I wake up the day after Jennifer’s funeral with twenty-three missed calls from my brother. I sit upright and scroll down the list. Ten from Vincent. Two from Hugh. Five from Carmen. Something has happened. Something went wrong at the funeral yesterday; I should have stayed to make sure she was presented well. Her lips weren’t sealed properly. One eyelid could have opened. The mother might have complained. I should have checked all the seals before leaving.
I shuffle along the length of the bed and call Simon back.
‘What’s happened?’ I whisper, while dressing quickly.
Simon wails into the receiver, sounding sticky and wet.
‘Tell me!’ I whisper-shout, trying to keep my voice down so Liam doesn’t wake up. I can’t believe I fell asleep here. Unacceptable. I must have been exhausted from several hours of experimental film.
‘Mum’s unconscious. They’re saying she might die. Just come and meet us at the hospital.’
He hangs up and I stare at the screen of my phone. I press redial and he answers, snivelling. There is the loud muffled sound of what might be a tissue being dragged across the receiver and I hear Vincent in the background: ‘Tell her to hurry.’
The noise stops and Simon says, ‘Vincent said you should hurry.’
Vincent again in the background: ‘Tell her it’s an emergency.’
‘It’s an emergency,’ says Simon.
‘I’m coming,’ I say, stabbing at the screen until the call ends.
I stand in the middle of Liam’s room, shaking. My lips feel like they are migrating to the edges of my face. A pain like I have been smiling too much pulls my mouth open, not in a smile, but something the same size.
I rush to pull on my dress, leaving it open, which makes the panels either side of the zipper flap open and hit the back of my arms each time I bend to pick something up. It would be helpful if the curtains were open so I didn’t have to hunt around in the dark for my shoes. I crouch next to the bed and run my hands across the carpet, feeling underneath. My fingers touch some threadbare socks, a tennis ball, a bottle of eye drops. Finally my shoes, but my fingers can’t quite grab them. I keep dropping them like my hands are the claw in one of those arcade games. It’s an emergency; there’s no time for this nonsense. An emergency. I’m in one. When my mum was dying I couldn’t even pick up my shoes. A sock springs away from my fingers. Couldn’t even put on socks, I’ll say. Too distressed. I need to piss but there’s no time to piss!
I run down the steps two at a time and walk into the lounge, where a petite woman is sitting cross-legged on the floor.
‘Morning,’ she says, her cheeks full of cereal and milk.
‘Got to go,’ I say, racing past. ‘Family emergency.’
I jog out of the house and into the lemony haze of the morning.
Three deep belly breaths.
I find my keys at the bottom of my bag among sand and food wrappers.
One big belly breath.
My hands are so numb that I can’t feel them holding the wheel. On the road to the hospital, I keep looking at my fingers to make sure they are holding on and not sliding off into my lap.
The hospital is a wide expanse of cement that looms over a group of young people in scrubs smoking in the car park. I pull over near them and fling the door open, searching for a sign that might orient me to her.
‘Where’s the desk that I go to?’ I ask the group. My voice is higher than normal, and my dress is still undone at the back. Where are their credentials? With whom am I speaking? Where is my mother?
One of the boys points his cigarette towards the entrance, and I scurry in past more young people in scrubs.
I sprint down hospital corridors, stopping to ask for directions from a cleaner, from someone getting out of a lift, from someone in a uniform wheeling a gurney. At last I turn a corner and see Vincent and Simon sitting on a low strip of plastic seats. Simon is resting his head back against the wall and biting his nails, while Vincent is hunched forward, his head in both hands.
‘Where is she?’
Simon points to a door a few metres away. ‘In there. You can see her in a bit.’
‘Now,’ I say, heading for the door.
‘No, no, not yet,’ Vincent says.
‘What happened?’ I ask.
She fell down the stairs at home. Simon was in his room when he heard her cry out, but when he opened his door to the landing, she was already broken at the bottom. No one wants to have their last breath sink into their unclean carpet. No one wants to leave their body in an uncomfortable position. It’s not the way anyone imagines it.
My toes are slippery inside my socks, and when I scrunch them, they squeak, and I stand scrunching and releasing them as I bite the inside of my cheeks, until the pain in my chest gives way to the pain in my mouth. I can tell I’m in the way from how people veer around me, but I can’t bring myself to move. For minutes I just stand there, unable to make a decision. Do I sit next to Vincent or Simon? How can I just sit while my mother is dying on the other side of the wall? I need to remain upright and alert.
A nurse approaches and begins to talk to us calmly but I have no time for this; I need to see my mother.
I interrupt him to say, ‘I’m going in.’
He pauses, then resumes talking.
I try again. ‘I need to go in.’
This time he doesn’t pause.
I want to tell him that I’m her daughter. That I need to tell her that I love her and that she’s mine. I want her to teach me the soup recipe with the soaked barley, and I want us to go and get fake nails like we did last summer and tap our fingers on every surface of Aurelia’s, testing the clicking sounds. I want us to take Spanish classes together, and do the Vogue diet where you only eat boiled eggs and white wine for four days straight. I want to talk about life and death with her.
As I am weighing up whether I can use the strip of chairs as a battering ram to break down her door, the nurse stands aside and we are finally allowed in.
I see the number of tubes that reach into her like reverse roots. Her thick, strong mother arms are filled with them, and it terrifies me. I stand at the furthest point from her, my back wedged into the corner. I look at my feet, willing them forward, but they are frozen.
Simon sits next to her, kissing her hand, while Vincent paces the length of her bed, before wrapping one hand around her foot. I can see the shape of her toes through the white waffle blanket. She has the most beautiful feet.
‘You need to come back to us.’ He rubs her big toe with his thumb.
I don’t realise Judy is standing next to me until I feel her shoulder touching mine. Carmen also appears, pink-eyed, and talks emphatically to a different nurse. Hugh crouches next to Simon stroking his knee, and I hear him murmuring things like, You’re doing so well. We will get through this, as Simon puts his face in her hand, curling her fingers with his own so that they cradle him.
The new nurse walks around my mother’s bed holding a clipboard. Frowning, she presses the call button. I remain nice and still, using all my meditation skills and willpower to remain standing quietly as the distress in the room builds.
The doctor purposely slows his pace as he comes through the door. Someone must have taught him that he shouldn’t rush his way through bad news, but the slow speed doesn’t suit him. He has a trim waist and a neat haircut, and I know that he could walk a whole wing of the building in a few seconds if needed. This is a man who might swim forty laps before breakfast. He checks my mother’s tubes and her monitor, and we all learn that she’s dead by his lack of speed.
The doctor looks around warily then approaches me. ‘Arrangements will need to be made,’ he says. ‘If you contact a funeral service, they can take care of relocating her, otherwise she will be transferred to the hospital morgue.’
‘We are the funeral service,’ I say.
Vincent interrupts. ‘My wife is not going into the morgue. Are you crazy? She’s coming home with us. You have offended me. This is very offensive. What’s your name? Who’s your supervisor?’
Simon pulls a set of keys from his pocket. ‘We can take her today,’ he says, handing them to Carmen, who moves quickly towards the door. Hugh stands and hugs Simon’s head awkwardly to the side of his body.
‘I’ll go and get things ready for her back at work,’ Judy says, rushing to catch up to Carmen.
I look at my mother. I can feel her tugging at the invisible line between us. Yanking it from afar. The umbilical cord. I plug my bellybutton with my finger. I miss her and I need her, and she’s me, or a part of me at least, and I haven’t fully absorbed her yet. I haven’t gleaned all the woman-ness from her, which is what a daughter does. Whose daughter am I now? Where has she gone?
I’ve never seen Carmen drive, but the van arrives faster than seems physically possible, given the distance, and our mother is zipped into a bag and loaded into the back—a slice of trauma seared into each of us to be digested at another point in time. Vincent insists on driving us home in my car, even though he looks haggard, while Hugh and Carmen travel behind in the van.
‘Your mother,’ Vincent says, while indicating right and merging left, ‘loved you both so much.’
I can’t breathe. I take off my bra underneath my dress, which is still open at the back. I need a window open. I need a glass of water.
‘Who will tell your dad?’ Vincent glances at me in the rear-view mirror, looking concerned because everyone knows Jack is still mourning a divorce from decades ago. Which one of us is willing to break this news?
‘Dad,’ Simon repeats, but I’m not sure if he’s referring to Vincent or our birth father, Jack.
At home, I lie on my bed with the air conditioner on high, holding my body in the same position as my mother’s in the refrigerated unit at Aurelia’s. Vincent has left all the windows open in the main house, and for hours strange noises bounce between our two homes. It sounds as if he’s taking everything apart and putting it back together, like the act itself will apply to him.
I think of my mother’s plump form wearing the landscape down, dropping skin cells and banging doors shut, making her mark on the world in various ways, even the book by her bed, marked halfway through with a folded page. Death always comes too soon, like a bus leaving minutes earlier than the timetable said it would. I want to feel her weight and measure her length. I want to know the exact colour of her eyes. What scars she has. I want to put her favourite things in a pile, and then I want to be underneath the pile. I douse the bungalow in her perfume but it brings no comfort. No peace.
I run to the bathroom in the main house and search through the washing basket until I find her sundress. I clutch it to my chest and carry it back to my bungalow, where I lay it out on the bed. I stuff it with a pillow. Then I take the pillow out and put the dress on. I take it off. It brings no peace.
I run to the fridge in the main house and pull out the lump of marzipan that she rolls each piece of fruit from. I carry it back to the bungalow with both hands and sit on the edge of the bed, tearing off chunks and cramming them into my mouth until my lips can’t close. I chew and swallow, then break off another piece and mould it into the shape of a woman. Wide hips, pointy breasts, hugging arms. I eat the woman head first, but it brings no comfort. No peace at all.
I get a pair of her favourite earrings, long beaded chandeliers. I put each under my bra strap, either side of my ribcage. I want the physical dent of them; I need to wake up with a pattern on each side of my body like pressed tin. I need to have her things near me. I need to have her near me. I need.