“You don’t have to walk me up.” I stop, halfway around the hood of the truck, and glare at him.
“Just let an old man use his Southern charms.” He shuts the door and gestures for the steps. “After you.”
I sigh, and he smiles. “You’re a battering ram, you know that?”
“Best compliment I’ve gotten all evening.”
I take the first step and he supports my arm, an annoyance that is, unfortunately, needed as I work my way up the four steps to the porch. When did they get so steep? When did I get so old? “You’ve got the new stuff I wrote?” I ask.
He pats his shirt pocket. “Right here. I’ll work on it tonight.”
“Give me an hour or so.” I come to a stop before the front door. I never locked it behind me. In my mad sprint to Mark’s car, I just pulled it tight. Anyone could have come in, be waiting for me behind the door, knife poised, ready to slash at my throat or rape me. I consider inviting Mark inside, then discard the thought.
“Give you an hour or so for what?” He watches me turn the knob and frowns.
“Before you start writing. I have another scene I want to write. I’ll do it right now and send it over to you.”
“It’s late. Send it tomorrow morning.”
“No.” I shake my head, tonight’s encounter with my mother still raw and fresh, a dozen memories pushing to the surface and begging for attention. I need to get them down on paper while my skin still bristles from her contact. “I’m itching to write.” I try to smile, to ease some of the worry from his eyes. “I need to.” Maybe putting some of the past on paper will expel it from my body, like bloodletting, the words a thousand leeches that will suck the impurities out and heal a little of my pain.
Though, in that analogy, if this is bloodletting… The Night It Happened will be a slaughter fest.
“Helena?”
I snap my eyes to his, and his face is wary, his stance protective.
“Are you okay?”
I nod, pushing the door open and stepping inside, swiveling to the front and swinging the door almost closed. “Goodnight, Mark. I’ll email over the new stuff soon.”
He wants to say something, I can see his jaw flexing, forehead squishing, mind churning. But he doesn’t. He nods, steps back, and I close the door, flipping the deadbolt latch and lifting my head, listening to the empty house. In the air, there is the faint smell of ash and smoke. I remember my fire, and glance toward the hearth, a few embers still glowing red among the charred logs. I am turning away when I stop, my vision sluggish in its alert of my brain.
“Helena.” My mother pushes off the couch and stands. “I was hoping that we could speak.” Her voice wobbles and I have never, not even at the funeral, heard her cry.
“Mother.” I don’t have the energy for this. It’s already been too long of a day for me, the hours too far since my last pain pill, my exhaustion at war with the pain. “Please go home.”
She comes closer, and at this distance, I can’t hide. Her gaze travels critically over my face, and I wait for clarity, for the aha moment of understanding, but it isn’t there. She isn’t surprised, because she already knew, probably discovered it in her last three hours of snooping. I curse the unlocked door and drop the bag with my pajamas on the floor.
“What are these for?” She holds out a bottle of pills, and it’s the Phenergan, the one I left beside the couch.
I take it from her, my eyes dropping to the label. “Anti-nausea.”
She sighs. “I know what Phenergan is for, Helena. Why do you have so much medicine? Why do you look so terrible?”
If I walk outside, will Mark still be here? Was her car in the cul-de-sac and I somehow missed it? I step backward and feel myself sway.
Her arm closes around my forearm, and I am half-pushed, half-guided toward the couch. I sink into it, almost knocking over the water bottle when I reach for it. She sits next to me, silently, and watches me shake out a pill.
One pill. Ten minutes, then I’ll be nodding off. No more Mother. No more conversation. No more pain.
“There’s some medicine on the kitchen counter.” I take the pill and settle back into the couch. “The Vicodin. I need two.”
I expect her to argue, to force me to answer her question first, but she only stands, and walks to the kitchen. I watch the embers of the fire glow through half-closed eyes, and try to envision her waiting three hours for me. A long time to be alone in this house. A long time for a woman who liked to open drawers, root around in emotions, and pry into lives. She wouldn’t have wasted time. She would have tried Bethany’s door, found it locked. Seen the empty rooms, my sterile bedroom. Would she have wondered why the media room was locked? Would she have entered my office, sat at my desk, and criticized my life?
She blocks my view of the fire, her hand outstretched, two large white pills in her palm. “Here.”
I sit up, and it feels strange when I touch her hand, when my fingers scrape over her palm. I think of the scene I was going to write, the one for Mark, and sigh. Now, my brain will be mush. Nausea pill mush. I put the pills on my tongue and tilt back the water bottle, the chalky taste registering for a moment before the water flushes it down. “Cancer.” I say it quietly, but she hears me, her body lowering onto the couch beside me, her hands coming together on her lap.
“I figured it was something serious. Is it breast? Your grandmother had breast cancer, when she was—”
“No. Brain.”
“Oh.” She looks down at her hands. “I’m so sorry, Helena.” I’m so sorry, Helena. She said the same words at the funeral. Then, they caused me to break, my hands to whip out, words screamed in the quiet of a thousand onlookers. Now, with the words uttered for a completely different reason, I search for sadness in her voice.
Is there some? Is that faint wobble from before catching on the end of my name?
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if she will miss me when I’m gone. I died four years ago, and she’s had four years to recover from that. I’m so sorry, Helena.
“I’m not.” I settle back in the couch, pulling at the blanket, covering my body. “Why are you still here, Mother?” It can’t be about that reporter. There must be something else.
“Why do you hate me so much, Helena?”
I groan. She came here, staked out in my home, listened to my diagnosis, yet she wants her own pity party, one that starts with an accusatory question and ends with a clinical diagnosis, one where I am to blame, and she is the victim.
“I only had Bethany’s best interests at heart. That day, I—”
“This isn’t about that day,” I interrupt, and the tone in my voice shuts down the topic. “Our problems were about you undermining my parenting and siding with Simon.” I force my jaw to relax, my breath to flow, my hands to unclench from the blanket.
“Okay.” She sighs. “Okay. Talking about this is good. Just tell me how you feel.”
I turn my head. “Why? So you can forgive yourself? So, after I’m gone, you can feel closure?” I shouldn’t have told her about the cancer. I can’t afford her to park herself in my life and pick the last bits of energy and peace from my bones. “A dying woman should be afforded one wish.” I lift my chin and eye her as squarely as I can. “I want you to leave me alone. Go back to wherever you’ve been for four years. Reinvent history and paint it however you want. You were the perfect grandmother, Simon was the perfect father. I was the terrible beast you both kept Bethany safe from.”
“Helena, I—”
“I. Want. You. To. Leave.”
“I was wrong in how I raised you.” She stands, and I pray for her to turn, to exit, to not open up that pinched mouth and say another word. “I should have been different with you. I know that. Parents should adapt to fit their children. You were different from me, and I failed to adapt. I’m sorry for that.”
It’s not an apology. It’s a point. It’s a monologue, where the parent in this example is me, and the child is Bethany. She wants me to accept her apology, to agree with her, so that she can then whip around and spear me with the same logic.
I turn my head to the side, pull at the pillow, getting it into position and then lowering myself onto my side. “Goodnight, Mother.”
In the dim light, I see her silhouette move in front of the fire. She bends over, and when she straightens, she’s holding a stack of papers. I close my eyes and think through the content I was reviewing before the movie. Bethany’s third year of life. Simon’s overspending. The tension in our marriage. The love letter in his pocket.
“I read this.” Her voice has lost some of its self-righteousness.
“Good for you.”
“You’re writing about us.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Maybe it’s cathartic.”
“You plan to publish this?”
I tilt my head and look at her. “Are you worried it will be bad for business?”
She shakes her head tightly, and her earrings make a rustling sound. “I retired a few years ago. When… well. You know.”
Oh yes. I know.
“I want you to be happy, Helena. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
Happy. I can’t think of the last time I was happy. Riding on the back of that four-wheeler, I’d felt a burst of something. Finishing a novel always filled me with a strong sense of accomplishment. In the movie tonight, there’d been a moment when I hadn’t been able to stop myself and had laughed. But happy? Happiness wasn’t possible anymore. Happiness left when Bethany did.
I think of my daughter. I wasn’t the perfect mother. In some ways, I failed her as often as this woman failed me. In other ways, I failed her a million times worse. I roll over, curling away from her and onto my side, my back to the fire.
“I’m happy.” The lie spreads as smoothly as butter. “And I forgive you.”
It isn’t a lie for her. The lie is for Bethany, a deposit into the bank of karma, an offering to the gods, an understanding that—if I ever had a last moment with Bethany, I’d need her forgiveness, I’d need her acceptance, I’d need her love.
“Goodbye, Mother.” I don’t tell her that I love her. I can’t.
I wait, listening to the crackle of the fire, and stiffen when her hand brushes over my shoulder, her mouth lowering to my head, a stiff kiss deposited there.
“Goodbye, Helena. Sleep tight.”
I don’t move, and when the front door creaks open, I close my eyes. When it pulls tightly shut, I let out my breath and throw off the blanket.
I take my time on the stairs, moving carefully to the hall, and unlock Bethany’s bedroom door. I lower myself to the floor and crawl onto the sleeping bag, my eyes on her desk, on the crude artwork pinned to the wall above it. A family, four bodies together, a giant heart encircling us all.
She had wanted it. Happiness. Togetherness.
But putting things on paper don’t make them so.