Wait Until Tomorrow

In 2006, the dice land in my favor. I am offered a teaching job with insurance benefits and a real salary. Not only that, but I have enough freelance writing work over the summer to pay off my old car and put a down payment on my dream car: a gray Prius. A quick search on the Internet and I find the perfect car—right color, right options, right price—just one town over from Charlotte.

A full-time teaching job is going to make things difficult. My mother is getting less and less able to take care of herself. With the extra money I make I can afford a little help, but it won’t be a lot.

Once school starts I develop a routine. Now every morning Emmy takes the Blue Monster to school, and I drive over to my mother’s. I scramble eggs with cut-up tomato and cheese. I make toast and lightly butter it. We sit at the table and eat. I don’t usually want to talk much. I peruse the New Yorker, gobbling up the cartoons. Then I put my mother’s compression hose on her, leave out some food for lunch, hug her goodbye, and dash off to work. Sometimes she looks at me with desperation before I go. Her depression, when it’s on, is like mustard gas filling the room. I’m afraid to breathe it in.

In the evenings while Emmy is at rehearsals, I go over to my mother’s. When Emmy is home, I try to be home as well. Hank spends most of his time working. He occasionally joins me on some obligatory parental outing, and we still go out to eat as a family or watch a movie on the weekends, but increasingly we are isolated units. Our differing political points of view have become sharper in recent years, our arguments a little more bitter. I know it’s not healthy, but I don’t know how to fix things. I’m doing the old one-day-at-a-time trick.

And Emmy is growing up. One night I dream of her as a little girl. How I sweep her in my arms, coddle and kiss her, nostalgia flooding my veins. I know even as I dream that she is no toddling child. I know I will never again feel that small body in my arms, heart beating like a rabbit. I ache to remember the way she would turn to face me and drape her small arms over my shoulders. Then I wake from the dream, rise and stumble into my teenager’s room, slip under the covers and cradle her long, lanky body in my arms.

One night in early November, I am playing Scrabble with my mother at her apartment; I almost have the word vizier. Emmy has been gone for about ten minutes; the dishes from our spaghetti dinner are still in the sink. When the phone rings, I know it isn’t good. I know it is her. I am already standing, looking for my coat, reaching for the phone.

It takes seven or eight minutes to get to the accident site. I keep calling Hank on the way over, but he doesn’t answer his phone, so I call the neighbors and ask them to go over and tell him to call me. Red and blue lights pulse through the chilly air, and I can see the Blue Monster in the intersection, front axle broken, wheel turned on its side like a broken leg and another car with a pancaked front end next to it, ambulances on either side. I park my car and dash across the busy four-lane street to get to my child.

“I’m here, baby,” I say, but she is surrounded by emergency workers, putting a neck brace on her, strapping her to a board. They explain that they are taking her to a hospital to have her checked out.

At the hospital I learn that a couple who stopped right after the accident took care of her and let her use their cell phone to call me, since hers was lost in the battered, liquid-leaking car. I also notice that she’s wearing my leather jacket. The jacket was given to me when Emmy was just a baby by my friend Mike Gearhart, who had once told me that Emmy was the closest thing he’d ever have to a child of his own. I was a single mom and he’d just received some insurance money from an accident. He bought Emmy baby clothes. He stayed up nights with me when she was sick. Even after Hank and I got back together, he was still a part of our lives. Emmy loved him. She was only five years old when he died of heart failure, but she never forgot Mikey.

At the hospital she has the jacket draped over her like a blanket. The X-rays show no broken bones. The CAT scan shows no internal injuries. We spend about four hours in the emergency room. The other driver turns out to be okay, too. After the doctor signs the release papers, my daughter slips her arms into the leather jacket and we leave the hospital to go home.

Except for briefly visiting my mother in a hospital, I haven’t been in one since sixteen years earlier when the doctors cut me open to remove my daughter from my womb. I have no idea that this environment will become very familiar in the near future.

A week later I hear a yelp and a thud come from Emmy’s room. She stumbles into my room, ashen-faced, holding her finger. She has just put a sewing machine needle through it.

“Go wash it off,” I tell her and rush downstairs to get ice. I find her a few minutes later, passed out on the bathroom floor with Hank lying beside her to keep her warm. We head back to the emergency room, where they remove a half-inch worth of needle from her finger. I am so thankful that she didn’t have this pair of accidents back when I didn’t have health insurance.

Emmy recovers but my mom gets worse. The bad days keep coming. She cannot stand to be alone. She is nearly always in pain. She forgets where the bathroom is. I have become her lifeline. I go over to take care of her seven days a week, once or twice a day, and it never seems to be enough. When I am not teaching, I am taking her to doctors or going to the store for her, or just taking her out in my car to get her out of the debilitating depression that swallows her like Jonah whenever she’s inside four walls. We can’t quite afford assisted living unless we sell the piano that she has had since she was eight or nine years old, and that’s something we’re not willing to do yet.

On the afternoon of November 27—my birthday—I check my voice mails. In one of them from earlier in the day, my mother screams “Help me, help me!” over and over. She had fallen that morning and the paramedics had come and lifted her up, but it’s my number she called, my recorded voice she begged for help. As I listen to her screaming message, something inside me turns hard and sour. Perhaps I am thinking of how I looked forward to this decade in my life. As my child-rearing duties lessened, I thought I would have more time for travel, friends, reconnecting with my husband, writing all those books in my head that are clamoring to be written. But now, I can see no end to this, and my heart feels like a shriveled peach.

But not all days are bad. At Christmas, my mother becomes concerned about all the other residents who have nowhere to go and nothing to do on Christmas Eve.

Perhaps she is remembering that bleak Christmas six or seven years earlier when she was all alone. Since she made her livelihood as a church organist and music director, she’d always worked on Christmas Eve and bah-humbugged the whole thing. That Christmas, however, except for the sparsely attended Christmas Eve service, she found herself with nothing to do, nowhere to go. No one had invited her for Christmas dinner. I was in California with Hank and Emmy. Both my brothers were spending the holidays with their own families. I remember calling Mom to wish her Merry Christmas and hearing a lonely pang in her voice when she said, “I haven’t seen a soul all day.”

When my mother gave up her church job and came to live near me, I wondered how she would function without her identity as a musician. The ideal death for her would have been on a Sunday morning while she sat at her organ during yet another boring sermon. When it was time for the anthem to begin, the choir would look expectantly over at her, but she would not move. She would not lift her hands this time. The grande musical dame would be gone.

Now she is no longer the grande dame; she is just another addled old person with a walker. And yet, since she’s been at the Landings, she’s managed to start a chorus. Of course, at first, the management loved the idea but refused to pay for music or even move the piano around so she could see the singers while she played for them. My mother tried to explain that the piano had wheels on it so you could move it, but our old nemesis—that statuesque blonde in her perilously high heels who had an alarming resemblance to Glenn Close with a dead rabbit on the stove—wouldn’t hear of it.

So instead of buying music, my mother handwrote arrangements for the group of twenty or so singers. Her trusty assistant, Sylvia, took it to the copier to make copies for everyone. When they put on a show every few months, the great room was packed. It wasn’t the best singing around town by a long shot, but it was definitely the most appreciated.

My mother’s idea for Christmas Eve is a little different. She doesn’t want to put on a concert. Instead she decides to throw a big sing-along party. Everyone who hears the idea loves it. Except the management. They tell her she can only do it as long as they don’t have to do anything. They won’t even publicize the event among the residents.

When we get to my mother’s apartment, she is wearing a glittery white vest, looking most festive. By now she can no longer walk as far as the great room, so she gets in her brand-new motorized wheelchair, which took weeks of wrangling to get, and we parade behind her, carrying punch and cookies.

We walk into the large room where a crowd of fifty to sixty old folks mingle around the tables laden with drinks, pumpkin bread, cranberry bread, muffins—all brought by a few volunteers. Word of mouth is a fine method of communication in a retirement community.

The life of the party has arrived. Mom takes command of the evening. Tom, a POW in World War II, sings “Oh, Holy Night.” Emmy sings “White Christmas.” The whole place sings “Jingle Bells” and “Joy to the World.” Mom’s makeshift chorus sings a few songs. She then whips out a few classical pieces. The happiness in the place is almost palpable, like a cat that leaps unexpectedly onto your lap. As I gaze at my mother in her sparkly holiday sweater, her body coaxing sound from that crummy little piano, hundreds of images of her doing this same thing in different places with different people reverberate through my mind like the infinite reflections you see of yourself when you stand between two mirrors.

My mother’s eyes shine as she makes that pitiful little upright roar. I look around at these people. They are having a wonderful time, and I can’t remember a better Christmas Eve.