Chapter 12 A Wordless Code for I Love You
A Wordless Code for I Love You
Death happens on normal days. It’s but one of death’s many injustices that it is, in fact, so unremarkable.
The morning you die, Frankie’s always thought, or the morning that someone you love dies, should start differently.
But the same sun rises, the sky looks like a sky, and the truth is that the end makes no announcement.
The day Frankie’s mother died, Fiona woke up and got dressed and then went to work, and that was it.
There was more to it, of course, but when the police lifted Fiona and spread her out on the ground and Frankie crawled alongside her, her head on her mother’s still chest, it was Fiona’s feet Frankie couldn’t look away from, one foot without its shoe.
There was the faint outline of her mother’s toes through her socks.
Her socks. Navy blue, a tear in the small toe, a bit of toenail showing through.
Her mother had put on socks. Of course she had.
Such a normal, heartbreaking thing to do, to put on socks only to die.
That day, there was a breeze. Nothing remarkable, nothing unusual.
A few red maple leaves clung to branches, and now and then a gust picked up, and the rest swirled and skittered on the sidewalk, piling up in corners.
The sky was blue but not incredibly so. The clouds full, but none in shapes worth noticing. A normal day.
Three times a week, they took the subway through the Joralemon Street Tunnel into Brooklyn.
There, Fiona worked in a white mansion with a towering two-story portico and twenty-five-foot fluted columns that were better suited to ancient Greece than Prospect Park.
The Hawthorne House. Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne tended to spend time at their house in Connecticut but wanted their Brooklyn house spotless all the same, and since their eighteen-year-old daughter, Catherine, would be at home, they “required” Fiona’s presence just to pick up the candy wrappers Catherine left on the counter or tables or sometimes on the long green chesterfield sofa where she liked to read.
That Sunday, Fiona wasn’t feeling well. She was tired and moved slowly but made it to a restaurant four blocks from their apartment, where she pleaded with the owner to use his phone for a long-distance call she’d pay back.
She called the Hawthornes in Connecticut, knowing that if she simply didn’t show up, Catherine would tell on her.
Catherine did that kind of thing—ran her finger along the tops of cabinets to check for dust, noted how long it took Fiona to clean each room.
Though Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne weren’t in Brooklyn, weren’t even in the same state, in fact, they still insisted she work, and since it was not the time to lose a job, Fiona agreed to go in, rubbing her left shoulder as if the decision itself had caused a pain.
At the Hawthorne House, Frankie was cleaning the bathroom when she heard a noise.
Something slammed against a kitchen cupboard.
Often, she would think of this moment, how she rinsed the sponge in the sink, how she swiped again at the toothpaste by the faucet.
Still, it stuns her that she cleaned a sink as her mother lay dying.
Back in the kitchen, she scanned the room, looking for her mother to ask what next. But no one was there. It was when she was turning to leave that she saw her mother’s foot, and then her body, slumped against the floor and the lower cupboard.
Frankie’s scream drew the Hawthornes’ daughter.
The telephone was in the parlor, and Frankie yelled at her to tell the operator they needed help.
Catherine disappeared, and Frankie held her mother’s hand, pleading with her.
Though it was faint, Frankie felt it, three taps in the center of her palm—the wordless code for I love you.
When Catherine returned, she said there was a fire in Flatbush, and it was only after she repeated it a third time that Frankie realized that what she was really saying was that there was no one to help them.
Then Frankie saw the burgundy Cadillac that the Hawthornes’ driver used when they were in town. The keys hung by the door to the butler’s pantry. “Get the keys.”
Catherine studied a spot on the wall. “I’m not supposed to drive it.”
Frankie looped her arms under her mother, pulling. “I will, then.”
Still, Catherine stayed put.
“Help me. Now.” There was fury in Frankie’s voice.
Catherine, not used to being yelled at, picked up Fiona’s feet. One of Fiona’s shoes came loose, and her leg hit the ground, hard. The shoe was still in Catherine’s hand as she started to cry.
By pulling and prodding and lifting and dragging, Frankie got her mother into the back seat and crawled into the front but then didn’t know what to do.
She’d never even started a car, much less driven one.
Catherine, meanwhile, was frozen by a boxwood hedge.
How long were they there? Arguing on a perfectly normal Sunday, clouds drifting in the sky.
Minutes? An hour? Time came loose, the last seconds with her mother gone, tumbled away, because at some point Fiona’s face went still, peacefully still, and Frankie missed it.
An entire life of smiles and dreams and barefoot dances on dirty floors, all the years of struggling to support a child who had no one and turning away from tables still hungry so that the child could eat, of nights being scared and mornings being happy, and slim, slender moments full of hope despite everything, all to die in the back seat of a car, alone.
When Frankie understood, her skin went tingly and she couldn’t breathe properly, but it was the shaking in her legs that alarmed her. Because they were trembling, almost violently, on their own. Shock, someone later told her.
When facts began to settle and solidify, when Frankie no longer felt as if her body were tingling like a foot that’s gone to sleep, it came out that Catherine was allowed to drive but the clutch made her anxious.
That, and her parents—the same people who’d insisted that Fiona come into work when she wasn’t feeling well, to clean a house they weren’t even at—preferred her not to.
Preferred. The word, to Frankie, was rife with luxury and privilege.
To have a life where you could prefer to not do something .
. . It was as foreign to her as a distant sea.
In the long nights that followed her mother’s death, Frankie realized that reliance, on anyone or anything, was no longer an option.
So she learned how to drive, and returned to that white columned house and relocated the Hawthornes’ Cadillac to a nearby pond.
Dark water rose against the shining chrome grille, then spilled over the bloodred paint.
Frankie faced the empty sky and wished she’d known on that Sunday that it was futile, so she could’ve crawled into the back seat and taken her mother’s hand to do as Fiona had: three taps in the center of her palm.
That’s all she wanted. One last chance to say I love you.