Seven years ago today I kissed my mother's forehead, brushed my hand through the softness of her remaining hair, and stepped back so a fat man in overalls could zip the black bag closed. Gone for good this time. Good-bye Momma. I rubbed my burgeoning belly for comfort. The baby shifted, restless, against my hand.
Mother's Day, a week before she died, I gave her oils and massage creams and sat on the floor, rubbing her feet. We had a grand celebration planned, but it lasted all of ten minutes. She lay back on the bed and fell asleep. She didn't close her eyes, but she fell asleep, and she stayed that way for almost a week, snoring, her blue-blue eyes staring at the ceiling. I visited her every day, despite the presence of her boyfriend, Don, whom I had feared with good reason since I was a child. She awoke a few days before the end and said the last words she would ever say to me, "I want to travel again. I want to eat popcorn again." Mom always knew what she wanted.
Coming home from a friend's house in the quiet dark of midnight, I found my sister slumped on my front lawn. She had walked from Mom's apartment. My answering machine, she told me, was full of their messages. Mom was dead, and had been for hours. They hadn't called anyone. They were saving her for me.
I drove her the few blocks back, numb, as I had been for months. A part of me had stepped away, and wouldn't return until my son was placed on my breast and suckled for the first time. What was left simply kept itself fed, its heart beating, hiding in the quietest corner of its mind.
Mom was on the bed and Clara, my niece, was sitting at her feet playing rummy with Don. Clara was eight. Mom's bare toes, the nails heartbreakingly painted, touched Clara's back. Mom was wearing one of the dresses she'd bought a few weeks before, when she was pretending there was still a reason. Its front was soiled with greenish black, the long stain spreading down her neck from her lips. Her eyes were half open, and the look of horror on her face made me want to run. Instead I cried. I wedged myself in between Clara and my mother's stiff toes and I cried.
My sister and Don were angry. They wanted to know where I'd been. They told me how awful it had been for them those last few hours. Clara said, "My mom wouldn't stop screaming," as she lay down three of a kind. I wanted to vomit. Jesus, no one should have to die like that. My GOD what is this child doing here?
My sister described Mom's awakening, her pleas for help, her choking, coughing up bile.
Don said he "might have" overdosed her in the end, when it was plain she was dying. I wanted to scream, "SHE WASN'T A DOG, YOU BASTARD!" But I cried, remembering the things she'd let that man do to me. Remembering there was a child in the room, and another unborn, and Mother's Day just past.
I prayed daily to be a better mother than mine, I had prayed my mother would live to meet my son, and sometimes, before she left, I secretly wished she would just get done with it and set me free.
Now as I sat watching my eight-year-old niece playing cards with a man who once tortured me, blithely sitting at the feet of the cold, sad shell of her grandmother, I cried. For the child within me, the child beside me, and the child I never was, I cried.
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