ONE DAY IN dress rehearsal for the Molière production, I’m having my bodice stitched up when my phone rings. It’s Dad. ‘Can you come home please?’ he says. His voice is strange.
‘Sure, I’ll see you after rehearsal.’
‘No, I need you to come now.’
‘I can’t, Dad, it’s dress.’
‘Sorry, but you have to come now. It’s important.’
I don’t ask what’s wrong. I hang up and tell the director I have to leave, and go straight to the car. My hands tremble on the wheel. I light a cigarette. Norma, my 1960s Cortina, is too old to go on the tollway and I don’t have one of those electric passes but I rattle along it anyway, eyes blankly monitoring the temperature gauge. The trip out to the suburbs lasts hours and a split second at the same time. I flash back to the hospital, the tests; my mother sitting on the bed with the tape across her voice box, the redheaded male doctor.
‘It’s just an annoying condition I’ll have to take medication for,’ she said. ‘It’s called sarcoidosis. Nothing to worry about.’ The word sounded so awful, all I could think of were hot coils in her throat, but she assured me it really was nothing.
When I pull up outside the house it looks as it always does. The curtains are open. A kid whooshes by on a skateboard. I mount the steps to the only home our family has had.
Dad is in the kitchen making tea, his back turned. The kitchen looks the same, the cork floor, the fridge covered in stickers and magnets, the hum of the dishwasher. Mum’s handbag on the kitchen counter, with all its mystery. Dad keeps jiggling his teabag. ‘We’re just waiting on Kate.’ He leaves the room without me seeing his face.
There are no biscuits in the pantry and no chocolate in the cupboard above the microwave. I’m not hungry anyway. I stand at the window and watch my brothers shoot hoops. The dog runs around their ankles. The strong smell of the gardenia in a vase above the sink infiltrates my nose, tightening my stomach.
Kate walks in, banging the back door. Beautiful Kate, so dark, like Mum. The opposite of the boys, me and Dad, all honorary Swedes. She and I share an apartment now, in the city. When the boys finish school, we joke, they can live there too.
Kate raises her eyebrows at me. I shrug. She puts her bag down. The boys come in, puffing. Ben says, ‘What do you think’s going on?’ Kate says no idea. Alex slumps in a chair. My stomach churns.
Dad comes back. His face is frightening. ‘Come into the living room,’ he says in a small, tight voice. He pulls the couches closer together, into a weird sort of circle. We sit down and Mum enters. Her eyes are red and she looks pale.
‘Hi guys.’ She smiles and scratches her head. She doesn’t hug us. She can’t quite look at us. The little piece of blue tape is still on her neck.
She sits down in the armchair she and Dad recently had reupholstered in a contemporary floral pattern. She seems dwarfed by both the chair and the design. Why couldn’t they have just kept the green velvet? Dad sits down on his knees, placing his hands on each thigh. He looks like a little boy. He goes to speak, then begins to cry.
I feel like vomiting. We wriggle, it’s unbearable, he takes forever to speak. Finally, he manages to spurt, ‘We asked you to come because. Basically. Your mother’s not well at all. They were wrong.’
My hands are tight between my knees. Dad cries more. Then he breathes. As if he’s been winded he says, ‘It’s not sarcoidosis. It’s cancer.’
I look at him, waiting for him to say something that will annul what he’s just said. His shoulders are hunched and tears drip onto his hands.
I look at Mum. She is even smaller in her chair. It’s like she’s on trial. I look back at Dad. Go on, I plead silently, go on. Make it go away.
But he doesn’t say anything. Kate leans her face into her hands. Ben curls in on himself. Alex sits rod-still. Dad tries to slow his breath in order to speak.
‘Lung cancer. And … it’s not possible. To operate.’
Our cardboard house falls gently down on us. Dad cries on the carpet. Mum shrinks still further into the chair. Had I really grown up in this house? Did I used to play in that sandpit outside, make Barbie homes inside that cubbyhouse? Who are these people? That is not my dad sitting there, I have never seen this person before. He is a little boy who got lost on his way to the shopping centre. Why won’t the little boy stop crying?
Mum’s hand is on the arm of the chair. I am close to her but I don’t know how to reach out and touch her.
I want to go back. I want to reverse out of the house, go back up Eastleigh Drive, back to rehearsals and do my Act II monologue. I want it to be yesterday, I want to be back in the Greek restaurant, on the funny date with the actor guy, Jack. I want to be in the apartment with Kate, watching her make me a sandwich as I tell her about the date. I want today not to come, I want it not to be now; I want to be a kid again, a snot-nosed toddler, a baby, in her arms, on her chest. I want to crawl back inside her and never be born.
Time has a new texture. Space too. We are far from each other and far from the rest of the world. This tight-knit family, exploded. Mum feels guilty, I can see it. She is leaving us. We don’t want her to leave. We would rather anyone else leave. Not her. Why her? She does nothing but help other people. She brings babies into the world! Looks after mothers. Researches how to make their lives better. Looks after us. Looks after everyone. It can’t be her. It can’t be real.
At some indefinable point she turns to us and says, ‘I’m sorry. We still have time.’
We have thirteen months.
I never thought she would actually die, though the redheaded doctor said, point-blank, ‘Six months to two years.’ Little grief by little grief, you get lulled into a new reality. First, the news. Grieve that. But she’s still there, still looks so well, you’d never know anything was wrong. So you stop grieving. You stay in the present. Chemo. Tubes and needles. Grieve that. But she laughs, her hair stays in, maybe a cure will come. She gets tired. Sleeps until afternoon. Grieve that. But she still laughs, still hugs, still asks all kinds of questions about your new boyfriend Jack. She’s still right here. How can there be any grief?
Then the hospital. The I-don’t-think-she-can-go-on-like-this-much-longers. The wheezing and gasping, the sprawling red bruise across her back, like two big red wings. Morphine. Palliative care. She sees portals in insipid hospital prints of country England. Talks to her dad in the portals. But she is still warm, still beautiful, still speaks small sentences. And so the plateaux go on, deeper and deeper, until she is in a bed, pillow covered in hair, in and out of consciousness, people shaking their heads a lot. Her eyes open a crack, for you. She squeezes your hand. She is still alive. Your mother. She is right there.
Kate and I are eating ice-creams outside our apartment one hot night with Jack. Our windows are open upstairs and we hear our landline ring. Nobody ever calls the landline. Kate goes up and answers it. Jack and I wait in silence. She comes running back down the stairs. Without speaking, Jack drives us to the hospital. Kate and I sit in the back holding hands like children.
We leave Jack’s car. The sliding doors open. A lady is there waiting for us.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘You’ve just missed her.’
Like she’s left on a train.
When I was little I would stand by my parents’ bed in the deep of night whispering, ‘Mum. Mum. Mum.’ Eventually she would wake and let me in. ‘Five minutes, then back to bed.’ I would lie there, stiff as a board, as far away from her as I could get, hoping she would forget I was there. But I could still feel her warmth.
Now I whisper, ‘Mum. Mum. Mum.’
She will wake any moment and say, ‘What is it, Jaynie?’
My French professor went missing once; there was a newspaper article saying he had disparu. Disappeared. I kept waiting for him to come back. I learnt much later that the word actually means ‘dead’. The meaning of this was not fully apparent to me until the days and weeks after that strange and silent night. I kept looking for her, expecting to feel her, smell her. But she had disappeared. No matter how hard I tried, how good I was, I would never see her or hear her or smell her again. Her absence was tangible, a hole, sucking all the warmth from the planet.
Months pass. The world feels warped – everything is familiar and yet not. I’m angry at it for being the same, when nothing is, or ever will be again. How can the streets have the gall to look as they did before, the houses, the faces, my front door?