The Last Cadillac (16 page)

My night watch nearing an end, I dozed, sitting upright. Sunrise was on its way, and it was time for another dose of morphine. I hated to move her, but she was getting restless. I put my arm around the back of my mother's neck and gently bent her upright while I held the dropper ready. It was easy to do, because she was light and didn't respond when I began the slow drip into her cheek. I hummed something, and I told her I was tired and that she looked beautiful and delicate like a silver fairy queen. But in the half dark, I shuddered and looked away from her bone-white face. The skin had
pulled tight on her skull. This wasn't my mother anymore. I couldn't stand to see her like this, her frail, stick arms, her belly distended, and not a single response from her except for a moan. She had always laughed so much.

I finished administering the drops and laid her back on the pillow.

She began to cough and gag, her face twisting, her eyes still closed. I struggled to right her again, but she went rigid, weakening my grip on her. Finally, I managed to sit her up, patting her back, rubbing and soothing her.

Then, like a shot with no warning, a fountain of brown liquid gushed out of her mouth, and then again. My senses shattered. Horror blotted out the dim room and the white bedclothes stained with evil. Dawn crept in slowly behind me, while Mom heaved, ready to crack. She bent over and gagged. She couldn't catch her breath. I thumped her back, wiped her mouth and chin, her gown soaked with the awful stuff. I yelled, and then I yelled again, but I couldn't hear myself. I looked at the strange liquid pooling on the bed, the light filtering in, an eery blue, and I held on.

My father was silent, not moving at all. It was terrible that my father, the Navy officer who had commanded a ship, was so out of it he couldn't do a thing to help. He didn't even speak while my mother gagged and coughed and I held her, coaxing her to relax, all the while, exploding inside. She was strangling. At that moment, I hoped it would end. Mercifully. I wanted my mother to die. To just not have to do this anymore. I didn't want to have to do this anymore. I was out of mind. Out of this world. In hell. I wanted this over with.

Now.

I didn't know what to do, and then I heard Lucy running from the back bedroom. She grabbed the aspirator, an awful
little vacuum cleaner on a stand in the corner. It looked like a torture device. I drew Mom closer. Lucy flipped a switch and held the hose firmly, shifting the small carriage that wheeled on a rickety stand. She cupped Mom's jaw, working to pry it open.

“You're not going to use that thing!” I said, paralyzed. The machine had a hose that resembled the long proboscis of some sort of monster. It made a horrendous noise—the only noise in the world—while it sucked rhythmically with an awesome, steady authority. It was saving a life where there was hardly any at all.

Lucy didn't even look at me, while she took up my position next to the bed. My sister Lucy, the restaurant maven of Chicago, hanger-on of celebrities and beautiful people, who could hardly operate a blender except to make darn good eggnog, stuck the end of the hose into Mom's mouth and sucked the fluid from her throat so that the gagging and coughing stopped. My mother's bird-like neck relaxed, and I looked at my sister, who had never impressed me, not in all my life, more than she did that moment. We looked at Mom's face, now smoothed over in sleep, which showed no recognition of what had happened.

We rolled her over gently and she woke up a little, without opening her eyes—she never opened her eyes again—and then she groaned when we moved her to change the gown and sheets. It was the sound I cannot forget.

“I thought I was killing her with all that morphine,” I said.

“Well, I don't think so,” said Lucy. She'd flipped her gaze from the water back to me and held onto her second margarita, then neatly changed the subject. “Bali chicken or blackened grouper?”

“I don't care,” I said. “Listen, I want to talk about this.”

“You really know how to kill a buzz, don't you?”

I took a gulp of the margarita to chase that buzz, and so did Lucy.

“Don't you remember what the hospice nurse told us?” Lucy's question was rhetorical. Of course. I remembered every word. “After you started interrogating her like she'd just arrived from Old Salem?”

“I guess. It's one of those times I went off the chain.”

Lucy threw her head back and laughed. “You! That's great. You're a regular Rottweiler, and you tell me that was one of those times.” She had another good laugh, then squeezed half a lime in her drink. “The nurse told us not to let up on the morphine. She said the vomiting was part of the process. Don't you remember that? The GD process! ”

The grouper sandwich and Mediterranean plate arrived. Our discussion had absolutely no effect on Lucy's appetite, while I could only shove the olives around my hummus. Lucy took a huge bite of the fish. It was so easy for her to live in the moment, taking one bite at a time. It was something I would always have to work on. I hated her for about half a second.

“Oh, yes, the process,” I said. “That was good. I really did lose it when she said that.”

“Yeah, and then the poor thing tried to explain to you, that things happen.”

“No, shit happens! And the whole long insufferable insane journey into the unknown was all just that!”

“Well, you do know how to put your finger on it,” said Lucy. “If you recall—geez, you have a short memory sometimes—after that god-awful night with the choking and the aspirator and all, what did that nurse tell us?”

“That there were a lot of powerful drugs in the house, and that we should definitely not let up on the morphine.”

That was when we decided. Lucy and I stepped up the doses of morphine. We didn't talk about it; we just did it. Every half hour. We did not let her have any pain. Not even for a second. We tried to stay ahead of it, although the nurse said we couldn't stay ahead of it.

“It will win,” she said.

At one point, Julia appeared to say that we shouldn't give Mom too much morphine, because she would have “an adverse reaction.”

Lucy and I ignored Julia.

At noon that June morning, greyer and colder than a November day, the hospice nurse found me sitting on a dining room chair with a shot of Jameson's warming to my touch through the crystal tumbler. I was numb, and I wanted to be even more numb.

“It's time,” the nurse said.

We all gathered around my mother's bed. I stood at the foot, watching her. She didn't move, and we didn't say a word, except to pray. My father's white, papery fingers absently stumbled over the beads of a black rosary, while he leaned over his wife. Each breath she took seemed to be her last, until finally the breathing turned ragged and coarse—and then she relaxed, gave in. If she could have said it, she would have—“Peace.” In a way she did. We felt it. It was over. Dad fell back in the chair. A shiver raced through me the instant she was gone.

I became a different person altogether then. A person without a mother. One who was expected to “grow up and
get on with it, and be strong.” I could hear her say it like she was standing next to me.

The waiter appeared with two frothy, green, salted margaritas, snapping me back to the present. He wore a blue Hawaiian shirt, and his greased black hair stuck up in all directions.

“You have an admirer,” he said. He jerked his head in the direction of the bald hot-bod and plunked the drinks down in front of us. Baldie was right behind him.

“Mind if I join you?” he said. He must have thought the invitation was in the bag, because he was loaded up with a drink in one hand, and a cell phone and legal pad in the other.

“Yes, we do mind.” Lucy whipped her head around, blond curls on fire. “We're talking about how we killed our mother.”

His mouth dropped open and he started to back away. “Wow!”

“Lucy! We did not kill our mother,” I hissed. I looked up at our visitor and smiled. “I'm sorry. We had a death in the family. My sister is upset.”

In fact, Lucy was drunk. I leaned over and peered at her. “Are you all right?” I hadn't been able to eat or drink very much, due to my brain going around in circles. Our visitor left briskly.

“Lucy?”

“No we did not,” she said, straightening up in the chair. “We did not kill our mother. We did what she wanted, in the end. She didn't want to go to Marilyn and Ben's wedding that June, and she didn't. She told me she did not want to lie around and die for weeks in a coma, and she did, and that
was enough of that!”

“Yes.”

“She's somewhere in heaven, watching us. You hear that?” said Lucy. She grinned and sipped her drink. “I can hear the clicking of those gorgeous apricot nails, probably on a bridge table somewhere up there.”

No sooner had she said this, than behind us, a woodpecker began tapping high up in the Australian pine that shaded the deck of the Sand Bar. I looked up into the long-needled branches and spied the little redheaded fellow, and Lucy and I both laughed.

“Yes, I suppose you are right.”

Lucy's birthday was washed out. Ellie and Bruce left for Chicago, roasted red after falling asleep on the beach, and hung over worse than Josephine. Lucy and Marque were due to leave the next day, but not before we took a trip to Moore's for stone crab, a true Gulf of Mexico delicacy that became available for half the year starting in October. I hated to think how the crab claws come to the table—removed from the crab that is then thrown back into the Gulf to grow some more. But I thanked them every season, with butter dripping off my chin and onto my bib.

Marque was gallant and patient. He wore a tight-fitting, black designer T-shirt of some sort with a squiggly weave, and loose, white linen pants. If I'd had a camera, I could have sent his photo off to
GQ
for a cover shot. Marque helped transport Dad into the car, up the stairs to the restaurant, and into his seat at the table, where we could see the bay through a cool, blue-grey expanse of glass. Then he bowed. Dad loved it.

“Good lord,” I said under my breath, trying to catch Lucy's eye. She was busy hailing the waiter for the first round of drinks.

Marque leaned across the table, listening to Dad tell a story about the last time he and Mom were in Paris.

“We were waiting in line at the
gare
—isn't that what you call it?” Dad said. “The station? To buy train tickets, you know, and when we got up to the window, the attendant slammed his little gate down in our faces. Thank you very much!”

Marque leaned back, clicked his tongue. He often heard about the adventures of Americans in France. He was used to it, but his generation had a fresh, more global perspective on international relations—and this was not a matter of global importance. “
De rien
,” he murmured, his full, usually petulant lips, turning down sympathetically.

“Re-en! Go again? My foot! Huh! I wouldn't go back in there to save myself. But, I tell ya, the look on that guy's face was something else. When a man's got to go, a man's got to go. He looked constipated as all get-out.”

Marque shot up in his seat and laughed. Food, drinks, and laughs for all! I shook my head, caught a glimpse of smiles passing from one face to another, Lucy sliding one hand onto Marque's thigh. We stuffed hush puppies, cole slaw, and crab into our mouths. Dad and I sipped Manhattans, a reminder of the first drink he ever bought me on my first flight to college—when we even smoked on the airplane.

“How about that Josephine?” said Dad. He lifted his glass, and then turned to Lucy in a salute. “That was some birthday for our Lucy.” He was in fine form, enjoying the small family circle, and his cocktail.

“Yes, that Lucia,” Marque said. “She make her birthday, how you say, a splash?”

After dinner, Lucy came over to kiss Dad good-bye. “How do you like Marque?” she whispered.

“He has a fine set of teeth,” Dad said. “I know you'll be a good mother to him.”

“Dad, I'm not his mother,” Lucy said, narrowing her eyes at me, because I was laughing.

“I know, I know,” he said, and winked.

We were just about settled in our new old house. The red rugs looked smashing on the freshly laid white tile floor. Somehow the contractor covered all the brown plastic paneling and replaced the drop ceiling in the family room to make the place sparkle in Snow Peek (sic) white. The kitchen cabinets weren't in as yet, but the house looked new, and white as a clean sheet of paper on which to write the latest chapter of The Adventure.

We did establish a routine, but every day brought a new twist of its own.

At 6:00 a.m., I woke up the kids, and at 6:15, Tick finally streaked to the shower. He came out five minutes later in a cloud of steam and Old Spice, his hair parted in the middle and plastered down on either side of his head where it stayed until he got to the bus stop and it turned into a haystack again. He wore shorts, low on his skinny hips, and polyester '60s shirt he picked up at Goodwill. Buying him new clothes was a waste of time. He was “old school like that,” he said.

One very early morning, I checked Dad before I went to Tick's room. Dad was sitting on the side of his bed, and off
in his bathroom, with steam whooshing out from under the door, I heard Tick singing these old “Walkin' Blues.” The soap clunked on the tile and doors and bottles clicked loudly making the only sounds of that silent hour.

“What's going on?” I said, my tone demanding and irascible. I was more than a little irritated that Tick had woken his grandfather so early.

Dad raised one hand and looked up at me. “It's fine.”

“It's not fine. You're awake, and it's way too early.”

“I'm all right. You know I'll go back to sleep.”

“But I don't want him in here waking you up. Tell him to use the other bathroom in the hall.”