“Why doesn’t she sell these things?” Hamish asked. “She could make a mint.”
I could barely hear him. He had taken the only pistol out of a felt Crown Royal bag and, holding it, had spread his legs wide as if it were something he’d seen cowboys do. As he aimed at a point on the opposite wall and put his finger to the trigger, I screamed and grabbed the barrel with my hand.
He held on, and we collided. Hamish took my right shoulder in his hand.
“What? You look so upset. What is it?”
I came very close to saying something. Words I had not spoken to anyone but Jake.
“My father taught me not to point a gun at anyone.”
“I was pointing it at that lamp shade!”
He set the pistol down behind him on the meat freezer. He cupped my cheek as if I were the child and he the parent. “It’s all right,” he said. “No one’s hurt.”
I was shaking. He turned to slip the pistol back inside the purple bag, then cinched the gold braid closed at the top.
“I’ll take this one,” he said.
With Hamish’s help, I put the rifles, which were much more valuable, back in their mounts. The pistol sat in its bag on a stack of starched linen napkins I had folded and left on top of the meat freezer. I remembered turning around and seeing it, imagining the dulled platinum barrel, the scarred brown grip, and thinking of my father lifting it, loading it, raising it to his head.
I positioned my mother’s body so that, standing three steps down into the basement, I could grab her around the shoulders and, walking blind and feeling for each stair with my foot, could use my body to keep her from tumbling into the no-man’s-land below.
I breathed in and tried to make my muscles strong, not rigid. I pulled my mother’s upper body out over the edge of the stairs and walked down one stair and then another. Her weight against me increased with each step. I smelled the lilac scent of her hair through the sheets. I felt my eyes watering but would not blink. Down two, three, four, five. Her bundled feet thumping their arrival.
My mother’s cocoon was unraveling. No hospital corners here. Her feet, first cleaned, were poking out of the sheets at the halfway point on the stairs. Her toes seemed blue to me in a way they hadn’t before, and I wondered if that was the light of the basement playing tricks on me. I took another step. Another. I knew, because I had counted them dozens of times as a child, that there were exactly sixteen steps. I saw the meat freezer humming to my left. On top of it was a stack of Sunset magazines, hoarded hand-me-downs from Mrs. Castle, who had relatives on the West Coast. Also left, from the previous Christmas, were the prop gift boxes lined up in rows in their sun-faded finery of ribbons and bows. I imagined Mrs. Castle taking them down the stairs for her, or perhaps it had even been me. My mother may have indeed instructed me to bring them down and put them in the giant plastic bags that she kept them in eleven months of the year. I would have failed to do that for some reason. I would have taken the time the task was supposed to occupy and sat in the old wicker-and-iron lounge chair near the washer and dryer, calculating exactly how many minutes I could let go by before I should reasonably appear upstairs to keep my mother company.
Until she was eighty-six, my mother persisted in using the basement. It was the idea of her becoming disoriented or lacking the energy to climb back out that inspired me to buy her a cell phone. Until then, my mother would descend the first three stairs one at a time, bracing her hands against the wall and preparing herself to go unassisted. Then, setting her jaw, she would pivot and continue down sideways, stair by stair. It could take her thirty minutes to get to the bottom, and by the time she reached the basement floor, she might have forgotten what she’d come for.
But just as Natalie’s father thought the ATM would eat his arm, when I’d placed the no-frills phone in my mother’s hand on her eighty-sixth birthday, she’d looked from it to me and said, “You’re giving me a grenade?”
“It’s a phone, Mother,” I said. “You can carry it with you everywhere you go.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“So you can always get in touch with me.”
She was sitting in her wing chair. I had made her favorite drink, a manhattan, and ruined, she said, her recipe for cheese straws. “I don’t know how you do it, Helen.” Delicately, she spit a half-chewed cheese straw into her cocktail napkin. “You have a gift.”
On top of the old mahogany dresser, beside the brown refrigerator, I saw the cell phone, where it had been for the last two years. She’d left it there the morning after her eighty-sixth birthday, which was also the last time she’d been in the basement. I’d seen it at least once a week for the last two years. In the irrational way I’d always experienced her rejection, I’d ended up thinking that in order to avoid talking to me, she’d renounced an entire floor of her home.
Despite my going slowly, my mother’s body swung out in an arc as the stairwell fell away halfway down. I watched the sheets unravel as her suddenly exposed lower half twisted backward onto the gritty cement floor. I held on despite the sounds-like Bubble Wrap being popped all at once-and rushed backward to the bottom, pulling her with me.
It was then that I heard the phone ringing in the kitchen.
I dragged her body free of the stairs and over to the meat freezer. I laid her lengthwise by the freezer’s side, then hurriedly did my best to cover her again. The sheets were twisted beneath her. No matter what I did, after folding and draping, her marbling knees were exposed. She lay there, silent and broken, and I thought of the horror that had finally come with control.
When I was a teenager, I thought every kid spent sweaty summer afternoons in their bedrooms, daydreaming of cutting their mother up into little pieces and mailing them to parts unknown. I did this both prone upstairs and gymnastically about the house. As I agreed to take out the trash, I cut off her head. As I weeded the yard, I plucked out her eyes, her tongue. While dusting the shelves, I multiplied and divided her body parts. I was willing to allow that other kids might stop short of this, that they might not, as I did, work out all the details, but I could not imagine that they did not explore this territory.
“If you want to hate me, I encourage it!” I would say to Emily.
“Yes, Mom,” she’d say. At six, she was already in possession of a nickname based on her greater reasonableness, her steely patience. “The Little Senator,” Natalie had dubbed her for her practical negotiations in the world of the sandbox, where Hamish, though her peer in age, was prone to tantrums and would often sit and cry.
I grabbed at the prop boxes on the meat freezer and threw them in groups and singly into various corners of the basement, to keep temptation at bay. Even growing up, I’d known that the boxes inside the faded wrapping paper and frequently refreshed bows would not hold what I wanted most. They would leak from their seams or be smashed if the postman happened to fall on a slippery patch when delivering my mother’s shin to a printing plant in Mackinaw, Michigan, or her foot to a trout farm outside Portland. Always, in my daydreams, I kept for myself her thick red hair.
I carefully placed the Sunset magazines on the edge of a nearby stair. Inside the meat freezer were the lean meat patties that my mother ate on her resumption of the Scarsdale diet five years ago, and two ancient hams from Mrs. Donnellson. I knew this without looking.
I turned the key in the meat freezer’s lock and opened it. There it was, an almost-empty ice cavity for one.
Jake had asked me questions concerning lividity, stiffness, what signs there might be of how she had died, but I was done with that. I had now not only broken her nose but managed to mangle her body postmortem. There was no reason why I shouldn’t fulfill my childhood dreams.