John Ridley - What Fire Cannot Burn

Lilac.

She thought she smelled it when she sat down. Now Soledad was sure. There was lilac in the air.

Soledad didn't know of any growing on Sunset, The smell had to be drifting down from up the Hollywood Hills. Near the intersection of Sunset and Holloway-six blocks away-in a car that was made in Korea a cover version of a song by Fleetwood Mac played on the radio. Somewhere on the Blvd. a woman cried, but they were tears of joy. For a brief moment a near portion of the entire world was received with exceptional clarity by Soledad.

It wasn't right. The situation was incorrect. A background as a cop wasn't needed for Soledad to know her mother suddenly showing up in LA by herself was messed up. As her mother talked, Soledad half listened, half tried to figure the most natural, the least abrasive way to ask what she needed to know. Except if Soledad was ever nonabrasive, she'd long ago forgotten how to be. Probably about the same time she'd forgotten how to be patient.

So Soledad blurted: "What are you doing here?"

"I came to see you," Gin said.

That didn't come right away. There was a pause ahead of it. Brief, but it was there. The hesitation her mother had taken, the thought she'd put into a simple answer: Gin was lying.

Having spoken enough of them, Soledad knew a lie when she heard one.

"For no reason? You just get on a plane, fly a couple thousand miles-"

"To see you, talk with you. Not over the phone and not in, in vagaries."

"You and Dad splitting up?"

A laugh from Gin. A bitter one.

"If you are, you can, I guess, stay with me if you want."

"I never should have let you be an only child. You needed more family than your father and I could give you."

Soledad didn't know what to say to that, didn't know where it came from.

The waiter stopped by with the Santa Fe salad, the sea bass Gin had ordered, asked the ladies if they needed anything further.

A couple of curt noes.

Soledad fumbled with her silverware. Gin cut her food with a knife, forked a piece and ate. Ate another bite. Then she set the fork at the edge of her plate.

She said: "I have cancer. Ovarian cancer."

The handle of the knife she held, dull as it was, hurt Soledad with the force which her fingers gripped it. Drove it into her palm. Her throat went dry. And her eyes as well. Someone else hearing that, hearing their mother was potentially terminal, most likely their eyes would go slick. Soledad's did the opposite.

Her voice, Soledad's voice was steady. "You should be in the hospital."

"I will be. I'm scheduled to go in Monday."

"You're going to wait until-"

"I wanted to see you. I wanted to tell you." Soledad started to say: You could have called. Except…

Her mother had called. She'd called and called, and Soledad had ducked and dodged.

Soledad felt a slow and steady drip of guilt water-torturing her. She knew she'd fed it for years.

Fucking cancer.

Gin: "I came to tell you… well, I came to say how much I loved you. How proud I was of you.

Was. Was?

"This is… you're, you're sick, and you come all the way out to tell me-"

"… but it sounded so odd, vapid to tell someone you loved them. Under the circumstances." Gin had to fight with that word some. Circumstances. "When you say it like you're making a final declaration. If they don't know it; if the person you're saying that to doesn't already know that you… and it sounded, and it sounded cliche. I'm dying, and therefore I have to… well, probably I'm dying, so I have to tell you that I… but I wanted to tell you."

"Stop it!" Soledad barked loud enough people four tables over looked in her direction. The has-been actor among them. "Stop talking in the past tense. It's like talking to a ghost."

Amazing even to herself; her mother had cancer, the bet was it was killing her, she'd picked flying to LA over going in for immediate surgery or treatment or whatever science was up to that was-in terms of fighting cancer- little better than a good leeching, and the only emotion Soledad could show was anger.

Unbelievable.

The waiter returned, asked the two ladies if everything was to their liking. Soledad's head shook.

The waiter thought one of the meals was lacking and started to go into a WeHo hissy fit.

Gin set the guy right, sent him off. She ate. She put an effort into eating, going to the trouble not hardly out of hunger as much as to give Soledad a minute to collect herself. Food was poor distraction. Gin didn't have an appetite, hadn't since her doctor had sat her down, looked her in the eye and told her with all the compassion of a guy who's told a hundred patients some HMOified version of the same spiel: You've got an illness which could very much end things for you, and it's pretty much beyond us.

Gin pushed her plate away. She looked to her daughter. "What I want to say, I wanted to say face-to-face. I'm going to be selfish, Soledad. I don't want you coming home."

"What?"

"I don't want you dealing with my sickness." In that sentence Gin put the emphasis on "my." "I don't want you watching me waste away."

"You're not going to die."

"You talk as if it were a matter of choice. If I choose to live, I will. That's hardly the way things are."

Except, in Soledad's world it was. In Soledad's world she had to believe it was.

Soledad: "Please quit the bullshit acceptance of the-"

"It's not… bull." Knocking on Death's door. Gin wouldn't sully herself with foul language. "I'm fifty-eight years old. My time is coming. Today. Tomorrow. It is. I can cry, or I can… I can get what I'm able to out of the time I have left. If that means taking a few days, flying to see my daughter… My fear, Soledad, my living fear was that something would happen to you while I was still alive. I didn't want that. I didn't want that as badly as possible. There is something so horribly out of sync about a parent burying their child. And I take comfort In knowing the manner I will end. It won't be by a bullet from a. a thug or some such. Or getting run down by some drunk. This way when it happens it will be just like, like slipping under water."

Soledad was realizing there was so much more to her mother than she knew. Was it some kind of law of nature you had to be close to losing something to appreciate it?

"How's Dad taking it?"

"Well. He's well in my presence. I think he cries alone, wishes that he could do something. I haven't… There are some things you avoid talking about, but I know it must be horrible for him. When you marry, you take a vow to love, to protect. Then there comes a time when the vow is useless."

"It's not useless. He still loves you."

Gin appreciated her daughter's insistence. But she was in a place of frankness. "Not useless, then. Hollow. How much does it hurt to love someone, to say you'll always protect them… I know he'd give his life for me. But he can't. He can't, and that's a hurt beyond imagination. I've felt it about you. There have been so many times where I've felt-"

"Do people know? Have you told people?"

"No." A slight smile. Even at this juncture Soledad steamrolled her mother, kept the personal conversation from becoming too intimate. "I told… do you remember Mrs. Schoendorf? Her daughter was in your class."

Soledad remembered the girl, her mother. She indicated so to Gin.

"Right after," Gin continued. "I got out of the doctor's office, in a store I ran into her. Don't even know why I'd gone shopping except so that I could pretend everything was normal. Pretend the doctor hadn't told me what he told me. So there I was. Mrs. Schoendorf, she was talking, going on about… whatever. About nothing, really. I don't know. Maybe it was important. Maybe it was the most important tiring in the world to her. But once you know you have, you have this thing, you have this thing that's actively trying to end your life inside you… once you know your self is trying to kill you, that's the only thing that's important. And I said that to her. I said: I can't talk now, I have cancer.'"