Streams of Babel (5 page)

These conversations never make sense. They're never pleasing in any way, and so I don't get this twitch to inquire often.

"At any rate ... I love you from here to the stars and back, Cora, and you just have to accept that as enough."

She means that my mother will never love me. My mother is wild and crazy and financially stupid. I slither down again, deciding it's time to find Barbie shoes that match a handbag. I like my Barbies perfect.

I jerked toward Oma's chair, and despite my achy joints, I picked up the mountain of Aleese's dirty clothes. I decided it was the mess around here making me sick—who wouldn't be sick? I lowered my eyes behind the mound, so as not to see the little stream of blood down the couch. Maybe I just decided to wash her clothes because they seemed more approachable than the couch.

In the laundry room, I separated out the lights from the darks and added bleach, so that when I decided on a charity, they would get the nicest package possible. Busyness—it had always kept me safe. And busying myself brought the needed memory to the forefront:
I know why I got out of bed.

I started the wash load and slowly retreated to the living room, back to the couch. Often Aleese left her crusty spiral
notebook full of poetry and thoughts on the floor beside her, but that night I would have to raise that bloody cushion to get to it. As I leaned slowly toward that stain, I felt my mind floating conveniently backward, away from the dried stream, to the first time I ever saw the notebook—

The front door slams and draws me out of the bedroom, and Oma's standing in front of her television chair. This woman with short black hair and beautiful peachy skin is standing between her and the television.

"Hi, Mom. I'm broke again. But this time in more ways than one."

Just a cardboard box and cheap suitcase lie beside her. The final thump is a backpack she lets fall off her thumb, and it lands at her feet. It's huge, covers her knees, but she's rubbing her left arm, which is bandaged from the shoulder to the tips of her fingers.

"I just finished six weeks in a rehab hospital in Israel, trying not to end up here, but their charity only goes so far."

"What happened, Aleese?"

"You still run around town saying you never lie?"

"Absolutely."

"
Then I can't lie to a nonliar. Uh ... two years ago my evil lover got carried away and tried to drag me off to his cave by the arm. Does that work? I've tried hospitals on three continents. But all the king's horses and all the king's men..." She takes a peacoat off her good arm, drops it on top of the pack.

"Aleese, you've been telling me you hurt your arm ... Why didn't you tell me it was this bad?"

"Denial." Her voice is loud. "Except for the fact that it hurts like hell, I got no feeling in it. Nor will I, according to the last idiots at Mount Sinai Hospital. They ate my last cash. Got any room?"

Oma's eyes swim over to me. I can barely see her mouth move as she mumbles, "You've always said you wanted to meet your mother. Well...
"

The woman comes toward me, stops, leaving three feet between me and her. She's not big. I'm just about as tall. Despite that she's petite, she swaggers, like a beautiful pirate, like somebody fearless. Her eyes are deep brown, so much like mine. But she's far prettier than I am. Her nose is sharper, her jaw is more squared and determined, her thin lips are redder. I feel ... diluted or vague or something. Her black eyes glare. At first I think it's fear. Then I decide it's something worse. Contempt?

"So, this is Cora." Her eyes run down my legs and up. "This is my brat."

"
Oh my god..." Oma rests her forehead in her fingers with her eyes shut, but one corner of my mother's mouth turns up.

"Don't mind my sense of humor, kid. It's rough. I'm Aleese."

I wonder why she's sticking her tiny hand out for me to shake instead of hugging me. "Please call me Aleese. We'll get along far better that way—
"

And out of her backpack had tumbled a fat, spiral notebook, the kind with the five dividers and lots of skinny-lined pages. It was big, and it hit the floor with a thud. It had been an angel of mercy, pulling my stunned gaze from the pirate eyes that were too strong, too weary, too angry, too apologetic for my normal existence.

I had seen the notebook a thousand times since then, as it was never far from her. Once, she'd caught me trying to scoop it up while she was sleeping, and she got me in some sort of death grip by the neck. Her strength seemed to gather when she was drugged.

"
The devil lives in my books, brat. You want to loose the devil all over your precious little Trinity Falls? Go ahead. Open it." Her dilated pupils bulged into the dark brown of her irises.

"
Lie back down, and don't ever touch me like that again." I have learned not to fear her, to believe she won't hurt me. She's never gone past pulling my hair, and only when she's so blitzed that she's speaking in Middle Eastern languages.

She lets go. I heave a sigh and vow not to let her dictate my movements.

I had opened the notebook occasionally when she was in the Land of Nod. But she'd always left it facedown, and I could only ruffle the back few pages without risking awakening her. I hadn't seen much—blasphemies I wouldn't care to repeat, nonsense laced with bitterness, things akin to "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

If she had
long
been a drug addict, had
long
been mean and spiteful, I could have done without that information. I could have done without it now. I still flipped to the back.

Dated February 27, just yesterday, she had written this:

Jack and Jill went up the hill to catch the perfect photo. Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill ... gets gangbanged by a goddamn bunch of rabid, fucking goons.

I plopped down in Oma's TV chair in disgust, pulling myself into a ball to ward off deeper chills. I remembered Oma telling me a few times how all Mother Goose rhymes had hidden meanings. She had even mentioned the Jack and Jill poem, something like Jack had been a King John of some European nation, and he had led his army into battle. He died
fighting, symbolized by "fell down and broke his crown," and his country, "Jill," surrendered shortly thereafter.

But applying kings and queens to my mother's life seemed too surreal. I could only flick my wrist, turn the huge clumps of dreaded pages, now stiff and crackly with writing. I couldn't remember the date Aleese came here to stay, but I knew the month had been September, the year 1996. There were only a couple of entries that month, toward the beginning of the notebook.

After the date "9/12/96" was "Somebody Tell a Joke."

I'm the sad orchestra playing in the end of an epic classic. I'm the oboe solo saved for lovers torn asunder, for child victims of the London plague, for stale smoke rising after bombs leveled German villages.

God, you're maudlin today, Aleese.

Skeleton walks into a bar. Skeleton sits on a stool, says to the bartender, "I'll have two beers ... and a mop.
"

Where's the stewardess with the scotch? How'd I get the goddamn middle seat on a transatlantic goddamn flight? If I cry, I will fall prey to my foes on either side. The perky pregnant lady on my right might try to hug me, and I'll have to strangle her. The stone-faced Pakistani on my left might roll his eyes and crumble into my well-kempt sling, not that I would feel it.

Where's Jeremy?????

Jeremy Brandruff Ireland. September 1, 1957–September 10, 1996.

Oh Jeremy.

Oh my god.

Why didn't I just die in Mogadishu?

Oh Mogadishu...

I glanced back up at this man's name, this death date, which apparently was just days before she wrote it. And I heard the echoes of Aleese's mournful, incoherent cries from one night in her second year home. It was the only time I'd heard her mention a place from her wanderings.

"Oh ... Mogadishu..."

"Oh ... Mogadishu..."

"Oh ... Mogadishu..."

She'd groaned it so soulfully and sadly, as if it were a lost lover's name. But I'd never asked her what the word meant. She had woken herself up muttering too loudly, and the next night when I came in, she was asleep with a sweat sock stuffed in her mouth.

Mogadishu ...
somewhere in Africa?
In elementary school, when a teacher showed us a map of the world, I would wonder where on it my mother was instead of Trinity. It had inspired me never to want to think of places outside Trinity. And now
Mogadishu
dissolved conveniently into the silence again as I stared at "Jeremy Brandruff Ireland," and two dates.

I had always associated myself and my roots with Oma, all the while knowing that this picture was inadequate. But with a mother so mysteriously estranged, how much chance did I have of knowing about my father?

As I stared at this name, the hair stood up on my arms, as though the air created a draft to signal his significance. If
September 10, 1996, was a death date, how did he die? Had Aleese come home beaten down by this grief, too? Did she simply have no feelings left?

I should have felt interested, having perhaps discovered my father's identity. But it was exhausting to stare at the name. Written so mournfully, it implied that Aleese had been capable of love. So her attitude toward me was even more stupefying, and like I did every so often, I saw clearly the inconceivable horror I always worked so hard to ignore:
Even bad mothers love their children. My mother should have loved me.

It was the morphine.
I'd relied on the morphine to explain so much—and except for a bad week here or there, her morphine had been able to kill
my
pain as well. It seemed strangely like it had been my addiction, too, and now that she was beyond its powers, so was I.

My eyelids suddenly seemed to weigh a thousand pounds as the memory struck me of the box Aleese had brought home with her, the one that was near her feet when she shook my hand and implied that I should never call her "Mother."
It had been full of videotapes.

I felt the reverb of it calling to me now from somewhere. Attic? Crawl space?

I choked as an ambulance passed by the window again. The hulking shadow was silent this time, except for splashing through that huge gutter puddle out on the curb and sending a great wave of orange dots dripping down the screen like tears. They filled the room yet again with red, and reddish orange tears dripped down the screen, forcing a vivid flashback of earlier tonight.

"We got clean sheets. Come on."

Why hadn't I gone with Scott Eberman?

The reddened walls and reminders of death doubled my aloneness, which I never dreamed I would have felt back when I used to predict that Aleese would eventually overdose. I didn't know what to make of myself without her. I should have felt relieved. But I felt so very alone.

The truth bled through with the crazed red flashes of the silent ambulance:
I could produce enough idle chitchat in school to earn myself a shiny trophy. But I had zero relationship skills. All my energy has gone into preventing relationships, not creating them.
To go with Scott Eberman would have been like flinging myself out of an airplane without any skydiving lessons. I would have crash-landed in the bramble of my own klutzy, panicking awkwardness.

I stood to make a dash for my blankets. But I managed to grab the phone out of its cradle and take it into the bed with me. I knew no one would call. I didn't want anyone to call. I think I just wanted to sleep with the phone.

SCOTT EBERMAN
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2002
10:59
P.M.

I ACTUALLY LIKE being inside Saint Ann's Hospital. I like taking my shift breaks in the emergency room nursing station, watching the medics fly around, hearing the ring of oh-so-many phones. But tonight, I didn't feel that sense of control over an out-of-hand universe that usually comes with being in the ER. I paced away from Mom's cubicle, back to Mom's cubicle. And the fact that I know all these doctors and nurses didn't help as much as you'd think.

They were probably more sympathetic to me when I brought Mom in than they would have been to your average Charlie. But when they couldn't get Dr. Godfrey in here immediately, and they couldn't kill her pain immediately, my toes curled and uncurled as I paced. I was resisting temptation to start kicking my fave nurses' anklebones. Familiarity does not breed solutions, and somehow that came as a shock.

Mom waved me away from her after almost an hour. I could tell this headache was still giving her hell, but her sinuses had stopped bleeding, and her vitals were normal. Dr. Godfrey was Saint Ann's allergy and infectious disease specialist, and I'm not sure whether it was Mom's reputation in the community or my employment here that got him to say he was coming at this hour, but I felt relieved.

"I don't need a babysitter while I pee in a cup and get the third degree, hon," she murmured, holding a cold pack over her right eye. "Go find your buddies and show up for the bottom line."

I actually raced down to the break room to see what the paramedics on night shift were up to. Before I could reach them, I almost clanged heads with Alan Steckerman, who was coming out of the elevator. I was surprised to find him here.

"Scott, I would have come up sooner, but the dispatch is all garbled down in the basement." He sighed in relief, like he'd been looking for me. "How is she? They said what? Strange sinus infection now, too?"

I shifted around. "And we'll probably be in drumroll status for the next twenty-four hours. I'm not looking to piss off half this town, but tomorrow I'm taking her up to a good research hospital in Philly if I don't get some answers fast"