T. Boyle - San Miguel

So it went through that fall and the following spring, home for the summer and on into the next term, and if she worried about her mother — and she did — it was at a remove. Each night, just after lights out, her mother’s face would float free of her consciousness to hover there in the dark over the bed, and she would say a prayer and close her eyes and the next thing she knew it was morning, girls rustling in the hallway, her roommate softly snoring in the bed beside hers and the smell of bacon and toast and scrambled eggs infusing the air. Then there was the onward rush of school, another day, another night, and no thought but for the moment. When she was home, when she could see her mother struggling to stand upright, her limbs wasted and the lines of suffering lashing her face, she could think of nothing else.

Then, on a rainy afternoon just before Christmas break, everything changed all over again. She was in the middle of her piano lesson with Mr. Sokolowski, who had a habit of beating out the time with the flat of his hand on the bench beside you in a slow steady drop that went counter to everything you were feeling (it was Chopin’s Nocturne no. 2 in E-flat Major, the tempo so dragged down and reduced she might have been sleepwalking), when Miss Everton herself appeared in the doorway. Mr. Sokolowski looked up, his lips parted in irritation. She stopped playing, though his hand went on beating through the next two measures. Miss Everton — she was her mother’s age, or no, older, dressed all in tutorial gray and with her hair pinned up so severely her scalp was blanched at the hairline — was simply standing there, looking lost. Was there something in her hand — a slip of folded-over paper? There was. And before she could say a word Edith knew what it meant. “Is she—?” she said.

“Your mother’s ill, that’s all the telegram says. You’re to return at once.”

* * *

She was two days on the boat, the seas savage in the face of the storm that chased them down the coast, and everyone around her was sick at stomach. The smell was awful — like being trapped in a zoo — and she couldn’t go out on deck because it was raining the whole time. She’d never been seasick — she had her sea legs, that was what Captain Curner had told her, praising her — but as the hours went on and the smell concentrated itself till she felt she couldn’t breathe, she began to feel worse and worse. In the head — filthy, sour, a discolored mop reeking in the corner and somebody pounding desperately at the door — she went down on her knees and hung over the toilet till there was nothing left inside her. The boat rocked and groaned as if it would come apart. Her legs felt weak. When finally she made her way back to her berth she lay there volitionless, unable to change into her nightdress, unable to read or sleep or think of anything but what lay ahead.

Her mother was ill, that was all she knew. But her mother had been ill a long while — she’d lost weight and color and she’d hemorrhaged more times than anyone could count — and yet she’d always recovered because she was strong, the strongest woman alive. Maybe that was what this was: a false alarm. Maybe it was just another hemorrhage, bad enough, yes, but the sort of attack her mother had survived before. That was what she wanted to believe and she fought down the voice inside her that told her she was fooling herself because why else would they have pulled her out of school and wired the money for her passage if the moment of crisis hadn’t come? And then the grimmer thought: What if she was too late? What if her mother was already dead — or dying, dying right at that moment?

By the morning of the second day her throat was raw. She was thirstier than she’d ever been in her life, but every time she took a swallow of water it came right back up. The woman in the berth across from her took pity on her and gave her a handful of soda crackers to soothe her stomach. She broke them into fragments and tried chewing them one at a time, but they turned to paste in her mouth and she couldn’t seem to get them down. At one point someone said they were passing San Miguel. She never even lifted her head.

There was no one at the pier to meet her — she would have thought Ida would come, Ida at least, and the fact that she wasn’t there or her stepfather either filled her with dread. She stood alone on the pier in the rain, feeling light-headed, the other passengers streaming past her, the smell of the sea so overpowering it made her stomach clench all over again. There were people everywhere, faces looming up out of the mob, their eyes seizing on her as if to take possession of her and know her in her grief and fear and need before staring right through her, and she didn’t recognize any of them. Adolph — where was Adolph? Anybody? Finally, the umbrella clutched in one hand and the suitcase in the other, she set out to walk the eight blocks home.

It was a struggle, the streets a mess, the gutters alive with refuse, cigar stubs, paper bags, leaves, branches, horse droppings. Carriages lurched by, but no one thought to offer her a ride. The rain plunged straight down. She pushed through it, hurrying, breathless, going as fast as she could, her shoes soaked, her feet cold, the hem of her dress — the one she’d been wearing when Miss Everton escorted her to the boat and unchanged now through two days and a night — sodden with filth. Her hair was coming loose, her hat poking awkwardly at the ribs of the umbrella. All she could think was what her mother would say, how angry she’d be. You change that dress right this minute, young lady, and here, give me the brush, your hair’s a disgrace .

Up the walk to the house, a single lamp burning in the front window, water cascading over the eaves, then the door, the umbrella, the suitcase dropping from her hand. “Hello!” she called. “Is anyone home? Mother? Ida?” The cat — Marbles — was perched on the footstool before the fire and he shot her a glance, startled, before springing to the floor and vanishing in the shadows beneath the chair. She saw that the fire had burned down. There was a half-filled teacup on the low table beside the chair and a book lying open there, facedown, the sort of thing her mother would never tolerate, You’re ruining that book, Edith. Think of the spine. Think of the cost . “Hello?” she called again, moving across the floor to the stairway.

There was the sound of footsteps, of a door flung open, and then Ida was there at the head of the stairs. “Edith, is that you?”

* * *

They tried to spare her, Ida clinging to her in the stairwell, her stepfather emerging from the upper bedroom with his arms folded and his eyes gone distant, and the man beside him too, the doctor, the doctor with his black bag and his spectacles shining and the dead dumb unflinching look on his face warning her not to go in there, not yet, not until they had a chance to prepare things, but she wouldn’t have it, wouldn’t listen, and she broke away from Ida and rushed up the stairs knowing only this: that her mother was already dead, dead and gone and extinguished, and that she’d never hear her voice again, never hear the coughing in the night or the soft calming lilt of her words as she read aloud before the fire or recited a poem she’d learned as a girl. Her stepfather tried to block her way, but she fought free of him, careening down the hall to fling herself through the open door and into the room that was lit by the lamp at the bedside and yet was dark all the same with its layers of contending shadow and the blood that wasn’t red, not red, not red anymore, but as black as the place where what was left of her mother — the shell, the empty shell — would go to rest.

Alone in her room in the dark, she listened to the shuffling and whispering from the room next door, the room where her mother lay dead. The smallest sounds: a patter of feet, the sudden startled whine of the wardrobe’s hinges, the sigh of a drawer pulled open and the soft discreet thump of its closing. Ida was in there, taking charge. She could hear her stepfather — a heavier tread, but soft, soft, the muted beat of a mallet wrapped in gauze — pacing the hallway, creaking up and down the stairs, his voice cast low. Then nothing. Stasis. Silence. Rain. And here it came again: the buzz of whispered griefs, concerns, question and response, a door opening and closing, the solitary rhythm of Ida’s feet on the bedroom carpet. She tried not to think about what those sounds intimated, but she couldn’t help herself: Ida was cleaning up, putting things to rights. And what did that mean? That meant preparing the body for the undertaker. For the ground.