Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

When he got home his mother sat red-eyed in a lawn chair on the balcony, Terry in another chair beside her, an ashtray balanced on his mother's chair arm. He felt a pang of needBeth should be here, she would be better at this than he was.

Of course after one evening they were not at that point. It would be far from appropriate.

He knelt in front of his mother and took her hand.

"Are you OK?"

She nodded slowly, vaguely. Her face was clean of makeup.

"Do you need to talk about it?"

She shook her head.

"I'll get us something to eat."

"She broke things," said Terry, catching tip to him in the kitchen.

"She broke things?"

"She threw the dishes down on the floor. See? No plates," and he opened the cabinet door above his head to display its emptiness. "She threw out all her shoes. And the-whatvacuum cleaner."

"She was just, what was she? Angry? Crying?"

"I gave her a tranquilizer. I have them for the airplanes? And so she is better."

When they brought the food out his mother decided she wanted to be inside, but she also wanted to smoke. T. opened the windows and the three of them sat at the table. His mother stared down at her soup with a lit cigarette in her hand; Teny slathered butter onto a piece of bread.

"You shouldn't be able to do that," said his mother finally, in a voice so soft he could barely hear it.

"Do what?" he asked.

"Get a divorce without telling the other person."

He watched her long ash fall onto the table.

"I was thinking," he said softly. "When you were staying here before you went traveling, you were going to Mass at St. Anne's, right?"

His mother nodded.

"Maybe we should go in together tomorrow. You can talk to the priest"

"I hardly know him."

"Then let's call home. Let's call Father Stevens. OK? He'll be able to help with this."

"I didn't tell him I was leaving," mused his mother. "But I did send a postcard. From Cabo."

"Let's call him."

He left his hand on her shoulder. In the morning, he was telling himself, she would talk to her old parish priest, kindly and soft-spoken. She trusted him implicitly.

He would marvel later at how a mind could slip into otherness without you even noticing it. Slip away right beside you, motionless.

After dinner Terry turned on the television in the living room, where he settled down with a beer to watch a game, pretending intense concentration. Angela said weakly that she was going to wash her hair, which T. seized upon as evidence of a restored normalcy. He said his own goodnights to both of them and retired to his room with the portable telephone, relieved.

While she ran her bath in the room next to his he called Beth and spoke to her, told her in low tones about the crisis. She was sympathetic and sounded sincerely worried; she offered to help but he did not want to give an impression of neediness. After he hung up he lay in bed letting his mind roam to business, legs splayed on the bed, one hand idly scratching the hair on his groin; while his mother picked up and inspected Terry's orange vial of tranquilizers he patted the bed and watched his dog jump up to curl at his feet. He closed his eyes and considered the wind farms of Palm Springs, the cost of the turbines, the megawattage that powered Coachella Valley. His own development would be powered thus one day, if he could swing it; and he was considering a contract with the wind-farm company when his mother removed her woven sandals and dark blue skirt.

As she stepped into the bath and opened a bottle of baby shampoo, he was already falling asleep. For a while they floated side by side like that, only a thin wall between them-she with her hair lathered, a towel rolled beneath her neck to soften the bathtub edge, he in an undershirt and boxer shorts on the bare sheets, the blankets pushed down hastily to the foot of the bed. As he fell asleep he was seeing the turbines that stretched along the San Gorgonio Pass, rows and rows of long, white windmill blades that whirred against the sky.

He had once spotted dinosaurs off the freeway there, a brontosatirtis and a tyrannosatirtis rex, their massive heads held high.

Stumbling out his bedroom door to the bathroom in the middle of the night he peed staring at the china shepherdess: and as he turned from the toilet to the sink to wash up he saw his mother.

He dropped to his knees and despite the shock of her nudity grabbed her out of the water and tried to breathe into her mouth and pump on her chest. He called out in panic between breaths, called out to Terry downstairs; and Terry was behind him fast. They kneeled over her together and did what they thought they were supposed to do, did what they could again and again until the ambulance pulled tip wailing outside and the attendants were rushing up the stairs and bending down around him. He welcomed them as he had welcomed no one before; with gratitude he relinquished her to them, a towel thrown across her stomach.

The paramedics took her over and made him stand up, urged him back from her a few steps so that they could work. He stood useless and spare in the corner, breathing hard, his T-shirt soaked in soap-smelling water, his underwear dripping down his bare legs.

When one of them said she had a pulse the strength went out of him and he sat down hard on the toilet seat.

Later he learned it had been a stroke caused by an overdose of Terry's tranquilizers. Later, sitting beside her bed and barely seeing her face for the tubes and the paleness of the skin, he would recall that-after all this panic, all this dread and this commotion-she had never seemed to notice his father much at all, around the house, back in the olden days. His father's absence, he realized, meant more to her than his presence ever had.

Even furniture could be an object of nostalgia. . in recalling her life with his father, as she lay there in the soft bathwater, he imagined her dulled by the weight but then, as if recalling an old armchair with fraying arms, stricken by homesickness. He imagined the life she had led, her weekly route to the grocery store where she had shopped throughout his childhood. He saw her holding the steering wheel and turning right and then left and then right again, watching the wipers shunt back and forth in the rain. She had grown up, as he had, and found the same thing: the warmth of other bodies dissipated as you pulled further and further away, and in the space between people the air became cool.

On the small television in her hospital room, which was on all the time, families sat in a row of chairs and argued. Women hurled recriminations at their stolid husbands and sons and then, meeting with indifference, broke down in a torrent of weeping. A Kleenex box on her nightstand was printed with brown flowers.

He had requested a private room but there was a waiting list, so she shared with another prone woman who was always snoring. During the first week of the coma he took Beth once to visit her, which should have been too intimate for an early date but felt natural. In fact Beth reminded him, standing over his mother's bed with a compassionate expression, of a nurse-not the nurses who actually worked in the hospital but an ideal nurse, capable, courteous, modest. He wondered how she came to have this capacity for appropriateness wherever she went.

But mostly he went alone, not wishing to overwhelm her.

They sent in orderlies to bathe the patients, and on the day his mother came out of her coma the orderly had secured her hair to the sides of her head with a pair of pink barrettes. He went to the bathroom in her room, wondering idly why there were plastic butterflies affixed to his mother's temples, and when he came out her eyes were open. She blinked several times.

"Mother?" he asked, and fumbled to press the call button. "Can you hear me?"