heroes that were Mark’s cronies back then. But there was one—Fiona would have been, what, fourteen? Not cute anymore, and her features hadn’t rearranged themselves into the pleasing openness of her adult years. She was a closed, secretive creature in adolescence.
Yet this boy—this young man—Mark’s freshman-year roommate from Northwestern, saw possibilities. I had always been alert for predators, but Eric slipped below my radar. Too sallow, too diffident, without any of the charm or resentment I associated back then with successful seducers.
What happened between them I don’t know. Fiona wouldn’t tell me. Was her heart broken? Did she catch a venereal disease? Did she have an abortion? Any of those were likely, but I think it was probably something less melodramatic. I thought at the time she was merely helping him through a statistics course. Amanda thought something similar. She thought Fiona had taken pity on him for his social clumsiness. It didn’t occur to either of us that Fiona needed anything from Eric. It just wasn’t what one thought about Fiona.
I ended it one night, after I caught them together sitting on the front steps. I wasn’t spying, hadn’t even thought about them, just opened the door and there they were. He had a petulant look on his face, the kind of don’t-you-love-me face that young men like to pull. Not one I would have thought Fiona would be susceptible to. Then I saw her expression. Not love. No. Something worse. A kind of despairing responsibility. A tortured acceptance of a heavy burden.
It took every ounce of my strength not to kick that young man in his bony buttocks. I can still picture his aggrieved shoulders as he leaned toward Fiona, willing her to give him some of her strength. And she looked back at me, saw that I saw, and the weight seemed to evaporate from her body as I shook my head. No.
Later that night she accused me, in tears, of ruining her life. And so we played out that particular mother- daughter scene with a gusto that fooled both James and Mark. But we knew what was going on. A timely rescue, met with gratitude.
I find a letter next to my morning pills and juice. My name on it, no address. No stamp. Two pages of unlined notepaper, tiny cramped writing. I read it through once, then again.
Today my mother died. I am not crying, it was her time. So it goes. So it always goes.
Such a lovely man, my father. He had a quiet mind, as Thoreau would say. How did he end up with my mother? She flirted with homosexual priests, told audacious lies, uncorked the whiskey at four o’clock every day. And now, finally, gone.
My flight to Philadelphia is delayed, and so when I arrive at the hospice the bed is already empty—someone failed to pass on the news that I was coming. I sit on the stripped bed. Does it matter? No. I don’t know if she would have known me in any case.
She wandered at the end. A devout Catholic always, in the last months of her life she forsook Christ and the Blessed Mother for the virgin martyrs. Theresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, and Lucy were her constant companions. She would giggle, swat at the air with a Kleenex, offer them bits of food. A hungry, witty lot, to judge from the constant feeding they required and my mother’s constant laughing at their repartee.
She retained her mischievousness. She never lost that. Once, she secreted a ketchup package from her lunch tray and dotted it on her wrists at the lunocapitate joints, on her ankles at the talonaviculars. Bitter, vinegary stigmata. The nurse’s assistant screamed, to my mother’s obvious delight. She gave a high five to an invisible coconspirator.
Ultimately what did her in was a fall. An innocuous one. Her knees buckled as she hobbled from her bed to the toilet. She collapsed onto the floor, was helped up, and that was the end of her.
That evening, she was running a high fever. Throughout the night she remained deep in conversation with her saints. It was a different kind of delirium than usual: She was saying her good-byes. She kissed the virgins good-
