry, I stubbed out the cigarette first. Next thing I knew, it was night and I couldn't figure out where I was. Then I couldn't stand up.”

”Oh G.o.d,” I groan.

”That's what I said. 'Oh G.o.d, don't let me be paralyzed.' I s.h.i.+mmied around on my b.u.t.t to stir my circulation. Then I grabbed onto the cedar chest, but I didn't have the strength to pry myself off the floor. I felt legless.”

”Why didn't you call Candy or the rescue squad? You should keep a phone in every room.”

”I don't like having one near my bedroom, ruining the little sleep I get. I decided to sleep right there on the floor beside the cedar chest. I was warm enough in my housecoat, and by daybreak I counted on the blood coming back to my feet.

”I laid my face against the carpet, and it was like bedding down on fur. Which reminded me of all the cats and dogs I've owned in my life. Every last one dead now. I miss them, but I wouldn't buy another pet. It'd just be underfoot, tripping me, and I couldn't bear having it die before I do. Or worse, live on with n.o.body to look after it. Normally I pray myself to sleep. But last night I kept remembering animals and fur until I had to pee.”

Willpower weakening, I pour a third whiskey. But it doesn't dull my senses. I remain preternaturally alert as Mom plugs into my brainstem, like one computer uploading its files onto another. This unbroken flow between us calls to mind nights in my childhood when she perched on my bed-pace Dr. Rokoko, sometimes she stretched out beside me-and released a stream of consciousness that rivaled Molly Bloom's riverine soliloquy. I listened then, and do now, with a combination of curiosity and skin-crawling qualms. Dr. Rokoko, sometimes she stretched out beside me-and released a stream of consciousness that rivaled Molly Bloom's riverine soliloquy. I listened then, and do now, with a combination of curiosity and skin-crawling qualms.

”I headed for the bathroom on my hands and knees,” she says. ”Then I got tired and slithered along on my belly. In the dark I didn't have any idea where I was going. I b.u.mped into a wall. Then I hit the door frame. Then this awful burning started and I thought I'd wet myself and was afraid Candy would find me in a puddle, like a sick cat. That'd be the last straw. Straight into a.s.sisted living!

”Then I saw crabs in my mind, and pictured how I used to boil them, and they'd sc.r.a.pe and scratch to climb out of the pot. They never made it. Not a one of them. They pulled each other down, like drowning people do, until they turned bright red and died. That's how I felt, like I was boiling alive.”

”Jesus Christ, Mom!”

”Lying there on fire, it hit me that I was having a foretaste of h.e.l.l and this is what I'll suffer for eternity unless you fly home and forgive me.”

”Of course I'll fly home. You know I will. Just tell me how you are now.”

”Not even a blister,” she says. ”Turns out I collapsed on a heating grate. The furnace kicked off before it did me any damage. I keep the thermostat on sixty to save money. In the morning my feet were fine. Now when can I count on your coming here?”

The next day I wake to dismal light. The damp roof tiles of Hampstead are as slickly layered as the scales of a snake. I think of Mom on the heating grate, and rather than pity, I feel I've been had again; she's conned me into flying to the States. Still, I book a ticket on BA and cancel the cleaning lady and my appointment with Dr. Rokoko. I leave a message on Tamzin's cell phone that I'm making an emergency visit to my mother. The entire time I have the impression that I've seen this film before. It has the formulaic shape of a trite made-for-TV movie. Failing parent urgently summons children. Together they revisit ancient history, heal old wounds, and achieve the contemporary equivalent of catharsis-closure! Soft music. Slow fade.

But the script for my family has never been that saccharine and our past can't be so tidily summed up. We're more like brooding, brawling characters invented by Euripides. My last call from Heathrow reaches Mal, who maintains he has BBC on another line. ”We're close,” he swears. ”Very close.”

”I'm not sure I'm still interested,” I lie through my teeth.

”Don't throw in the towel,” he says, and leaps from boxing to s.e.x. ”Before we get into bed on this deal, we just need to find out who's s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g who.”

Maury

Mom promised me a plane ticket to Maryland. It comes in the mail in an envelope with Candy's return address and a letter from her saying Quinn paid for it and I should be thankful to him. I am thankful and I look forward to flying. But then Nicky tells me to fork over the ticket. She cashes it in and buys me a seat on a bus. The money left over, she says, barely covers what I owe her.

I tell Nicky if it's a question of squaring accounts, I'll hitchhike east and she can keep all the money. But she claims my hitching days are done. At my age, either people won't pick me up or they'll pick me up and kill me. That's how it is, everybody just roaming around and ready to steal.

The day Nicky drives me to Needles to the Greyhound station, she goes over it again. The schedule. The cities where I change buses. The state lines where the time changes and I lose an hour and have to fix my watch. She hands me a map out of the glove compartment and shows me the roads that go to Maryland. Some are blue, some red, all zigzagging and crooked as the veins on the back of my hands. They have numbers so you can keep them straight, and I store them in a drawer in my head.

Nicky goes on talking it to death. How I need to keep track of my bag. How I have to eat. How I shouldn't stare at people except when I'm talking to them, and then I should look them in the eye, but not too long and not too hard. How I'd be smart not to stand too near anybody in the bathroom.

The way she talks, the trip sounds like prison. But that's okay. I know prison. To get along you go along and follow the rules.

She drops me in front of the station, says, ”Bye-bye. Bring home the bacon,” and speeds off. I wait there in the sun, holding my bag, my feet in the pool of my shadow that's like a circle of oil on a slab after a trailer leaves. I have this feeling I might sink in it over my head. So I step into the shade where my shadow doesn't follow.

A gizmo with a clear plastic window, like the oven in Nicky's house, has a stack of newspapers inside it. On the front page there's a prison riot. The inmates are stripped and hooded and have their hands cuffed behind their backs. Dogs on leashes bare their teeth, ready to bite. A dozen naked guys are piled together. Maybe hurt, maybe dead. They're stacked up like wood and their arms and legs jut out.

The guards, some of them women, laugh and point at the privates on these prisoners. You can't really see them because the newsprint is smeared between their legs. Still, you know what's under the eraser marks. I don't look too long because it gives me that feeling of sinking in an oil pool to see parts of their bodies rubbed out.

A little boy and his mother leave the station. She's pulling a suitcase on wheels. He's carrying a toy bus no bigger than a cigarette pack. I don't stare. I don't stand too close. But I ask where they bought the toy bus. Without stopping or looking my way, the mother says, ”The souvenir shop.” Then they hurry on, and I haul my bag inside.

The shop has maps and cigarettes and gum and cold drinks. There are free color foldouts of towns along the road and I take a few. There are toy buses too and I buy one that's silver.

I hold it up to my eye. Through the winds.h.i.+eld I see the little bus has seats and luggage racks and a b.u.t.ton-size steering wheel. It even has a door in back for the bathroom. There's no driver or pa.s.sengers, and it's no trouble to memorize the layout. In case of a fire or a rollover I'd escape through a window. Whenever I go light in the head, then light in my whole body till I'm scared I'll float away, I usually stretch out and grab the floor until the feeling stops. But now I can grab the toy bus instead.

As I count the coins to the cas.h.i.+er, I repeat the numbers to myself, not out loud, and I don't stare too hard. When Mom worked at Safeway, she hated people who made her wait. I go fast. But there's a bad moment when the cas.h.i.+er makes change and tries to put it in my hand. I ask her to put it on the counter and let me pick it up. She shoots me a look. She seems to be a nice girl, so I tell her I don't like to be touched.

On the ceiling of the station, there's a speaker calling the names of cities and the numbers of buses. I trace the towns on Nicky's map, and when the voice calls my bus, it's not hard to find outside at the curb. The problem starts when the driver says I have to stick my bag into a s.p.a.ce behind an aluminum flap underneath the bus. I argue that the bag has to be where I can see it.

”You carry it on board, you'll block the aisle,” he says.

”No, it'll fit over my seat.” I show him inside my toy bus where the luggage rack is.

”Whoa, man!” He ducks his head. ”Don't blind me with the d.a.m.n thing.”