I supposed I had known it. Really it had all been one household, though as a child I had seen mainly the distance between the two estates: my house, modest but calm, and the Big House, where the toys were more expensive and the arguments more vicious.
I asked whether E.D. had been to the hospital.
"E.D.? No. He's busy. Sending spaceships to Mars seems to require a great many dinners downtown. I know that's what's keeping Jason in Florida, too, but I believe Jason deals with the practical side of the matter, if it has a practical side, while E.D. is more like a stage magician, pulling money out of various hats. But I'm sure you'll see E.D. at the funeral." I winced, and she gave me an apologetic look. "If and when. But the doctors say—"
"She's not expected to recover."
"She's dying. Yes. As one physician to another. Do you remember that, Tyler? I had a practice once. Back in the days when I was capable of such a thing. And now you're a doctor with a practice of your own. My God."
I appreciated her bluntness. Maybe it came with her sudden sobriety. Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it.
We arrived at George Washington University Hospital. Carol had already introduced herself to the nursing staff on the life-support floor, and we proceeded directly to my mother's room. When Carol hesitated at the door I said, "Are you coming in?"
"I—no, I don't think so. I've said good-bye several times already. I need to be where the air doesn't smell like disinfectant. I'll stand out in the parking lot and smoke a cigarette with the gurney-pushers. Meet me there?"
I said I would.
My mother was unconscious in her room, embedded in life support, her breathing regulated by a machine that wheezed as her rib cage expanded and relaxed. Her hair was whiter than I remembered it being. I stroked her cheek, but she didn't respond.
Out of some misbegotten doctorly instinct I raised one of her eyelids, meaning, I suppose, to check the dilation of her pupils. But she had hemorrhaged into the eye after her stroke. It was red as a cherry tomato, flushed with blood.
* * * * *
I rode away from the hospital with Carol but turned down her invitation to dinner, told her I'd fix myself something. She said, "I'm sure there's something in the kitchen at your mother's place. But you're more than welcome to stay in the Big House if you like. Even though it's a bit of a mess these days without your mother to boss the help. I'm sure we can scare up a passable guest bedroom."
I thanked her but said I'd prefer to stay across the lawn.
"Let me know if you change your mind." She gazed from the gravel drive across the lawn to the Little House as if she were seeing it clearly for the first time in years. "You still carry a key—?"
"Still do," I said.
"Well, then. I'll leave you to it. The hospital has both numbers if her condition changes." And Carol hugged me again and walked up the porch stairs with a resoluteness, not quite eagerness, that suggested she had postponed her drinking long enough.
I let myself into my mother's house. Hers more than mine, I thought, though my presence had not been expunged from it. When I left for university I had denuded my small bedroom and packed whatever was important to me, but my mother had kept the bed and filled the blank spaces (the pine shelving, the windowsill) with potted plants, rapidly drying in her absence; I watered them. The rest of the house was equally tidy. Diane had once described my mother's housekeeping as "linear," by which I think she meant orderly but not obsessive. I surveyed the living room, the kitchen, glanced into her bedroom. Not everything was in its place. But everything had a place.
Come nightfall I closed the curtains and turned on every light in every room, more lights than my mother had ever deemed appropriate at any given time, a declaration against death. I wondered if Carol had noticed the glare across the winter-brown divide, and if so whether she found it comforting or alarming.
E.D. came home around nine that night, and he was gracious enough to knock at the door and offer his sympathy. He looked uncomfortable under the porch light, his tailored suit disheveled. His breath smoked in the evening chill. He touched his pockets, breast and hip, unconsciously, as if he had forgotten something or simply didn't know what to do with his hands. "I'm sorry, Tyler," he said.
His condolences seemed grossly premature, as if my mother's death were not merely inevitable but an established fact. He had already written her off. But she was still drawing breath, I thought, or at least processing oxygen, miles away, alone in her room at George Washington. "Thank you for saying so, Mr. Lawton."
"Jesus, Tyler, call me E.D. Everybody else does. Jason tells me you're doing good work down there at Perihelion Florida."
"My patients seem satisfied."
"Great. Every contribution counts, no matter how small. Listen, did Carol put you out here? Because we have a guest bedroom ready if you want it."
"I'm fine right where I am."
"Okay. I understand that. Just knock if you need anything, all right?"
He ambled back across the winter-brown lawn. Much had been made, in the press and in the Lawton family, of Jason's genius, but I reminded myself that E.D. could claim that title, too. He had parlayed an engineering degree and a talent for business into a major corporate enterprise, and he had been selling aerostat-enabled telecom bandwidth when Americom and AT&T were still blinking at the Spin like startled deer. What he lacked was not Jason's intelligence but Jason's wit and Jason's deep curiosity about the physical universe. And maybe a dash of Jason's humanity.
Then I was alone again, at home and not at home, and I sat on the sofa and marveled for a while at how little this room had changed. Sooner or later it would fall to me to dispose of the contents of the house, a job I could barely envision, a job more difficult, more preposterous, than the work of cultivating life on another planet. But maybe it was because I was contemplating that act of deconstruction that I noticed a gap on the top shelf of the etagere next to the TV.
Noticed it because, to my knowledge, the high shelf had received no more than a cursory dusting in all the years I had lived here. The top shelf was the attic of my mother's life. I could have recited the order of the contents of that shelf by closing my eyes and picturing it: her high school yearbooks (Martell Secondary School in Bingham, Maine, 1975, '76, '77, '78); her Berkeley grad book, 1982; a jade Buddha book-end; her diploma in a stand-up plastic frame; the brown accordion file in which she kept her birth certificate, passport, and tax documents; and, braced by another green Buddha, three tattered New Balance shoeboxes labeled mementos (school), mementos (marcus), and odds & ends.
But tonight the second jade Buddha stood askew and the box marked mementos (school) was missing. I assumed she had taken it down herself, though I hadn't seen it elsewhere in the house. Of the three boxes, the only one she had regularly opened in my presence was odds & ends. It had been packed with concert playbills and ticket stubs, brittle newspaper clippings (including her own parents' obituaries), a souvenir lapel pin in the shape of the schooner Bluenose from her honeymoon in Nova Scotia, matchbooks culled from restaurants and hotels she had visited, costume jewelry, a baptismal certificate, even a lock of my own baby hair preserved in a slip of waxed paper closed with a pin.