I said I would.
My mother was unconscious in her room, embedded in life support, her breathing regulated by a machine that wheezed as her rib cage expanded and relaxed. Her hair was whiter than I remembered it being. I stroked her cheek, but she didn't respond.
Out of some misbegotten doctorly instinct I raised one of her eyelids, meaning, I suppose, to check the dilation of her pupils. But she had hemorrhaged into the eye after her stroke. It was red as a cherry tomato, flushed with blood.
* * * * *
I rode away from the hospital with Carol but turned down her invitation to dinner, told her I'd fix myself something. She said, 'I'm sure there's something in the kitchen at your mother's place. But you're more than welcome to stay in the Big House if you like. Even though it's a bit of a mess these days without your mother to boss the help. I'm sure we can scare up a passable guest bedroom.'
I thanked her but said I'd prefer to stay across the lawn.
'Let me know if you change your mind.' She gazed from the gravel drive across the lawn to the Little House as if she were seeing it clearly for the first time in years. 'You still carry a key—?'
'Still do,' I said.
'Well, then. I'll leave you to it. The hospital has both numbers if her condition changes.' And Carol hugged me again and walked up the porch stairs with a resoluteness, not quite eagerness, that suggested she had postponed her drinking long enough.
I let myself into my mother's house. Hers more than mine, I thought, though my presence had not been expunged from it. When I left for university I had denuded my small bedroom and packed whatever was important to me, but my mother had kept the bed and filled the blank spaces (the pine shelving, the windowsill) with potted plants, rapidly drying in her absence; I watered them. The rest of the house was equally tidy. Diane had once described my mother's housekeeping as 'linear,' by which I think she meant orderly but not obsessive. I surveyed the living room, the kitchen, glanced into her bedroom. Not everything was in its place. But everything had a place.
Come nightfall I closed the curtains and turned on every light in every room, more lights than my mother had ever deemed appropriate at any given time, a declaration against death. I wondered if Carol had noticed the glare across the winter-brown divide, and if so whether she found it comforting or alarming.
E.D. came home around nine that night, and he was gracious enough to knock at the door and offer his sympathy. He looked uncomfortable under the porch light, his tailored suit disheveled. His breath smoked in the evening chill. He touched his pockets, breast and hip, unconsciously, as if he had forgotten something or simply didn't know what to do with his hands. 'I'm sorry, Tyler,' he said.
His condolences seemed grossly premature, as if my mother's death were not merely inevitable but an established fact. He had already written her off. But she was still drawing breath, I thought, or at least processing oxygen, miles away, alone in her room at George Washington. 'Thank you for saying so, Mr. Lawton.'
'Jesus, Tyler, call me E.D. Everybody else does. Jason tells me you're doing good work down there at Perihelion Florida.'
'My patients seem satisfied.'
'Great. Every contribution counts, no matter how small. Listen, did Carol put you out here? Because we have a guest bedroom ready if you want it.'
'I'm fine right where I am.'
'Okay. I understand that. Just knock if you need anything, all right?'
He ambled back across the winter-brown lawn. Much had been made, in the press and in the Lawton family, of Jason's genius, but I reminded myself that E.D. could claim that title, too. He had parlayed an engineering degree and a talent for business into a major corporate enterprise, and he had been selling aerostat-enabled telecom bandwidth when Americom and AT&T were still blinking at the Spin like startled deer. What he lacked was not Jason's intelligence but Jason's wit and Jason's deep curiosity about the physical universe. And maybe a dash of Jason's humanity.
Then I was alone again, at home and not at home, and I sat on the sofa and marveled for a while at how little this room had changed. Sooner or later it would fall to me to dispose of the contents of the house, a job I could barely envision, a job more difficult, more preposterous, than the work of cultivating life on another planet. But maybe it was because I was contemplating that act of deconstruction that I noticed a gap on the top shelf of the etagere next to the TV.
Noticed it because, to my knowledge, the high shelf had received no more than a cursory dusting in all the years I had lived here. The top shelf was the attic of my mother's life. I could have recited the order of the contents of that shelf by closing my eyes and picturing it: her high school yearbooks (Martell Secondary School in Bingham, Maine, 1975, '76, '77, '78); her Berkeley grad book, 1982; a jade Buddha book-end; her diploma in a stand-up plastic frame; the brown accordion file in which she kept her birth certificate, passport, and tax documents; and, braced by another green Buddha, three tattered New Balance shoeboxes labeled mementos (school), mementos (marcus), and odds & ends.
But tonight the second jade Buddha stood askew and the box marked mementos (school) was missing. I assumed she had taken it down herself, though I hadn't seen it elsewhere in the house. Of the three boxes, the only one she had regularly opened in my presence was odds & ends. It had been packed with concert playbills and ticket stubs, brittle newspaper clippings (including her own parents' obituaries), a souvenir lapel pin in the shape of the schooner Bluenose from her honeymoon in Nova Scotia, matchbooks culled from restaurants and hotels she had visited, costume jewelry, a baptismal certificate, even a lock of my own baby hair preserved in a slip of waxed paper closed with a pin.
I took down the other box, the one marked mementos (marcus). I had never been especially curious about my father, and my mother had seldom spoken about him apart from the basic thumbnail sketch (a handsome man, an engineer, a jazz collector, E.D.'s best friend in college, but a heavy drinker and a victim, one night on the road home from an electronics supplier in Milpitas, of his own fondness for speedy automobiles). Inside the shoebox was a stack of letters in vellum envelopes addressed in a curt, clean handwriting that must have been his. He had sent these letters to Belinda Sutton, my mother's maiden name, at an address in Berkeley I didn't recognize.
I removed one of those envelopes and opened it, pulled out the yellowing paper and unfolded it.
The paper was unlined but the handwriting cut across the page in small, neat parallels. Dear Bel, it began, and continued, I thought I said everything on the phone last night but can't stop thinking about you. Writing this seems to bring you closer tho not as close as I'd like. Not as close as we were last August! I play that memory like videotape every night I can't lie down next to you.
And more, which I did not read. I folded the letter and tucked it into its yellowed envelope and closed the box and put it back where it belonged.
* * * * *
In the morning there was a knock at the door. I answered it expecting Carol or some amanuensis from the Big House. But it wasn't Carol. It was Diane. Diane in a midnight-blue floor-sweeper skirt and high-collared blouse. Her hands were clasped under her breasts. She looked up at me, eyes sparkling. 'I'm so sorry,' she said. 'I came as soon as I heard.'
But too late. The hospital had called ten minutes earlier. Belinda Dupree had died without regaining consciousness.
* * * * *
At the memorial service E.D. spoke briefly and uncomfortably and said nothing of significance. I spoke, Diane spoke; Carol meant to speak but in the end was too tearful or inebriated to mount the pulpit.
Diane's eulogy was the most moving, cadenced and heartfelt, a catalogue of the kindnesses my mother had exported across the lawn like gifts from a wealthier, kinder nation. I was grateful for it. Everything else about the ceremony seemed mechanical by comparison: half-familiar faces bobbed out of the crowd to utter homilies and half-truths, and I thanked them and smiled, thanked them and smiled, until it was time for the walk to the graveside.
* * * * *
There was a function at the Big House that evening, a post-funeral reception at which I was offered condolences by E.D.'s business associates, none of whom I knew but some of whom had known my father, and by
