All Apologies
Jillian Luft
The windows are dark, the lawn neglected, the driveway empty. In the fall of 1993, at the end of a street that curves like a frown, my family’s three-bedroom, two-bathroom with screened-in patio casts a weighty shadow on the other shiny and manicured homes lining the block.
Dad vacates our house the day after my 13th birthday. The remnants of my party (Chinese take-out and Publix birthday cake) cool in the fridge while Dad struggles to find the words to explain his impending departure. He can no longer do it, he says. The “it” is caretaking for our sick mother. Mom’s body is occupied by Multiple Sclerosis, Rheumatoid Arthritis and a host of minor afflictions that medical experts vaguely attribute to a poor immune system. I cannot recall a year when there was not a hospital stay, a late-night emergency room trip, a deep cry of pain emerging from behind closed doors.
Dad doesn’t so much leave as vanish in a flood of tears and a blur of incoherent apologies. He leaves my younger brother, Justin, and I behind as a final consolation, as a way to not entirely break her. At the end, he’s so much of a phantom that I think his absence won’t matter. Yet, somehow we can’t function naturally without him. In his wake, there resides an eerie stillness. A permanent quiet that never ceases no matter how much noise we make.
This new quiet feels confused. Dad’s frustration in the last few months brought its own silences but this pregnant hush is different and strange. The dishwasher still sloshes, the washer and dryer still rattle and thrum, the TVs in the living room, my mom’s bedroom and my bedroom emit separate fantasies of other families living better lives. There is still the incessant chatter of our pet birds, Aerial, the cockatiel who lays unfertilized eggs, and Frosty, the parakeet whose throaty “pretty bird” is now more a mournful lament than a party trick. On our dining room floor, in separate cages, they chirp their unique birdsong, each note more frantic and desperate than the last. All the familiar noises are still here. Yet, my ears ring with the deafening void that echoes throughout this space, throughout my body.
Our house is dark and cavernous despite the bright white walls, sleek white Formica, blank white appliances. Mom insists on a modern home with a minimalist aesthetic. In addition to the white, the palette is pale grey and dusty mauve. Nothing can stray from the fixed color scheme until she decides there is a new one. Teal becomes a thing temporarily and then seafoam. Rooms are sharp corners, clean lines, bare shelves. Even before Dad leaves, the goal is for our home to look uninhabited.
In 1993, time abandons us. Like ghosts, we repeat our domestic routine, mostly confined to the same four walls. Days fall listlessly, flatlining into a predictable rhythm of comfortable chaos. We are isolated from the rest of the world yet detached from ourselves. It could be any year, any day, any season. But I keep track through the television, specifically MTV.
The Grind signals it’s 7:00 am and time to get ready for school. Walking to the kitchen, I pass a swarm of overly groomed bodies, slick and sinewy surfaces gyrating to watered-down house music. I pour cereal into two bowls and grab two spoons out of the dishwasher. We’re out of milk, so I slosh half-n-half on top of the marshmallow jumble. The first visiting nurse arrives at 7:45, so I can safely avoid judgment on my breakfast’s nutritional value.
At 7:10, tan abdomens sway to a has-been rapper’s ostensible comeback, and I check on Mom. She’s still asleep, cocooned by thick bedding and cradled by the white light of cable TV. Her chronic pains temporarily dulled, dissolving through morphine and morning talk shows.
“Mom, are you awake?” I whisper from the doorway.
Her eyes remain closed. The only sound is the soft hiss of air from her oxygen tank and the cheers of a live audience. I gently close the door and head to the bathroom to begin my private morning routine.
In the past, I would have crawled into her bed and wet her pillow with my tears. In the past, I would have woken up in my bedroom and prayed to the orange glow of my closet light that I could hide here for just another hour, swear my brother to secrecy, and then surprise her with cinnamon raisin toast while explaining that I wanted to take care of her. Just for one day. Please. Yes, I understood that’s why the nurses came, but please, I could miss one day of school. There was no homework due and besides it was already nine and just one day… And that’s when I’d curl up next to her, place my arms delicately around her chest, my fingers accidentally grazing the slit in her throat, then moving to her shoulders as I buried my blotchy, glassy-eyed face into the curve of her neck, feeling her pulse weakly throb and her hands drift through the tangled sheets until they found my quaking spine and then she’d scratch her long nails across my back with such tenderness that a few new tears would spill down my cheek and onto her pillow. In the past, I would have beamed under the blankets with the immense relief that whether my mom lived or died today, I’d be the first to know. I’d be here. In her bed. Vigilantly watching the rise and fall of her comforter like I watched the ocean waves: with fear, awe and a calm acceptance that this was the way it was.
Behind the locked door, it’s just the cool bathroom tiles underneath my feet and my mirrored reflection gawking back at me. I inhale the familiar bouquet: mint, baby powder, rust, bleach. Then I grab my toiletries from underneath the sink, lining them up in a row like beauty pageant contestants: all-natural coconut body butter, a drugstore exfoliant scented like synthetic apricots, deodorant with a wave-shaped cap, a handful of melted lipsticks, a sample size mascara, hairspray that my mother’s owned since the early 80s. I slowly and carefully use each one, inspecting my progress as I go. It’s hard to evaluate my efforts since the glass is speckled with water spots and toothpaste spittle. I am never satisfied with the results but I can hear myself think in front of the mirror. My thoughts are clear and unclouded and dumb. My thoughts are about me and only me: the shape of my ass, the shape of my eyes, whether my braces are less noticeable when wearing lipstick in a bloody hue or one the color of dirty gauze.
I am preoccupied with my body in a way that feels crucial, as if my life depends on it. It is not so much a distraction from my daily routine as it is an integral part of it. If I do not make contact with myself in this way, I fear I might disappear. In this house, I am flashes of color gliding through dim rooms to service her needs. I am a disembodied mind concentrated on the next mundane task to keep us all alive. At school, I doubt the veracity of my body and am prone to embellishment: padded bras, soft deference to the prettiest girls and any boy that beholds me long enough for me to notice. But during these twenty minutes of each day, I greet myself through the glass and acknowledge a glimmer of beauty in my imperfect form.
I am wearing my white bodysuit with the sheer bell sleeves although the soft buds of my nipples show through. The truth is I want them to. They’re sole proof that I am changing into someone that deserves a second look or a thorough once-over. Not quite like The Grind dancers but there’s potential. I’ve worn this outfit once before: bodysuit, black lycra flares, black fringed vest, and black clogs. The boys in my 7th grade class ruthlessly laid into me, inquiring about the funeral I was attending and snickering about my inability to dress for this decade. At least they hadn’t directly acknowledged my lack of tits. The true saving grace, and reason I was wearing this outfit again, was Adam Jons. He’d rushed to my defense and proclaimed my ensemble “sorta cool.” That shut those other scrawny mouth-breathers up.
Adam Jons isn’t “sorta cool.” He is “cool.” Period. His scraggly copper locks cover either one, or both, of his eyes at all times. He draws the anarchy symbol on every notebook. He looks unwashed and surly but showers girls with compliments. Only when he takes a test does he tuck a piece of auburn behind one ear, and offer a clear view of his eyes. They are the color of angst, dark and fiery. At least once a week, he wears his favorite t-shirt. It’s black and reads Touch Me I’m Sick in bold white letters.
One day in gym class, we both sit on the bleachers because we refuse to dress out. His defiance is a customary act of rebellion. Mine is a way to avoid showing the girls in the locker room that I don’t wear a bra. He is wearing the shirt and I work up the nerve to ask him what it means.
He tells me it’s a Mudhoney song. I pretend to know who they are and he pretends to believe me. He says I can borrow his CD and that he’ll bring it tomorrow. And he does. He casually tosses it on my desk during first period and my body vibrates with anticipation as I place it in my denim backpack. Adam Jons and I share a secret and I’ll soon find out what it is.
In my room, with my back pressed against a bookcase filled with unread classics, I place the CD in my discman and press “Play.” The wind is kicked out of me like a gym class mishap. It’s that guitar riff: a corrosive assault that playfully threatens to obliterate whoever I ever thought I was or could be. Each staticky note simultaneously escaping and colliding in a doomed free-fall. The song is escaping the control of the hands that play it and the band welcomes this disintegration. I have no choice but to follow them into the swarm of sweat and sex and disease, the lead singer’s unhinged howl releasing something within me. “Touch Me, I’m Sick!” he taunts. But I don’t flinch. He doesn’t know I understand what it is to intimately encounter sickness and how it infects those in its presence with an insatiable need to assert their own bodies. To see my mother’s body stripped of its freedom, of its use, is to be plagued by shameful feelings of pride in my own healthy form. My body has unrealized potential for connection, for destruction, for things I desire but cannot name. “If you don’t come, you’ll die alone,” Mudhoney warns. I want my body’s use to be found but I don’t wish to be used. I don’t want to be screwed but I need to know I’m screwable. I don’t want to die alone. I don’t want her to die alone, but I don’t want to stay here. Adam Jons and I don’t share a secret. The secret is mine alone.
Courtney Love once said that “Touch Me I’m Sick” inspired her to become a rock star and saved her. The song saves me, too, but in a different way.
It lets me accept this new life like these trips to the bathroom do. I check my reflection one more time. My dirty blonde bob droops around my rounded chin despite my best efforts to add body. I decide that the bloody hue works against my pale skin even though my lips are thin and my mouth is devoured by the baby fat that is the rest of my face. And yet, I feel almost pretty. I take a deep breath and open the bathroom door.
I find an unsigned 4th grade field trip permission slip and last night’s homework on the dining room table. I forge my mother’s signature and stuff the homework into my backpack.
“Put this in your bag.” I march into the kitchen, tugging the back of my brother’s oversized polo shirt and thrusting the permission slip in front of his face.
“Get off me, ugly!” He elbows me in the ribs and grabs his bowl of soggy cereal. “You’re stretching my shirt out and it’s new. God!”
“Whatever. Just trying to help you.” I fold the slip and leave it on the counter.
His response is not human. He parrots my speech but as if I was an unintelligible ghoul who speaks only in groans and shrieks.
I ignore his display and walk out into the living room, steadying my gaze on the TV. A shirtless man in shorts and combat boots gestures dramatically with his hands as a Swedish pop group’s #1 hit plays. Ooh..she leads a lonely life.
For most of my life, Mom resembles an old-world movie star. A spotlight seems to follow her, filtering out her imperfections and playing upon her most attractive features: a sleek Roman nose, crimson lips of modest but fitting proportions, sculptural cheekbones. But the likeness to studio starlets mostly lies within the eyes. They are large and knowing, a cloudy hazel-green that renders her enigmatic yet approachable. There is an underlying warmth in her irises that she can control like a thermostat, with an arch of her brow or a curve of her smile.
A look from her can devastate across the school auditorium, the grocery aisle, the brief expanse of the cruddy backyard as you stand motionless, trapped within her web of reproach. You do not know what you’ve done but you regret it. You hang your head to escape her gaze but that withering look has already branded the most sensitive and deepest parts of you. Hard lumps of shame clog your throat, tears threaten to escape as you turn back to face her. But she is no longer concerned with you. She’s cast her eyes elsewhere, turning them warmly to an object of affection rather than scorn. You are left alone and cold, frozen in your own mortification and confusion. Her eyes now bestow their effulgent glow upon those far more deserving: your teacher, your neighbor, your brother. You ache for her to look at you as she did at them soon again. But the truth is that she’s never looked at you that way.
Mom was prettier than other moms. Sometimes she privately took pleasure in this knowledge and sometimes she forgot entirely. But now she is forced to remember every waking moment that this is no longer true. The inescapable proof of this is too much for her to bear alone, so she reminds me of what she used to be. Slurred words said in contempt, with bitterness and resentment. While weaker, she is meaner and crueler in spirit.
The steroids balloon the face, the upper arms, the midsection. She jokes that her body is an overripe banana, sallow and bruised. She jokes that she’s a pregnant cripple. Her eyes lose their luminosity, firmly switched to “Off.” There is the tender slit in the neck from the tracheotomy and the legs that no longer cooperate. There is the sagging and the sallow and the unrelenting pain. And the drugs. There’s always the drugs.
I crack Mom’s door a sliver and listen. I can hear the faint and slow exhale of her breath over the machines like rain.
“’Bye, Mom. See you after school.” No response.
I feel relief that she is not yet awake and asking for things.
Eric Nies, the hunky host of The Grind, flexes for the camera. “See ya next time. Peace,” he winks. This is my cue to grab my backpack and head to the bus stop. When Rude Awakening, an hour block of various music videos starts, I know I am late. My brother eagerly switches the channel to cartoons. C.J, his best friend’s mom, picks him up sometime after 8.
“Don’t forget to put your bowl in the dishwasher,” I remind him with one hand on the doorknob. His scrawny limbs stretch across the elephant grey of the sofa, bowl of cereal balanced precariously on his knee.
“Duh,” he snaps, eyes glued to animated chipmunks.
***
When I return home from school, The Grind is on. Again. The same episode I caught glimpses of that morning. I toss my backpack onto the vinyl loveseat and pause in front of the TV.
“Stay tuned because up next…”
I grab the remote and press the “Power Off” button. It’s four, so at least one of the nurses is here. This means I can briefly escape, that my absence can temporarily go unnoticed because attention is being paid to vital signs, administering medication, mending my mother’s broken heart. Her nurses are preternaturally kind. They are able to tap into my mother’s magnanimity without having to ingratiate themselves through handwritten apology notes or an overly cheery disposition.
I sneak off to my bedroom and sit cross-legged in my closet, surrounded by clothes my parents bought on maxed out credit cards—the promise of a different life. I thumb through the latest issue of teenage wish fulfillment, inhaling the fragrance of fake beaches and devouring the images of cared for girls in crocheted beanies and designer flannel with pouty nude mouths that carry the secrets of desire without saying a word. I yearn to be mute and irresistible, feeling the eyes of boys and girls roam across my skin. I want my body to matter and a tongue in my mouth. I want to inspire music that is the aural equivalent of a scab: damaged but hopeful, dangerously on the verge of infection. I want to be Drew, Winona, Courtney. Mostly, I want boobs.
But then: the sound of the bell. Ringringringring.
I’ve lost track of time. Minutes or hours have passed. If she’s beckoning me, it means the nurses are gone.
It’s been hours.
My mother’s pale hand trembles from afar, furiously shaking her crystal bell. She is bedridden, marooned to her mattress, tied to the television. As every home health aide reminds me, I am at my mother’s beck and call. It sounds like a divine calling, so I take my father’s place with pride and a deep love for my mother, a fervent want to help. She could summon me now at any hour and I would arrive instantly to tend to her every need, assuaging her physical pain and healing emotional wounds with my zealous spirit and quiet fortitude. At first, it doesn’t occur to me how much I will be needed, that I will answer the call of the sound even when the bottom of my adolescent heart begs to do anything else, heeding it even in my dreams, springing from my bed to race down an endless hallway. Beckoned for eternity. For whom the bell tolls. In waking life, I constantly make the journey past the kitchen and straight into her darkened room. Usually it is the pills she wants.
Ringringringring.
I bristle at the insistent chime and turn the page, falling into another fantasy before I hear her croak: “Jilllll! It’s your mean Mommy Dearest!” I feel my skin tighten, my jaw clench, my entire body cave under the welcomed heft of an endless sigh. I force my body to relax and take one last look at the young starlet smiling so wide at me from the page that her eyes are nothing more than slits of wild joy. Her arms are raised above her head in total surrender causing her baby tee to ride up and expose her belly. A butterfly permanently flits near her perfect navel.
I throw her smug image against the closet door but try to copy her smile before I trudge to my mother’s room.
I focus on my feet as I walk down the hallway. Carpet the shade of good wine keeps the impression of my canvas sneakers. I notice that the floor darkens unnaturally in spots. Its color varies wildly from deep burgundy to cherry coke to mud. Is it blood or soda? The stains have set too long to tell.
After Dad leaves, I notice the cracks in things. There are the literal cracks: in the ceiling, in the doors, along the walls. And then there are the smaller signs that our life is crumbling.
Ants crawl along the sideboards, palmetto bugs drop from the ceiling like ninjas. Broccoli, accidentally buried in the garbage disposal, starts to rot, filling the air with its stench. It’s the smell of giving up, of barely holding on. Everything is rusted or mildewed or in a state of decay.
There is no keeper of the house, no one to maintain the facade like we’d once done as a family unit. I fondly reflect on those weekends we’d spent dividing up domestic tasks, cleaning up the evidence of dysfunction: fast food wrappers strewn on the coffee table, a gaping hole in the plaster of the master bedroom wall, shards of broken dinnerware glittering in the kitchen tile grout, another hole in the wall bearing the self-inflicted indent of my brother’s still-developing skull. We swept and wiped and patched every inch until what was left gleamed and glowed like new. A spotless surface.
Now, we let it all fall away and reveal itself.
Slouched and sullen, I arrive at Mom’s bedside. I’ve lost my magazine smile. I want to dissolve into the walls. I want her to only detect the outline of me, my silhouette illuminated by the music video playing in the background, casting its ominous red-purple glow.
Nirvana bandmates, Kurt, Dave and Kris, sit in a hospital room holding vigil over a dying man, his wizened skin a mapping of unforgiven trespasses. This somber scene cuts to one that is beautifully sinister. The old man dons a Santa hat, climbing up a ladder to hang himself upon a wooden crucifix. Animatronic crows from a hellified Disney peck at the darkness that lurks behind the bright blue deception of the sky. It is a cutting portent of what’s to come. Three months from now, Mom will be admitted to Intensive Care for the last time.
I look at my mother’s drugged-out face and then through her, awaiting to fulfill her command, to carry out whatever perfunctory task she has in mind.
“Can you get me the Demerol?”
“Of course, Mums.” I smile and reach for the medicine box on the headboard shelf, grabbing two pills the shape and color of Aerial’s unfertilized eggs. Two years ago, I started calling her “Mums” because it sounded more refined. She’d laughed and found it endearing, if a bit strange. Now she doesn’t laugh. She does not react at all.
“Want water?”
She nods. I retrieve a glass from the kitchen. Standing before the refrigerator’s water dispenser, I dawdle a bit longer than necessary. The water magically rushes in and I work myself into an anxious state, anticipating my mother’s impatience with me, the way her words come out sharp and pointed like spears when she’s particularly testy.
I return to her bedside, handing her the water as she sits hunched against the headboard. I gently brush my hand against hers, hoping to leave an impression with this subtle gesture of affection, aiming to make her smile. She swallows, never averting her gaze from the screen, and hands me her half-empty glass.
“Don’t forget to put it in the dishwasher.”
“Okay.”
“Did you even say hello to the nurses when they were here?”
“I forgot. I’m sorry.”
“Where’s your brother?”
“At Jose’s, I guess.”
“Well, did you call there to check?”
“No, I’ve been doing homework.”
“Take a break and call please.”
An eye roll.
An accusatory glare.
I remove my hand from hers and bring it back to my side, gently clawing at my lycra thigh. My skin is aflame and yet a shiver runs through me as I focus on Kurt screaming into the camera. He’s lunging like a caged animal toward the lens, his shaggy blonde hair failing to mask the electric-blue pain burning in his eyes, threatening to set the TV set and my whole world on fire. I wish it would. Instead, the screen fades to black and is quickly replaced with a corny candy commercial.
“Do you need anything else?”
Her eyes are closed. The slightest twist across her lip lets me know she’s feigning sleep. I can tell by how her hand grips the remote, her crimson talon firmly planted on the “Channel Up” button.
“Life has just begun. Life, as you know it, is over.” The promo for MTV’s new show, Dead at 21, flashes across the screen, dramatic narration accompanies grim yet sexy sci-fi images chaotically layered like a sleek Gen-X hallucination. I haven’t seen the show but gathered that it’s about a young man who discovers he’s part of a government experiment on his 20th birthday. A chip’s been implanted in his brain that will kill him when he turns 21. He must find a way to prevent this death sentence. My mom enjoys this show and now her eyes flutter open.
“Oh, it’s just a commercial,” she mutters and quickly closes them again.
Mom lives to see the first three episodes of Dead at 21. She turns 40 the day the 5th episode airs. The day of the 6th, she is removed from life support.
***
The house reeks of Buffalo wings: vinegary hot sauce and deep-fryer grease. It is what remains of tonight’s dinner. The stench always lingers for at least another day, coating breakfast in its pungent film. Our meal options are mostly limited to: stir-fry, pasta, wings. They are the few dishes I can cook confidently and capably. But I also gravitate toward this menu because the ingredients are special. Unlike our grocery staples bought with rainbow-colored food stamps, frozen wings and shrimp, bagged stir-fry kits and fresh mozzarella are purchased by thoughtful neighbors and relatives on shopping trips to Sam’s Club.
By the time I’ve loaded the dishwasher, Mom nods off again. The last prescription cocktail of the day allows her to doze for the next few hours. I tend to the remaining chores: wiping the kitchen counters and checking on the birds. I carelessly dump more seed into their cages. Ariel has laid three more eggs since morning and Frosty paces back and forth frantically. Both squawk aggressively until I place some dirty towels over their cages.
“Sleep already,” I grumble.
It is nearly my bedtime. I can feel my bones melting but I force them to remain solid and alert, if just for another hour. I need to shower. My shower is a nightly catharsis, a compulsive way to self-soothe and assuage my feelings of paranoia and fear. Like my morning bathroom routine, it is a way to remember who I am outside of these walls.
Even at my age, I’m still afraid of ghosts, of watchers. At night is when I feel the most unattended and alone. There’s no one to protect me from what stalks in the dark. There’s no one, I think as I dart toward the bathroom, avoiding looking at any of the windows that line both sides of the house, sprinting to safety. Once inside the bathroom with the door firmly shut, I immediately disrobe and then turn on the shower. The room is hot and sour like gym class.
Through the foggy glass, I inspect my naked body as others would, standing on my tiptoes so my pubic hair emerges into view. I look to imaginary faces to gaze upon me, hold my flaws up to the light, and offer encouragement. I choose who watches. First, I examine my puffy nipples with the discerning leer of the horniest boy in school. The heat keeps them from respectfully protruding. I sneer with disapproval. Next, I turn around to take a quick glance at my backside, assessing its growth. My prayer to have a significantly enlarged derriere remains unfulfilled. In the mornings, I am the one beholding myself, reminding myself that I matter. At night, my audience is tougher, but I appreciate the criticism.
The scent of blood and eggs fills the air. “Well water,” Mom says, when I ask her why I smell like pennies after showering. The iron gushes out of faucets and streaks the sink drains. Our formerly immaculate white bathroom tile is covered in cuts, scrapes, sulfur-smelling wounds. My hair rusts orange.
I squat underneath the faucet while my electric razor hums along my bony shins, my furry knees. All hot girls are hairless. I move the buzzing blade toward my thigh but there’s nothing to shed there. All hot girls are smooth and simple. Life feels certain for them. Life unfolds for them without incident, without accident. They aren’t kept in darkness with secret responsibilities, strange smells, unexplained departures.
I keep crouched as the water burns my back and perfume every part of me, scrubbing with the loofah until my flesh feels raw and new. I check for new blood between my legs, hoping that the smell is more than just hard water deposits. There is nothing. My body betrays me.
After my shower, I crawl into bed. I pull the bedspread up tight to my chin and clench my toes so they remain firmly under the covers. A foot is as vulnerable to supernatural predations as any other part of my body. If all of my body is not under the mauve cotton, then I am entirely susceptible to what lurks in the dark.
Mom used to walk the house at night. I’d hear the creak of her joints, her slender legs tiptoeing as she checked in on my brother and me. She never came in our rooms, just stood briefly in the doorway long enough to make out our sleeping silhouettes. We both slept with makeshift versions of nightlights. For me, it was my closet light and the hall light just outside my door. For my brother it was both of these, plus the bathroom light. Out of habit, she’d sometimes turn the hall light off as she made her way back to her bedroom. A whisper of “Oh shit” and then a click of the switch and the click of her knee before light and quiet returned. I felt comforted by this nightly ritual, but also a bit unnerved. There was something anxious about her slow treading back and forth at two, three, four am. Where was my father? Why couldn’t she sleep?
Now, she lay in bed at those hours. On a late night trip to the bathroom, I catch a glimpse of her from down the hall. Her face a projection screen of technicolor blurs. Canned laughter punctuates her sighs and moans as she drifts in and out of her morphine sleep somewhere between half-awake and delusional and wide awake with the terrors of insomnia. I crawl back into bed, nerves crackling like static. I turn on my TV to drown them out.
The red-purple glow of the screen paints my walls. Kurt rocks back and forth in his chair, sneering his complaints like a lullaby. I drift off to sleep. I am safe. I’m not alone.
***
In winter 1994, my brother makes a phone call. He’s grown tired of leaving obscene messages on Dad’s answering machine. It turns out that he doesn’t want him to “fuck off” and doesn’t really hate him or the “stupid slut,” my mom’s former ICU nurse and current ex-friend. Actually, he wants to live with them. So he does. And he leaves his mess behind. I don’t bother to clean it up. Instead, I glower at the ransacked baskets of toy crap littering the floor of his room and slam the door shut.
Dad asks if I want to stay. He knows I can’t leave so I don’t know why he presents this as an option. It seems needlessly cruel.
Then it’s just the two of us. I help her into lightweight dresses instead of grungy nightshirts, retrieve her makeup bag from her double sink vanity, bring out her fancy perfumes and remnants of overpriced and expiring lotions. A friend comes over and applies some highlights to her head, a fresh coat of paint to her hands.
“She isn’t that pretty, right? That’s one thing,” she says while blotting her lipstick. It is mostly on her teeth. “Not as pretty as Kaya.” Kaya was the other nurse Mom befriended while in the ICU, the one she added to her list of women my Dad should remarry when she died. Others on the list included her friend C.J. (who was already married), my younger, still single aunt, and the former ICU nurse and current ex-friend.
“Your dad’s coming over, you know. Justin forgot his Jordans.”
“I know,” I reply, embarrassed by her excitement.
“Do I look okay?” she asks. Beavis and Butthead are chuckling on TV. I lie next to her on the bed, an unopened paperback in hand. She is wearing a sundress in an abstract print, gold jewelry, and one of those wide and stretchy black headbands. The bedspread is tucked underneath her slim legs, slick and shiny with lotion. Her bruises glint like those rainbow swirls you find in street puddles. Her hair is no longer permed but combed straight into a shapeless tuft, haphazard stripes of burnt gold painted from root to end. The drugstore highlights kit has not yielded salon-quality results. She applies Clinique to her eyelids with an unsteady hand. I do not offer to help. I know better.
“You look great, Mom,” I thumb a page of the horror novel hovering in front of my face. “You always do.”
“Liar,” she shoots me a dirty look and runs her french manicure through the frizz. “I know I taught you to always tell the truth but now you’re too polite. Save that for school.”
“I mean it. You’ve always been the most beautiful.” I close my book and turn over on my side. I give her my full attention, so she knows I mean it. I take hold of her hand while she continues to look in her compact mirror.
She holds my hand limply, bares her teeth. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this depressed in my life,” she sighs. “Not one thing that anybody could offer me could make me happy at this point except having my old body back.”
I let go of her hand and return to my book, scanning the empty spaces between the words in silence. I burn with resentment. I cannot give her what she wants.
Dad doesn’t show on this day. He buys Justin another pair of shoes instead. Mom leaves her walker near her bed, just in case Justin changes his mind and needs both pairs. When hours pass, she swipes at her burgundy mouth with tissue, leaving smudges of shame along her bloated face.
***
In spring 1994, a few months after Justin leaves, I crack a few windows and open the blinds. The sun shines a bit longer through the panes, tiny slats of light dazzling the dirty carpet. One weekend, I can’t resist and I kneel in front of one of the living room windows overlooking the front yard. I weakly pull at the latch, but it slides up effortlessly, revealing the whole world in its rectangular frame. I feel the sticky heat beat down upon my skin, the wind caressing my hands. The unmown grass teems with wildness, carrying neighborhood sounds across the breeze and straight into my blood: a distant lawnmower wheezing, the metallic yawn of a garage door, the playful shouts of old friends I’ve forgotten. I feel a twinge of something I barely recognize as longing. For what, I don’t know. But it scares me.
I still want to be alone with her. If it is only me, maybe she can learn to love me again. Maybe she will learn to love me best. But only when I want her to.
It’s Friday night. Mom is looking at me and laughing. A real laugh that causes her to cough and wince with pain.
I’m lying on Dad’s side of the bed, knees pressed to my chest, head nestled into his freshly laundered but unused seafoam green pillowcase. It no longer smells like his department store cologne, a nauseating blend of fake ocean breeze and macho spice. The matching seafoam comforter molds to the curves of my fetal-positioned form, its modern geometric pattern like scales across my body. I’m a sick-bed mermaid luxuriating in the waves of my Mom’s affection, telling jokes I’ve learned from late-night TV.
“You’re killing me,” she giggles as she tries to catch her breath. I reach up behind her head and grab the glass of water perched on the headboard. She takes a large gulp but I can see her lips are still curved in a smile.
“I’m sorry,” I say and snuggle deeper into the mattress. But I’m not sorry. I’m ecstatic. The track lighting shines above our heads like a benevolent moon, soft and full. For hours, Mom’s mood has been buoyant, open and loving. She’s regaling me with tales of old boyfriends while we scarf down orange-chocolate cookies and sweaty hunks of gouda cheese unsheathed from its waxy covering.
There is a blonde surfer, goofy but adventurous, who dives into swimming pools while wearing his Levis and Baja hoodie and begs her to go to Mexico. There is another more serious blonde, Cole, who doesn’t surf but loves Jesus. There is a photo of Cole and Mom at a Lutheran Youth Group Halloween party. Mom beams, wide-eyed and beautiful. Cole wears a Halloween mask of an older, ugly man but you can still tell from the sideburns peeking through that he’s dreamy.
“Do you have any crushes at school?”
I think briefly of Adam Jons.
“Not really,” I blush.
“Oh, I’m sure you do, but you don’t want to tell your uncool mom about them.” She playfully slaps my arm while I burrow into the seafoam. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
I pull the comforter tighter around my body even though I’m now sweating from pores I didn’t know I had.
I want to tell her about Adam and the Mudhoney song and the fantasies I keep in my closet but I’m afraid it will hurt her feelings, that she’ll figure out it’s how I escape from everything here in this house, that it’s my way out from her.
Instead, I give a dismissive head shake and ask more about the surfer, stuffing another cookie into my mouth before she can interrogate me further.
We play a few rounds of “Go Fish” and Poker in relative silence until she lays her cards down and looks hard at me.
“Hey Jill, I want you to know something,” she nearly whispers. “I know sometimes I get mad. I’m not really mad at you, I’m just mad at what’s happening to me.”
I listen by looking intently at her face as she continues. I want to remember each subtle shift in expression that follows every word. I want to remember the tenderness, the openness, the honesty.
“Besides from not feeling good, I feel very alien...alienated from everybody and everything, even myself. It’s like I exist and don’t all at once.” Now she looks away.
I want to say that I understand this feeling, that we share it. That it bonds us, connects us and maybe we can free each other from it by just being here with one another. By reminding each other that we do exist. We do matter.
But I say nothing. I just keep looking at her and hope she sees it somewhere in my face.
She asks me to turn out the light. I know she wants me to remain in bed with her. I don’t have to ask. Treating this like a true sleepover, we settle into the 2 am Cinemax premiere of Tomcat: Dangerous Desires. Richard Greico, a swarthy pin-up from my teen magazines, plays Tom, a terminally ill dancer injected with a cure consisting of tabby cat DNA. He is all leather and hair and oily seduction. And yet, his character is utterly ridiculous. Mom and I can’t stop laughing at the absurdity of the plot: Tom has nine lives and they’re all devoted to fornicating until, suddenly, he’s consumed by a violent rage and goes on a murderous feline rampage.
“Medication always has its side-effects,” Mom snorts.
We don’t make it to the end, nodding off as the TV’s watery glow is snuffed out by the blue dawn burning through the windows. I still don’t know if Richard was cured or killed.
***
It’s a weekend. End of March. Chicken wings for dinner again. We’ve grown sick of Buffalo-style, so tonight it’s “Teriyaki.” I find the recipe on the back of the frozen wing bag: soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, chopped scallions for garnish. A bottle of rice wine vinegar is unearthed from the back of the pantry. With a paper towel, I wipe off the coat of dust on the bottle and channel all my strength to twist off the lid. I’m pleased with my ingenuity.
The fryer sizzles. I watch the oil bubble so I don’t catch my reflection in the bay window above the kitchen sink. I bend my face close to the spattering amber, the heat whispering against my cheek as I think about the algebra problems that remain untouched on my desk before my thoughts quickly shift to the back of Adam’s head in Math class. The carroty hairs on his pasty neck, curving up toward his oversized ears.
Then, outside, I hear a doleful howl that shakes me from my reverie. I move closer to the kitchen window but can’t make out whatever animal lies in wait. Instead, my terrified twin stares back at me: braces glinting, eyes nervous and hair matted from grease and fatigue. Outside night falls hard, collapsing upon the overgrown backyard and the thicket of palms behind it. The motion sensors in the backyard have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them. Anything could be out there beyond the screen, stealthily emerging from the deep woods to terrorize us. Bobcats, raccoons, wild boar, men, demons.
I hear her before I see her. It is the sound of birthday parties ending, helium deflating. It is her oxygen tank but ugly.
“Mom? Is that you?” I call out. The wall in the kitchen obstructs my view. I am in the middle of placing boiling hot drumettes onto a paper towel-lined plate. I wait for her to respond.
Seconds pass and nothing. The white noise of her air is absent.
“Mom? Do you need something?” I’m paranoid again, my imagination taking hold in these quiet hours. The hot oil continues to sizzle.
I place the last wing onto the plate and emerge from the kitchen. I cannot make sense of the scene in front of me. Time is sucked out through my lungs and replaced with bright pangs of confusion. My stomach spins in a tight spiral toward the carpet. I am a heart holding its breath, legs falling forward and apart, teary eyes in denial.
She is in her wheelchair, facing me but seemingly unaware of my presence. She is crying but there is no sound. No, she’s not crying, she’s choking. The metallic rattle of the wheelchair echoes in the unearthly stillness. No, she’s not choking, she’s suffocating because the oxygen tubing is firmly coiled around her throat. Her throat is flushed, deep red, nearing purple. Her face, also nearing purple, is a mask of concentrated surrender. Her eyes are large and distant. Bulging but blank. This is not an accident. The air hisses and sputters, the tubing no longer in her nostrils. Then, silence. This is intentional.
Her eyes beg me not to help but I am already clawing at the tubing, unraveling it from around her neck while she clenches her teeth.
“Mom, stop it! Stop it!” The sound of my voice is unrecognizable and ridiculous in its panic. Like a TV movie.
With one hand, she swats at me blindly, hitting my shoulders, my face, my arms. The other hand is grasping for the tubing that I now have tightly coiled around my own wrist. She is panting without it, and then coughing, but I can’t give it back. Panting means she’s at least breathing. She’s at least alive. Her eyes briefly apologize as she digs her nails deep into my palm. I crouch before her in silent reproach. I cannot show that it hurts. I cannot show that I am more afraid than I’ve ever been of anything. She’s at least breathing. She’s, at least, alive. She hangs her head. Not in shame but because she’s been defeated, she’s given up on her plan. And then she collapses, bringing her head to her knees, releasing a torrent of tears and expletives.
“What do I have left?” she wails. “He’s never coming back here. I look like fucking Shamu. Just let me do it. Please. Let me fucking kill myself. I’d be doing everyone a favor.”
I recognize that this is a sincere plea, that this is what she wants. And yet, she hoisted her body from bed to wheelchair and rolled herself out here. She knew I was in the kitchen. She knew I would find her.
“But I love you.” The words sound hollow and meaningless, but they’re all I can think of to say. “I love you so much.”
I wrap my arms tight around her, wedging them between her back and the back of the wheelchair. I feel the rise and fall of her chest, the clammy flesh beneath the thin cotton of her t-shirt. Her breathing is shallow from her jagged sobs but also from the lack of oxygen. I remove the tubing from my wrist and place it over her head, delicately inserting the nasal prongs in her nostrils. I give her an encouraging smile as if we’ve reached this understanding together that she undoubtedly wants to live and shares in my relief of interrupting her darkest moment.
Yet, in that moment, and others that I do not see, she wants to die.
“I don’t know why I’m here anymore.” She continues to wail, rocking back and forth, shielding her face with her elegantly thin hands. I stay kneeled before her, keeping watch over her aliveness, her breath until her inhales and exhales reach a steady rhythm.
And then her voice is calmer, deeper, quieter: “Will she or won’t she? That is the question.”
“Don’t talk like that,” I chide like a schoolteacher. My words fail me. They are useless.
In silence, we sit like that for what feels like hours. But I’m not sure. The TVs are off. No way to tell time. At some point, she distractedly pats my head and asks me to wheel her back to the bedroom. She says nothing else until I ask her if she still wants some wings.
“That sounds good,” she says as she hangs herself on my shoulders, the full weight of her is almost unbearable. I clumsily heave her back onto the mattress.
“Hopefully you’ll like my new recipe, Mums.” My voice slides into familiar, syrupy territory.
She gives a wan smile. A manicured hand covers her pale and puffy face but I see with relief that normal color is returning to her cheeks.
I say a prayer to whoever's listening, whoever’s watching: I take it back. I’m never leaving. I promise. I really promise.
Out in the kitchen, the deep-fryer is still on. The oil bubbling and turning dark.
***
On a Friday afternoon in early April, her bell chimes before my backpack even hits the floor. Giddy with the possibilities of my first school dance, I don’t shudder at the sound but happily follow it. A nurse has left the track lighting on over her bed. She is bathed in golden light, and wears an expectant smile. Her head is propped against three pillows and nearly upright, the TV on mute.
“Excited for your first real dance?” She is looking at me like she looks at everyone else, like she looks at Justin before she envelops him in all the love her pained limbs can muster.
I shrug. The excitement I felt only moments before quickly dissipates. I don’t want to admit to anyone that I can’t wait to enter the darkened gymnasium, drugstore cologne and cinnamon gum wafting through the air while Miami booty bass pulses through my horned-up body. Plus, I can’t trust that her mood won’t turn. I prepare for our exchanges like I prepare for the weather. On any given day, the sun is blotted out by torrents of rain and black, angry clouds before once again emerging as though the storm never happened. Where there’s clear skies, a tropical depression is sure to follow, no matter how temporary.
“Fake it for your dear, sick mother, please.” The more self-deprecating her sense of humor, the brighter her mood. I relax my shoulders, unclench my fists and surrender to her sunny climes.
“I’m pretty excited,” I murmur as I crawl onto the foot of the bed and curl myself at her feet.
“Well, where’s the dress?” She calls out to my coiled form.
“You want me to put it on now?”
“No, put it on tomorrow when the dance is long over.”
“You’re such a comedian,” I roll off the bed and force myself to walk slowly toward my room, to pretend that I’m not aching for her to see me all dressed up.
“Oooh, I’m so excited!” she squeals. The energy in her voice conjures impressions of other long-ago afternoons. Days of after-school brownie binges, the proud showing of schoolwork, each ditto sheet and watercolor “oohed” and “aahed” over for a blissful eternity, the spontaneous mid-school day pick-ups where she’d whisk my brother and I off to a matinee and made the word “hooky” sound better than any other freedom we’d ever know.
MTV blares as I reenter the bedroom. I consider that she’s unmuted the television to add a festive air to this occasion, to make this as special for me as she can. MTV is no longer background noise but, rather, the soundtrack to a milestone.
I give an exaggerated spin, my hands on my hips as if I were Linda or Kate or even Cindy. I toss my hair back and give my best supermodel pout. The dress is a full-length, black and white floral print with a corseted back. The teal padded bra underneath gives the illusion that I should be wearing one. I consider pairing my dress with combat boots but opt for black platform sandals instead. Three months later, I will wear this outfit to my mother’s funeral.
“Beautiful, Jillian.” She is sincere in this assessment. “Did grandma get you that?”
“Yeah, last year.”
“You’re a young woman now,” she fake-cries, wiping away imaginary tears.
“Stop!” I blush, but what I really mean is “Thank you.”
She pats the bed, beckons me with a grin. “Okay, let’s do your make-up, my teenage daughter.”
I plop onto the mattress and face her, my body squarely between her legs, my attention focused on the music videos playing behind me because I’m afraid of disappointing her somehow. The flaws can easily be found in my face, in what I might say. We are so close, closer than we’ve been since her last ICU visit when I insisted on placing my cheek on the warm sliver of skin between her tracheostomy tube and hospital gown. I stayed there, feeling her weak pulse beat against my face like a private message. I imagined it said: “I’m with you, I’m with you, I’m with you.”
Now, she applies rouge to my cheeks so I look “healthy and flushed.” She lines my lips in bold color and fills them in with something even bolder that screams “Video Vixen.” Next, she uses the kohl pencil and mascara. I raise my eyes to the ceiling as she commands while she rims each upper lid, then traces my waterlines. Her delicate hands are damp and soft. They smell like metal and flowers and clean. I lose track of what song is playing and give myself over to this moment. She is painting me as I’ve tried to each morning before school. She is painting me beautiful.
A furious whoosh, the sound of typewriter keys clacking, and then Kurt Loder’s voice: “The body of Nirvana leader, Kurt Cobain was found in a house in Seattle on Friday morning, dead of an apparently self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head…”
“Oh god,” Mom gasps. She drops the eyeliner onto my thigh.
I turn around now, away from her, and move closer to the TV. I perch at the edge of the bed as Mr. Loder provides the sordid details. An electrician found him in his former Seattle home. He looked through a window and recognized the body on the floor. Kurt had been missing for six days. A source close to the band said that while the story that Nirvana was breaking up and Kurt was seeking drug treatment “sounded bad, it was better than what was really going on.” Loder then states, “That comment remains to be clarified.”
Mr. Loder, it will never be clarified. No one ever knows what’s really going on.
In 1994, Kurt Cobain isn’t my favorite musician. But his omnipresence in my household during this time of quiet and shadow endears him to me in ways that I’m not ready to let go of. He’s a part of the furniture, a beacon, a caretaker.
Mom heaves herself to the edge of the bed. I stand up to assist but she insists she doesn’t need my help. Once sitting by my side, she is breathless and clearly in pain. I want to place my hands somewhere to comfort but everywhere, on her and in her, hurts.
“This is sad,” she says. She brushes a trembling nail against my cheek, then runs her fingers through my hair. “Not a surprise but still very sad.”
“Yeah,” I say and try not to cry. It is her caress that threatens tears, not Kurt.
Her hand pauses on my forehead. “We all have stories of, you know, what went on.” She’s intentionally vague but I know that she doesn’t mean Kurt’s suicide. I know she means her last trip to the ICU—when we all thought she was going to die.
She swallows hard, her voice shaking. “And all I have is the nightmarish memories of staying awake all night afraid something might kill me. And whether it was psychosis… It doesn’t make any difference. It was very real.”
I nod. This is her way of explaining that night. This is her way of helping me make sense of what I witnessed, what I felt. But I don’t understand. I try. I’m trying. I’m trying so hard.
I begin. I stammer, “Mom...I…”
“Your dad will be here soon,” she interrupts softly. “Have lots of fun. Take pictures in your head so you can tell me about it later.”
***
At the dance, I enter the sprawl of the gymnasium and search for faces I know. My eyes wander anxiously while flashing lights flicker in sync with a trashy techno beat. I catch the eye of a girlfriend and wave shyly as I head in her direction. But then I see a flame bounce toward me, a flash of dark pupil. Adam Jons is running to me with arms open. He is gripping me in an unexpected hug, hard and tight. It’s an embrace of grief, of camaraderie, and, perhaps, of desire.
“I can’t believe he’s dead,” he says over my shoulder. I smell the cigarettes in his hair. “This sucks! It fuckin’ sucks.”
“I know,” I dumbly say into the soapy sweetness of his neck. Before I can utter another sound, he’s retreating, turning his back away from me and toward his gang of flanneled boys. My arms plummet to my sides like baby birds.
Sitting on the bleachers, I stare hard at my ruby toenails, kicking myself for not finding the right words to keep Adam Jons’s body close to mine. Around me, perfect girls are huddled in groups, content in the knowledge that they are wanted here. My beauty fades under the soft lights as I compare each body part, each facial feature to theirs.
“What are you doing sitting down? C’mon!” My girlfriend pulls me like taffy toward the throbbing heart of the dance floor. She twirls me around in the throng of sweaty 7th graders as we belt out gleefully: “Never trust a big butt and a smile.” My girlfriend bends over and a classmate smacks her denim ass. I arch my back as I sway, hoping he’ll do the same to mine.
Before I find my rhythm, and can be acknowledged, it’s slow dance time. Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” summons all the couples and wannabe couples to make way to the center of the dancefloor, girls’ arms resting on boys’ shoulders, boys’ hands firmly on girls’ backsides. They move like zombies in heat, leaden, hesitating movements. Around and around. My girlfriend is chatting now with a group of hot girls that make me sweaty and afraid. I stand apart from them, alone.
Then, the DJ transitions to Nirvana’s “All Apologies.” The couples extricate themselves from each other’s arms and stand around awkwardly, unsure of how to proceed in the midst of this earnest lament.
What else can I be? All apologies.
I scour the gym for Adam Jons and his long-haired pals. A second of recognition is all I need to remember that I am seen, I’m here, I exist. I matter. But Adam Jons is nowhere to be found. It’s so dark in here and I can’t stop thinking about “suicide note at the scene” and the sound of oxygen hissing and “found in a house...dead” and “Will she or won’t she?”
Everything’s my fault.
I choke back a sob and rub my palm against my lips. My lipstick has worn off.
I try to block out the dark in my mind and look for the sun. So, I think about the moment when Dad will pick me up from here and bring me back to a house that is no longer his, how he will leave me in the white glow of our driveway with a telling hand squeeze and a “So long, Sweet Pea.” I think about the moment I will unlock the door and enter the dark to tell her about Adam Jons and how my body felt in his hands. I think about “I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black” and “Touch Me, I’m Sick” and what love looks like when it’s tainted and spoiled by forces beyond our control. I think about Kurt and the night when she let me stop her from becoming like him. And how I never thanked her for prolonging those quiet, timeless, if terrible, few months when I kindly gazed upon her body and knew it better than my own.
Jillian Luft is an emerging writer and educator living in Brooklyn, NY. She mostly writes nonfiction about mothers, daughters, trauma, bodies and Florida.