When you first saw her, even after Michael had warned you, you wanted to run away. But the horror passed, and you were glad you could do something for her. You were glad you could be with her. But for those last hours you might never have really known her. The last few nights she was not sleeping at all, so you talked.
"Have you ever tried cocaine," she asked that last night.
You didn't know what to say. A strange question from a mother. But she was dying. You said you had tried it.
"It's not bad," she said. "When I could still swallow they were giving me cocaine with morphine. To ease the depression. I liked it."
You mother, who never smoked a cigarette in her life, who got loopy on two drinks.
She said the morphine was good for the pain but made her drowsier than she wanted to be. She wanted to be clear. She wanted to know what was happening.
Then she said, "Do young men need sex?"
You asked what she meant by need.
"You know what I mean. I should know these things. I don't have much time and there's so much I've always wondered about. I was brought up to think sex was an ordeal that married women had to endure. It took me a long time to get over that idea. I feel sort of cheated."
You always thought your mother was the last Puritan.
"Have you slept with a lot of girls?"
"Mom, really," you said.
"Come on. What's to hide? I wish I'd known a long time ago that I was going to die. We could've gotten to know each other a lot better. There's so much we don't know."
"Okay, there have been some girls."
"Really?" She lifted her head up from the pillow.
"Mother, I'm not going into details."
"Why not?"
"It's, well, embarrassing."
"I wish people wouldn't waste their time being embarrassed. I wish I hadn't. So tell me what it's like."
You began to forget the way she looked then, and to see her somehow as young, younger than you had ever known her. The wasted flesh seemed illusory. You saw her as a young woman.
"Do you really enjoy it," she asked.
"Sure. Yeah, I do."
"You've slept with girls you're not in love with. Isn't it different if you're in love?"
"Sure, it's better."
"How about Sally Keegan? Did you sleep with her?"
Sally Keegan was your high school prom date. "Once."
"I thought so." This verification of her intuition pleased her. "What about Stephanie Bates?"
Later, she said, "Are you happy with Amanda?"
"Yes, I think so."
"For the rest of your life?"
"I hope so."
"I was lucky," Mom said. "Your dad and I have been happy. But it hasn't always been easy. One time I thought I was leaving him."
"Really?"
"We were human." She adjusted her pillow and winced. "Foolish." She smiled.
The candor was infectious. It spread back to the beginning of your life. You tried to tell her, as well as you could, what it was like being you. You described the feeling you'd always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn't worry quite so much about why. You talked about your first day of school. You cried and clutched her leg.
You even remembered how her plaid slacks felt, the i scratchiness on your cheek. She sent you off to the bus – she interrupted here to say she wasn't much happier than you were – and you hid in the woods until you saw the bus leave and then went home and told her you had missed it. So Mom drove you to school, and by the time you got there you were an hour late. Everybody watched you come in with your little note, and heard you explain that you missed the bus. When you finally sat down you knew that you would never catch up.
"Don't you think everyone feels a little like that?" Then Mom told you she knew all along about the hot-water-on-the-thermometer trick, but let you pretend you were sick whenever you really seemed to need it. "You were a funny boy. An awful baby. A real screamer." Then she grimaced and for a moment you thought it was the memory of your screaming.
You asked her if she wanted the morphine and she said not yet. She wanted to talk, to be clear.
The window behind the headboard showed a glimmer of gray. In the other rooms your three brothers, your father, and your Aunt Nora were sleeping. Amanda was in New York.
"Was I worse than Michael and the twins?"
"Much worse." She smiled as if she had just conferred a great distinction upon you. "Much, much worse." The smile twisted into a grimace and she clutched the sheet in her fingers.
You begged to give her some morphine. The spasm passed and you saw her body relax.
"Not yet," she said.
She told you how unbearable you were as an infant, always throwing up, biting, crying through the night. "You've never been much good at sleeping, have you? Some nights we had to take you out in the car and drive around to get you to sleep." She seemed pleased. "You were something else."
She winced again and groaned. "Hold my hand," she said. You gave her your hand and she gripped it harder than you would have imagined she could. "The pain," she said.
"Please let me give you that shot."
You couldn't stand to see her suffer much longer, felt you were about to collapse. But she told you to wait.
"Do you know what this is like?" she said. "This pain?"
You shook your head. She didn't answer for a while. You heard the first bird of morning.
"It's like when you were born. It sounds crazy, but that's exactly what it's like."
"It hurt that much?"
"Terrible," she said. "You just didn't want to come out. I didn't think I'd live through it." She sucked breath through her teeth and gripped your hand fiercely. "So now you know why I love you so much." You were not sure you understood, but her voice was so faint and dreamy that you didn't want to interrupt. You held her hand and watched her eyelids flicker, hoping she was dreaming. Birds were calling on all sides. You didn't think you had ever heard so many birds.
In a little while she started to talk again. She described a morning in a two-room apartment over a garage in Manchester, New Hampshire. "I was standing in front of a mirror as if I'd never really seen my own face before." You had to lean down close to hear. "I felt strange. I knew something had happened, but I didn't know what."
She drifted off. Her eyes were half-open but you could see she was looking somewhere else. The bedroom window was filling with light.
"Dad," she said. "What are you doing here?"
"Mom?"
She was silent for a time and then, suddenly, her eyes were wide open. Her grip relaxed. "The pain is going away," she said.
You said that was good. The light seemed to have entered the room all at once.