Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

“But that doesn’t matter, does it? Could he die?”

“The doctors would like to operate immediately, as apparently the pressure on his brain is serious.”

Sally stopped talking, and Irene could tell by her breathing that she was choking down another crying jag. “But he is refusing treatment,” she clipped out. “He wants to continue as he has been. He’s in a lot of pain, and they won’t give him his drugs. They don’t want him on the opiates when he goes into surgery.”

“Who’s with him?” Irene said. “Where are you, and who’s with him?”

“Sam Beth is with him,” said Sally. “But she doesn’t—”

“Oh, I see,” said Irene. “Sally, what do you want, from me? Why are you calling?”

“I want you to come home.” The words came out in a rush. “I’m sorry I shouted at you. I’m sorry I treated you so badly. Come back.”

“You’re sorry for how you treated me?” Irene pushed on. “Not sorry for what you did to us? To me and George?”

“I’m sorry for what happened to your mother.”

“My mother was a drunk and a suicide,” said Irene. “I don’t know what you ever knew of her, or what she did to you to make you hate her, but to me she is—”

“She’s what?”

“She’s the reason I’m standing here!” Irene snapped. “She’s what I am: worthless, expired, a golem, a suicide. This is what we are. Used up, and then too shamed to go on.”

“No,” said Sally. “She wasn’t a suicide.”

“She was,” said Irene. “She killed herself! I know! You don’t know where I am right now. You don’t understand anything.”

“No, she didn’t kill herself, Irene.”

“How could you possibly know? Were you there? Will you tell me the truth?”

“Irene, I was there. I was there!”

“Why?” Irene asked. “Why?”

“I was there for George,” said Sally. “I was there to yell at her, because she wouldn’t leave him alone. Stalking him, feeding you information about him, tailoring your life to his. After I had told her no!”

Irene swallowed. “Did you push her? Did you kill her?”

“No. And she did not kill herself. She was drinking, and she fell, and she died. We were talking, arguing, and she just fell.”

Sally coughed and went on. “I didn’t ignore her, you know. All those years. I looked in on her, you know, only to make sure she was alright.”

Irene took a deep breath in. Just a drunk. Just a fall. This must have been the client Mrs. Betty had seen. Just an old friend, an old fight. Nothing more complicated than that. “That’s fine, that’s fine. She needed all the help she could get. And look at me,” she said. “I’m just like her. You know I don’t belong with him. You said it yourself: I’m ragged. I’m ruined. I’m not for him.”

“You stop that,” said Sally, her voice savage. “And you listen to me right now. You worry that you’re just like her?”

“I do,” said Irene. “I came from her and I am her.”

“Of course you are. Of course you’re just like her,” said Sally. “And you should be. Your mother died drunk, Irene. And that was horrible. But Bernice lived beautifully, and she loved forever. You’d be lucky to be as good as she was, but damned to be so unlucky. It was not her fault, falling down those stairs.”

“Then whose was it?” Irene sobbed. “I couldn’t do anything more than what I did. I did everything I was supposed to do.”

“I should have helped her,” Sally cried. “I should have been there, not to yell at her, but to be her friend. But I was a coward, and I left her all alone. It was me. I did it, twenty years ago. I made this happen. And I will pay. I’ll pay whatever you want, but please come home. He needs you here, and I need him to be well.”

Irene paused.

“Don’t bear the weight of this down on his head. I’m begging you,” Sally said. “I am so, so sorry. You have to forgive me. I wanted to help you. I wanted to save you! Both of you, don’t you see, we were a family. I—”

“Why did you leave her? Why did you leave us?”

But Sally was silent. Irene chewed furiously on her lip, and with the phone still stuck to the side of her head, she began to march off the bridge. All she could think about, suddenly, was Sam Beth. She thought, How dare she? How dare she stand there where I should be standing? How dare she, with her little gold snake armbands and her weak understanding of string theory and her dark eyeliner? I belong there. I belong with him. And she could say it was her doubt and her fear that kept her away, or her loathing for herself or her desire to die or not die or her mother’s awful failings. She could say whatever she wanted, and stand on whatever bridges, and take whatever positions she wanted, but that was all bullshit. Who cared about being right?

She was bound to him, heart and soul, and had been for as long as she had been alive. As she ground her teeth into her lip and felt the skin break and tasted the iron in her own blood, she realized what a stupid idiot she would be, to keep on punishing herself, and him, for their mothers’ crimes. Their mothers didn’t care. One was dead and one was crazy. There was no score to keep, no justice to be served. There was either a life of loneliness with death at the end, or love and happiness, and Irene was in control of which she had. She resolved at that moment not to be stupid about this any longer.

“Alright, I’m coming,” she said. “And I don’t care what you have to say about what happened. And I don’t care who you are, or who my mother was, or what happened twenty years ago, or on those stairs, or what star was in what sky, or what planet was orbiting what star, or what lunatic was standing on what landing. It doesn’t matter. I’m coming home.”

“Please come,” said Sally. “Please come. I need you. Please forgive me, and come. You have to know, in all of this, I only wanted to help George. And that’s what you want, too, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

“I’m coming on the first plane I can get on.”

“Don’t fly,” Sally said. “She always said—”

“Now come on—pull yourself together,” Irene growled. “And don’t be ridiculous. Don’t you get it? All of those plane predictions, all those dreams she had about a plane, are really about George! His plane, his symmetrical plane in the universe, all of his research—this is what she must have been seeing. She just had the wrong kind of plane.”

“I don’t know,” Sally said.

“I flew out here, nothing happened, and I’m flying home. But I don’t know how easy it will be for me to get out of here, how long it will take. If you can’t get him into surgery, you find someone who can. Where is Dr. Bryant?”

“He won’t see anyone from the institute except Sam Beth.”

“What about his father? Where is his father? Have you told him about this?”

“I don’t even know where he is. We were fighting—”

“Find him,” Irene said. “Find him, and get him to the hospital, and get him in the room. Tell him he must convince George to have this surgery. And I will be there as soon as I can.”

As Irene marched off the bridge she was filled with an emotion she could only identify as sympathy, and the target of this emotion was her mother. Or maybe it was pity. Or respect. It was too unfamiliar to properly understand, but in the forefront of Irene’s mind, a phrase pounded in time to her heels tapping on the sidewalk: it worked. Her mother had created her to be a golem, a monster. She was the Bride of Frankenstein. And she should be angry about that; she should hold on to the rage that made her frown, the resentment that made her hate. But in the end, I do love George, she thought. Could she argue the path that brought them here? Could she blame her mother now? Maybe, in the end, it had all been motivated by love, and love had been the result. After all the murky circumstances, and the trials and failures and right and wrong moves, she loved him. And as she flew to him now, all she could think to say to her mother was: thanks.