Тэд Уильямс - The War of the Flowers

Grandma Dowd had died when Theo was twelve. At the time he had thought it didn't bother him much, had been surprised and impressed at his own sangfroid . He realized he had simply been too young to know how much it truly hurt.

And now, as though in dying her daughter was somehow assuming her essence, he almost felt he was at his grandmother's bedside, something he had been denied the first time as she lay dying from pneumonia, since his parents had thought it would give him nightmares.

This is my whole family , he thought, staring down at his mother's wasted, sleeping form. My whole family is dying. I'm the last one left .

"I want to tell you something," his mother said.

Theo sat up in the chair, startled out of a half-sleep and another of those persistent, disturbingly vivid dreams in which he was looking out through fogged glass as though he were a shut-in or a captive animal in a terrarium. He had definitely felt himself to be someone else this time — not Theo, not Theo at all, but instead something old and cold and amused. It had been terrifying, and his heart was still hammering.

At first, before he saw his mother's open eyes, he thought the whisper might have been part of the dream. She slept so much now — sometimes through the whole of his morning or afternoon visits. He had almost begun to think of her as something motionless, as an effigy, although there were also the times she moaned in pain, even after the nurse had come to give her more medication, and he found himself wishing frantically for the return of that absent, dismal quietude.

And there were still moments of lucidity, as this seemed to be.

"What is it, Mom? Do you need more meds?"

"No." It was a sound made only by the least amount of air, a sip. Deep breath pained her, made smaller the space in which the cancer grew like a dark conqueror. "I want to tell you something."

He pulled his chair over close to the bed, took her dry cold hand in his. "I'm listening."

"I'm… I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"That I didn't… didn't love you like I should have, Theo." Through the haze she was trying to see him properly; her eyes rolled a little, trying to focus. "It wasn't your fault."

"I don't know what you mean, Mom." He inched closer so he could hear her better. "You did fine…"

"No. I didn't do what I should have. It was just… something happened. When you were a little baby, practically a newborn. I suppose it was that, what do they call it… ?" She paused to get her breath, laboring in a way that made his stomach lurch. "Post-natal depression? I don't know. We didn't know about those things, really. But it just happened one day. I went to your bassinet — you were crying and crying and you wouldn't stop. Gas, maybe." She showed the ghost of a smile. "But I suddenly just felt like I didn't care, that you weren't really my baby." She frowned and closed her eyes, trying to summon the right words. "No, it must have been different than that. I didn't even understand what a baby was anymore. Just a little screaming thing. Not a part of me." She screwed her eyes more tightly shut against a wave of pain. "Not a part of me."

"You can't beat yourself up about things like that, Mom."

"I should have got help. I tried to tell your father. He didn't understand — told me I just needed more rest. But I didn't love you the way I should have. I never did. I'm so sorry, Theo."

He felt his eyes sting. "You did all right. You did your best."

"That's a terrible thing, isn't it?" Now her eyes came open, fully open, and for the first time in days he thought she really saw him, complete and true, with a terrible clarity that would make normal, everyday life a nightmare. He tried hard to hold that awful stare.

"What is, Mom? What's a terrible thing?"

"When you die, and the only thing anyone can say about you is, 'She did her best.' " She took a shaky breath, then waited so long to take another one that his heart began to race again. When she finally spoke, it was in a whispery quaver like a frightened child. "Could you sing me a song, Theo?"

"A song?"

"I haven't heard you sing… in so long. You always had such a nice voice."

"What would you like to hear, Mom?"

But she only closed her eyes and gave a little wave of her hand.

He recalled the day he had found out about her illness, when they had gone out to hear the band play. An old one, then, an old Irish tune. She liked those.

he began quietly,

She smiled a bit so he kept going. A nurse stuck her head in the room, curious about the sound, but then backed out again, staying near the doorway to listen but trying not to intrude. Theo ignored her, struggling to remember the words, the tale of some nameless poet's regret.

The words were coming back to him, which was a relief, since he didn't want to break the spell: this felt more like being called upon to perform a ritual than just singing an old song. He sang it as simply as he could, avoiding the reflexive mannerisms of pop music. Only as he finished the last verse and began the final chorus did he remember what it was really about, the poet's regrets in the face of imminent death. He faltered for a moment but saw that his mother was asleep, the smile still on her lips, faint as starlight on a still lake.

He left her there sleeping. The nurse, a young Asian woman, smiled and started to say something to him as he came out of the room, but saw the look on his face and decided not to speak.

In the end, Anna Vilmos did not get even half a year. She died in the middle of the night, August 8th. It seemed to be a good death, given the circumstances. A nurse saw that she didn't appear to be breathing, took her pulse, then began the list of procedures that would ultimately free up the bed for another patient. Someone from the hospital called Theo at home and, after giving him the news, told him there was no point in coming in before the morning, but he roused himself anyway and got into his mother's old car, feeling that it would be safer to drive in his somnambulant condition than to ride his motorcycle. They had drawn the curtain around the bed, covered her face with a sheet. He pulled it back, his thoughts fractured into such tiny, whirling pieces he felt like a snow globe, felt he had been shaken and shaken and then set down.

She did not look peaceful, particularly. She didn't look like anything.

She looks like where someone used to be, but isn't anymore.

He kissed her cold cheek, then went to find the night administrator to make arrangements.

The warehouse district sweltered in heat unusual even for the season. A work gang of nixies, lounging on a break in the shade of one of the tall old buildings, were reluctant to move back out of the black coach's path until one of them recognized the flower-glyph on the license plate. A name passed between the lean, hard-muscled creatures, a murmur like the sea that was denied to them until their indenture had been paid, and they quickly flattened themselves against the wall to let the limousine past.