The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [94]
She called me in San Diego the day before I went into labor to tell me she was dying. Miraculously, Andy answered the phone, and hung up, and lied. He said, “Your mother says she loves you.” He waited for our son to be born. Then he waited a little longer. He told my sister and me in our living room in San Diego a week after Miles was born. The three of us cried in my little seahouse, Miles asleep in my arms.
It took six months. The rest of her life. One of the more difficult parts of her hospitalization was her intense withdrawal from alcohol. You will hate my saying this, but it will be true nonetheless. If I hadn’t had Miles, I would have moved back into her house of pain. And I would have brought her a bottle to ease her suffering, her journey. Every day if that’s what it took. But my Miles - there was a deathmother, and there was his life.
That is all.
When she died I was not with her. I tried to help her during her illness but she had so clusterfucked her life up by then there was almost nothing I could do. Andy and I flew to Florida to see her. To comfort her. To show her Miles. She looked so happy to see the little baby boy with the lifeforce larger than thunderstorm. She said, “Belle, take him - I don’t remember how to hold a baby right.” She said, “A boyah! We’ve never had one a those!” Clapping her hands together and crying. But she had almost no life left in her.
Once when I was alone with her in her hospital room, I asked her a question. She looked so small and still. Her face was shrunken and wrinkled, and her body so pale and slight. She almost looked like a girl, except for the lines a sad cartography across her face. I asked her, “What’s the best thing that’s ever happened in your life?”
It was the question Kesey had asked me. It’s what I could think to ask.
She said, “Oh. Well, Belle. That’s easy. My children.”
Though I couldn’t imagine how, I believed her.
They called me from a Florida Hospice all the way in Oregon when her skin became ashen and her eyelids began to flutter. They put the phone to her ear. She could not speak, as she had starved herself and hadn’t the energy by then. They said when she heard my voice on the other end her eyes became very wide, and then her breathing became very loud and urgent. Then the nurse took the phone back and told me she was gone, and that she looked peaceful, and that she believed my mother had heard me.
You probably want to know what I said to this woman. She was not a good mother. She did not save us from my father, and she taught us things that we have spent our entire lives trying to unlearn. But sometimes all I can remember is the way she rode with me to have my third abortion, the way she sat in the little room where they vacuum your insides out and call it a procedure, the little life disappearing into a glass container - and more specifically, I remember her face as we sat in the parking lot of Denny’s because I didn’t want to go home, or anywhere else, yet. She didn’t say anything. She simply parked the car in the back near the big metal refuse bin. She petted my hand. She cried a little. She smelled like day old vodka and Estée Lauder. Her real estate signs were in the trunk. Nothing happened, she didn’t ask me anything, she didn’t tell me anything, and after that I was able to move.
Or I think of all the mornings she drove me to swim practice at 5:00 a.m. Or the sound of her voice singing I see the moon. Or the day she brought the shoe box out and showed me the story she’d written, and the redbird drawing my father had done - the lives they could have lived. Or her face when she told my father she’d signed the scholarship letter, and that I was going to college, that I was leaving.
Or I think of Israel and Becky Boone.
So when I tell you what I said to her maybe it will sound deluded or trite, since this woman is where my trouble started, since she let us down so terribly, and birthed