When she was eighty-one, my mother suffered two strokes in one year. After the first stroke, she was unable to move the left side of her body and in need of full-time care. After the second stroke, she was affected. Or that’s how she described the feeling. She felt she’d briefly crossed over to the other side, where, she explained to us, she saw a world she’d never believed possible. Among the visions she’d had in this other world were: her own death at the hands of a final stroke by the end of the year, and Dee’s body decomposing in a handmade grave somewhere in the city of Milwaukee.
My mother first saw the psychic on the Today show after her second stroke. Thomas Alexander was featured in a long segment detailing his most recent success stories. One of these successes—a cold case the psychic claimed he helped solve—caught my mother’s eye. A young woman’s murderer was finally found, though the killer himself was by then dead too. My mother watched the woman’s parents speak about what this discovery meant to them, and she was shot through with jealousy, then with a fresh spike of hope. The jealousy could be managed; the hope was more dangerous, because in our family, hope could travel like a virus we passed between us.
Though my mother wanted our support, logistically she needed it, confined as she was then to her bed at the Lutheran Home. Ma met with each of us (my brother, Pete, her sister, Suze, and Wolski) separately, in an apparent divide-and-conquer strategy. Though, in the end, she may not have needed to be so cautious. We were, every one of us, easier to convince than she expected.
My mother’s right eye nailed me against the wall of her room. Her left eye was still and murky. She waited to hear my objections. It was telling that I couldn’t think of many.
“He is going to be expensive,” I offered.
“So bury me in a cardboard box if you have to.”
“Ma,” I protested. “Please.”
“I’m serious. You know I don’t care what kind of damn container I’m in, but I want her next to me.”
“There are other options,” I said. “Still.” Though I knew this wasn’t true and so did she. We’d known this for twenty years now. I pressed my back into a bookshelf full of framed photos of her children, her grandchildren, her sister, my father in his navy uniform. One of the pictures, of Dee in middle school, toppled off the shelf. The rubber bands in Dee’s braces were magenta. I scrambled to set it right but couldn’t and ended up clutching the photo awkwardly. My sister’s twelve-year-old face shone up at me.
“Don’t give me that crap,” she said. “Not from you.” My mother tried a shake of her head. She looked like a doll being tossed by a toddler.
I nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“This is my last chance. I can tell, Pegasus,” she whispered to me (using Dee’s nickname for me was purposeful), and then she repeated, “This might be our last chance. I want her next to me and your father when I’m buried. I will not leave Dee’s plot empty. I won’t do it.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. We’d buried my father in Forest Home Cemetery after his heart attack. My mother had purchased a plot for herself then too, and after Dee had been missing for twenty years, she’d purchased a third plot for her youngest daughter with the hope that one day we might find her body and finally have a proper funeral for her.
She clutched frantically at the air with her right hand like she wanted me to go close to her, but a bout of nausea rose in my throat. I stayed where I was, so she clutched her own dead shoulder instead, crossing her right hand diagonally over her chest. Her left hand lay like a dismembered limb by her side. Outside the room there was another Lutheran Home resident yelling, You’re hurting me, you’re hurting me. I felt a little dizzy from the heat of the room, the smell of reheated food, the overlapping white noise of the residents’ TVs on all at once.
“You owe me this,” Ma whispered. The nausea continued to bubble. It had moved into the soft palate of my mouth, which now watered. Suddenly, my mother began laughing. It was unlike the laughs Dee and I had shared with her as children, though. There was something dull and metallic about it: a knife in need of honing. She clutched her dead shoulder and laughed and laughed. The doctors had said this was something that could happen too. It was called emotional lability: It caused her to mix up her emotional reactions, to express them without provocation, to be confused. I had the awkward instinct to laugh with her, but when I looked into her eyes, I saw a deep well of fear and confusion. I just reached for her right, feeling hand. Her whole body went limp.
“Watch that video,” she said. “Just watch it.”
“Okay, Mama,” I whispered back. “Okay, okay.”
She laughed at me.
Across the street from the nursing home, my aunt Suze was sitting on the curb, smoking a cigarette and rebraiding her long gray hair. She had just gotten off work—her cheeks were flushed, there was a sweaty dew on her brow, and she was wearing dirty sneakers crusted with diner-floor filth. As I’d gotten older, I’d become more impressed by my aunt’s ability to waitress well into her sixties. Though of course she’d never looked at it like that: It’s got nothing to do with ability, Margaret, she’d scolded me once, it’s about need. Though she’d tried on a few different jobs over the years—a couple stints as a receptionist in various offices, some telemarketing gigs, even sales—she always seemed to go back to waitressing. She was an incurable extrovert, she was hugely anticipatory of her customers’ needs, and she was most content when she was in motion. So she was very good at what she did. Still, I knew the lifestyle wore her mind and her body down, though she wouldn’t admit it to us.
Though she was fifteen years younger than Ma, they’d always been close. When Pete, Dee, and I were young, she was like a second, much cooler mama to us. She’d watch us on weekends and sometimes take us camping or to the 7 Mile Fair, a big flea market near Illinois. She used to rubber-band big wads of her cash tips, tuck them into her fanny pack, and then hand the cash out to us at the flea market so we could buy whatever random shit caught our eye. These outings used to infuriate our parents, but she always laughed at the junk we brought home. She never had kids of her own, so she doted on us.
When she saw me, she crossed the street and then wrapped me in a tight hug. I breathed in her smell, which was mostly of the perfume called Red Door.
“How is she?” Suze asked. This was a question we rarely asked of each other anymore because the inanity of it was too overwhelming. Maybe my mother’s deteriorating condition had made it seem more appropriate again.
I shrugged. “She’s . . . animated.” I hoped this would serve as a warning.
“So what did you say?” she asked.
“I said sure. She wouldn’t hear much else.”
Suze hardened her face like she was receiving a bad diagnosis. “I figured.”
I wanted then to warn her about a shift I felt inside me. “Maybe she’s right?” I said. “I don’t know.” I looked past Suze onto the stretch of North Avenue that ran from the swamps in the suburbs all the way downtown where it eventually spilled over the bluffs and into Lake Michigan. “Maybe we have a chance here.” When I looked back at my aunt, she was gazing at me sharply. Though she tried to soften her face, I’d already caught an expression she hadn’t meant for me to see. There is no word for the specific mixture of pity and pain one feels toward a beloved who is sinking.
“Maybe,” she said, but it was obvious she didn’t mean it. She cupped one of my ears and then tugged on the lobe like she used to do when I was a kid.