Alligator - Lisa Moore [33]
Let me walk you to the door, Mr. Harvey, the policeman said. There’s a cruise ship in the harbour.
FRANK
FRANK HAD BEEN saving to send his mother to the Mayo Clinic, but she died before he’d got the money together. He had read in the Telegram about a local millionaire who had been taken by helicopter to the Mayo Clinic and had recovered. Frank wanted his mother to go in a helicopter. Sometimes he sat by her bed with his head resting on the metal bar and waited until an overwhelming impatience built in him that forced him out of the room.
No part of him wanted her to die faster, even though allowing that much suffering to continue was indefensible.
He was afraid to be without her. He wasn’t ready. But he wanted to be free of dread. Dread dogged his every move. His mother had resigned herself to her death. Sometimes she was agitated, but this had more to do with wanting it over than wanting to recover.
Once, after a dose of morphine, she had gripped his hand with remarkable strength. She hadn’t spoken for three days and he wanted her to say something. He longed for advice or for her to share a memory, or even an unvivid comment about a nurse. He watched her eyelids quiver and finally open. Her eyes were foggy but she made the effort to focus and he saw her battle whatever hallucinations were threatening to cloud the room. She recognized him; he saw it at once. Her voice was hoarse. She said, E.T. phone home.
As soon as she had spoken her eyes rolled up in her head and then closed. He saw her settle into the pillow. The grip on his hand loosened. But he saw her smile and realized it was a joke. Ba-da-boom.
Frank left the hospital and walked down LeMarchant Road marvelling at his mother’s joke. They had watched the video together when he was a kid. Her eyelids must weigh as much as transport trucks.
The way you see the elm spanworms is you are almost on top of them and what you see is a blur that registers in some primitive part of the brain as danger, you focus involuntarily on the worm before your face. It comes into focus, the way it inches up the clear thread, and the other worms hanging beside it become visible. They look like twigs. You can mistake them for inanimate objects, except they move. They waver slightly as if they are uncertain of what to touch next. They look like they think. They inch forward. They are sticky and have a feathery touch.
Simultaneously, the street and cars and houses behind the worm become out of focus. There was a screech of tires followed by an anti-climactic crunch because Frank had stepped off the sidewalk into the lane of traffic to avoid the worm that hung an inch from his right eye.
A minivan swerved into a station wagon. After a moment the drivers got out and looked at their bumpers in silence. Then the older man extended his hand and the two drivers began to speak. One bent to touch the other’s fender. Frank ducked into the Shoppers Drug Mart and went through the air-conditioned store out the back door into the heat. There was a worm on his forearm and he swore softly at it.
Frank made sure there were fresh flowers in his mother’s room every week. He kept the curtain around her bed drawn so the other patients wouldn’t disturb her.
The day before she died Frank’s mother opened her eyes again and said, Frank, I want you to get a university degree.
She started to choke. She had Frank by the arm so he couldn’t reach the buzzer to call the nurse. He could see the buzzer on her side table but he could not reach it.
His mother’s grip was very strong, the tendons inside her wrist stood out from her thin arm. He didn’t want her to choke to death. He needed it to be a graceful death. He would not withstand it otherwise.
He did not want to be present. He could not see her off. Her body was rigid and her face was dark red. She kept choking, the colour of her skin went a deeper red, and deeper, the shades changing, her eyes watering. This was it. His mother would choke to death holding his arm, as if to drag him with