The Empty Room (22 page)

It was what you would expect from a daughter, wasn’t it?

Without quite knowing how she got there, Colleen was standing at the door to her mother’s room. Another woman, sleeping from
the looks of it, lay in the bed nearest the door. There was a lot of equipment around this woman’s bed. Her mother sat on the side of her bed and looked, from the back, like a small child. She faced the window, which faced out onto little more than another building across the street.

“Hello, Mum.”

Her mother didn’t seem to hear her, so Colleen walked in and stepped into her line of sight. Her mother turned and smiled. Her teeth were small and yellow and her lips were thin. The skin on her face hung from her high cheekbones and fell beneath her jaw in wattles.

“Oh, hello, dear.”

“I hear you took a fall.”

“They’re idiots at that place. And here too. The dishwater … the jam jar … oh, I can’t remember. I’m too tired. Why are you here?”

More than anything in the world Colleen wished she’d brought that bottle of vodka.

“It’s time for bed. Where are your pyjamas?”

“I don’t know. A woman comes in at three in the morning and steals everything.”

Colleen saw a Whole Foods canvas shopping bag by the nightstand. In it were her mother’s pyjamas, a toothbrush and toothpaste, some underwear.

“Here they are. Let’s get you into them.”

Colleen’s mind went blank. She was not in this room. She was
not anywhere. She was not the person doing these things. It was some other woman, a capable woman who did not mind doing this, a woman unaffected by it in the slightest way. A professional woman, competent and detached.

Colleen helped her mother stand.

“I’m dizzy.”

“It’s okay, it’s just because you stood up. Hang onto me.”

Deirdre looked at her daughter sideways for a moment, settled her mouth into a line of disapproval and turned away, although she kept a grip on Colleen’s arm. Colleen hoped the mints she had chewed disguised the smell of alcohol on her breath. Her mother had such extensive experience ferreting out the offending smells on her father, Colleen doubted she was getting away with anything, but with luck Deirdre had forgotten the word
drunk
.

The woman who swore she’d kill herself if she ever lost her privacy stood beside the bed and let her pants and her underwear drop to the floor. Colleen had never, in her recollection, seen her mother naked. Not completely. During periods when Deirdre’s depression or mania was acute, she frequently insisted on showing Colleen parts of her body—her stomach, her back, her hips—standing within inches of her daughter’s face and pulling up her shirt or pulling down her pants so Colleen could assure her that no, it didn’t look as though she had cancer, or ringworm, or shingles or whatever she was paranoid about at the moment. Sometimes Deirdre repeated this over and over until Colleen yelled at her to
stop it, please, stop it! You don’t have cancer for God’s sake
. Often Deirdre, striving
for control, jammed the bathroom door so it would not lock or close properly so she could (and would) walk in on Colleen while she was on the toilet. It was as though her mother were trying to prove there was no escape, there was no place she could not invade. Colleen learned to check for such booby-traps and dismantle them.

Colleen began to pray.
Let me, oh Lord, forget everything but compassion. Let me, oh God, do, think, feel, only what is for her good and for my good and for your greater good. Dear God, be with us here, be with us now
. She knew it for what it was, lush-speak, a drunk’s prayer, filled with noble sentiment, wallpapering over the holes in her morality. She clung to it nonetheless and hoped for Grace.

Deirdre’s legs were alarming. Papery-brown and red-blotched skin hung from withered thighs, little more than rag-wrapped twigs. Colleen wanted to look away, but she couldn’t for fear her mother would fall. Her blouse covered her sex, and Colleen nearly wept with gratitude at being spared that. Deirdre’s underpants were not clean. Brown marks. She held the pyjama bottoms while Deirdre, her hand on Colleen’s shoulder for balance, stepped into them. Deirdre slipped off her blouse. Her bra hung over her breasts, not supporting them. Colleen could not look at her breasts. She could not.

Snippets of Psalm rose up unbidden.
Lord, make me to know mine end, And the measure of my days, what it is; Let me know how frail I am. Behold, thou hast made my days handbreadths
. Surely, this would be Colleen herself one day, raddled and infantilized by the ravages of time.
O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more
.

The bra was so old the elastic was utterly worn out. Colleen
unhooked the clasps and tried to see what size it was, for she would have to buy her mother a new one. The tag was faded and unreadable. Colleen slipped the pyjama top over her mother’s head. It was sleeveless and pink and frilly, and her poor tattered arms were a cruel joke in this girlish garment.

Nurses and aides walked the corridor, tending to other patients in other rooms.
Won’t anyone please come here and help? Please, someone come and help
. No one did, of course. Colleen was her mother’s family. She was the one.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get you into bed.”

“I’m tired,” Deirdre said.

The two women spent a few moments in an awkward dance as Colleen got Deirdre settled. She looked at Colleen blankly, ill at ease now there was no more busy-work to be done. Perhaps she was not quite sure who Colleen was, or where she was, or why Colleen was here, or why she was. Colleen asked if she wanted to turn the television on.

She nodded. “That would be okay.”

Colleen turned it to one of the bloody, car-chase-and-gun-battle shows her mother liked. On the screen the body of a battered young woman lay on an autopsy table. The knife cuts and tubes went into her flesh with amplified squelching noises. The scene shifted to someone ambushing someone else. Fists and bone-crunching punches. Men ran through a warehouse and guns blazed.

“I don’t think I like this,” Deirdre said.

“But you’ve always liked this show. It’s one of your favourites.”

“I think that’s changed,” Deirdre said, her sparse brows drawn down. She looked puzzled.

“Well, then. Off it goes.”

They sat quietly in the room’s perpetual twilight. Colleen took Deirdre’s hand and for a horrible moment she imagined her mother’s skin might slip off like a glove, so loose was it on the bones. She felt another urge to cry. What was wrong with her these days? She was always crying. She looked at their hands and could not help but think of her own next to Jake’s. Those liver spots, the puckered skin around her knuckles.

“You had a fall. You gave me a scare, you know.”

“Yeah, I guess I did,” Deirdre said.

“Do you remember doing a runner?” She made it sound as though it were a joke.

“Me?” Deirdre grinned like a mischievous, if ancient, elf.

“You bet. They found you in the lobby heading for the door and out onto the street.”

“Really?”

“You were truckin’!”

She laughed as Colleen imitated her determined walk, neck forward, arms pumping, the mad-hen expression.

“I don’t think I’ll do that again. I know I need to be here.” She pointed behind Colleen. “You know, I look out the window and this is the first day it looks right, not really right but a little more.”

Colleen looked out the window. Lights glowed from the windows of the apartment building across the street. It was easy to imagine
happy families. “What do you mean? How did it look before?”

Even the hall had grown quiet now. Deirdre struggled to find the words. “I don’t know. Not real. And I think I saw my mother”—she made motions with her hands—“working on something.”

“Ah, so you’ve been seeing Grandma.”

“I guess so.” She plucked and fidgeted with the sheet for a moment, and then looked up at Colleen. “Now what will happen? Where will I live?”

“You’ll live where you’ve been living. You have that lovely room overlooking the lake.”

“I know that. It’s been so long since I was there.”

The woman in the next bed began snoring. It sounded like the death rattle of a brontosaurus. Deirdre glared at the curtain separating the beds and whispered, “She’s awful.”

“She is,” Colleen said. “Mum, do you remember you got very mad at another lady this afternoon?”

“I did?” Her eyes were wide.

“You did. The nurse found you with her. You had your hands on her.”

“I did
?”

“I’m afraid so.” The noise from the next bed was so dreadful Colleen understood how someone might get strangled.

Her mother bit her bottom lip. “Did I hurt her? I didn’t hurt her, did I?”

“No, but you might have. You can’t do that, Mum. You can’t lay hands on anyone else.” Colleen didn’t know why she was saying
this. Deirdre wouldn’t remember, but somehow Colleen needed to hear her say she didn’t want to hurt anyone, that she didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Because really, she couldn’t help it, could she? She’d never been able to help it.

“I think I’ve been very angry the past few days, haven’t I.”

“I think you have been.”

“Isn’t it funny. Your mind does things. And you’re not there.”

“It must be frightening.”

She shrugged as though she didn’t understand the remark. She kept hold of Colleen’s hand.

“It’s going to be okay, Mum. All you have to do now is let people take care of you.”

“That’ll be nice.”

It dawned on Colleen that all her life Deirdre had fought against whatever she perceived to be the worst thing that could happen. She battled her husband’s drinking and philandering. It didn’t matter that he stopped drinking twenty-five years before he died. She never felt she’d won that battle because she couldn’t forget. After he sobered up she still blamed him for every worry and disappointment in her life, and then, he died and left her alone. It changed practically nothing. Up until the day she had her first mini-stroke, she complained about her husband every time she and Colleen spoke. She traced all her woes, past and present, to her dead husband’s drinking and his cheating and his death.

But her anxieties weren’t limited to her marriage. She battled against moving from her house into a condo. When she finally did
she forgot how hard she’d fought against it, and loved her new home, so with that fear gone she became a hypochondriac. When Colleen went in to clean out the condo, to get it ready to sell, she found hundreds of clippings from newspapers and magazines:
Warning signs of cancer/stroke/heart attack! Eat grapefruit/cranberries/bran/kale/blueberries, etc., etc., to avoid cancer!
Every drawer was crammed with them. They were posted inside every cabinet, stacked high on every table and counter and footstool. Articles on diabetes, cholesterol, vascular disease, arthritis, back problems, constipation and urinary tract infections. She stockpiled vitamins and herbal remedies, some of them going back years. The shower was unusable because it was filled with bottles of green tea concentrate, liniments and salves (some dating from the 1960s) cranberry tablets, fish oil capsules, sleeping medications like melatonin and valerian, St. John’s wort, and more bran and toilet paper than a constipated army could use. And this from a woman who never spent a day in hospital until the past spring, a woman whose only prescribed medication was a cortisone cream for arthritis in her right thumb.

The war’s over, Colleen thought. Mum lost. There is nothing left to fight.

Colleen reached over and picked up a bottle of hand cream from the bedside table. She held her mother’s hand and smoothed lotion onto her skin. She kept an impassive smile on her face, for she felt her mother’s eyes on her, looking for clues. Her arm was textured like the brittle skin of onions, overlaid with cobwebs, blotched with deep purple. The veins on the back of her hand looked
like bloody worms. Colleen massaged her mother’s forearms and wrists—gently, gently, for the bones could tear right through if she wasn’t careful. Something gritty stuck to her palms. Her mother’s skin was pilling like an old sweater. Colleen raised her arm and the skin flapped like soiled cotton, both elbows encrusted with thick black scabs. Colleen was afraid if she touched them they would peel off.

“That’s nice,” Deirdre said, her eyes half shut, her face fallen in on itself.

My mother’s skin is breaking down, thought Colleen. Ten days ago when she called Spring Lake Place, Deirdre told her she had been in bed and used her elbows to scoot up higher toward her pillow. As she did, the skin on the arms tore open. There had been a lot of blood on the sheets, she said.

Lord, make me to know mine end, And the measure of my days, what it is; Let me know how frail I am
.

Colleen put the cap back on the lotion. She resisted the urge to rush to the bathroom and wash her hands. Without Deirdre noticing, she wiped them off on a tissue. She put the lotion in the top drawer of the metal cabinet next to the bed.

“Cover that over. They steal things in here.”

Colleen covered the plastic bottle with a Kleenex. Her mother blinked and smiled. Her teeth were yellow and brown with bits of hospital food lodged near the gums. Her white and grey hair curled randomly around her ears and forehead, but was flat on the back of her head. It was sticky to the touch. Her once-fabulous high
cheekbones jutted out like stones beneath her red-rimmed eyes. She smelled slightly yeasty, slightly sour.

There was a noise, a sort of snort, from the woman behind the curtain in the next bed, and then she resumed snoring.

Colleen’s mother pressed her lips together in an expression of suppressed anger Colleen knew well. “I hope I won’t have to stay with that one, that one there, the one—she’s, it’s like that with the grocers, no, not the cats, when you go, want …” She made fists of her hands and shook them by her head in frustration. “Oh shit,” she said.

“It’s okay, Mum. It’s all right.”

“They’re putting something in my food, you know. I don’t like that.”

“They’re not putting anything in your food.”