The Funnies (37 page)

My cereal had gone a bit soggy listening to this, so I took a few contemplative bites and considered the plan.

“Not to take the wind out of your sails,” I said. “But it sounds a little wonky to me.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, well…”

“Do you believe in that stuff?”

He pursed his lips, thinking. “I believe in her,” he said finally.

“Well, okay, good.”

“She thinks I need to go find the place. She says it's like there's a little part of Dad that isn't fully dead, but wants to be, and I have to go put it to rest.”

“Can she talk to the dead?” I asked.

He looked shocked. “Of course not!” he said, turning back to his game. “Don't be ridiculous.”

* * *

I was standing in the yard watering the bushes when a little red Ford Fiesta with an ankh painted on the hood pulled in behind the Caddy. Gillian Millstone tore herself from the car and ran across the yard to me like a four-year-old. She was wearing short shorts and knee boots and a University of Massachusetts sweat shirt. “Hi!” she yelled, and threw her arms around me with such force that I dropped the hose. I thought at first she had mistaken me for my brother, but then she said my name and that she was happy to see me, and I decided she was just an extremely friendly kind of person.

“You look happy today,” she said.

“I sort of am.” It was true. Fall was a week from beginning, and, for better or worse, my stint as a cartoon journeyman was coming to a close. In a few weeks everything would be different. Even considering the vast gulf between the best-case and worst-case scenarios, this prospect gladdened me, and when Gillian untangled her skinny body from mine I felt a little twinge of regret.

“It's good to see the old place again.”

“I thought you'd never been here,” I said.

“I've driven by,” she said. “I get good vibes from it, anyhow.”

I nodded, thinking about the warehouse plan. “I wish I could say the same. So, Gillian.”

“Yeah.”

“This plan of yours. Do you think it's going to work? I mean, you can actually detect…auras?”

She smiled at me, and I saw in her face a surprising intelligence—calculating, though not in a bad way. What was the chance of picking out the place at random? What was the chance of your parents getting killed in a plane crash? I got the idea Gillian had the numbers. “A little,” she said. “I'm better at detecting your brother.”

“How so?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “He wants to believe we'll find it. But not too much. Know what I mean?”

I picked up the hose, which had soaked my shoes. I didn't know what to make of Gillian's forthright willingness to confide in me. “Hmm,” I said.

* * *

They packed the car with their tools: water bottles, lunchmeat sandwiches, fruit. I peered into the back and saw a few mysterious items: a black wooden box with a brass latch, and some pentagonal doodads made of string and sticks.

“Well,” I said. “Good luck. What'll you do when you find it?”

Pierce cleared his throat. “Well, nothing at first. I'll need a little while to think about it.”

I felt a rush of empathy for my brother and clapped my hand on his shoulder—too hard, maybe, but he stood steady. “Well, I'd like to be there when you open it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. He made no effort to mask his alarm at the thought.

They climbed in and drove off. The little car, receding, looked like a giant groundhog, waddling down the driveway. An eroded sticker on the back bumper read
MY OTHER CAR IS A BROOM
.

I did my chores in the yard with something like ecstasy, barely recognizing it as such until I was almost done. I slowed, holding off the end until I had gotten my fill: the sweetness of rotting leaves and fish washed up on the shores of the river, not a hundred yards away; the sun-warmed air, just getting its baby teeth. I found myself reliving, with a kind of instant nostalgia, something that had happened the evening before at Ivy Homes: my mother, confused and narcoleptic as was now usual, had awoken from a sound sleep with an urgent need to be taken to the bathroom. I had been reading a magazine in the chair at the foot of her bed, in the shifting light of the muted TV. She couldn't seem to voice this desire and, like a cat staring mournfully at its empty bowl, only moved her eyes and head toward the toilet.

“The bathroom, Mom?” I said.

She blinked. “Yes.”

I got up to find a nurse's aide, and though there were plenty of them purposefully navigating the halls, in the end I couldn't bring myself to ask their help with my own mother. I went back to the bed and helped her into her wheelchair. If she could distinguish me from the usual help, she didn't indicate it, but all the same there were no complaints, no protests at my treatment, and I was grateful. I wheeled her to the bathroom and lifted her out of the chair: she was light as a child. I could say here that the entire process was like helping a child, except that it wasn't, save for the absence of speech, the absence of embarrassment over the body. Otherwise she was still my mother, a woman who had known ruin, had wrecked herself willfully and deliberately escaping the onus of life with my father, whom she had ceased to love, and of life without the man whom perhaps she did. I set her down on the toilet, helped her raise her nightgown, cleaned her when she was through. And I cried, not out of pity—though I did pity her imprisonment in this body—but because there was dignity in her lack of shame for this sorry state, dignity even in her helplessness. She met my eyes while I worked her gown back over her, and if anything passed between us in that look, it was that she would let me usher her into her death, would trust me to help her find whatever comfort I could give her.

And to my surprise, I wasn't disgusted by this task, or even saddened. I was moved by the revelation that this, like cartooning, like stepping out of bed in the morning and opening the bedroom door, was work, and by definition important, a discrete, fully contained act. It was an act of maintenance, and of mercy, but it was good and useful and utterly proper. And when I had put my mother back into her bed and she again fell to sleep, I felt a tacit acknowledgment between us of the fact of her death, which waited for her like a gift from a distant relative that had been shipped but had not yet arrived.

Out in the yard, shoving fallen branches into a metal garbage can, I let happiness run its course through me, knowing that it wouldn't last, but also knowing that it would always be somewhere waiting for me, if I made the effort to find it. This understanding seemed an almost criminally excessive piece of good fortune, but for the time being I accepted it without question.

* * *

They came back at ten o'clock. Gillian aimed a knowing smile at me as she crossed the threshold of the studio, but Pierce was in a fever, sweating, his hair wild and damp, his hands talking to each other in the air.

“What?” I said. “What happened?”

“Oh, man,” Pierce was saying. “Oh, man.”

“What!”

Gillian threw an arm around Pierce, trying to contain him. “We found it,” she said.

“Really? So the plan worked?”

“Oh, totally!” Pierce said, as much to himself as to me.

“Sort of,” Gillian told me. “We skipped a bunch of them. Then we got to the twenty-fifth or -sixth or something, and I thought, this is it, and we asked the guy in the office if the key was his. And he said no, but that he knew the guy who had those kind of keys at his warehouses, and he gave us the address, and we went to this guy and he said it was to the Girard Avenue location, so we went there.”

“And that was it?”

Pierce gaped at me. “It's fucking huge, Tim, it's totally huge! The door is like…you could fit a dump truck in there!”

“It's true,” Gillian said. “It's a big door.”

“We didn't go in. I couldn't. I can't.”

“Sure you can,” she told him, giving him a friendly shake.

“No way. Oh, man.” He suddenly looked out the door at the house, as if he'd heard something there. “I gotta get a shower or a bath or something.” He wriggled out of Gillian's grasp and dashed away.

She watched him go, then turned to me. “I know he seems a little riled, but he'll be okay.”

“If you say so.”

“So you're coming, right?”

“Whenever you're ready,” I said.

She patted my shoulder. “You're a good brother,” she told me, then went out after Pierce. I had been accused of a lot of things in my life, but never that.

* * *

The next morning I did a strange thing. While getting ready to visit my mother, I grabbed a sketchbook from the kitchen counter and a couple of number two pencils. I'd been inking in the sketchbook before breakfast, working on some cartoon versions of household items, but I couldn't remember what I had done with the pen. I felt a little pang of guilt over this—my father would no sooner have drawn in a sketchbook with a number two pencil than eat dinner with a garden trowel—but I let it pass. I don't know why I felt the need to bring the sketchbook at all. I just did it.

Gillian had spent the night, so the Caddy was available. I set the sketchbook and pencils on the passenger seat while I drove. The simple thought of them thrilled me. For a moment I considered turning around and going back to the studio, but I squelched the impulse and made it to Ivy Homes.

My mother was asleep. She woke up briefly when I got there, regarded me with an expression of plain surprise, then just as abruptly collapsed back onto the pillow and fell asleep again. The nursing home was quiet; most of the residents were at the nondenominational Sunday religious services the home provided and that my mother, even in her nonplussed half-consciousness, had the presence of mind to eschew.

I set the drawing supplies on the edge of the bed and watched her. It is often said of the dead or dying that they look peaceful in sleep, but my mother looked like she was deep in a drugged coma beneath the tent of an army field hospital. I don't think I'd ever seen someone so enervated, so utterly whipped. I glanced at her chart on the back of the door and read that already today she had woken up, sung several songs with the other residents, ate breakfast, went to the toilet and took her first of several handfuls of medications. It was no wonder she was tired. There was something vital missing from her face, as if life was only accessible to her during waking hours, rationed like wartime electricity.

So I tried to draw her, or at any rate to capture this absence on the page. How could you render nothing with a pencil? The first few tries were in vain; I was aiming for stark realism and got nothing but vaguely melancholy smudges. I tried to draw the cartoon Mom: first as a young woman, placidly dozing, then older, aging her in stages. What I came up with was not too bad. There was only an empty space, a cartoon void, between her cheekbone and nose, but in the first drawing the space implied a round, flushed cheek, and in the second a concavity, the sunken cheek of an old woman.

Still, the cartoon lacked anything of what I actually felt for my mother. It was the aged version of my father's creation, something that would never be useful in my career as the author of the Family Funnies. I started a fresh page and tried again, this time jettisoning the rigid toadstool-shaped coiffure and the angular calendar girl's nose and inserting my own interpretations, in a thick-lined cartoon shorthand, of her features. The nose, not a V but a gentle curve with a curious reverse loop at the nostril: my mother's were wide and expressive, like little mouths. Her eyes a set of parallel lines, as if desperately squeezed shut against an incomprehensible world. It took me several tries to get it right, but ten minutes later, there she was, both a cartoon and my mother.

“That's swell,” said a voice at my ear, and I jerked so hard my chair barked against the floor like a car horn.

“Oh God! I'm sorry!” Bitty said in a piercing whisper. She was standing behind me, wearing a yellow sundress and a gigantic straw hat. My mother's face tumbled through a series of anxious quivers.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, my heart thundering. I gathered the pencils and pad from the floor. Bitty pulled Mom's wheelchair up beside me and sat down in it.

“I thought you knew I was here. I was right behind you!”

“I was kind of absorbed.”

She pointed. “Can I see that again?”

I handed her the sketchbook unopened, and I watched as she leafed past my failed experiments. She lingered on the Family Funnies version, and then longer on the final version.

“This one back here looks like something Dad would have done,” she said. It sounded like a curse, and I said so.

She bit her lip. “I don't like to think of him being here to see Mom like this. I mean, so far gone.” Her eyes took on a faint gleam, and she blinked it away.

“No.”

“So this drawing, the last one. It's good. It's the best of the bunch, you know.”

“I was just thinking that.”

“You ought to do something with it.”

“Do something? Like what?”

She stared at it awhile. “I dunno. Maybe give it to me.”

“Tear it out,” I said. “It's yours.”

“Really? Thanks.” She tore cautiously, though it was a spiral notebook and there was no real need. She folded it in half, careful not to crease the actual drawing, which was small, and set it on her lap. “So,” she said. “I guess she's coming home soon? I talked to Uncle Mal.”

“A couple weeks,” I said. Mal was buying a hospital bed, the kind with the sides that can be unlocked and pushed out of the way, and was finding her a good nurse, evidently a formidable task. We talked about these things as if they were established truths just waiting to be made manifest, but in fact it was not so simple, and I worried about all of them, from the nurse's fee to whether or not the bed would fit through the front door.