T. Boyle - San Miguel

“Mother?” she called, coming back down the steps, her heart slamming at her ribs, and then she was bolting across the lawn, the sunlight bleaching everything so that the shadows flattened and the house stood out as if it were made of pasteboard and she were onstage, shaking her now, “Mother! Mother!”

The moment swelled, huge and hovering, and then, abruptly, it burst. Her mother’s eyes eased open. “What?” she gasped. “What is it?”

“I thought—” Edith trailed off. Under the glare of the sun her mother’s face looked depleted, the bones standing out in relief, lines tugging at the bloodless flesh around her eyes as if to cinch it tight, tighter, till there was no trace of softness left. “What I mean is… I’m home. From school.”

“I was just sitting here a moment, trying to catch my breath.”

There was noise, all that clamor she’d missed — voices from the house next door, the creak and clatter of a passing carriage, the dull intonation of bells sounding the quarter hour — and it distracted her. For a moment she was gone, back at the hotel, ascending the steps with a little dog in her arms, the doors flung open wide and all the facets of the chandelier glittering like stars in the ballroom at the end of the hall. She didn’t want to be here. Didn’t want to see her mother like this. Didn’t want to be afraid. “Do you need anything?” she heard herself say. “A glass of water? Your parasol — don’t you want your parasol?”

Her mother was looking at her strangely, almost as if she didn’t recognize her, and then her eyes contracted and she began to cough. The cough was high and hollow, echoing in her diaphragm as if it were the chamber of an instrument, and then there was the wheeze for breath and the next cough and the next until the cough and the wheeze seesawed back and forth and her mother was doubled over in the chair. Edith felt helpless. Once the cycle started it would play itself out whether anyone was there to help or sympathize or not. She began patting her mother’s back automatically, though her mother wasn’t choking — she was drowning on her own fluids, on her blood and mucus and the dead cells of the disease that was in her and would never leave, not till she lay still for the final time. The truth was there before her, but it was hard, too hard to hold on to. She let it go and felt the darkness sweep through her like the chill through an open door.

Her mother coughed. She patted. Kept on patting. From the palm tree in the next yard over, a flight of dark miniature birds hurtled themselves into the sky.

“Let me go get your medicine,” she said.

“No. I’m”—the cough tore at her—“I’m fine.”

“Water, then. Here, let me help you up.”

Her mother pushed her away, arms in furious motion, wrists jangling like bracelets, coughing till something came up and she spat it in the tin cup she kept secreted between her legs. Then she drew in a great wet wheezing breath, the next cough waiting in the wings, hanging there like a bat ready to swoop down and twist through the air, her eyes wet with the effort of turning herself inside out. “I don’t”—and here came the cough, racking and harsh—“I just want to, to…”

“You need a doctor. I’m going for the doctor.”

And suddenly her mother’s voice hardened, narrowed, came at her like the filed point of a blade: “I just want to be left alone.”

* * *

They were three at dinner that night — Edith, her stepfather and Adolph. Ida served — a roast of beef, with baked potatoes and sautéed vegetables and lemon pie for dessert — and when the serving bowls had been set out and the glasses filled, Ida took a portion for herself and went out to the kitchen with it. Edith’s stepfather never said a word about school or whether she’d been late in coming home or not. He was in high spirits, the glass before him stained dark with whiskey poured from the bottle he kept right out in plain sight on the table, and Adolph’s glass was dark too. The main theme of the evening was business — business couldn’t be better, or so she gathered. Wool prices were up and the profit was in, more than anyone could have expected, and her stepfather kept pouring whiskey from the bottle and reaching out to pour for Adolph too. From upstairs, from behind the closed door of her mother’s room, came the sawing rasp of a cough that wouldn’t let up.

She kept her head down through the meal, surreptitiously reading from the book spread open in her lap and hidden from view by the corner of her napkin, though she found she couldn’t concentrate. She was more upset than she wanted to admit, the image of her mother pushing her away driving everything before it, the school, her homecoming, the pleasure she’d taken in the hotel grounds and the fashions of the ladies. She spoke only when her stepfather addressed her—“You like that cut of meat? Beef for a change, huh? I don’t know about you, missy, but after all that mutton I think I could eat a whole steer by myself”—and as soon as the meal was done and Ida cleared the table she went out to the kitchen. Ida was at the sink, her back to the door, arms and shoulders working over the dishes. Steam rose around her. Outside, beyond the window, the sun picked its careful way through the red-gold trumpet flowers climbing the espalier against the fence.

“Would you like some help?” she asked.

Ida looked over one shoulder, the sunlight catching her eyes so that they seemed all at once to leap out of her face. “It’d be a mercy, I’m so worn with all this moving from one place to another. Truly, I’m dead on my feet.”

Edith took up the dish towel and Ida plucked the plates from the rinse water — her mother’s best china, in a pretty rose pattern that made you feel good just to look at it — and handed them to her one by one.

“And what of you? How was your first day back to school?”

“Fine.”

“Fine? No more to say than that? Don’t tell me it’s not a glory to be laying your eyes on somebody your own age besides Jimmie, who might mean well, who might—” She lifted her hands from the dishwater to sketch a picture in the air and they both laughed.

“Oh, no, I don’t mean that. It’s just strange, that’s all, to be back after all this time. Everything seems so busy.”

Ida gave her a look. “I’d say busy is just what you want — myself, I felt half-dead out there on the island, dead of boredom for one thing. Do you know I went down to the market this morning, just that, just there and back, and it was like being transported to heaven — and on the wings of angels, no less.” She was going to say more but just then there was a fierce breathless burst of coughing from above and they both paused to lift their eyes to the ceiling. “Your mother seems worse today,” Ida observed after a moment. “It’s the moving, is what it is.” She shook her head. “The dampness of that boat…”

“She pushed me away.” Edith tried to control her voice, tried to focus on drying the plate in her hand and finding a place for it in the stack on the counter, but she couldn’t help herself. “She was having a spasm — outside, in the chair, when I’d just got home — and all I wanted to do was, was—” She could feel it all coming up in her, all the tension and fear and loneliness — her mother was dying and she’d been dying a long time and once you started dying it was like being dragged down the side of a hill and all the dirt coming with you. To the bottom. To bury you. “I just wanted to help.”

“Hush, it’s all right, she doesn’t mean it.” Ida laid a hand on her shoulder and they stood there a moment without moving. “When people fall ill they’re not themselves anymore. It’s like dogs, same thing. I can recall when I was ten or eleven maybe and living with my Aunt Maeve — remember I told you about her, my father’s sister, the one that took in the three of us? We had a dog, just a mutt, really — Lucky, his name was — and he liked me most of all, maybe because I fed him scraps when no one else would bother with him, but then a wagon ran him over and broke his leg so the bone was showing through and my aunt warned me not to go near him because in his pain he wouldn’t know me—”