I waited by the phone while I stared at her. My mother’s face must have been wet under the towel, and this disturbed me. I dropped to my knees and crawled over to her. Without looking, because I was not ready to see her face, I removed the towel in one swift flick of my wrist. I heard her yelling. I heard her calling my name.
I jumped up and walked quickly from the room, through the tiny back hall, and into the living room, where my day had started for a second time, a million years ago.
What had I been doing before Mrs. Castle called? I had gone shopping at the greenmarket in town. I had bought string beans from the elderly Armenian couple who sold only three things out of the back of a small pickup truck. I had gone to my dance class.
I saw the brass ash bin next to the fireplace and went to stand above it. If only I could vomit.
I knew then that my idea of counting on anyone in this was bullshit. What could Jake do, sitting in a rich man’s house three thousand miles away? He had taken another call while I stood in the kitchen with my dead mother! “You got yourself into this mess, now get yourself out of it.” When exactly had that become my philosophy?
Jake had been asking me questions about temperature and hours and stiffness, and obviously this was all about rot. He’d done enough ice sculptures in the cold capitals of the world to know things I wouldn’t have thought of. Couldn’t have thought of. Briefly I tried to recall the plot of a movie I’d seen with Natalie last fall. It hinged on whether the death was murder or manslaughter. I could remember the actress’s face, her dewy beauty as she broke down on the stand-past that, I couldn’t recall a thing.
My mother had been dead too long to cover it up easily, and I had, fatal tell, broken her nose. Now, out of the kitchen and away from her, I saw more clearly the trouble I was in.
I had never been able to do Jake’s meditation exercises. I’d sit on the little round black pillow and try to om-out while my feet and hands went into prickly pins and needles. Inside my head, strange figures walked in and out as if my brain were a heavily frequented coffee shop.
I stood on my mother’s porch and planted my feet. I could feel the straw from the mat through the soft, wet leather of my jazz flats. I thought of the old Victorian house imploding. I breathed in and out ten times, counting very slowly. I made the exhalation noises I usually ridiculed in yoga class. What I was going to do next could not be misinterpreted. What I was going to do next left me no way back.
It was dark; the cicadas were thrumming in the trees. I could hear the trucks shifting miles away on the ridge of the highway. I knew that, no matter what, I would not be able to stay in the house tonight. I could not wait the hours it would take for Jake to arrive. Besides, as the minutes ticked by, he did not, I noted, call me back.
As I breathed and counted with my eyes wide open, I stared into the house and saw the front hall, the stairs that led up to the three small bedrooms, and the thick padded carpeting that Natalie’s son had installed to break a fall.
“We have to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to you that happened to your husband,” Hamish had rather witlessly said. He knew the version of events that Natalie had told him-that my father had died when he fell down the hardwood stairs. I had stood by quietly that day, nodding my head, unable to look in my mother’s direction.
They would have brought my mother’s body out of this house on a gurney, I thought. They would have carried her almost vertically down the steep front stairs. She would have been another lonely old lady who died in her home. How sad. How helpless. How very very high she would rate on people’s sympathy curve.
But that was not going to happen. I would make sure of it.
I walked inside. I resisted pausing in the living room to march in place. My muscles were stiff from the time on the kitchen floor, but, posing at Westmore, I had known and recovered from worse. I went upstairs and retrieved a simple white sheet. Then, two at a time, I descended the stairs.
Being careful not to glance at my mother’s face, I stood at her feet, briefly bent down to close her legs, and then played the game that first Emily, and then Sarah, had begged me for when I tucked them in at night. A game my father had made up for me.
We called it “waft.” I would stand at the end of their beds, with their top sheet balled up in my hands, and then shoot it out over their bodies, allowing it to slowly waft down over them. It was a game that, if given the choice, Sarah in particular never wanted to call an end to. “I love the feel of air escaping all around me,” she had told me once.
For my mother, it was a one-time waft, and I did it so the queen-size sheet covered her face. It stuck to her damp body in an almost ghostly way. Hurriedly I repackaged her in the Mexican wedding blanket and the Hudson Bay as if she were a gift I was returning to the store.
I stood and walked into the small back hallway and opened the basement door. Then, holding her under her armpits, I dragged her headfirst to the top of the stairs.
I walked a few steps down in almost pitch-black darkness and flailed my hand along the wall until I found the light switch. The bare bulb at the bottom of the stairs came on. I walked down the rest of the way. These stairs, when I was little, were a dare for neighborhood children and me. Past the first three stairs, both walls fell away, and never, no matter how much one was needed over the years, was a guardrail installed. Hamish had even volunteered to fabricate one out of old pipes after laying down the carpet upstairs. “These stairs are the real death trap,” he’d whispered to me when I’d brought him to the basement so he could choose among my grandfather’s old guns as payment.
But what had always made the dare of descending into the dark basement worth it was the supersize brown refrigerator at the bottom of the stairs. This was where my mother kept tins of brandy balls and stores of Hershey’s bars. Mason jars of pecans and almonds, Christmas boxes of peanut brittle left uneaten, and hideous sherry-soaked fruitcakes given to us each holiday season. The Levertons gave everyone a box of After Eight mints. Mrs. Donnellson, before she died, would bring my mother a ham.
The ham, like all meats, went in a separate place-the long, low meat freezer that hummed to the right of the stairs, on top of which my mother sorted laundry or stacked magazines she wanted to keep. During my father’s life, there was always a shifting parade of objects on top of the meat freezer. He had hoped she’d take up arts and crafts, so there were baskets filled with green foam blocks and giant discarded jug-wine bottles that, if she found the time, might make beautiful terrariums. Acorns, horse chestnuts, boxes of goggle eyes, and distinctly shaped twigs. River rocks polished in my father’s workshop. Odd bits of driftwood he’d collected. And a pristine economy-size Elmer’s that ruled over it all.
The gun had been my mother’s idea.
“What does he want with a gun?” I whispered to her while Hamish was washing up. “Why not cash?”
“He’s a grown man,” my mother said. “Emily just gave birth to a child.”
But by the time I could trace my mother’s thought process and figure out that this was my mother’s way of pointing out that both Hamish and Emily were adults, the insanity train had left the station and I was in the basement, showing Hamish the rack of guns.
We stood in front of the meat freezer as he took up each rifle and held it in his hands, testing the weight of it.
“I know nothing about guns, except that they’re cool,” he said.
I was no help. I watched him lean each rifle out of the wooden rack and hold it inexpertly by its stock as if it were a particularly thick-stemmed weed he had pulled from the ground. Hamish, like Natalie, provided the perfect light contrast to my darkness. Until she began to sprout enough gray hair that she chose to color hers what I thought of as an alien shade of red, Natalie had been the blonde to my brunette. When I stood by her son, I saw the same brown eyes his mother had, heard the same easy laugh.