17

Will You Be Here Tomorrow?

Fort Collins, Colorado, March 2012.

Mom is lying on her bed. This is what she does most days since arriving at the nursing home nearly a year ago. In this position she looks small, her dark hair wild amid the white scrambling of bedclothes. She weighs all of eighty-two pounds. Her dark-brown, widened eyes are the color of the rich, dark loam in Ohio, that state where she was born. They contrast sharply with her pale Scottish skin, which settles like parchment on her frail bones. Her eyebrows rise in recognition, and she smiles; it is a look of pure happiness. That same smile has greeted me more times than not over the past fifty-plus years. I return her smile, but with a pinprick of pain, as I am once more forced to acknowledge her aging.

Her single twin bed is in the middle of the room, clad in the Laura Ashley quilt Rick and I purchased twenty-five years before for our bed, just before expecting our first son. Once it was decided she would live here, she made it clear I was not to waste money on another quilt. “It’s still perfectly good,” she said, scolding my interest in material things. She was raised during the Great Depression, and her family was extremely poor, but they ate well, having two acres on which to grow their food. Her mother would begin food preservation as soon as anything came to fruition. As a result, Mom was not fond of blind consumerism.

10. Adoptive mom, Eleanor; and Susan, age four. Photo by Jed Devan. Courtesy of the author.

Sometimes when I visit I lie down beside her and we watch the large-screen television on the wall, commenting on Jerry Springer or Dr. Oz or golf or football. Today, however, I sit on the edge of the bed and begin once more to survey Mom’s limited collection of personal belongings, starting with the simplistic collage of photos in the inexpensive gilded frame. They are photos of me, at various times of my life. Some are school photos; many are not.

The most prominent is my baby picture provided by Montana Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services to accompany the announcement of their adoption of me. In the photo I am eighteen months old, clad in a pink dress, reaching for something out of the camera’s eye while a small smile played hesitantly on my face. When I was in my twenties, Mom explained that photo to me: “You know, when we found out you were up for adoption, we came to see you. ‘She is the most adoptable baby we have,’ the social worker said. And when we came into the room, you sat on a chair and looked at me with your dark eyes and that Indian stare—you know the one, the one that measures people to see if they pass the test before making any kind of judgment? That’s the stare you gave me, and I knew, right then and there, I was going to have to earn your trust, that I was being measured as well.”

In the adjacent photo I am three, standing in a meadow filled with gray-green prairie sage, with pines, aspens, and mountains providing the background. I are surrounded by black-eyed Susans. The original photo had been black and white because color film was cost prohibitive for a young biologist with a new family, so Dad had added color dyes. As a result, the yellows of the flower, the reds of my overalls, and the blues of the sky are soft, almost pliant. In the meadow my small, pudgy hand is clutched around a green stem, and I look at the camera, smiling.

Next to that one is a photo of me, taken in 1966. I am standing on the lowland near the Bitterroot River, where the soil is rarely moistened by the gently moving water. I am seven and wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt. My hair, flighty and fine, is pulled back into a dark-brown ponytail.

“Here,” my adoptive father says, as he moves me from place to place, his hands on my shoulders, guiding me, forcing me, while my feet stumble on the rocks that are too big and rounded to rest smoothly against one another. “Sit here.” “Stand over there.” Always, the Bitterroot Mountains laced by cottonwoods are my backdrop.

My father takes the shovel that he has brought with him and places the blade into the rocky earth, near a soft-pink flower. With his foot he forces the blade in, uprooting the plant with its papery petals, lifting it from its home. He is careful to keep as much of the soil around its branched roots as he can, but little by little the soil falls away as he transfers the plant into my small hands.

11. Susan, age three. Photo by Jed Devan. Courtesy of the author.

“Hold this. It’s a bitterroot,” he says, stepping back as he looks into the square box at the top of the camera whose two perpendicular eyes stare at me from the front. He checks the small, brown light sensor in his right hand. “Smile.” He snaps. He frowns and looks at me through the box again. “Smile,” he says, his voice now edged with irritation. “This flower is the bitterroot,” he adds by way of explanation. “For the Salish, the tribe you belong to, it is sacred. It has important meaning. Now kneel down on one knee and smile.” I do, but the rocks dig into my skin that barely covers the bone, and the smile I produce is fake. “Do it again, but this time hold the plant away.” “Hold the plant here.” “Hold the plant down and in front of you.” “Stand up.” He is always looking into the box, always checking the light meter. The only time he looks at me is to show his irritation of my inability to follow his simple directions. By the time we’re done, that plant doesn’t feel very sacred. I watch him place it back into the hole from which it was extracted, but the soil is now broken, scarred by its removal.

I’ve since learned the plant is sacred for its medicinal properties and high nutrition value, but its most impressive characteristic is the fact that it can withstand drought for several years, during which time it doesn’t bloom. But when the rains come, these delicate, long, pink petals shoot up and out, producing the floral display that resides in my heart. Oh, so many metaphors. I breathe deep and look away. I ask Mom how she’s feeling.

“I’m doing pretty good.

This is her standard response.

Mom is eighty-four years old, an age neither one of us thought she’d ever see after sixty-some years of smoking, four full-blown manic episodes, two marriages, and a lot of loneliness in the most rural locations of the American West. I’m thrilled she’s still with me, and I tell her so. I don’t tell her I can’t imagine a time she will not be.

She gives me a cryptic look, one full of confusion. “I don’t know why I’m still here,” she says, her voice wavering and unsteady, more from nonuse than emotion. “Nearly all my family is gone.” Her brows now knit together in consternation. “Who do I have left?” She shrugs and raises her hands palms up.

In that small gesture and that short question, she’s raised a delicate subject that dangles awkwardly between us, one that we have never addressed. What are we, really, to each other? To me, she has always been my mother, because any memory of my birth mother has long been wiped away, cleansed, erased physically, legally, and psychologically. But I haven’t always been her daughter. On a certain level there is an awareness of a “before” time, when other people constructed my family, when she was childless.

That question defines this razor’s edge of being.

In the early to mid-1970s I began to explore, through poetry, what it meant to “be Indian,” but also what it meant to be me: being Indian and living white. Even in those early years I perceived that a decision was involved; a requirement to be one or the other. I couldn’t be both; I couldn’t borrow; I couldn’t pretend. Perhaps I was trying to order my world. Or perhaps the world was trying to order me. Regardless, the pressure was palpable. “With what will they bury me, flower or song?” I asked at the end of one such poem, referring to the white lilies that graced the funerary sanctuaries or the drums and the harsh ululations of grief I’d heard in the movies, read about in stories. Shadow memories.

A year later I switched mediums, trying to fit those two identities together in a fairy-tale happy-ever-after type of way. This time I sought something three-dimensional. I purchased beading string and beads in white, turquoise, rust, and bright red, as well as a three-inch-long narrow, stainless-steel needle. In my fifteen-year-old mind’s representation, white beads represented white people; rust beads represented American Indians; turquoise represented the world in which we lived; the red represented the blood spilled for us to survive in that world. I skewered several rust-colored beads at a time and watched them run down the length of string, until the line ran several inches. I then strung a few turquoise beads to indicate a break, followed by a few white beads. The white beads really weren’t white, but pearl, possessing a luminescence that caused me to fall under their spell. As I worked, my fingers stopped shaking, having become comfortable with the machinations of working on a very small scale. Inch by inch the single line of beads grew, rust, turquoise, and white. Then I changed the pattern. I alternated ten rust beads with ten red beads, interrupted by a brief turquoise section. Then I interspersed the rust with white, intermingling them, breaking up their cohesiveness. I tied the ends, and it became a necklace, which hung midchest in a single strand that looked to outsiders like chaos, but to me like a new world order.

Mom smiled when I showed it to her, narrowing her eyes in intent study. “That’s quite creative, Susie,” she said, moving that study to my face. “Tell me what it means.”

“It shows the world before, when just Indians were here, then it shows the white people arriving, then it shows the wars, and then it shows how we live in the same space.” Her study returned to the necklace, and she nodded, a look I didn’t fully understand crossing her features. I can place it now. She was surprised at my awareness of assimilation, though neither one of us at the time knew what to call it.

How uncomfortable is that subject for an adopting parent?

“Who is that?” Mom asks, pointing to a framed photo on her dresser, the one where a woman is wearing a colorful paper conical birthday hat, its elastic string pulled taut beneath her chin. Dan, who turned two, sits quietly on her lap. In front of them sits a large piece of birthday cake. The woman’s smile is large; Dan’s is shy.

“That’s you,” I explain, slightly taken aback that she can’t see herself in the photo. “It’s Dan’s second birthday, and you were celebrating with us.” Mom peers at it for a long time as if she is trying to bring her two selves into focus. A decade ago she’d mentioned sometimes when she walked by a mirror and caught her reflection, she was shocked at the face staring back at her, wrinkled and old. “I still feel like I’m twenty years old; imagine my horror at being seventy-five!”

She doesn’t laugh when she says this.

Mom arrived in Fort Collins in 1991, just six months before the birthday photo. She and I had talked of her moving to be closer to me, and as I waited for that to happen I imagined her life once she was here. In my mind I moved her into the small, yellow townhome near our house, the one surrounded by a border of black earth in which she could garden, her hobby for the past sixty years or so. I saw us around a glass table eating dinner on her patio or sipping tea and laughing as we watched my children, her grandchildren, playing in the small yard. In that house, I believed, she would watch them grow into young men.

But that dream was shattered when she flew into Denver’s Stapleton Airport one late morning. She’d left behind her second husband (a retired investment banker), her membership at the Billings Country Club, and her friends in the life she’d carved out in the seventeen years of living in Billings. As I bundled her and one overnight bag into my car and drove north on Interstate 25, I began to realize, with a sick feeling, that she was in the midst of her second manic episode, sputtering words and ideas at once true and fantastical. Her husband, she whispered that night after dinner, had been a drug addict; she’d seen the needle tracks on the inside of his elbow. Warning bells went off. He was seventy-five and an alcoholic. Neither Rick nor I had ever seen any needle marks.

That first week in our house she slept very little, perhaps fifteen minutes a day. For the next week or so she was animated, filled with guile, extroverted and creative, composing small intricate drawings, symbolic and deep, whose meanings were known only to her. Within days of these drawings the paralyzing paranoia crept in, and her drawings then became dark scrawls, scattered and jagged. She was suspicious of anyone who looked at her for more than a few moments. But the odder her behavior became, the longer people stared.

In early May I found a psychiatrist whose office was located in the hospital. He was able to see her the same morning I’d contacted him. I had reached my limits of not sleeping and watching her antics with my children become more bizarre as time went on. The psychiatrist diagnosed her as manic-depressive, and she walked out in a fit of rage. The doctor called 911 and asked them to contact him if a woman matching her description was called in. A half an hour later the doctor received a response. Evidently, Mom had begun knocking on doors and asking people to let her in. The woman who allowed her admittance then placed the call and assured the dispatcher that Mom was “harmless.” “I just think something’s not quite right,” she said.

By the time they got there, Mom was gone.

In the meantime I’d returned home. This is where they reached me when she’d been spotted at a school. Could I meet them there? Yes, give me twenty minutes, I answered. The thing that didn’t make sense was that the school they said was located all the way across town.

“No,” the secretary said, warily, when I’d entered the building and introduced myself and my reason for being there. “We didn’t call about your mom. The woman you describe never came here.”

I wanted to vomit. Where the hell was she?

The phone rang and the secretary reached over and picked it up on the second ring. “Yes? Yes? Why yes, her daughter’s here. Sure. I’ll tell her to go over to the other school. No, no. That’s all right.” When she put the phone down, she informed me that dispatch had given the name of the wrong school. I was to go to the one near the hospital. She laughed. “Well, they start with the same letter of the alphabet! Good luck!”

Jitters coursed through my body as I pulled up behind the police cruiser, by which two officers towered over my five-foot-three mother. They wore dark-blue uniforms and dark-gray sunglasses. Mom grinned and waved. I could tell she thought she was important, having these strong men so interested in her life that they’d come to find her! I cringed.

Then Mom looked at me, and a sly smile creased her face. She glanced at each officer, then announced she knew karate and took a stance, raising her hands into straight-edged sharpness. Oh, God. They didn’t laugh. They didn’t find it even mildly humorous. Instead, one officer touched his fingers to the butt of his pistol, while the other wrapped my mom’s hands behind her back and placed her in handcuffs. Putting his hand on her head, he manipulated her into the police car, ignoring the angry sputters that escaped her pursed lips.

“We’ll take her to the mental-health facility,” he said to me, without preamble. “You can follow us there.” I drove through the neighborhood, which melted in my tears, but whether I cried from witnessing the scene of her madness or from witnessing the scene of her enforced control, I am not sure.

That afternoon dark clouds gathered above us, breaking into a storm whose rage swirled violently in green anger, while bolts of lightning called forth sheets of rain that fell on the thirsty land. Its brutality mirrored my emotions. The life I envisioned for her was disintegrating into soul-shattering shards. The dream died entirely when I learned a year later that she hadn’t gardened in years; arthritis in her knees caused her too much pain.

Within six months Mom moved into low-income housing, a far cry from the country club lifestyle she’d shared with her second husband. When he died the following year, she didn’t receive anything from his estate. Evidently, she’d signed a prenup that allowed an inheritance only as long as she lived at their residence. Like many women in her generation, Mom was too trusting. They had sat at his lawyer’s office, after having had a few drinks, when she signed the document willingly. She believed that her husband-to-be had her best interests in mind when he called it a formality. His lawyer hadn’t suggested she get her own legal representation. Gone was the money for ten years of “service,” as she liked to call her marriage, her country club lifestyle, and her status. She’d grown up in severe poverty. It had once more become her identity.

My thoughts are interrupted by Mom’s quiet voice, and I slowly return to her small room in the nursing home. I ask her to repeat her question.

“Did you have trouble finding me?”

“No,” I assure her, with a smile. “I always know where you are.”

“You’re so full of bullshit,” she says, laughter shaking her small frame and her brown eyes shining with mischief. But I can tell she’s waiting for an answer. I ignore the question; there’s no appropriate answer I can give.

She is here because her lungs are compromised to the point that she gets winded after walking only twenty feet or so. Plus she’s no longer able to take care of herself in the traditional sense. For one thing there are too many medications for her to keep track of. Many of the pills and inhalers treat her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Other pills and capsules treat her bipolar disorder. Unfortunately, the medications have a tendency to manufacture new side effects, for which she requires additional medication. Each day is a tightrope walk of being agitated or sleepy, engaged or confused, independent or helpless, happy or sad.

I’ve begun to hate the television advertisements that romanticize aging while denying the reality of the life she’s living, all with large grins of the unconcerned. In one commercial a woman smiles as she pushes her grandson on the swing, both of them laughing with wild abandon in the face of pulmonary disease. In another a man smiles through his depression when the sun comes out of hiding behind a cloud. In daily programming there is a succession of people who, with the right medications, beam their joy as they move through their various diseases and malfunctions. They grin despite what their bodies and minds are telling them: the end is near. But watching these commercials is a bit like watching the last movies that the dying people see in the film Soylent Green. The end is not awful. It is green fields and flowers and blue skies.

A small table sits beneath her window, holding items that are reminders of her previous abilities, most of them books. She hasn’t read any of these in a decade and probably wouldn’t be able to concentrate long enough to enjoy them now. There are four Time-Life books of literature, the biographies of Albert Einstein and John Adams, and two volumes of poetry by Robert Frost, as well as a well-worn copy of a green, cloth-bound Audubon bird book.

“What have you been up to?” I ask, drawing my attention back to the small woman beside me, the one whose fingers hold the afghan I once crocheted.

“I played BINGO, today,” she says brightly.

“Did you win?”

“I did. When you get a BINGO, you win a quarter.” She beams, then her eyes grow dark and her brows knit together, as if she is trying to reason through a puzzle. “I wonder what you get when you get a black out. That’s when you black out all the numbers on the card,” she explains, quietly and carefully. She focuses on me with the wide-eyed awe of a child. “That has to be worth a lot.”

I smile and nod in agreement, knowing that in her mind, she is once more a child, when a quarter meant so much more.

But then, just like that, her smile, her awe, her wonder, disappears, and her face takes on a tension that was absent only moments before. Like clouds moving quickly over the eastern Colorado high desert, confusion, embarrassment, and sadness cross her face. I am suddenly aware that she is no longer “pretty good.”

Her expression has gone blank as she surveys the room in which she’s lived for the past year. Uncertainty shadows her face as her gaze wanders over the photos that document our lives, my mother and me, my husband and me, the kids and me, all of us together. It deepens when it settles uneasily on the lightweight wheelchair that sits near the foot of her bed, an oxygen canister hanging from its handles. After several moments of intense study, she points a shaky index finger (a neurological condition she’s always had) toward the chair and says, politely, “Someday, when you have a bit more time, I’d like you to show me how that works.”

I don’t tell her I have time now because it doesn’t matter. Her confusion will increase with compounded interest if I attempt an explanation. So, instead, I say in a soothing voice, “Sure, Mom, I can do that.” My throat grows tight, and tears blur my vision. I am once more aware of the inversion of our roles: me as caretaker, her as the one taken care of.

Her gaze continues around the room, and she points to the bathroom and the armoire, respectively, and her voice becomes steadier. “That’s where I take a shower, and that’s where my clothes are.”

My soul shatters just a bit. She is not explaining her room to me; she’s explaining the room to herself, reminding herself that she still knows that the world has order. And then she falls silent, because suddenly it’s all gone, her memories as well as her ability to converse about them.

Mom is tired. Her eyes are rimmed in red, and the scattered remains of her thoughts ricochet off of invisible ideas. As her memories slow down, mine pick up. She viewed her role as a mother with paramount importance. It was visible in everything she did, with care and patience. She improved my fine motor skills by having me place raisins on gingerbread men. She taught me how to read recipes and decipher ingredients, explaining what a “dash” or a “pinch” or a “scant teaspoon” meant. Unfortunately, even with this instruction I didn’t become interested in cooking until my midtwenties, not because she didn’t try to teach me but because I just wasn’t interested in learning. She made a myriad of Barbie doll dresses from the odds and ends of fabrics left over from her upholstering projects and other sewing projects. She created grand ball gowns from pink floral ticking and scraps of golden jacquard. She knit chic sleeveless dresses with the smallest of needles, their stitches fine and precise. She sewed a woolen skirt and jacket set, trimming the neck with faux leopard fur, a fashion requirement of the 1960s. Eventually, she taught me to sew my own dresses. She spent hours driving me to and from my piano lessons, violin lessons, singing lessons, and orchestra, choir, and theater rehearsals. She taught me to read, listening to my stuttered beginnings of Dick and Jane and soon graduating to Dr. Seuss, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and Winnie-the-Pooh. She taught me to embrace creativity through writing, painting, pretending, acting, and music. But most important, there was always time to talk, in front of a fire, sipping a cup of tea, about the gossip, the boys, the teachers, the future. And then she sent me out into the world with all the tools she provided.

Sometimes I failed. And sometimes I cried. With the exception of her first manic episode, she was always there to help pick up the pieces as I was coming of age. That’s the way I remember her.

“Will you be here tomorrow?” I hear the fear in Mom’s voice, and I cringe because she’s never been a fearful woman.

“I will,” I assure her.

“Will you know how to find me? You know, sometimes they put me in different rooms.”

“No, I didn’t know that. But you know what, Mom? Anytime you look up and see that picture that Aunt Ann painted, if it’s in the room, that’s the room you’re supposed to be in. They will always have that in your room.”

She leans back and thinks about what I’ve said and nods, as if to convince herself the statement is true.

I can’t imagine the fear of not knowing where you’re going to be the next night. Evidently, I went through it when social services removed me from my home and placed me first with a caseworker, then with my parents.

Mom has erased much of that for me.

I am trying my best to do the same for her now.