Lidia Yuknavitch - The Chronology of Water

My mother was an alcoholic manic depressant borderline suicide case with a limp. All of that.

In 2001 my mother went to the doctor because she was having trouble breathing. I was in my ninth month of pregnancy in San Diego. She’d been taking care of my memoryless father for over 15 years by then. I know what kind of toll that caretaking takes. It must have drained every drop of her. My mother didn’t visit doctors much, having spent her childhood years in body casts and hospitals. So there were no chances for early warning. Cancer had already invaded her lungs, her breasts.

She called me in San Diego the day before I went into labor to tell me she was dying. Miraculously, Andy answered the phone, and hung up, and lied. He said, “Your mother says she loves you.” He waited for our son to be born. Then he waited a little longer. He told my sister and me in our living room in San Diego a week after Miles was born. The three of us cried in my little seahouse, Miles asleep in my arms.

It took six months. The rest of her life. One of the more difficult parts of her hospitalization was her intense withdrawal from alcohol. You will hate my saying this, but it will be true nonetheless. If I hadn’t had Miles, I would have moved back into her house of pain. And I would have brought her a bottle to ease her suffering, her journey. Every day if that’s what it took. But my Miles — there was a deathmother, and there was his life.

That is all.

When she died I was not with her. I tried to help her during her illness but she had so clusterfucked her life up by then there was almost nothing I could do. Andy and I flew to Florida to see her. To comfort her. To show her Miles. She looked so happy to see the little baby boy with the lifeforce larger than thunderstorm. She said, “Belle, take him — I don’t remember how to hold a baby right.” She said, “A boyah! We’ve never had one a those!” Clapping her hands together and crying. But she had almost no life left in her.

Once when I was alone with her in her hospital room, I asked her a question. She looked so small and still. Her face was shrunken and wrinkled, and her body so pale and slight. She almost looked like a girl, except for the lines a sad cartography across her face. I asked her, “What’s the best thing that’s ever happened in your life?”

It was the question Kesey had asked me. It’s what I could think to ask.

She said, “Oh. Well, Belle. That’s easy. My children.”

Though I couldn’t imagine how, I believed her.

They called me from a Florida Hospice all the way in Oregon when her skin became ashen and her eyelids began to flutter. They put the phone to her ear. She could not speak, as she had starved herself and hadn’t the energy by then. They said when she heard my voice on the other end her eyes became very wide, and then her breathing became very loud and urgent. Then the nurse took the phone back and told me she was gone, and that she looked peaceful, and that she believed my mother had heard me.

You probably want to know what I said to this woman. She was not a good mother. She did not save us from my father, and she taught us things that we have spent our entire lives trying to unlearn. But sometimes all I can remember is the way she rode with me to have my third abortion, the way she sat in the little room where they vacuum your insides out and call it a procedure, the little life disappearing into a glass container — and more specifically, I remember her face as we sat in the parking lot of Denny’s because I didn’t want to go home, or anywhere else, yet. She didn’t say anything. She simply parked the car in the back near the big metal refuse bin. She petted my hand. She cried a little. She smelled like day old vodka and Estée Lauder. Her real estate signs were in the trunk. Nothing happened, she didn’t ask me anything, she didn’t tell me anything, and after that I was able to move.

Or I think of all the mornings she drove me to swim practice at 5:00 a.m. Or the sound of her voice singing I see the moon. Or the day she brought the shoe box out and showed me the story she’d written, and the redbird drawing my father had done — the lives they could have lived. Or her face when she told my father she’d signed the scholarship letter, and that I was going to college, that I was leaving.

Or I think of Israel and Becky Boone.

So when I tell you what I said to her maybe it will sound deluded or trite, since this woman is where my trouble started, since she let us down so terribly, and birthed an unforgiving darkness into us forever.

I said thank you mamma. I love you so.

And then she died.

It was 2001, the year my son was born. Her urn was a faux gold box about the size of a coffee pot. My father wouldn’t part with it — brainbird that he was by then — and so I didn’t try to take it until after he died. Then I put it in our garage on a shelf for two years. I didn’t look at it, I didn’t talk to it, I barely thought about it. It just sat up there with nails and cans of paint and summer storage items and garden tools.

But one day I was in the garage hunting for corner braces to build a frame for a painting and I saw it on the shelf looking all …well. So I called my sister and asked, uh, do you want to do something with mother’s ashes? My sister who had been estranged from my mother from the time she was 16.

Oddly, she said, I guess. So I drove my mother in a box up to Seattle. She sat in the passenger’s seat.

Sitting in my sister’s living room on her brown leather couch that smelled vaguely of cat piss, we stared at the motherbox between us.

She said, “You wanna open it?”

“Sure,” I said. Then I examined the edges more closely, and I jammed my fingernails into the joints, and saw that there wasn’t a clear way to do it. So I said, “Do you have a knife?”

My sister left the room, went into the kitchen, and came back with a butter knife. I stared at it in her hand. Then I took it and tried to pry my box of mother open.

No luck.

“You have a flathead screwdriver?” I said.

“I think so,” she said, and went off in the direction of her garage.

“And a hammer,” I yelled after her.

I put the box on the living room floor. My sister knelt next to me. “Hold the bottom of it,” I said.

“Don’t hit me with the hammer,” she said.

“Move your head,” I said.

I placed the flathead screwdriver at the line where the box edges joined, and then I whacked it with the hammer. The box shot across their hardwood floor. “Look at it go!” Came out of my mouth before I could stop it. Then we both nearly died laughing, rolling on the floor like kids.

I swear to god we tried everything to get that goddamn motherbox open. At one point I even dropped it from the roof of her deck hoping it would sort of break open, but no. I briefly considered running over it with the car. There was no way into the motherbox of ash.

After I left, my sister told me she buried it in her backyard, but I visited her a month later and saw it in the back of her mini-coop with all her life shit and dog hair and car crap. I never confronted her about the lie. But I never saw the box again after that, either. It could be in the ground in her backyard.

Or it could be someplace else.

I can still see my mother sitting in her car as I’d come out of swim practice as a kid. The heater running. Whatever else she was, she was there.

Morning. I’m sitting in my car waiting for them to unlock the doors of the swimming pool. They open, and I enter. I shed my clothes. The water is the color of my eyes. The chlorine smell is more familiar than anything I have ever known. When I dive in, all sound, all weight, all thought leaves. I am a body in water. Again.