Saving the World (27 page)

When no one answers or calls out for her to come in, Alma nudges the door open. Angry voices are coming from the back of the house, Mickey's and, now and then, Helen's. A fight is going on.

“Please, Mickey, please,” Helen is pleading. “I can't let you do this.”

“You can, but you won't help me,” Mickey accuses. What a time to be asking Helen for help! Doesn't Mickey know his mother is at death's door? The doctor has amended his hopeful prognosis of six months. Helen might not last the year. The guy is unbalanced, Helen as much as said so. With a queasy feeling in her gut, Alma remembers Tera's remark about Mickey's being up to something.

She considers calling out. Surely, that would break up the argument. But then, after Alma leaves, Helen will be left in whatever untenable
situation she is in. And knowing Helen, she won't complain about it. Alma should find out what Mickey is up to and report him to the team. They'll know what to do with the former Marine. They're trained to handle difficult situations at these dire junctions when, so they've explained, unfinished family business is likely to get stirred up again.

“I always want to help you. I do.” Helen sounds so frail. What is she doing up? Has she returned to using her walker? “But this thing is crazy, Mickey. You can't let Hannah talk you into this!”

Hannah … Hannah. The name sounds familiar, but Alma is too caught up trying to figure out what crazy thing Mickey is talking about to unravel who this Hannah person might be.

“Forget it, okay? Just forget it! I knew you wouldn't do it. You can be everybody else's mother! But you won't help your own son!”

Helen is sobbing now. Alma cannot bear to hear her old friend cry this way. She feels pulled to the rescue as a mother might by the sound of her infant wailing in another room. “Hello!” Alma calls out. “Helen! It's me! Hello!”

A deathly silence follows her call. Alma walks down the front hall, craning her neck to look into the empty living room. She is pretty sure the voices were coming from the kitchen.

In a matter of seconds that seem endless, she hears the clomping of Helen's walker on the linoleum. Then the bang of the back door. In a moment Helen will turn that corner into the hall, her face distraught; her eyes red; her thin, white hair falling out of its plaintive ponytail; and there's a fifty-fifty chance that when Alma asks her, “Helen, are you all right?” the old woman will say, “I'm fine, dear.”

And it's as she is waiting for this moment that Alma's memory finally makes the connection. The AIDS caller was named Hannah, so Tera said. Hannah McSomething. There can't be two of them. Hannah McMullen, Mickey's sick wife!

When Helen comes into view, Alma doesn't even ask. “I heard the fighting, Helen,” she confesses. “You shouldn't have to put up with this.”

The old woman bows her head, sobbing inside her walker.

A
LMA IS STILL AIMING
on leaving after Thanksgiving to join Richard, but she keeps delaying calling the airlines. She wants to be sure Helen will be all right. Surprisingly, Helen has been on the upswing since the Mickey incident. Maybe Helen will stick around for a lot longer than the doctor predicted. Maybe fighting with her son gives her a reason to go on living—she can't die until she makes peace with him.

Alma has not been able to pin Helen down on what the fight was about. Helen has been vague. Mickey was upset because he wants to take care of his mother himself, wants this whole team of busybody women to back off.

“Families shouldn't treat families.” Alma reminds Helen. Is this really what the fight was about? It sounds fishy. Alma is sure she heard Mickey asking for Helen's help, not asking to take care of her. “Besides, Mickey hasn't even been practicing as a nurse, has he?”

Helen isn't sure. She hasn't kept up with the particulars of her son's life. He still has some friends in the medical field. They get him jobs from time to time. One of these friends is a medical missionary. Another heads a lab where Mickey last worked. Helen is straying from the issue at hand. What does Mickey want? “He wants …” Helen waves her hand vaguely, gets weepy again. She won't say. No doubt she will protect Mickey till the bitter end. He is her son, the boy who won the 4-H contest and who now needs her help. “Has anybody heard from him?” Helen asks. The plaintive upward tilt of the old woman's face reminds Alma of being young, in love with someone who was going to break her heart.

No one has seen or heard from Mickey. He hasn't come back to the house since the day of the incident. Claudine with her local connections makes a bunch of phone calls and finds out from Mickey's wife's family that Hannah has left the treatment center. No law's been broken as she was released into the custody of her husband. She had been doing very well, but the worry is that she might stop her medications and have another full-blown psychotic breakdown. And, yes, this Hannah is the very same woman who was making disturbing phone
calls, claiming she had AIDS. She was tested at the center, and the results were negative. But she insists that she has an invisible strain of the disease, which won't show up on any test. She has brought it to Vermont, to infect everyone she calls, an AIDS of conscience that will wake up this country as to how the rest of the world is dying for lack of a little of the too much we have here. Except for strategy, Alma thinks, this woman sounds like Tera. Except for the rage, Alma finds herself agreeing with what both women have to say.

“Things are really crazy around here,” she tells Richard when he reaches her late one night. She feels gratified that he is calling her, missing her at bedtime. It's her and only her he wants, why should she doubt this? She fills him in on the Mickey fight and the follow-up. Her AIDS caller was Mickey's wife! “The very same woman, can you believe it?”

“I don't know,” Richard says. “I used to think Vermont was a safe place. Maybe you should come down here?”

Is he serious? Has he read her mind? “Don't think I haven't been thinking about it.”

“But it sounds like you've started on something new?”

“Not really.” Alma has learned her lesson about stringing people along with the promise of a novel she hasn't written. She has already told Richard about the call with Lavinia, with Veevee. Richard is all for waiting and offering Veevee whatever Alma ends up writing. Fifty grand is a lot of money.

“How about that smallpox story you faxed me?”

“It's just an idea.” Who is she kidding? The story is already inside her, string in the labyrinth, as she makes her blind way out into that big-hearted life she wants to be living with him.

“Well, any time you want to come down.”

“I just want to be sure Helen's going to be okay.” She had been doing so well after the Mickey incident. But she has taken a downturn again. The doctor says Helen should consider having hospice in the hospital. “Claudine and I were over there last night talking to her. I know she really doesn't want to go, but she is saying yes, she doesn't want to be a bother to all of us.”

“My wife, Florence Nightingale.” Richard laughs, but Alma can tell he is only half joking.

Florence Nightingale with the dark soul, full of self-doubt and mixed motives. But there are worse things to be in the world, Alma decides. Look at Mickey, making a dying woman's last days miserable. The spark is gone from Helen's eye. The party is called off. She is going to die as she has lived for the last few decades. Without her son.

A
LMA OFFERS TO SPEND
Thanksgiving with Helen. Tera's off to DC on a march with Paul and Richard is a world away. “We're the two turkey orphans,” Alma teases Helen, who smiles weakly after the lapse of a second. That lapse reminds Alma of Mickey's slow absorption of conversation, but in Helen's case it is the slowing down of her brain. What was it the team called it? All systems are shutting down. The body is saving its energy for the things that must absolutely be working for life to go on. Soon those, too, will stop, and like the astronauts in their fragile capsule, Helen will go behind the moon. But she won't be coming round again.

As for her trip, Alma has gone back to the original plan. She'll fly down for Christmas at her parents' condo in Miami, where she'll meet up with Richard. There she'll present him with his Christmas gift: she will be joining him for the next three, four months. Surprise! She hopes it will be a surprise he wants. Every phone call, he mentions that he's missing her lots, that she sure would be welcome if she decides to come, that he doesn't want to pressure her. And these last few days, he has sounded downright forlorn. Holiday blues kicking in, no doubt. Since his divorce, the boys have always spent Thanksgiving with their father, Christmas with their mother. Even now that they are grown men, the “tradition” has continued, the two older boys driving up from the city with their current girlfriends, the tumbleweed Sam flying in from wherever he is currently living. But this year Richard will be eating his yucca and plantains and fried cheese all alone on a Dominican mountainside. Bienvenido is in the capital attending a
workshop. Starr is back in Texas for a family wedding, staying on for Thanksgiving.

Alma's new plan makes a lot more sense all around. Richard will have had almost two months to get settled in, making the project his. And Alma will have three more weeks to be with Helen. It seems the mantle has fallen on her, maybe by default: Alma is the one Helen seems to want around as her energy is diminishing. “Read to me,” Helen will say. “Anything you want,” she answers when Alma asks what kind of book Helen would like. So Alma reads her what she is writing, the story of Balmis and Isabel and the orphan carriers and the wide Atlantic they have just finished crossing. Helen mostly dozes. But, like a child, if Alma stops for more than a few moments, Helen's eyes open. “Is it already over?” she asks.

E
ARLY THANKSGIVING AFTERNOON,
on the way to Helen's, Alma stops at Jerry's Market for the jellied cranberry sauce Helen likes. Alma thought of making the sauce from scratch—can't be that hard—but Helen insisted she really likes the canned brand. The truth is, Helen is unlikely to eat more than a tiny spoonful. She just is not hungry anymore and eating in general makes her feel sick. Stomach and intestines signing off. Roger. Next to go will be the synapses in her head, then the muscles of her heart. Alma finds herself torn, wanting Helen to hang on and then wanting Helen to die before the old woman suffers any more than she has to, before Alma leaves for four months, heartsick that she isn't waiting until Helen is done with her dying before going on with her life.

As Alma turns into the aisle where the woman at the cashier said she'd find the jellied cranberry sauce—there it is, only one brand, this is a mom-and-pop store, after all—she sees Mickey, coming up from the back of the store, swinging the red plastic grocery basket as if he's on a picnic. By his side, an arm through his, is a tall, thin blonde woman who looks almost ethereal in the very paleness of her coloring. For a moment, Alma considers turning on her heels, pretending she
hasn't seen them. What can she say to Mickey? You've made your mom miserable? What good will that do? What if the prodigal son repents and decides to return to the fold? Can that be good for Helen?

Mickey spots her and his face lights up. He murmurs something to the woman at his side, who turns to look at Alma. There is nothing for Alma to do but wait as they approach her.

“Hey!” Mickey stops that one step closer than Alma likes for people to stand talking to her. Hannah comes up beside him, smiling, a kind of free-floating smile, maybe medicated, maybe shy.

“Hello, Mickey,” Alma says briskly. Should she tell him she's on her way to have Thanksgiving with his dying mother? Don't be mean, Alma cautions herself. This is Helen's son. The boy on the refrigerator. But Alma is still too upset with Mickey to care if he was once that boy. All she knows is that he is now the man making Helen's last days miserable.

“Sorry about the other day,” Mickey says. He must have recognized her voice from the front hall. His penitence, if indeed it is penitence, surprises her. He has always seemed implacable in his oddness. Well, if he is sorry, it's not Alma he should be apologizing to, but his mother.

“Your mother is very sick,” she says. “She doesn't have much longer to live.”

“Poor Helen,” the woman says. Her voice is surprisingly normal-sounding, not the ugly voice that called down curses on the other end of the line. But this must be Hannah. Who else could she be? Alma waits for Mickey to introduce his wife, but those civilities are beyond him. And, at this moment, beyond her.

Mickey is watching Alma with that look that pulls her in, so that she feels trapped in his mind, a mind she doesn't understand, so she can't pick the lock, let herself out. She looks away, her eye caught by the two frozen turkey dinners in his basket. Jesus. The boy is back, the 4-H kid who will grow up to live a pitiful life.

“Your mom's very sad,” Alma says in a kindlier tone. “She needs to make peace with you so she can die in peace.” The team is going to kill
her! How dare Alma take it upon herself to engineer a reconciliation between a dying woman too weak to get through a whole meal and her angry son? Dry tinder to his lit fuse! But Helen would never forgive Alma if she knew that Alma had a chance to bring her boy home and Alma didn't do it.

Mickey is still watching her, but his eyes, Helen's eyes, glisten with tears. If Alma has been hard on him, it was only in telling him the truth he needs to hear.

“We just called Helen.” Hannah nods to the front of the store, where an old rotary phone, not unlike Tera's, is mounted on the wall, a little sign above it advising customers to limit themselves to short calls, please, no long distance. Homey touches abound throughout the store. There is a bulletin board with Polaroids of the latest newborns. Raffle tickets for sale to sponsor the local ball team. The place has a following. Today it is empty. But now and then someone hurries in. A convenience to our customers, Alma has heard the woman say about the store being open on Thanksgiving Day. “But there was no answer.”