Everything I Have Is Yours

“Your daughter has such lovely bone structure,” the clerk in Davison’s said. She was showing Mother a cream-colored St. John knit.

“That’s nice,” Mother said in her clipped, cold voice. Sarah couldn’t tell whether Mother was talking about the clothes or about her. Had to be the clothes.

Couldn’t be her.

Later in the dressing room, Mother lit one of her unfiltered Gitanes and filled the whole place with smoke.

The clerk peered over the white wicker dressing room gate, her brow wrinkled with worry.

The woman wouldn’t dare tell Mother to put the cigarette out. Mother’s sort of money and fame ensured that no one would say a thing.

Such lovely bone structure.

Sarah was sixteen. She looked in the mirror and saw a puffy face that made her think her of a soft flesh-colored cabbage or that fat talk show woman. She couldn’t remember her name. The dark brown St. John knit Sarah had tried on pulled tightly across her breasts and rear. Well, when you are so damn fat, you can’t wear anything.

Mother stepped out of the dressing room. “I don’t care for it,” she said, turning around, looking over her shoulder at Sarah. “It makes me look like a horsewoman.” She paused and said in a contemplative tone, “I had a pony, once.”

The cream-colored knit suit hung on Mother’s hips, emphasizing the angle between the bones and her flat rear. Not flat. Concave, that was the word.

“Maybe a smaller size,” Sarah said.

“Oh, heavens,” Mother said. “It’s a two, dear.”

“Another style?” Sarah suggested.

Mother was looking Sarah up and down, her eyes narrowed to slitty lines. The Gitane hung at the right corner of her bright red mouth. “That’s not right at all,” she said. “Oh, why did I—”

Think to take Sarah to Davidson’s, where all they had were knits?

Fitted things. Short skirts. Jackets with a quarter-inch of give.

“It’s pulling at the waist,” Mother said. “Pull it down over your rear.” That just makes it look bigger. “Pull your skirt down in the back and up in the front.”

Sarah pulled the skirt up so that the front elastic was right under her breasts. Big things, so big she could feel them pressing against her arms. Hard to look down and see—

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mother said. “Your breasts look just like a pair of cantaloupes.”

Sarah crossed her arms. Mother took a furious drag on the Gitane and pulled it from her mouth, gesturing with it for emphasis. “If you’d watch your diet, you wouldn’t have this trouble,” she said. “I honestly don’t know why I—” Her voice rose in pitch like the siren of an approaching ambulance. Mother took a deep breath. Then she made a little gagging noise, deep in her throat. She turned grayish pink. She tried again to breathe. The cigarette dropped from her fingers to the floor, where it began to smolder. Sarah stared. Mother began to cough. A hacking, retching cough from deep in her chest.

“Mother!” Sarah cried.

When she touched Mother’s shoulders, Sarah counted one, two, three bones on each side. Lump, lump, lump. Under the cream knit fabric, Mother’s skin felt so fine, like a tissue over the bones.

“What is it?”

Mother coughed up a wad of brownish phlegm all over the skirt of the cream-colored St. John knit skirt.

Then she drew a deep, shuddering, wet-sounding breath. “Jesus... God.”

“You have to see a doctor,” Sarah said. She felt foolish. What did she know? Mother had always coughed. She lived on cigarettes, espresso and glasses of sherry. It was the way she stayed a size two and kept her own exquisite bone structure.

But Mother was strong. Rarely sick. She slept four or five hours a night, staying up painting or reading scripts.

It was what Helene Bacon, the greatest filmmaker of her generation, did.

And every two weeks or so, Helene would decide that she’d been neglecting Sarah again and take her shopping.

“I’ve seen doctors,” Mother said in a tiny, strangled voice.

“You have to go again. Get help. This is—”

Mother pushed Sarah away with her delicate, long-nailed hands, looking steadily in Sarah’s eyes, her own deep green-blue eyes full of pure fury.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said in a papery whisper more menacing than any shout. “You’re just a child.”

“Mother,” Sarah said. Why was it always this way? Always anger that could not come out; Sarah did not know how to say what she felt.

“I’m fine,” Mother said. “It’s just a cough.”

The brownish stain spread into a saucer-sized circle on the cream-colored skirt.

Mother inclined her head toward the wicker gate that led to Davison’s dressing room.

“Go tell the woman,” she said, her voice sounding slightly stronger. “Have them charge it to my account.”

“Yes,” Sarah said.

The clerk was charming about it.

And she wanted to know if Sarah wanted the brown suit.

Sarah shook her head.

“You could try one size up,” the clerk said. “I’m sure it would look much better.”

“Mother would never let me,” Sarah said.

The clerk leaned close, smiling. “I’ll get it and switch the tags for you.”

Sarah stepped back. She heard coughing from the dressing room and looked nervously over her shoulder.

“Why not?” the clerk asked. “She doesn’t need to know.”

And then she winked.

“Is Miss Bacon all right?”

Mother was always Miss Bacon, following the Hollywood tradition of the permanent mademoiselle.

When she took a moment to think about it, as she did just then, Sarah wondered why she was always Helene’s daughter, and not her own sort of Miss Bacon.

“Go ahead,” Sarah whispered.

The clerk had a kind face. She was perhaps fifty. The shadow of the beauty she had once had still colored her carefully made-up face.

Maybe I’ll look that way someday, Sarah thought. It helped that the woman was kind. She looked easy in her clothes, St. John knits, of course, navy blue. To be easy in her skin like that. Sarah could barely imagine.

“I’m ready,” Mother rasped from the dressing room.

And she was coming out, face still ashy gray, but a new coat of lipstick on and her nose powdered. She’d left the stained suit in the dressing room. The clerk said nothing. It was all understood.

“I’ll see you next week,” Mother said.

The clerk nodded and smiled. “Of course, Miss Bacon,” she said. “Always lovely to see you and your daughter.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’ll bring Sarah next time. There’s really nothing for her here.”

A frown marked the clerk’s still-pretty face.

“She is young,” the clerk said. “She should be shopping at Bebe or one of the other boutiques.”

Mother leaned over the long marble counter toward the clerk.

“My daughter does not wear trash,” she said.

They left.

When they got to the Mercedes, Mother began to cough again.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she turned off the alarm. Mother had always preferred to drive herself. Sarah had not yet dared to ask when she was going to get her learner’s permit.

“About what?” Sarah asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Embarrassing,” Mother said, her cough dying down into a dry hack. “That was ...embarrassing.”

“No,” Sarah said. “It really wasn’t.”

She was so adept at lying; she believed that it might even be true.

“Oh, darling,” Mother said as they drove up Beverly Drive. “Darling.” Then she began to cough again.

Sarah found the crumpled letter in the kitchen when she went down for a glass of milk after her morning exercise. Mother was gone, off to a breakfast meeting at Cantors, where she’d have a twenty dollar breakfast and leave a forty dollar tip: double espresso and half a grapefruit. They loved Mother at Cantors.

Sarah smoothed the letter on the cool green tiles of the kitchen counter. “Dear Miss Bacon,” it said. It was from 2021 North Western Avenue, Los Angeles. The plain red lettering of the logo and the shadowed star couldn’t be mistaken. The American Film Institute.

A near-black ring of espresso marred the star and a cigarette burn obscured the first paragraph of the letter.

“We respectfully inform you that the Distinguished Committee has selected you to join us June 18th at the Kodak Theatre as the 54th recipient of AFI’s Life Achievement Award.”

Sarah knew that no female filmmaker had ever won this award. Only a handful of actresses had gotten the award—the last one the popular and well-regarded Meryl Streep, who’d received the honor before Sarah was born.

“Christ—morons,” Mother had scrawled at the bottom of the letter.

“Mother,” Sarah said, shaking her head. How could she grow up as the daughter of Helene Bacon and not understand what it meant for her mother’s name to join of Ford, Huston, Hitchcock and Coppola? Billy Wilder and Martin Scorsese! And the great Stephen Spielberg. Sarah knew that Spielberg, who’d been a mentor to her mother long before she was born, was under twenty-four hour care and had not been seen in public for several years.

“His mind’s a wreck from Alzheimers,” Mother had said.

Sarah remembered that. And felt sorry for him. Mr. Spielberg had always sent her presents for Chanukah and Christmas. Big presents... things from his movies. She still had the Jurassic Park dinosaur in her room. He startled everyone who came in. And then they’d laugh.

Today, her tutor wasn’t due until two. Sarah sat in the kitchen and waited. Mother would be home between 9:00 and 9:10. She always was after a breakfast at Cantor’s.

At 9:07, Mother walked in the door.

Sarah held up the letter.

“Why did you crumple it?” she asked.

Mother blinked at the letter. A strange expression came over her face, one that Sarah had never seen before. An expression of sadness, perhaps, or regret.

Maybe she was sorry she’d treated the letter so disrespectfully.

Mother said nothing. Instead, she reached in her jacket pocket and took out a Gitane, then lit it. She took a long drag.

Please don’t cough, Sarah thought.

After a moment, Mother said, “What do John Huston, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Francis Ford Coppola have in common?”

Sarah licked her lips. “They’re all great directors. They all—”

“They’re all dead,” Mother said.

“Well, yes,” Sarah said. “They were directors a long time ago. They—”

“Died.”

“Yes, but—”

“Shortly after receiving the AFI Life Achievement Award.”

“Mother,” Sarah said. She smoothed the letter. “It’s a great honor. Why are you acting like this?”

“The ceremony is in June,” Mother said in a bare whisper. “I won’t make it.”

It was April.

“That’s only two months!”

“Six weeks, darling,” Mother said.

“The ceremony is two months away,” Sarah said, feeling stupid. Why were they arguing about dates?

“Forty three days.”

“Mother, this is incredible. You’re the first woman director to ever come close! Much less get it.”

Mother’s shoulders slumped. She crushed her cigarette in the sink and ran the water. Then she took another out of her blue pack and tapped it on the counter. But she did not light it.

Mother’s mouth twisted as if she was about to say something. Her lips moved slightly, but she was silent.

Sarah shivered. “Mother?” she asked.

“Do you remember Anne of a Thousand Days?” Mother asked.

“Yes,” Sarah said.

“A thousand days is three years,” Mother said.

“Yes.”

“And then he cut off her head.”

“Yes.”

Sarah had cried. It was one of their favorite films.

“Six weeks is forty three days. Forty two and a half, actually.”

Mother lit the cigarette. She inhaled deeply. Her face went pale, but she did not cough.

“Mother,” Sarah said in a whisper. “What are you saying?”

Mother smiled. Her gums were pale. The inside of her lips was blue. Nearly as blue as Mother’s eyes, which were rimmed with red. They looked abraded. The whites of her eyes were red as well.

“Let’s go to Palm Springs,” Mother said.

“Today?”

“Like we used to.”

“Sit by the pool,” Sarah said.

Mother shrugged.

“You know you don’t like my bathing suit,” Sarah said.

Mother’s cheeks were marked by pale pink blotches.

“I love your bathing suit,” she said in a strange, small voice.

“But it makes me look—”

“It makes you look beautiful,” Mother said. “Always and forever.”

And Sarah felt the strangest tightness in the center of her chest. And her throat felt like someone was squeezing it with cold, wet fingers. Her eyes burned.

For Mother had never said that before. Not once. Not ever.

“Come on, get your things,” Mother said, brightening as she straightened her shoulders and smoothed her jacket. “Like we used to. Vamanos! Out to Two Bunch Palms.”

“Sure,” Sarah said.

“We can stay ...I don’t know. Two—three days. As much as we like.”

“What about Henry?” Sarah asked, meaning her tutor. She was ahead on her lessons, but she still thought she shouldn’t miss them.

“I’ll leave a note.”

“Okay,” Sarah said. “That’s good.”

And they were off on an adventure. Like they used to have, when Sarah was a young child. But something had happened along the way. Sarah was never sure what it had been. One day, they’d just stopped going. And Mother had become angry all the time. Demanding. When she had the time at all, which was seldom.

You look beautiful, Sarah thought.

She didn’t, of course. But just to hear it. And all seemed right with the world, though Mother coughed through most of the ninety miles to Two Bunch Palms, and they had to stop twice while Mother went into a restaurant and used the bathroom.

There were tables and permanent gas torches that burned even in the daytime beside the natural stone pools at Two Bunch Palms. A private resort for the very wealthy, mostly Industry people. Two Bunch Palms had once hosted famous gangsters and their molls. But now it was filled with actresses and faux producers and anyone who had the money to pay the membership fee. Quite possibly, everyone there had a script.

Sarah sat with her mother at a natural stone table and pair of benches beside a deep blue-gray, irregular stone-lined pool. Mother had ordered Mai Tais for both of them. A few people stared. Actors, most likely. Or writers. It was Sarah’s first real drink. The Mai Tai made her shudder, but she sipped it anyway.

Mother took long drinks, holding the liquid in her mouth long moments before she swallowed. She was so thin that Sarah could see every sinew in her throat working as she swallowed. Between drinks, Mother smoked a cigarette. She didn’t cough much.

The torch beside their table made a constant hiss under the soft piped-in music.

Mother had an old brown book the size of an atlas on the table. Its cheap plastic cover crackled as she opened it.

“Scrapbook,” Mother said.

Sarah had never seen it before.

“We passed where I grew up on the way out,” Mother said. She opened the book and pointed to a picture of a smiling, chubby teen wearing white shorts, feeding watermelon to a fat-bellied spotted pony.

For a moment, Sarah wondered when she’d ever had a pony.

“You can see my house in the background,” Mother said. Sarah saw a yellow cottage obscured by trees and part of a chain-link fence. “That’s my pony, Checkers.”

“Checkers,” Sarah said.

Sarah had never had a pony. She’d never worn white shorts like that.

“Ponies are hell to take care of. All they want to do is eat ...and crap,” Mother said, laughing.

She took another drink, then turned the page.

The pink-skinned girl making muscles in the too-tight red bikini looked exactly like Sarah.

“That’s not you,” Sarah said. “You’re teasing me or something.”

“You have good bone structure,” Mother said, then she touched Sarah’s cheek.

Mother turned the page again.

The girl was studying something seriously. A computer film-editing screen, Sarah saw.

“I made my first film when I was twelve,” Mother said. “I still have it if you want to see it.”

“You did?”

The girl’s dark blonde hair fell over her cheek exactly as Sarah’s did when she was concentrating on something. A book. A drawing.

The computer-editing screen.

“I’d like to see it,” Sarah said.

Mother turned the page again.

The girl was older now, close to Sarah’s age. Her hair was unruly, held back by two tortoise shell combs. She looked uncomfortably at the camera. Her eyes were deep blue, the color of the ocean in a storm.

“My eyes got greener as I got older,” Mother said.

“They’re between green and blue now.” Sarah looked in Mother’s eyes. They were still red around the rims. But she hadn’t coughed all morning.

“Your eyes will turn green too,” Mother said.

“They will?”

“You’ll grow thinner.”

“Mother!”

“You won’t have to worry. You’ll become slender. Your bones will ... come out.”

“Mother, where did you get those pictures? This is me, but I haven’t done any of those things. Those aren’t my clothes. These pictures are old.”

“Sarah,” Mother said quietly. “I’m showing you these pictures because I wanted you to see me.”

“I—guess,” Sarah said. “I guess we looked a lot alike.”

Mother was always so hard on herself. Maybe because she wanted Sarah to grow up as she had. She was the greatest female director in Hollywood, a woman of great power, beauty and strength.

“And this is also you,” Mother said.

Sarah could not understand. Her stomach felt strange and weak. Something shivered at the base of her spine.

“Me? But you said ...”

“You have something inside of you that cannot be denied,” Mother said.” A call. A charge, if you want to call it that.”

“I don’t understand,” Sarah said.

“I’ve worked ever since I was thirteen,” Mother said, inhaling smoke and blowing it out her nostrils in two thin streams. “You’ve had it much easier than I ever had.”

“But my father took off. He never took care of me. He didn’t—”

Sarah had no idea who her father was. Her mother had seldom spoken of him. All Sarah knew was that he was never there for her, or for Mother. Somehow, it didn’t seem to matter much, though in the lonely times, sometimes she wished she knew who he was. Where he was. If he cared.

Mother sighed. “Sarah,” she said.

She turned the page of the book. The young woman wore a lavender formal with a red corsage, smiling uncertainly into the camera, standing beside a young, dark-haired teen with a Roman nose and crooked teeth.

“Prom,” Mother said. “He kissed me. I didn’t like it much.”

Sarah had never been kissed. People had tried. But she had always stopped them. Mother wouldn’t have liked it.

It was as if Sarah stood beside the young man in that dress, though she’d never seen him before in her life.

“Is that my father?” Sarah asked.

Mother shook her head. She snubbed out the cigarette, then lit another.

Mother looked across the deep, stone-lined pool. At the beautiful bodies arrayed on chaise lounges across from them. A Hawaiian-shirted waiter came toward them. He was a few steps away when Mother spoke again.

“You have no father,” she said.

Sarah watched the waiter’s eyes widen, then he paused and turned away discreetly.

Once the waiter was out of earshot, Sarah said, “My father ran away.” She’d never heard Mother speak so harshly. Sure, she’d been abandoned, but Mother had already been a successful director. Plenty of money. She hadn’t needed a man around to take care of Sarah. Hadn’t she said that a thousand times?

“Sarah, you are me. There is no father.”

In the distance, a plate shattered. Sarah heard a woman cry out, then awkward laughter. She turned. The waiter who’d overhead Mother was cleaning up the spill.

“I have only six weeks, darling. I didn’t want to tell you this way. I never wanted to tell you at all.”

“Mother,” Sarah whispered. Her mind was screaming “No!” while her heart told her with a sick, icy slap of truth that she’d known all along. She’d been no normal child. She was no normal teenager.

“After I made Curve,” Mother said.

Mother’s first Oscar for Direction. A modern film noir. Now it was a classic.

“I went to a clinic. There was a surrogate. I still send her money.”

Something dark and ugly came over Sarah. “Blackmail? So no one would know?”

Mother shook her head. “No. She was a good person. She just... needed money. Had a big family of her own.”

“Normal,” Sarah said. Her voice sounded nasty. So cold.

“I wanted to have you normally,” Mother said. She reached across the table, her fingers brushing the back of Sarah’s hand. Sarah ripped her hand away and held it against her chest as if Mother’s fingers were fangs.

“Are you saying I’m a result of artificial insemination, or ...I’m a—” Sarah couldn’t say it.

“You were cloned.”

Sarah couldn’t speak. She stared at Mother. The high, delicate cheekbones with skin stretched taut and drum-like over them. Eyes blue-green, full of burning pain. And something else behind the pain. Shame, perhaps. Mother was staring back, those almond-eyes pleading.

“Why?” Sarah asked at last.

Again, Mother reached across the table. Sarah drew away violently, nearly falling off the granite bench.

More people began to stare. The waiter saw this too and the look of pity on his face was unmistakable. But he could not know what had been said, only that the two were fighting.

Mother’s jaw worked. Her cigarette fell from her fingers to smolder on the stone table. The smoke rose from it in thin, intertwining tendrils.

“I never wanted you to know. I never wanted anyone to know.”

“That’s not why,” Sarah said, hearing a new, strange strength in her voice. And also a glassy coldness which she had heard so many times before. From the woman who sat across the table.

Sarah felt a shooting pain in her back, under her shoulder blades, as if someone had stabbed her, and they were working the blade in and out. She remembered the woman at the store. You have such beautiful bone structure. No, your daughter. Your monster.

“I never wanted to—”

Mother’s voice was weak and trembling.

How old she looked. Her face was curling in upon itself like old celluloid.

“I can’t think of anything worse,” Sarah said.

Mother tried again to touch her.

“Don’t you ever touch me again,” Sarah hissed. “Sarah, I love—”

“It makes fucking sense, doesn’t it?” Sarah said, lingering on the filthy word, a word she’d heard Mother say a thousand times, but which she’d never said the way she meant it now.

Mother was stricken, her face a taut, chalky mask of pain.

“You’re so fucking in love with yourself you had to make a copy.”

“Oh, God, no Sarah.”

Sarah stood, putting both hands on the table. Then she grabbed the packet of Gitanes and shook one out.

“I’ll be just like you,” she said, as she lit one of the French cigarettes and drew in the hot, bitter smoke. God, it burned her throat. No wonder Mother had been coughing. She fought back a cough, leaning forward, every muscle tense. “What’s the word, Mother? Auteur?”

“Sarah,” Mother whispered. “Please. I love you. You’re my daughter. In every way that counts.”

“Of course,” Sarah said, turning. She looked back over her shoulder, spitting the words out as quickly as she could, clipping the ends of them just as Mother did. So precise. Every word like a surgical incision, she’d once heard her say. You operated on people with words and took their hearts out so quickly that they didn’t even realize they were gone until hours later.

“The sole creator. Making a perfect product.”

Mother tried to stand. Her legs seemed to give; then she righted herself, gripping the stone table.

“Sarah,” she called once more. Her heart was gone, Sarah thought. She’d done it. Taken it out.

“The Film Institute should give you another award,” Sarah said. “You never made a picture quite like me, did you? Just think what they’d do if they knew.”

“There’s something else,” Mother said.

But Sarah was halfway to the bungalow, holding her shoulders back the way Mother did when she was angry. Even though the pain was something she could barely recognize. A black, cold thing inside of her with claws that were dragging over the surface of her heart. Dragging and pulling and tearing.

“Sarah, please listen,” Mother called. “Stop.”

“No,” Sarah said, though she knew that the woman clinging to the table could not hear.

In the night, Mother woke her.

The desert stars and moon were bright enough that they cast a cool blue light into the bungalow.

Sarah stared out the window.

A hand was on her shoulder. She didn’t turn.

“I have forty-one days now,” Mother said.

Sarah did not move.

“Cancer,” the voice said.

Sarah had known.

“There’s nothing they can do. Except a total lung transplant. Other organs, too.”

And Sarah knew this as well.

Mother was silent. Sarah heard her painful, wet breathing over her own quiet, measured breaths.

Her heart began to drum in her chest.

God, let her not say it. Please. Please let her not ask. For Sarah’s lungs. My lungs.

Mother sighed.

Instead, she said, “I want to be buried at sea.”

A salt tear burned down Sarah’s cheek.

“I don’t want a funeral. You just go. By yourself.”

“Mother,” Sarah whispered.

Then Sarah turned. Mother’s face was white in the moonlight, her eyes dark crescents. The edge of her jaw was a pearly line like the edge of a mussel shell above her drawn, shadowed neck.

Mother backed away, holding her thin arms stiffly at her sides, her hands oddly outstretched.

“I wanted to raise you up,” she said, a strange thickness in her voice. “I wanted to see you strong. Healthy. Successful.”

Was that why she’d been so cruel?

“Now that can’t be.”

Sarah’s heart felt as if it would shatter with regret. “Mother,” she whispered.

Mother raised her hand, as if to ward Sarah off.

“I’ve lost,” she said. “If I can’t breathe, they’ll take me to the hospital.”

Sarah felt a scream gathering deep in her chest. She covered her mouth with one hand while her other hand clutched at the covers.

“Don’t,” she said through her fingers.

Mother took a deep, shuddering breath. Sarah’s shoulder burned where Mother had touched her. As if she’d somehow felt the pain through her own skin.

“I don’t want to die in the hospital,” Mother said.

Her face became smooth, like milk glass in the reflected moonlight.

“Mother, there has to be something the doctors can do,” Sarah said.

Mother didn’t bother to respond.

“Mother, you’ll be okay. You have to go to the AFI Awards. I know how important it is. You’re the first—”

“The first female director to receive the award.” She paused, looking out the window for a moment. “Everything I have is yours. I would like you to go to the awards. For me.”

“You can get better,” Sarah said, sitting up. She sounded like such a child; her voice was the piping twitter of an ignorant baby. “You can make it. I know you can.”

Mother shook her head.

And in an instant, the wrongness of it: the unfairness of it took Sarah in a blank, vicious wave of fury like a hot August wind.

“No!” she cried. “You don’t know. Forty days? Forty three days? How can you know? Cancer goes into remission.”

Mother raised her hand and looked at it, then she looked at Sarah’s shoulder, where she’d touched her. Once more, she touched Sarah’s shoulder. Her fingers were so cold, but Sarah felt pain greater than anything she’d ever imagined. It was coming from Mother.

“You are my flesh,” Mother said. “How can you not know?”

Mute with misery, Sarah nodded.

Then Mother turned and left.

Alone, Sarah shivered, clutching the thin sheet and blanket to her chest, curling into herself, while the pain coursed through her with its insistent drumbeat of death and of ending.

It had been twenty-one days since they came home from Two Bunch Palms. Mother had been taking shots from a small clear vial. Sarah thought it was morphine.

Mother had been working constantly. There were three pictures in development. And it was as if she wanted to finish them all at once. Finish them in a week, or even in a day. Visitors streamed through the house at all hours. Sarah had found a man curled up on the love seat in the parlor, a script clutched to his chest, his shoes thrown carelessly on the floor. The shoes had smelled like inexpensive cheese, so she kicked them under the couch before covering him with a merino throw.

That morning, Mother’s voice had dwindled to a raw, papery whisper.

“I have something for you,” she’d rasped to Sarah at breakfast. And then she had tried to put something like a smile on her face. “After lunch.”

It was nearly lunch. There were six or seven people working over a screen in one of the downstairs bedrooms. A couple of composers were at the piano in the living room. Nearby in the parlor, the writer still slept on the love seat, and he had started to snore. Sarah went upstairs.

The door to Mother’s bedroom was ajar.

Sarah knocked, but there was no answer.

“Mother?” she called? She had been wandering in a sort of numb stupor for three weeks. Somehow it wasn’t real. None of it was real. Any day, Mother’s cough would improve. She’d stop coughing up bright clots of blood.

The bedroom was empty.

Beside the bed on a marble table lay Mother’s medicine. Half a dozen needles in plastic wrappers. A couple of the vials of clear liquid. The labels had been marked out.

Beside the labels was a blue plastic case.

“For Professional Use Only,” said a label on the case. “Controlled substance.” And there was a small picture of a skull and crossed bones inside a red slashed circle.

Sarah opened the case.

Inside was another vial, this one filled with a pale, yellowish liquid, and another larger, longer needle.

There were directions inside the case.

“Prepare dose according to indications 2.0 mg maximum dose in solution. Inject into jugular vein.”

Sarah’s hand went to the side of her neck, where she felt the blood pulsing.

There were tiny, spidery letters on the vial, spelling out the word “Atropine.”

Sarah’s fingers touched something on the underside of the box. She closed the box and turned it over. It was a taped, folded paper.

Carefully, she peeled the tape and unfolded the paper.

“Inject 30 to 60 minutes prior to transplantation,” the paper said. It was written in the same spidery hand as “Atropine.”

Now Sarah knew. For whom the drug was prepared.

She put the box down, and had an immediate sense that she was no longer alone.

Mother stood in the door, a faded blue workshirt hanging from her shoulders, billowing over absurdly loose jeans. Her bone structure was as lovely as a skull on an anatomist’s shelf.

“Someone gave me that,” Mother said.

Neither of them could pretend any longer.

“Will it kill me right away?” Sarah said.

Mother shook her head. “No. I don’t know. Put you to sleep, he said.”

Sarah didn’t ask who “he” was. Dr. Feelgood. The kit looked homemade.

It was illegal, of course, just as cloning had never been legal. Not the sort that Mother had done. People were never supposed to clone themselves and raise the clones as their own. There were organs, of course. And even whole bodies, lacking only their brains, though many people objected to that, considering the bodies to be “human.” Why Mother, with her cigarette habit, hadn’t thought to clone heart and lungs and liver years earlier, Sarah didn’t understand. She’d learned a lot in the previous three weeks.

“When did you mean to do this?” Sarah asked.

Mother shook her head. “I didn’t,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”

Sarah licked her lips. She wanted to believe Mother.

“It’s hopeless,” Mother said. “Everything inside of me is eaten up. Lungs, liver, pancreas,” she said. “They say it may be in my brain. I won’t go for a brain scan.”

Sarah said nothing.

She was healthy. There was not a thing wrong with any of her organs.

Mother laughed, a terrible, dry, coughing laugh. “Maybe I’ll outlast the six weeks. I feel fine. Pretty well, actually.”

There were bright red spots on her sunken cheeks, the only spots of color in her ashen face.

She walked toward Sarah, her arm extended, bony hand trembling.

“Mother,” Sarah cried. And she took her in her arms. So thin, God. And there was a heat from inside of her, as if she was burning up from the inside. And the pain... again Sarah felt it shooting from her mother into her...an agony unlike anything she could ever have imagined.

“I’m okay,” Mother whispered. “There are so many things I wanted to do,” she said. Something hot and wet hit Sarah’s shoulder. Tears.

She had never heard her mother cry. At least not more than a few tears of rage.

“I wanted to see you through college,” she said. “See you married. Happy. Have—grandchildren.”

“Oh, Mother,” Sarah said, holding her close. Mother was a fragile doll, about to break. She brought her hand to her mother’s cheek and felt the tears there against the hot, papery skin.

“Take that case and throw it away,” Mother said. “It’s...dangerous. Pour out what’s in the bottle. Break the needle.”

Sarah nodded, her head against Mother’s chest.

Mother leaned over, picking up the blue plastic case. She pressed it into Sarah’s hand.

Sarah took it, letting her arm drop to her side.

“I have something else, too,” Mother said. “What I told you about.”

“It isn’t lunch yet,” Sarah said with numb lips. Her heart was empty. The blood echoed blankly in it. She looked around at Mother’s bedroom, not really seeing anything.

“It’s in my pocket,” Mother said, drawing away.

Her thin fingers fumbled at the workshirt, still trembling. Like an old woman.

“Here,” she said, holding out an engraved lozenge-shaped gold locket on an old, tarnished chain.

Sarah opened the locket. There was her face on the right, as a young girl of perhaps four or five. She looked more closely. No, that was Mother’s face, not her own. The child wore an old-fashioned smocked dress with a white eyelet collar. On the left was another face with familiar lines. The almond eyes, the straight, narrow nose. Full lips, yet not wide. High cheekbones.

She looked at Mother, questioning.

“My mother,” she said, simply.

“My grandmother?” Sarah said, though that wasn’t quite right. Her other mother, perhaps.

“I don’t remember her,” Mother said. “She died when I was less than a year old.”

“She’s ...”Sarah stopped. Exactly like us, Sarah thought. Or close enough to be a sister and not a mother.

“She was a far better person than I could ever be,” Mother said, holding herself tightly around the waist, as if she was afraid she would fly apart if she let go.

“Miss Bacon! Miss Bacon!” someone called in a frantic voice. Mother turned toward the door, then looked back at Sarah.

“We’ll talk after lunch. I have more pictures of her. She was a great talent. Everyone loved her.”

“I’d like that,” Sarah said, fingering the locket as she wove the tarnished chain between her fingers. What had her grandmother... mother done? She was lovely enough to have been an actress. There was the mark of the old-style movie star upon her.

Mother started to leave, shoulders bent. So tired. Why couldn’t she sleep?

Sarah knew. She’d felt the pain, every last agonizing shred of it.

“My life,” she whispered, hardly aware that she’d said it. It sounded like “my love.”

Mother didn’t turn at the door. She’d heard nothing.

And Sarah went to her room, the locket in her right hand and the blue plastic box in her left, and lay on her bed amid the soft white down covers, staring at the white ceiling and the thousands of golden stars that had been there as long as she could remember.

After lunch, on the patio overlooking the pool, Mother told Sarah that at age forty, her own mother had died of invasive pancreatic cancer. Like Helene, she had smoked her entire life. And worked with chemicals and all the tools of the old film editor’s trade. Mother had always understood that this was what caused the cancer. She had worked for John Huston and at times, with Orson Welles, though his inability to share any task, particularly editing, was legendary, and of course everyone who worked for him worked for free. At the end of her life, she was planning to go to England to work with David Lean.

She was a great beauty, Helene told Sarah. She could have been in front of the camera at any point, but she chose to work behind it.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Sarah asked.

Mother shook her head. “There are parts of my life I’ve never been able to talk about,” she said. “My mother is one of them.”

“She was remarkable,” Sarah said.

“Yes,” Mother said, her voice a bare whisper. “She should have won Academy Awards, not me. Been a director herself. But that wasn’t the time or the place.”

“And you did it,” Sarah said.

Mother grimaced. She looked down at her narrow laced fingers. “It cost me my life.”

Sarah knew she did not mean the cancer. Not at all.

“It doesn’t have to be like that,” she said.

“Even if I have all the transplants and treatments, there’s only a twenty-five percent chance.” She was silent for a long while before she spoke again.

“Sarah,” she said. “There are choices a woman has to make. That she makes...all-knowing.”

“What choices?”

Mother sighed. “Do you know what it takes to make a film? The way I do? It takes every part of you, Sarah. Your heart, your soul, your money... yes, all those practical things. Time. Every minute you have.”

Sarah nodded.

“In a way, it takes your soul.”

Sarah thought that she understood. In her way, Mother was explaining why she had done what she had done. Or as close to it as she could come.

“One morning I woke up,” Mother said. “And I realized my soul was gone. In its place was something black and cruel and lonely. Because I’d let it all sieve away. Given it away when I thought I had to. A piece to this producer, a piece to that financier. Put what feelings and time and heart I had into each picture I’d made. Myself, a piece at a time. And done things I’d rather not tell...anyone ...to get where I thought I wanted to be.”

“When you made Curve,” Sarah said.

Mother nodded.

“When I made you,” she said.

“Mother, it doesn’t have to be this way,” Sarah said, her heart suddenly feeling full and pressured unto bursting. “People love you. They love your pictures. You don’t have to die. You can get the Life Achievement Award. You’re—”

“No,” Mother said. She put up her hand, stopping Sarah in mid-word. “Not me,” she said.

Sarah shook her head. Beauty still shadowed her mother’s elegant, pained face. “Yes,” she said. “Only you.”

“But you are me and I am you,” Mother said. She nodded, once, then stood, walking stiffly and uncertainly toward the house. She had to hold the doorframe, leaning heavily against it, in order to open the heavy oak door.

“Mother,” Sarah called after her.

Mother’s back was turned. She was nearly in the house.

“What does it matter, which one of us?” Mother asked, without turning back.

She disappeared and the door swung slowly shut.

Mother put on her favorite music. Some of it was rock, older songs. Things that were good to dance to, or just for sitting and listening. Driving rhythms, things she liked. And delicate classical music, with choirs and harpsichords. Purcell. Mother pronounced it “PURSE-ell.” Sarah wondered why she didn’t just say “Purse-ELL” as it was spelled.

“I wanted wine,” Mother said, smiling as she sipped from a blue bottle of mineral water. She shrugged. She couldn’t drink anything like that without vomiting, Sarah knew. Hadn’t been able to since Two Bunch Palms. The Mai Tais.

They sat in front of the fireplace for twenty minutes before either spoke.

“Do you remember when you were little?” Mother asked. “We toasted marshmallows, right here.”

Sarah nodded. “And Oscar Meyer hot dogs.”

“You danced to my music. Interpretive dance. I was so proud.”

Sarah smiled. “I could right now. Again.”

“Go ahead,” Mother said. She was resting against a pillow. The blue case rested beside her right hand on the gray marble hearth.

Sarah danced as if she was a child again.

The music flowed around her. She closed her eyes and danced in front of the hearth.

When she opened her eyes, Mother was smiling at her, lips drawn away from her too-long, too-white teeth.

Sarah knelt beside her. She touched the box, then withdrew her hand. The plastic had grown warm from the fire. So had Mother. Too warm. Her brow was damp.

“Do you want some more water?” Sarah asked. The bottle of mineral water was empty.

Sarah looked in Mother’s blue-green eyes. Too wide, set too far apart. And far too large in her pale, gaunt face.

“The woman in the store,” she said suddenly.

Mother nodded.

“She said I had fine bone structure.”

“Yes,” Mother said. “You do.”

“You said I was beautiful,” Sarah said, her voice sounding tiny and weak even in her own ears. “Before we went to Two Bunch Palms.”

“And so you are,” Mother said.

Sarah looked into the fireplace for a long moment. She shut her eyes against the heat. She felt Mother taking the box from her hand. Heard it opening. Heard the crackle of the plastic being stripped from the needle. Heard the faint pop of the needle piercing the foil that covered the vial.

“At the awards, will you tell them you loved me?” Sarah asked.

She threw her head back.

“I love you,” Mother said.

The needle was at her neck. The blood in her vein pulsed. The point stung, then the pain was gone.

Mother’s eyes were very large. Too large. But beautiful all the same. Like an angel. Dark eyes in a pale, delicate face.

“I see you,” Sarah said. “You were always so beautiful.”

Then, something like a pen pressed into Sarah’s hand. She felt another sting and forced herself to look down.

The needle was in her palm. Still full of the atropine. Mother had not pushed the plunger.

Mother’s eyes were so wide in her pale face. Beautiful eyes. Almond-shaped and pleading. The darkest blue she’d ever seen. Lashes long and dark, brows fine and sensitive still in Mother’s ravaged face.

Sarah found the locket in her pocket. She took it out, pressing it in Mother’s hand.

“I never knew my mother, Sarah,” Mother said.

So it was time. Sarah put the needle to her mother’s neck. It was simple to find the vein. The blood swirled prettily in the clear atropine before she drove the plunger home.

I want a pony, Sarah thought. Mother had the pony, and not she.

“My child!” Mother called.

Mother’s eyes went black. Sarah watched the pupils become huge; distorted, with just a bare sliver of blue iris around them. Her mouth became slack. Her face was grayish white. Her breathing sounded strange: slow and labored.

I have fine bone structure, Sarah thought.

The locket slipped from Mother’s fingers. Sarah picked it up.

“Help!” she cried.

Sarah thought there were people all around; upstairs, in the editing rooms. The man with the stinking shoes was sleeping on the couch, wasn’t he?

Not a sound.

Why wouldn’t anyone come?

They were all gone.

“Someone,” Sarah called, her voice a thin thread of sound. “Please. Someone help.”

o0o

But no one comes. Sarah stays by her mother’s side feeling the warmth seep from her mother’s cheek into her trembling fingers.

We hear the sound of a pony whinnying. The room darkens until only Sarah and Mother shine in a spotlight, which shrinks in size until only their faces can be seen as if formed in a locket; the one fine and lovely even in death, chiseled by shadow, the other a mask of regret. And finally, it shines only on the girl’s trembling lips and a bare whisper is heard.

“I have left you, Sarah,” Mother says in voice-over at the end of the film documentary of the end of her life. Only a few hear her barely whispered final word: “everything.”

Some months later, Sarah accepts her own Academy Award for Best Documentary and as she cries, the world cries with her.

“I must thank my mother, for everything I have is hers,” Sarah says.

Sarah is now a great filmmaker. There are many lights.

Lights which postpone for a moment, but only a moment, Sarah’s journey into darkness and the land of sorrow, misery and regret.