She had told Jeremy that she was flying to Nevada to entrust her mother to someone after her mother had taken a fall, which was true. She was also planning to stay in Brooklyn for a day on the return. She was planning to meet Lyle Michaels and her brother.
Lately, Jeremy removed himself from the apartment or else he was a roving camera trained on her body. He turned to her when she said his name, and his eyes were flat black, and he asked sharp questions about her mother’s health. She believed if she pretended not to notice, he would stop. A romantic idea: a woman in control, emotions tight to her, all tucked in, administrative almost, capable of being a woman who had it all.
When she got to Nevada, there were ten résumés. Ten curations of history. She had made the calls. But references were strangers too. Everyone with a horror story had trusted someone once.
“My own flesh,” her mother said, “can’t stick at home for her mother. My own flesh hiring the cheapest person.”
“You think this doesn’t cost me?”
But there was a moment, Alexandra already at the door. She turned back. Federica, the new nurse, was folding a towel. Her mother was a slumped thing, thick but wilting, and there was black mascara all over her eyes. It would be different when Shel returned and Alexandra brought her son. There would be a phenomenon of numbers, multiplied people. Her mother had never believed a life turned better was common sense. It was not in the evidence she’d accrued, the years, and now she was old too soon, had been some years, aged by small checks and worry and all the disdain from the neighbors, teachers. It would be a shock, no, a surprise, such goodness.
Alexandra looked at her mother with the remote control in her lap and the dry, loose gullet. Her hands were lumpy on the arms of the chair, and Alexandra remembered their tremble on a pencil when once Alexandra had asked for help with her algebra homework. Her mother had copied the problem slowly, begun and then erased and then started over again, had gotten a new sheet of paper and tried once more. Her mother’s hands were shaking. Her mother had crumpled the new sheet eventually and stood, told her she would not tolerate a stupid daughter who didn’t pay attention in school, didn’t learn any better, and as Alexandra watched Federica place a blanket on her hunched mother’s shoulders, the pity and rage were fast in her chest.
Her mother was slapping Federica’s hands away, but she was very weak now, clumsy with opioids. She was moaning like a child, and Alexandra wished her mother would call out to her. She wished, for a moment, she could with no fear of retort tell her mother she loved her.
“I thank God my husband isn’t alive to see his ungrateful daughter,” her mother told Federica loudly.
When she’d gotten many miles away from her mother, inside the hotel, Alexandra could smell the exhaust of expensive food. Fried cremini mushrooms. Aged steaks. She cut straight through the lobby with all its dark wood and leather. Up the elevator.
In the room, she poured three drinks and sat at a table reflecting city light. Out the window, there were windows. Alexandra could see a figure in an adjacent building pacing. She was certain if only there was one more, just one, she would fall into the filled boxes of their life, part of a company, a marriage, a family, all the indices of experience. It was not too much to ask, she was certain, in the twenty-first century.
An alert in her pocket. Unlock phone. Not going to happen tonight.
Lyle Michaels.