Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Itasca, Minnesota
It was a Tuesday morning when Liz got the call she’d been dreading. “It’s your mom. You’d better get over here.” It was her mother’s next-door neighbor Harold, who checked every morning to make sure Cecily had raised the blinds in the kitchen of the big old Victorian by 7 a.m. If not, he went straight over to check on her. “She fell,” Harold said. “She’s unconscious. I called the ambulance.”
Liz tossed her phone onto the bed, shucked off her flannel pajamas, grabbed a sweater and jeans and wrestled into them. Alarm had numbed her limbs, made them hard to manage. As happened most mornings lately, she’d been sipping coffee and staring at the row of Dean’s golf shirts still hanging on his side of the closet, telling herself this would be the day she’d box them up and take them to Goodwill. People said time slowed after a death, but, for Liz, whole days, weeks, even months, had zipped by in a blur. She could not account for the more than three years that had passed since the day—also a Tuesday—she’d woken up beside him and he simply had not. An aneurysm; there’d been no predicting it. Nor did she understand how the pain could seem to grow worse with time, not better. The initial shock that had shifted to a dull ache for a couple years was now, from time to time, a screaming pain.
And now her mother! A fall. The first slip toward the end, as everyone knew, especially at Cecily’s age. Liz yanked on wool socks, grabbed her phone, and ran to the mudroom. She shoved her feet into her SORELs, pulled on her parka and leather gloves.
Car keys, car keys, where?
On the hook where they always were, thank God. And her purse beside them. She dropped her phone into its pocket and hurried out into the cement-cold of the garage, pressing the button for the opener, the door whirring up (thank you, Dean; her birthday present, seven years ago). Into the cold Grand Cherokee. She fired it up, then jumped out to grab the shovel and hack away at the six-inch-high drift that had formed after last night’s snow. Frozen solid. She tossed the shovel into a much bigger drift against the garage, hopped back into the car, and gunned it in reverse. A big galumph over the bump, but she made it! Out onto the frozen gravel road, sheltered by tall pines. The road was slick, and she was driving too fast.
Slow down, slow down, she heard her own voice, as if she were talking to her daughter, Molly, who always drove way too fast, in Liz’s opinion, but now it was Liz herself who only pressed harder on the gas. It was eight miles to town—thirteen minutes, minimum, in even the best of weather—and she was half cursing Dean for insisting fifteen years ago that this was their dream lake house, where they’d retire, and half thinking how she’d been trying and trying (hadn’t she?) on her twice-weekly visits to tell Cecily that it was simply time to leave the old Victorian where Cecily had lived for nearly seventy years; where Liz had grown up, and Liz’s father, Sam, too. Heartbreaking, yes, but a woman at ninety-four couldn’t expect to still live alone, and, if it was independence Cecily wanted—she’d refused even to consider having Molly and Caden move in, saying flatly, “They are not invited”—surely an apartment up at the Senior Village would be nice, wouldn’t it, when so many of her friends were there?
“The same people I’ve had to answer to all my life, you mean?” Cecily would say, with a dismissive laugh. And Liz, inwardly fuming—she’d always felt herself the more adult of the two of them, even when she was a small child—would turn to chores that seemed more immediately “pressing”: the garbage needed taking out, the steps another sprinkling of Ice Melt, and so on. Honestly, Liz just hated to argue, especially with Cecily, who never failed to win. And, yes, there’d surely been a part of Liz that had been happy to deny that disaster was on their doorstep (just the bare facts: ninety-four; that big old house), happy to let Cecily continue blithely on—or else it had been Liz herself who’d been blithe, pretending this call wouldn’t come, when she must have known it would. But—she supposed; and not that this was an excuse—she’d been caught up in her grief, unable to handle things with the practical efficiency she’d always handled most everything before.
Before.
And now see where they were. Knowing Cecily, she’d probably been out shoveling the back steps after last night’s snow, even though she’d been told a thousand times to wait for Harold to do it.