Тэд Уильямс: The War of the Flowers

"You are a very bad liar, Theo." She paused for a long beat. "It's a lucky thing you're musical."

He flicked a glance at her. Yes, she was — she was smiling. It was all just weird beyond belief. Did my mother have to get cancer to develop a sense of humor? That's a fairly shitty trade-off, isn't it ?

But there are no trade-offs. The universe isn't a machine for fairness. There's no Complaints Department. There's no court of higher appeal.

Pretty well sucks, doesn't it?

The descent went on throughout the spring and early summer, a free fall both agonizingly swift and yet somehow as thrashingly, stickily slow as a nightmare. Johnny Battistini quit coming over, unable to face the scarecrow figure that Anna Vilmos had become, although he still called from time to time to ask after her and to urge Theo to get out, just for an evening.

"Come on," he said the last time. "It would do you a lot of good, man. Just for a couple of hours…"

"Right. Right. And what if she falls down in the bathroom while I'm out?" Theo heard the hysterical edge in his own voice as though he were eavesdropping on someone else's conversation. "I'm supposed to just sit there drinking beers and scoping chicks and hope that doesn't happen? Easy for you to say. If it was your mom, you probably would."

"Hey, man…" John's voice faltered. They were lurching across a line they had never crossed before.

"Look, I can't do it, right? I'm sorry, man, but I can't. So just stop bugging me."

"But what about the band, Thee? The guys are asking me when you're coming back."

"Tell them as soon as my mother dies…" Even in his fury, he realized he was getting too loud — he was only assuming Anna was still asleep in the other room. "Tell them once this whole… inconvenience is over, I'll be back, cheerful and ready to play power-chord music with a bunch of twenty-year-olds. Yeah, with bells on. No need to worry about it."

"Theo…"

"I don't care. Tell them I quit. Now leave me alone."

Putting the phone down felt like slamming a door. He wanted to cry but he wouldn't let himself. Stupid, stupid, stupid .

Catherine's call a day later was a different kind of misery. Someone had told her about what was happening — Theo had resisted the urge to phone her up himself a dozen times, resisted it like a drunk fighting a late-night run to the liquor store, but now there she was, that familiar voice. But there was something different in it, a careful distance as though she had scrubbed up like one of his mother's doctors before calling him, pulled on surgical gloves and a mask.

"I'm really, really sorry to hear about your mom, Theo."

"It's pretty tough. On her, I mean."

Catherine asked how he was doing, listened while he talked a little about the icy horror of the daily routine, even made a little small talk of her own — a promotion at work, a movie she'd liked — but there was an unmistakable subtext to the entire conversation. This call is about loyalty and human decency, but nothing more than that. Don't get ideas .

No problem there. His ideas were gone.

When the careful pas de deux with Catherine was over, he walked into the living room feeling entirely empty, as though something had eaten him away from the inside out, removing all the essential Theo-ness, leaving only the skin. He found his mother sitting on the couch, her head back but her eyes open. The television was off. She was so far gone most afternoons, wandering far off the map in the realms of her own pain, that she didn't even bother to turn it on anymore.

"I think it's time for me to go to the hospital," she said when she heard him.

"You had your appointment this morning, remember?"

She shook her head, but just barely, as though if she turned it too far it might simply fall off. She was having a very bad day, he could tell. "No, I mean it's time for me to move into the hospital."

Something had a grip on his innards — something chilly that squeezed. "You don't need to do that, Mom. We're doing all right here, aren't we?"

She closed her eyes. "You're doing fine, Theo. You're a good son. But the doctor thinks so too. I can't do it any longer."

"Do what?"

"Hold up my side of the bargain. I'm too tired. I hurt too much. I want to rest."

"But you can do that here…"

She raised her fingers to quiet him. "I don't want you carrying me around, Theo. You've had to do that a few times already. And I don't want to have my own son wiping my bottom. I couldn't stand that. It's time."

"But… !"

"It's time."

And so the last, pitched phase of the descent began, a voyage into the depths as bad in its way as anything Dante had imagined. But there would be no beatific vision at the end, Theo felt blankly certain. No shining city. Only the endless white corridors of the hospital ward.

She was letting go, he could feel it, spinning away from him like a moon that had broken the tethers of its orbit and would soon disappear into the empty dark spaces. He spent part of every day at her side, trying to concentrate on books he had been planning to read for months or even years. There was no point being with her all the time, but what else was there to do? He was afraid to return to his job, as if somehow that would be tempting fate, would ensure the receipt of the dreaded phone call while he was away from her more surely than if he were simply sitting around the house. The boys in the band had taken him at his own grief-maddened word and had made the split official — John had left him a halting, apologetic message making it clear without ever quite saying it, and Theo had not bothered to call him back. A sympathy call from a friend of his and Cat's, really more acquaintance than friend, had also gifted him with the unwanted information that Catherine was dating someone. When he hung up, he put on an old Smiths record and walked through the house from room to room to room trying to remember what a person was supposed to feel like inside.

It sometimes seemed to Theo that he was letting go too, cutting all ties, following his mother on his own journey into the void. Only the knowledge that she had no one else kept him connected to the Earth. Uncle Harold had come to visit once, in the early days, but he was even less gifted with sickbed chat than Johnny Battistini, and Theo knew they would not see him again.

There were still a few good days, though, days when the pain was not too bad, her mind not too fogged by painkillers. He wished he had more news of his own to offer her as distraction, but he was as barren as a stone. It didn't seem to matter, though: when she felt well enough to focus, she talked. It was as though during its destructive course the cancer had also eaten away a wall inside her, the partition that had kept in all the normal chitchat and reminiscence, so that he had only realized when she became sick what a stranger she was to him. She talked about Theo himself at first, about his childhood, his school days, his inordinate love of Hallowe'en and the work of trying to make the costumes he wanted, but then, increasingly, she began to talk about her girlhood in Chicago. She told him stories he had never heard about the large Irish family of which she was the youngest child, of all those aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, and sisters from whom she had become estranged when her mother did the unforgivable — in a Catholic family, anyway — and divorced Anna's abusive, drunkard father. Theo knew little of this history, but it explained why he had met almost none of his relatives on his mother's side of the family, and it also explained why Theo's Grandma Dowd, a woman with seven children in Illinois, should have wound up living with her youngest out in California.

Hearing his mother talk now, he missed his maternal grandmother all over again. Grandma Dowd had been much more loving than her daughter, so much so that Theo had sometimes felt that he and his grandmother had a sort of secret treaty. Most of the childhood things he remembered fondly had her in them somewhere — trips to the drugstore that stretched to the candy counter as well, little gifts of money when his parents weren't looking, and of course all her wonderful, quirky Old Country stories about fairies and giants that made his mother roll her eyes and actively irritated his aerospace technician father, who thought his mother-in-law was filling the boy with what he called "simpleminded nonsense."