Chapter Three
Three
Jane
June 2001
I sit across from my mother in the study, beside the bookshelf jammed with picture frames and waterlogged novels, at the Steinway. With its characteristic black sheen, it’s the piano I tended to play growing up, for no other reason than to be different from my mom, who was always seated at the Baldwin. It’s been decades since she gave me lessons, since I’ve spent any real time at it, but without a piano of my own, I’m drawn to this room whenever I’m over. Sitting on this bench helped remind me of who I was when years ago, I strayed so far I was sure I’d never speak to my parents again, never mind be enveloped in the safety and comfort of this room. I can’t sit near these pianos and feel lost too long. I am in the thousands of strokes of my fingers on the keys, as my spine lengthened and my feet grew to reach the pedals, my mother beside me, music the one place we could always meet.
I don’t allow myself to look at her, to calculate all the ways she has already changed that I somehow missed. The tiny fractures I chalked up to normal aging. I can’t bring myself to face the real culprit, the one that can’t be reasoned with, the diagnosis I should be focusing on, that would bring me to my knees if I weren’t so bewildered by their response. Not when it’s much easier to confront the flawed being that is my mother, to dip into the years we did battle and draw from them a shield to cover what I could be feeling, should be feeling. I can’t be generous with her right now, offering condolences, without somehow agreeing there may be justification to her thought process. Not when they’ve made this decision without us, without allowing us to plead a different case. Not when one year is so arbitrary, when she might have many more. Not when digging for details, facts, timelines, all the ways I usually build a full picture, will point to dying mother . Instead, I play scales with my left hand, unable to fight the subconscious muscle memory. “So what did you want to talk about? Another bomb to drop on me?”
This is the first time I’ve seen her, seen either of them—although Dad is conveniently busy in the garden, leaving us alone in here—since they made that ridiculous announcement, presenting it to the three of us in a pleasant package, setting out appetizers and asking about our jobs before handing it over to detonate in our arms. Thomas was silent, cagey, when I dropped him off at the train station that night. We don’t talk regularly; our schedules—me recording my segments in the studio early mornings, and my brother working until ungodly hours at night—mean we mostly catch up at holidays and on birthdays. So it was a shock when he called me the next afternoon, demanding we stop our parents before it’s too late. Obviously, I agree. We can’t let them go through with this. Mom, not now, not yet, at least. Dad, not ever. But they have always been this way, wrapped up in each other, codependent, and part of me is not surprised they would propose an end like this. A world where the end of one means the end of both. It seems like exactly the kind of thing they would come up with, and when I told Thomas that, he hung up on me.
“You’ve been avoiding us,” my mom says, her tone cautious.
I normally come over every week or so, every couple of weeks at least, unless work gets chaotic. I hadn’t been by since that night, although we’ve spoken on the phone a few times, briefly, calls I thought I was ready for. Until I heard their forced calm, voices dripping with concern when they asked in turn, How are you? as though they weren’t the reason I may be a bit off. I have looked at it a hundred different ways, tried to put myself in their shoes. I imagined nearing eighty myself, being handed a debilitating diagnosis, and I have come up with the same answer every time. They haven’t thought it through, not completely. And they won’t do it.
“Like Dad’s avoiding me now?” I peer through the windows at my father kneeling outside in the tiger lily beds, a pile of discarded weeds beside him. “He knows I’m here.”
“I asked him to give us a few minutes.”
“So you could guilt-trip me?”
“I expected Thomas to bury himself in work, to push us away for a while. But I’m surprised by you, actually.”
My anger flares, the safest of my sparring emotions. “You don’t really have the right to be surprised by anyone at this point, Mom.”
“Fair enough. I just thought you’d have questions.”
“I’ve been processing,” I say, then on hearing my own bitterness, add, “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine how hard this is on you. I’m not trying to downplay that, or be insensitive, because, Jesus , it’s awful, Mom. But it’s...a lot.”
I’ve been punishing her, actually, and she wants me to admit it. Punishing her because it’s easier than confessing I jolt from dreams where she no longer recognizes my face. Punishing her because I had to be the one to tell my daughter, Rain, to field questions I didn’t have the answers to. To tell her first, that Grandma is really sick, and second, that both her grandparents plan to end their lives because of it. I was even younger than Rain is now when I had her. She is my only baby, and we’ve never kept things from each other. As hard as it was to tell her, as irresponsible as it felt to continue spreading this idiocy, it would be impossible not to, it would be there every time we spoke, growling at me to bring her up to speed. I also wanted to tell Rain before she heard it from her cousins, didn’t want that news to travel and arrive butchered via the game of telephone like every story shared with any member of the family. So I was forced to explain that I don’t know if they mean it or not, but for now we had to take them at their word. I was the one who had to hold her when tears of confusion and preemptive grief fell, who stayed up past midnight analyzing a decision I couldn’t justify or understand. I considered making my parents face their oldest grandchild, to look her in the eyes and say the words that would devastate her, sure it would be a slap of reality, maybe even a reason to reconsider. But the one it would hurt most would be Rain, to learn a harsh lesson about my parents I accepted a long time ago, that they would always love each other a little more than they loved you.
“Process away,” Mom says, like she is being the reasonable one. She, who so graciously gave me time and space these past couple of weeks, waiting for me to come to her, when I should have been the one to be gracious, to offer to help her, to see how she felt, what she needed. Until she decided she had been patient enough and requested I come over, said there was something she needed to ask me in person. I, too, have a question. I want to know what it is about old age that has given my parents such a flair for the dramatic, because these big formal announcements are entirely too much for me to take.
“So, what was so important you couldn’t ask over the phone?” I know I should be somber, but I can’t play along. I feel out of my body. It is exhausting to be discussing this, to act like killing herself a year from now is a real and rational option, her only option, and it isn’t. Can’t be.
“Does Marcus still have connections to the Boston Globe ?” Mom asks.
I resist the urge to ask if she is high. Given our history, a comment like that would not amuse her. But surely, she is going to open with a retraction of their twisted plan to reenact some elderly version of Romeo and Juliet . Or she could at least offer more explanation, some context, information I can look into, names of her doctors, test results, treatment options. She did not ask me here to make some ridiculous request of Marcus. Marcus, who they’ve only met a handful of times, and never really with my permission. They’ve run into him at the news station when they came to visit me for lunch, and my mom is always incredibly obvious, elbowing me and asking probing questions and inviting him out with us. He is always gracious when he politely declines, because he’s a news anchor who is paid to be smooth and affable. He knows I make the call if, and when, he joins. And I’m not ready.
I may never be ready. I have the worst taste in men, it’s not worth trying, anytime I get close, I swear, I jinx it. Marcus is good right now. He’s nearly perfect. No ex-wife, no kids, his biggest traumas belonging to other people, horrors he witnessed as a war reporter for years. No baggage in our relationship except for mine, and I have enough for the both of us. There is only down from here. And what’s the point? Look at my parents. Aunt Maelynn too. If that’s what real love requires, if that’s what it can do, they can keep it. He wants more, he’s patient but clear about that, but I assure him it’s easier this way. No one needs to get in too deep, nothing needs to get weird at work and no one needs to spend extended time with anyone’s parents. And my mother certainly doesn’t get to start asking for personal favors.
I suck in my breath, willing myself patience. “Why do you ask?”
“I have something of a final request.”
I grimace, my fingers still. “Come on. You and Dad aren’t going through with this.”
“That’s the plan, at least for me. Your father is impossible, but you could try to work on him.”
“There’s no way—”
She cuts me off, “Do you think Marcus knows anyone at the Boston Symphony Orchestra from the years he worked at the Globe ?”
I shake my head, unable to believe her ability to be so single-minded. “You really think we’re going to let you do this?”
“I need something from you, Jane.”
“And I need you and Dad to stop talking crazy.” I dismiss her with a shrug, a nonstarter. She had been prepared to lie by omission, to hide the real reason, and that knowledge is a barb tearing into me anytime I soften against her. If she truly thought it was possible to conceal her symptoms, then either, one, she thinks we’re idiots, or two, she’s giving up way too soon. She may have many years of quality life left. I don’t blame her for not wanting to live past a certain point. I don’t want to see her in pain, or totally lost to herself. I wouldn’t want to go that way either; I don’t think anyone does. But I’m baffled as to why she would pick a random date and call it quits without seeing how things go. And that doesn’t even get into how dumbfounded I am at my father’s response. It’s wildly distracting, won’t allow me to react to my mom’s very real diagnosis like a normal human. With concern, sadness, fear for her future, for what it means for all of us—which quite honestly, pisses me off. Somehow it paints us three as the bad guys, insensitive to her plight, selfish, even, to be thinking of ourselves at a time like this.
That said, Dad leaking a hint about her condition was a surprise. Normally, my parents are impenetrable, a united front to a fault. I doubted the level of their devotion once, doubted everything I once knew. We are in such a better place now, we’ve been in a good place for years. They have everything they worked for their entire lives—each other, their family and freedom from running the Oyster Shell—it doesn’t make sense to cut that short, by even a day. But I do know they would do anything for one another. Even if that means blowing up the island they’ve always inhabited, leaving us with the fallout.
If the situation weren’t so grim it would be funny. Me, the rational one in the family? Mom and Dad are delusional, Thomas is sulking like a child, and don’t even get me started on Violet, the only human in existence that can romanticize everything but her own marriage. It’s maddening. She still reveres our parents like she’s a kid and they’re the grown-ups, and she’s incapable of looking at any of their actions critically. I told her their plan is incredibly flawed, and they are going to back out when it gets too real. She disagreed, convinced they’ve always known they couldn’t live without each other, that they had probably agreed to something like this ages ago. She said she can’t imagine one without the other, that maybe it’s better this way, so they don’t have to be lonely or heartbroken. This is when I consider I am not the only one in the family who has done a lot of drugs.
“It’s important,” Mom insists. It takes me a second to register she is still referring to the symphony, that somehow that is what she deems important at this juncture.
I whip around, a cornered bull. “So is this.”
If she wants to do this, we can do this.
She pauses, in that exaggerated way she does when she wants to be clear that she hears us. It feels condescending, especially now. “I want to play. With the BSO. I’ve always wanted to. And I’m running out of time.”
“You’re choosing to run out of time. I understand you say you’re getting worse, and fast, and I’m sorry for that, really, but to pick a date, to not even try to hold out as long as you can—” I screech. “This conversation is absurd!”
“I want you to play with me.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“At the symphony. I need you up there with me.”
Her insistence makes me laugh, cruelly. “First of all, I have no idea if Marcus even has those strings to pull. Second, I haven’t played a concerto in years.” I’m lying, of course. Marcus has deep ties to the Boston area, he grew up in Roxbury and became a bit of a local celebrity. He was the first African American to win the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Reporting. He spent years at the Boston Globe , frequently interviewed politicians and diplomats on television before a heart attack at thirty-six prompted him to question his fast-paced career, to leave Boston entirely and settle into a quieter life along the Connecticut shore. One call would probably be all it took, and the city would jump to its feet. The concerto is another story. I am not lying that it’s been years since I’ve played at such a high level, but her question has me wondering if I still could.
“You never forget.”
“Why do you need me there?”
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to do it alone.”
I let my gaze fall to her hands, trembling against the keys, and a brick loosens in the wall I built. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Thomas’s question that night, Is one of you dying or something? It can’t be true.
“Self-protection, I guess.” She sighs. “But now you know why I need to take control of the rest of my life, follow this dream before it’s too late. You have to understand.”
She plays this card, the trait we share. The driving force that carried me through late nights while I studied journalism, and worked full-time as a bank teller, and raised Rain as a single mom. It’s not my fault she didn’t get to follow her dreams, but I get why she wants to. My mother and I, as my grandma always chided, never satisfied. A criticism I wear like a badge of honor. Intense, some people call me. Relentless. They can call me what they want, it’s gotten me far. My mom, less so, but she prioritized things I didn’t. Her marriage, for one.
She smiles. “Don’t you want to know what we would play?”
“I haven’t even said yes yet, and you’ve already picked out the music. You’re unbelievable.” The nerve on this woman. But against my best judgment, my curiosity is piqued.
“So you plan on saying yes?”
“Depends.” I look up at her for the first time, this entire conversation so absurd I lean in, following the White Rabbit to Wonderland. “What did you pick?”
“Mozart’s Piano Concerto number ten, designed for two pianos.” She pulls the sheet music from the hinged seat, and sets it in front of me.
“I’m not done talking about this.” But I begin to toy with the notes, finding my footing, my shoulders softening as the music unfolds before me. A memory rises to the surface, unbidden, a Christmas when I was a teen, right before I moved out, my mom and I constantly at odds. Dad came up with the idea for us to surprise her by playing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and singing together, a corny kind of gift only he could get away with. He enlisted Violet, immediately on board, to recruit us. I begged for something more interesting to play, an actual challenge. Thomas, of course, took a lot of coercing.
We rehearsed for weeks—far more than necessary—when Mom was out giving lessons. On Christmas morning, Thomas and Violet and Dad sang along with the music, standing around me in their pajamas, with the tree and the crumpled wrapping paper littering the floor, their voices off-key and kind of terrible, but trying. Mom could barely speak after, thanking us through tears. I haven’t thought about that in years, completely forgot about it until now. I’m not sure what reminds me but my throat catches as I contemplate Mozart’s score.
I don’t know what this year will bring, or what my parents will decide. But it could be a way to stall. A worthy distraction to look forward to, to work toward, playing together with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Something to give my mother, a dream she never fulfilled, for all she has forgiven of me. Something to give myself, a part of me I’ve let wither, a reminder of our earliest harmony. A memory to hold on to if what they say is true, if, despite what I believe and despite our protests, at the end of this year, they really are gone.