When Secrets Die (16 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Emma's mother was buried in one of the smaller cemeteries—nothing at all like Lexington Cemetery, with its cultivated gardens, lush walkways, and historical significance.

Emma knew her way on the worn, snaking asphalt drive that wound in figure eights in and around the various graves—some marked with small headstones, family plots made noticeable by large monuments proclaiming their surname as if it were an advertisement. Her mother was buried in one of the newer sections, and when she had first been laid to rest, it had one or two large old trees, and a lot of new saplings. Emma supposed that she would always think of it as one of the newer sections, though the saplings were tall now, and lush, the grass thick and well rooted for not being recently dug up.

The tombstone was a doublewide, the plot next to her mother on reserve for her dad. He had remarried several times since, and Emma looked forward to the day when his latest wife would put him defiantly to rest into a cemetery of her own family choice, hopefully miles and miles away from Kentucky, and her mother's own resting spot. Then Emma would have the headstone removed and a new one put in, this of rose marble, and bearing her mother's name only, and it would be back to back with the small white lamb that marked her son's resting place. She would have liked to have them side by side, but it was only back to back, head to head, that was available. She had been surprised to learn that you can bury more than one person in a grave; you could bury up to three. The knowledge had been given to her with kindness and a practicality regarding the cost of funerals.

She'd brought Neddie a toy. Wrapped up, because like all small children he had loved presents. It was a little thing, a Pez dispenser in the shape of a dinosaur. He'd have loved it, and really, it was not quite a good idea for his age, as he'd have chewed the head off, possibly choking—Ned put everything in his mouth in the universal way of toddlers. But it posed no danger to him now, and she left it in the paws of the lamb that marked his grave. She stroked the head of the lamb, taking small comfort in the rough concrete, running a finger along the carved edges of the stony ears.

She did not feel guilty about being ready to be happy again. Her son's death would stay with her always, like a scar on her cheek, and it was an integral part of her, that regret, that
missing him
, but she was ready now to be happy again.

Except she was never quite sure that she'd followed the rules for a proper show of grief. There were rules about such things, and while the rules might change with the people around you, they were as tangible as the ground on which you stood. And if you violated those rules—it was as if you had cut the ground from beneath the feet of the friends, acquaintances, and even strangers who watched your sorrow so judgmentally. They did not know what to do with their discomfort, but they sure as hell knew who to blame.

People were so odd in their expectations. You were supposed to grieve forever the loss of a parent or child, but to do it in such a way that you never intruded upon their happiness. Make sure to keep the anger out of the way. And please, no self-pity. You are never supposed to get over it, but you are also supposed to almost, but not completely, hide this fact. The thing is, when they look for your grief, sniffing away at your tragedy like dogs in the woods, they want to be rewarded with the smell of something. There had to be something tangible for them to see, something to let them know that it was there, as if it not being there meant that it could come from behind and mount a surprise attack. People had to see something to validate their pity for you, and to separate you from them, so that they were always safe from bad things, because they don't know how you handle it, they simply could simply not.

Her mother, on the other hand, had been expected to be brave, and to pretend that nothing had happened and that her life was still happy thanks to courage, tenaciousness, and the art of medical science. Because her mother had taken that mare out to ride, out of the round pen, on just the kind of October day that Emma liked to remember, and the horse had spooked and bolted and after three years in the round pen, well, hell, her mother just didn't have the legs she used to when she really rode, and down she'd gone, breaking two of the vertebrae in her back.

The strange thing was her walking back to the barn—catching the horse first, leading her along as she limped across the pasture, calling to the house, to Emma, who was annoyed at being interrupted, couldn't her mother see that she was
on the phone
, did she always have to call her like that, and in that tone of voice?

Her mother had looked scary pale. She had gone into the house to lie down and handed the horse over to Emma, warning her to cool the mare down and to rub her with a rag, one of those old cloth diapers, her mother liked those best. Emma had been annoyed, but immediately solicitous because her mother had looked off, sort of, and mother and daughter were very close, close enough for Emma to understand something was very wrong.

Her mother had made it in the front door, getting no farther than the couch, and if she'd looked pale at the barn, she was chalk white by the time Emma made it back to the house.

“You're okay, then,” her mother had said, as soon as she'd set foot in the door. “She didn't give you any trouble?”

“No, Mom, not really.”

“And she's okay.”

“She's fine, Mom. Can I get you something? Some Advil and a Coke? Do you want me to call Dad?”

“Your father?” Her mother had thought about it. They were not close, her parents, something Emma had not noticed at the time, thinking, as everyone does, that her family was the soul of normality. It was mainly Emma and her mother, and the animals—Empress, whatever dogs or cats they'd had at the time. Once, for a brief while, there'd been a bird.

“Mom, you really should let me drive you to a hospital.”

“I think you're right.”

That sentence had heralded the beginning. That sentence had woken Emma up, and let her know that things with her mother were very, very bad.

Emma had put the seat as far back as she could on the Mazda, and added a blanket on the bucket seat and a pillow, and her mother had cried, suddenly, when she was helping her to the car, slipping against the side door because she couldn't make her leg work or support her weight. Emma had caught her, awkwardly, and sort of rolled her into the front seat, and she had been rended by the tear track in the dirt on her mother's cheek. Jesus, even when they'd had horrible childhood accidents or illnesses, involving vomit, blood, and stitches, her mother had always had her take a bubble bath first, and put on clean clothes.

They had joked on the way to the emergency room. Carrying on mock mother-and-daughter fights—now, now, watch your driving, slow down, and all that, though Emma, unlike her usual habit of “driving like a Frenchman,” her mother always called it, kept her speed so slow that she was passed, honked at, and cursed by impatient drivers on that long drive in from the farm.

They'd been rescued at the turnoff onto Old Frankfort Pike from Pisgah, the vet that saw to Empress driving up behind them in his truck with “Woodford All Creatures” stenciled on the side. He'd honked and gotten out and appeared at Emma's elbow, his sunburned face and permanent eye crinkles as welcome as Superman in a cape.

“What's wrong, Emma? Kitty? Did you fall off that damn mare?”

“It wasn't her fault.”

“No, it was yours for taking her out of that round pen.”

Emma had flushed and been ready to defend her mother—after all, the last thing she needed when she was hurt was to be yelled at—and her memory of how she herself had complained about having her phone call interrupted by her mother's call for help was conveniently, though temporarily, absent.

But her mother had chuckled, and told him not to try and boss her around, and he had said heaven forbid, and Emma had been relieved, so very relieved, because even if she was eighteen, and mature for her age, sometimes you did want the grown-ups to take over.

The vet, Dr. Bender—Martin, her mother always called him—had opened the car door where her mother was sprawled, saying, “Lady, you don't look too comfortable.”

Emma remembered very well how she had looked across at him and saw the way his smile had faded, saw the way he frowned when her mother said she couldn't roll sideways, she'd tried and she just couldn't no matter what. Emma had expected things to get more complicated then, had expected him to tell her to follow the truck, or call an ambulance, or even drive his truck, but they'd actually gotten simpler.

“Hop in the back there, Emma, while I move my truck to the side of the road. I'm going to drive you all into the University Med Center.”

“Baptist is closer,” Emma's mother had said.

Martin Bender hadn't argued, and he hadn't moved Kitty an inch. He'd just driven them straight to the emergency room, telling them about a cow he'd delivered after coaxing her out of the pond where she'd been stuck, mired in mud and labor pains, all the while folding in precise little questions about how Kitty had fallen, and where she hit, and where it hurt, and the details of how she actually got up and walked, and other things that made Emma think that everything might be okay. Only his tone of voice, his air of something bad, told her something different. Still, she hung on to that one thing, that her mother had walked back to the barn. It was the other thing, her mother saying she could not roll sideways, that kept her hands bunched into fists.

It was a long, slow process. There were a lot of tests. But the end result was a wheelchair, the special kind where patients can move only their arms and their shoulders, and her mother had been ten days home from the hospital when she'd called Emma to her room. It was cold then. January. Christmas nothing more than the memory of a family straining to pretend a joy in the holidays that not a one of them felt.

They had talked for a long time, the two of them, Emma sitting by her mother's bed. Her mother was her old self, like she hadn't been since she'd gotten hurt, and Emma had remembered thinking,
Okay, I can do this. I've still got her, she's still here
. One is understandably selfish about one's own mother.

“Emma, honey, I need your help.”

“Of course, Mom, anything. Tea and toast?” Emma made her mother toast broiled in the oven on white bread, a delicate, perfectly buttered treat her mother praised to the skies.

“I need something different from tea and toast. I need you to go to the drugstore for me, and get my prescription refilled. And I need you to bring me in that bottle of Maker's Mark we have next to the china cabinet in the kitchen.”

“You just got your prescription. I saw Dad bring it in last night.”

“I know. And I want you to go and get the refill.”

Emma had taken a long, slow breath, and her mother had put a hand on her head. “If there was any other way, I wouldn't involve you, honey. I'm not asking you for a decision. I've made that myself.”

Emma had known, of course, what was in her mother's mind. She had heard the angry conversations behind bedroom walls, her mother railing at the doctors for refusing to help her do what she wanted to do, at her husband who had found the cache of pain pills she had so carefully saved away. He had taken them from her like you might snatch a cookie from an overindulgent child, and her mother had not even looked at her father since then.

“You can say no, Emma. You can say no, and I won't be mad at you. I'll just find another way. But if you help me, you'll just make it easier for me. I won't stay like this. I won't be brave. For me, this is not a life.”

“What about me?” Emma had said.

“Honey, you're eighteen, well, nineteen now, and you have two years left of college, and then you're going to grad school in Denver just like you planned. I've got all that money set away.”

“I won't leave you.”

“Yes, I know, that's exactly what I'm afraid of. You have to live your life, Emma. And I have to live mine. Now mine is over. And it's been a good one. But this that I have left, this isn't a life for me, much as I love you. I'm in so much pain, honey. And it's only going to get worse. And I've got two arms now and shoulders and a head, but I'll lose ground. That's my future, and it's one I don't want. I don't care what's socially acceptable. Can I make you understand that dying isn't the worst thing that can happen? Can I make you understand that for me, dying is another form of life that is much better than this? Can you respect me and love me enough to let me make up my own mind?”

“You're sure?”

“I'm sure. I'd do the same for you. Martin Bender will take Empress and turn her out with his horses when you head off to Denver.”

“You've got it all worked out.”

“Can you see this as a choice, and a simple end of the day for me?”

“Sure, Mom.”

She'd done it, and she'd never regretted it. She'd gotten the pills and handed her mother the bottle of Maker's Mark. She'd wanted to stay, but her mother had forbidden it. Her mother had kissed her good-bye and told her to feed the horse, leave the door open so the dogs could come in, and head out for her evening class as planned.

“We don't want to let them know you helped me, Emma. That stays between you and me.”

“They'll know somebody had to help you.”

“I've got that covered too.”

“How?”

“Kiss me good-bye, Emma. And know that what you are doing is the kindest, kindest, most respectful thing any mother ever had to ask of a daughter. I hope someday you have a daughter just like you. And know this”—and her mother had tugged on Emma's sleeve, pulling the cotton material out of shape—“I will always watch over you, and I will always be with you. I am going to be with my mother and my father, and I am going to be happy and okay like I can't be in this body I'm in right now. If I had any choice other than to have you help me … but there is no one but you, honey. I need you more now than I've ever needed anybody. Don't let me down.”