Things Unsaid: A Novel (32 page)

Her mother tried again: “I wanted to be a good mother. I tried, but I don’t think … I don’t think I knew how.”

Her eyes closed, but she kept talking in her sleep. Her skin was a purplish-blue, her legs a network of green veins.
She would be mortified to see her diva appearance had vanished
, Jules thought. To see what she looked like in the end.

Jules took both of her mother’s hands in hers: cold, almost unbearably so. Their mother had always been self-conscious about those hands, thinking that the curves of her fingernails were too rounded, like claws. Now her nail beds were aquamarine. She breathed in short little pants, stopped and started again. Her hands were folded in on themselves like
clams. Jules had always been afraid of those hands, but now she kissed them gently.

She wanted her mother to leave this world now. In a moment when she seemed more at peace—not in a rage. Jules stroked her hand, then gently glided her fingers up her arm. She heard rattling, the sound of dying, deep in her mother’s lungs and upper throat. But it was almost rhythmic—musical, even.

“Mother? Why don’t I ask the nurse for something to help you sleep?” Jules whispered, as if she were talking to Zoë when she was a baby. She stiffly bent down to kiss her mother. The air seemed to puff out, a blowing of the lips with every exhalation. Her mother’s lips, once so beautiful, ruby red and vital, looked defeated. Jules looked away.

Andrew blew into the room, throwing off his heavy overcoat before sitting down to snack on potato chips and pretzels. Joanne and Jules both looked at him, and then down at the coat he had thrown on the floor. Stepping around it like it was the outline of a murder victim at a crime scene, Joanne took a few steps towards him and tried to hug him. He leaned back, jaw dropping, as he saw their mother. He remembered her lecturing on what his and Abigail’s son should look like, a cram course on Mendel’s theory of genetics, so many years ago. Almost ten.

Even with Andrew sitting down, the room suddenly felt too crowded. Too confining and claustrophobic. The space seemed to be shrinking, closing in on them. Like their mother.

“You know, I hear her voice inside my head,” Andrew said, choking on the words. “And Dad’s.” He rose and went to their mother, bent down to kiss her forehead. She doubled over coughing, but nothing came up.

“Would you like something to drink, Mom?” Joanne asked as she tried to fluff the pillow beneath her head.

“No!” she panted. “Everything … tastes … bitter. I want … I want … to die. I never thought it would be like this.” And with that, their mother’s mouth collapsed. She exhaled once, very loudly and harshly, a fish out of water. Two long shudders followed. Her eyes snapped wide open, unblinking, looking less lifelike than her Sarah doll. Then they fluttered shut like a moth too close to the light. Fluid, perhaps a single tear, leaked out. Jules dabbed it with a Kleenex.

Jules ran down the hall. She spotted the attending nurse at the on-call station, chatting with one of the doctors. Jules waited until the nurse noticed her before stepping closer. The doctor, glancing at Jules, left.

“I think our mother has died. Can you please come quickly? Tell us what’s happening? If she’s still alive?”

The nurse reached out to touch Jules’s hand. Ordinarily she didn’t like to be touched by strangers, but the nurse’s touch soothed her.

“Let’s go,” the nurse said as they walked together to room 583.

When they entered the room, the nurse checked the machines. “She’s not gone yet,” she said gently. “Almost, but not yet.”

As if sleepwalking, Jules went to her mother and bent over her hands again. She held one of them as she reached into her tote bag. She had read someplace that talking to the dying was a comfort to their departing soul. That hearing was the last sense to go.

“Mother, it’s just us here: Joanne, Andrew, and me,” she said, She pulled out her copy of
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
.

Somewhere deep in her mother’s throat, gurgling bubbled up. “Don’t leave,” her mother rasped—or so Jules thought. Her voice was so faint now. Hard to hear.

“Are you ready now?” Jules whispered softly, feeling nauseous, though she didn’t know why.

Her mother’s eyelids were still, but her hand tightened like a vise on Jules’s.

There’s still time
, Jules thought,
to be the good daughter
. So she opened her book—a book for the dying, for transitioning from one rebirth to another, for change—to the page that was folded over. The words she read throbbed, pressing up, behind her collarbone. She remembered how little Max, her student, had described words as having power, the power to surprise. “Words move,” he’d told her.

Jules read: “If we cannot stop struggling to hold on to our old life, all our fear and yearning will drag us into yet another painful reality. Let go into the clear light, trust it, merge with it. It is your own true nature, it is home.”

Andrew blew his nose. Joanne sobbed.

“At death, we lose everything we thought was real. Unless we can let
go of all the things we cherish in our life, we are terrified.” Her throat tightened. The words became blurry on the page. She stopped reading.

Then Jules began to sing—“Someone to Watch Over Me,” her mother’s torch song.

Joanne and Andrew hummed along, halting frequently, choking, quietly patting Jules on the back.

Her mother’s memorial service was only the second one Jules had been to. The first was the open-casket affair of her Sicilian grandfather, who’d died over forty-five years ago, the day before Father’s Day.

“That’s the last thing I want to think of. All those family members and friends gawking down at me in a box. I want to leave this world knowing no one will ever see me again. No makeup mask, prettified to make the gawkers feel more comfortable,” their mother had written about her preferences. So the funeral director at Soleil Funeral Home in Seattle complied with her wishes. There were lots of flowers—yellow roses were her favorite, so they were in abundance—and purple drapes over every surface that could be covered. Lots of purple bows, too, with gold sparkles—the school colors of Sarah’s middle school. Jules guessed her mother had been thinking of her death for some time, since Sarah was now almost finished with high school.

Jules had been in middle school when she went to her grandpa’s funeral. He’d been a fake Catholic, like a lot of Italian men in those days—so, since he had lived with no close relationship to any parish, his requiem Mass had turned out to be quick and conventional, as if the priest just wanted the payment for his effort. She could still remember looking at her grandfather, so nice and powdery—as if he were sleeping in full makeup and costume. She had dug her index fingernail into his folded hands, the one on top, to see what it felt like. His skin was too cold—rubbery like baby doll skin, but stonelike underneath. Like a Stone Boy. That was almost forty years ago, but she still remembered.

Now, as she prepared to bury her mother, Jules understood.
It’s not the dead we cry for
, she thought.
We cry for ourselves
.

Their mother had specifically requested a cremation. When Mike’s
mother had passed away, she had also requested a cremation but his oldest sister, Suzy, had refused. So everyone had been forced to look at the cadaver, the corpse in its open closet. No one had liked it much.

There would be no Catholic requiem for their mother, just as there had been none for their father. Catholics did not “condone” cremations, and their mother did not condone open caskets. A Catholic lay deacon who wore the vestments of a priest—also in purple and gold—would preside over the service, however.

Andrew sat with his two sisters in the front pew on the left, reserved for their mourning family. He fidgeted with his tie as if it were a subway strap that he had to hang on to so he wouldn’t stumble and fall. Joanne looked tranquillized, eyes inflamed, and she kept sobbing softly when she thought no one was looking. Jules stared straight ahead at all the purple.

After the brief Lord’s Prayer, led by the deacon, their mother’s seventy-one-year-old baby brother, Uncle Sal, was the first to speak. Rasping and rattling—just like their mother right before she expired, Jules thought—Sal soldiered on bravely, his voice straining up and down the scale several times. When he was done speaking, elegant in his dark suit and yellow tie, Uncle Sal approached the podium near the low table with the urn of ashes, carved with ornate yellow Romanesque roses and grapes. Joanne had selected the gold and purple pattern from a catalog provided by Soleil’s director because, she told Jules, it looked like a skirt that their mother had always loved. The skirt they dressed her in the day she was slipped into the crematorium furnace. A diva to the end.

The ceremony in the committal shelter was simple; no military honors for the veteran’s spouse. As their mother’s remains were made ready for deposit where their father’s ashes lay waiting, Jules thought about the inscription they’d decided upon. Jules had wanted “I’m not chopped liver” for their mother’s mausoleum drawer, but Joanne hadn’t approved, even though that had always been one of their mother’s favorite expressions. “I’m not chopped liver, you know,” she would
say when she felt she was being ignored—which was often. Her voice still reverberated in Jules’s eardrums. But that was one letter too many, anyway. Only seventeen were allowed for the veteran’s spouse, empty spaces not counted. The epitaph would have been cut off at “I’m not chopped live.” So instead the epitaph read, “To our beloved mom.” Two spaces more were allowed, but that wasn’t enough to allow them to spell out the word “mother.”

Jules left a rose in front of her mother’s drawer, a yellow one similar to the Romanesque ones on the urn. Beautiful, without a crease or wrinkle on any of its petals. Her mother would have loved it. Jules’s shoulders felt numb. Frozen. Her grief was a subtle one. Like a marinade on some meat. Her parents’ ashes were now deposited safely in a drawer in a cemetery she would probably never visit again.

T
hey were approaching the anniversary of her parents’ deaths. Nearly one year.

Almost eighteen boxes in total, in three piles, each towering almost seven feet. Jules arched her back, rubbing her aching lumbar, and bent back over the box she was packing. The Mayflower moving van was coming for a nine o’clock pickup the next morning. Sunday. She had been taking trips to Salvation Army all day, cleaning out a life’s worth of throwaways. Photos and family memorabilia were nonnegotiable—worth keeping. But everything else …

Jules had thought it would be traumatic to discard all the schlock she had accumulated over the years. But it wasn’t—not in the least. After boxing up so many cartons, she couldn’t even imagine what the contents were. What a relief. An evacuation. A cleansing.

She and Mike had to sell the house in Carmel to recover from all the loans they’d taken out. Jules was moving into a caretaker’s cottage in Pebble Beach. In exchange for some light gardening and cat-sitting, Jules would pay below-market rent and have time to write. And she would buy some bright pillows for the futon couch for Zoë, who would stay with her in her new place until her plans for college were finalized.

Jules watched as her daughter picked up a photo album and flipped through it half-heartedly.

Jules walked over and looked over Zoë’s shoulder. Photos from Lake Tamsin. Strange. The time and place seemed so distant now; the photos were like memories of someone else’s life.

“Geez, Mom, these are seriously old. Retro. You guys all looked like hipsters before hipsters even existed!”

Jules remembered how Zoë had looked on the Internet for photos of old people to represent her great-grandparents for a family tree project in high school. She had had to make up names for ancestors no one knew. She wanted Zoë to have some connection to her roots—to have a sense of control over her life through knowing her ancestors, her old family. Even though her parents and siblings had not been all she had hoped for. But her parents had done nothing to preserve their own past. Her mother had hated photo albums.