I’m no builder. The house got messy instead. I stopped cleaning the coffee grounds off the counter, stopped removing dead flowers from their vases. If I spilled something, I left it there to stain. Ants took over various surfaces in the house. There was no care left in me.
When my oldest friend, Barbara—an actual caretaking expert, a preschool teacher—came to visit, she ran the bath in that drab bathroom and poured a bag of Epsom salts into it. She lit candles and scrubbed surfaces and kept close but not too close. This is what S is supposed to be doing, I thought indignantly. A moment passed. No, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.
At Barbara’s urging, we went down to see my mother. “If it will bring you some kind of peace, why not?” she said. I drove fast. When we got there, my mother did not get off the white couch. The grandfather clock chimed on the wall, and the various greens from the front lawn shape-shifted outside. Her skin felt soft and delicate when I brushed my cheek against hers. I could tell she wasn’t happy that I hadn’t come on my own. She told us that she wanted to stay inside, out of the sun, so we kept the doors closed. I sat on my mother’s chair in the living room and let my feet turn cold against the white tile.
Barbara led the conversation. She asked about my mother’s treatment before talking about her own life and family. My mother wore out quickly. “The chemo,” she said. “Girls, I’m just so tired.” Her eyes grew heavy, her jaw slack. We left as she fell asleep. I called S on the ride home, but I had no words.
That night, Barbara announced that we would watch a show, one I would really like, she promised. She wrapped a blanket around me, made hot tea, and put my feet in her lap. My face was salty and puffy and red. Barbara picked an episode. Five men appeared on the TV screen: fixers come to repair another man’s house and his life, too. My chest was hot from the tea. The man’s wife had just died, he told the camera. We both felt it immediately: a heavy and determined sadness, the kind that was floating over my parents’ house like a giant bubble. It was all over this man’s house, too. Barbara looked at me: Shit.
I laughed and I couldn’t stop.
* * *
While in the hospital for sixteen days, my mother only craves baked potatoes with “the works,” she tells me. I find myself with S at a fancy restaurant, ordering a single baked potato. He laughs at me. “Good order,” he says, kissing my cheek. I’m devouring this potato when my phone lights up, a message from my father: a drawing. My mother is bald in this portrait, the top of her head drawn with a single confident mark. It is perfect, this crescent.
His sketches are brutally rendered. Without warning, they arrive on my phone at all hours of the day for over a month. In one my mother is sleeping, her head resting against a pillow, her cheeks bloated and her eyes two dark holes. She looks dead. I want to tell him to stop sending me these painful portraits, that I can’t handle them, but I don’t. Where will they go if I’m not there to receive them?
My father doesn’t communicate much with me beyond his drawings and short staccato texts. They are cryptic, and punctuated in a way that makes them feel like knife jabs. I am his diary. He counts the days of what he calls “house arrest.” “Day 17,” he texts me. “Day 20.”
One morning, I try to fall back to sleep after one of these texts arrives, but bright sunlight is streaming through my bedroom window. I think of the house I grew up in, the Georgian windows and the exposed golden-brown beams. The tiny treasures in every corner.
Framed pictures. Wood ceilings. White walls. Bookshelves. No space. Cool shadows. An image arises: I am in the living room, on the white couch, looking out at the neon-green lawn. A thick tube descends through a pane of the window, attaching itself to the side of my neck like an artery. This is my mother’s love for me, I realize.
When my mother checks out of the hospital, I text her a link to a poem by Marge Piercy, “My Mother’s Body.” “Most important,” I write, knowing that she might not feel able to read the whole poem, “is this.”
I carry you in me like an embryo
As once you carried me.
I copy lines from a different stanza into the notes on my phone, though—one I cannot stop thinking about but will never share with her:
What is it we turn from, what is it we fear?
Did I truly think you could put me back inside?
Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten
furnace and be recast, that I would become you?
The day after Barbara leaves, I wake up surrounded by white light and march purposefully up the stairs to the bathroom with the inherited tile. I pull back the shower curtain. Barbara has left eucalyptus leaves hanging from the shower head. I inhale deeply and run the water.