I turned away from her and lay on my back, listening to her breathing beside me. My father had fallen asleep, too, on the other bed. The walls of the hotel room inhaled and exhaled along with them, and I slipped into semiconsciousness. I thought of my mother’s belief that spaces hold memories, that walls take on meaning, that homes become a part of us, just as people do. I imagined her, young and strong, in all the rooms she had known. I wondered whether the more I became a woman and the more space I occupied apart from her, the more she would deteriorate. We slept.
* * *
When my father first came to see the house I bought myself in Los Angeles, the one filled with light, he chuckled. “It’s so similar to ours! Even some of the same trees! Look at the wood beams!” I looked around with a new awareness, shocked by the accuracy of his observation. Still, I thought, my house has walls that meet the ceiling.
S came with me to Los Angeles the week my mother began chemo. I’d purchased the house just a few months after we got married, but we hadn’t spent much time there together yet, as I had been traveling for work and S had been based on the East Coast. On arrival, we found a hummingbird nest right above the front door, coiled around a delicate piece of ivy. We hugged each other and smiled: This was a sign. The birds were a blessing on our home, our union. How clever and magical that they’d chosen to shelter on top of our door frame!
S had returned to New York for work when I found one of the chicks on the front steps, fallen from the nest but alive. I could feel its fragility just by looking at it, the hollowness of its bones, the tenderness of its pinfeathers. I was sure that its fall had been a mistake, a small misunderstanding by the universe. I carefully—with a large leaf, never touching it directly—put the baby back in its nest.
The next day, I saw a dark shape on our white patio steps. I shook off a feeling of helplessness and gracelessly placed the little body back in its place beside its squawking sibling—once, twice, three times. It became a part of my routine around the house: do the dishes, take out the trash, check the mail, save the baby hummingbird.
A few days later, I found the hummingbird’s tiny carcass covered in ants. I used a piece of mail to sweep it off the stairs and into the plants in our front yard.
“I couldn’t manage to rescue it,” I told S on the phone. “I guess I’m no savior.”
* * *
AS MY MOTHER’S chemo began, I visited my parents’ house a few times, returning to Los Angeles to sleep in my own bed after each trip. On days I was not there, my mother would call and, in a voice that sounded more like her mother’s than her own, describe how she was feeling. She told me about a friend who had survived breast cancer: “Her girls moved back home to be with her,” she said. I pictured her in her chair in the living room and the dappled sunlight coming through the window behind her.
I wasn’t working on anything that demanded I be on the East Coast, and being in Los Angeles, two hours away from my mother by car, seemed like the best compromise between what I knew she wanted, which was for me to return to their house as her caretaker, and what I wanted but was too ashamed to admit even to myself, which was to be all the way across the country in my new life with S. Although I’d planned to visit her frequently, weeks passed, and I found myself staying away, afraid of the power my mother bestowed on me. I stayed in my new home alone, feeling stuck and unsure and heavy with guilt, constantly aware of the magnetic pull of my parents’ house.
On these mornings, I’d wake up on our giant, hard mattress and stare at nothing. I could spend the whole day like that, watching the light cross the room until it faded. The woozies, I’d think. I had plans for this house, this room, and the well-lit lovemaking and strong bitter coffee S and I would share. But those plans seemed beyond reach now, as if they’d existed in someone else’s life.
I wore S’s musty, oversized T-shirts so that I could feel swallowed up by him, surrounded by him, but they only reminded me of my loneliness. S would text or call, but I didn’t want to hear about his day or what was going on with his work. I’d end our calls bitterly, immediately regretting the tension I’d created between us. It didn’t occur to me that what I wanted from S was the same thing that my mother craved from me: to have someone live in her pain with her.
After a few weeks, remembering the version of myself who’d expertly guided my parents through the Mayo Clinic, I decided to try to shake the woozies by retiling the upstairs shower on my own. The burgundy tile left behind by the previous owners looked drab and unfamiliar. I researched instructions, filled a shopping cart full of tools, considered tile patterns. This is how you make a home yours, I thought; you build it yourself. I argued with S when he said I’d need a tool called a diamond saw in order to do this, and then I gave up the plan completely.