Chapter 20
When I read Beckett’s casino bathroom scene, I’m surprised to find that it’s closed door.
Fade to black. It’s very sweet, don’t get me wrong, and yes, there’s still steam, but nothing like what I’m expecting.
I’m grateful, for many reasons, but also incredibly surprised.
I guess I shouldn’t be, considering the earlier scene in the water was handled with a light touch as well.
But Evan didn’t mention it was like this.
He made it sound like we wrote the same thing—I just assumed it was the same steam level, too.
Sex sells. Evan and I have talked about this more than I care to discuss. So I just find it hard to believe that this guy became so successful with a closed-door romance novel.
The good news is, now that I’ve broken the seal on the sex scenes, I feel like I can finally read this thing.
No more procrastinating. I got through it, made it to the other side.
I know what’s to come, because I lived it.
Beckett’s words have transported me back to our trip, a place I never dreamed I’d want to be again.
And yet. I turn the page and keep going.
I read until midnight, when I finally can’t keep my eyes open any longer. My hand searches for the hacky sack, locates it, gives it a comforting squeeze. It lowers my blood pressure instantly and gives me permission to fall asleep.
Mom got the hacky sack at a little specialty shop on Continental Avenue called Pastimes that closed a million years ago.
We used to refer to it as “the hippie store” because it was all crystals and wind chimes and the lady who sat behind the counter wore a floor-length, floral skirt, loads of bangle bracelets and beaded necklaces, and no shoes, ever.
It was in the coolest location. 71st-Continental Avenue is a unique street.
It’s the gateway to Austin Street, where there’s tons of shopping and little restaurants.
Walking from our apartment, though, you’d need to cross Queens Boulevard to get there, and the most popular entry point was at the corner of 71st-Continental at the subway station.
The actual block had several banks, a bagel store, and every retail outfit you can fathom, all shoved onto one single city street.
At one time, there was a movie theater (one of four in a half mile radius), a Sam Goody record store, Roy Rogers, Nature’s Elements, and a Waldenbooks.
And down a little cobblestone alleyway that would probably seem incredibly sketchy to anyone not familiar with this corner of the city, there was something called the Forest Hills Mini Mall.
It was a narrow, half-covered walkway that felt like its own little secret garden, albeit devoid of greenery.
A secret to be sure. All the way down the alley on the left-hand side was a shop called Pastimes, where many a smooth stone or voodoo doll or piece of silver jewelry could be purchased.
She got the hacky sack for me from the tiny selection of “children’s things” at Pastimes when I was three years old.
It was a fidget, a decoy for my hands to keep me from sucking my thumb—a hobby I took up once she took away my pacifier at age two.
Mom didn’t want me to get an overbite because she was afraid that on a teacher’s salary as a single parent, she wouldn’t be able to afford braces.
It worked. I loved that hacky sack like some children love a blankie or a particular stuffie.
It kept my hands busy. It soothed me. And one day, probably when I was about six or seven years old, I didn’t need it anymore, so I stuffed it in my sock drawer, pronouncing myself “too old for this baby stuff.”
It lived there for the next twenty-plus years.
It was a Wednesday in late September. I’ll never forget it, of course, because that was the real beginning of everything, to quote Beckett’s book.
I was giving a test—my first of the year for my freshman English class, fifth period.
Out of nowhere, Mr. Ludwig—our assistant principal—came into the room.
“Ms. Adams, can I see you in the hallway, please?” he asked.
My eyebrows knit together. I was not a get-in-trouble type, so I couldn’t imagine what he needed to see me for. “I’m giving a test,” I said.
“Please,” he asked, and something in his tone indicated that the test in question wouldn’t mean much to me after that.
“Everyone, please turn your papers over for a second,” I asked my class, mentally juggling how I was going to keep them all from cheating while also wondering what this interruption was all about.
I followed him outside. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
Mr. Ludwig looked down at his shiny black work shoes. “It’s your mom,” he explained. “She was teaching—conducting the band. She just collapsed.”
“What?” I asked, certain I could not have heard him correctly. “Where is she? Is she okay?”
“We called 911. They came right away. They just brought her over to LIJ.”
“How come nobody told me sooner?” I asked. “Is she awake?”
“They were stabilizing her when they got here. I’m sorry, Melody. We were just trying to keep the students calm. Ms. Richards is with them now.”
“The guidance counselor?” The hallway was spinning.
“Yes. And I’m here to bring you to the hospital. Mrs. James is on her way. She’ll cover the rest of your class. Please go get your things, okay?”
My eyes swelled with tears. “Is my mom okay?” I asked Mr. Ludwig.
“I hope so,” he said. “I’m honestly not sure.”
Twenty-five minutes later, Mr. Ludwig dropped me off in front of the entrance to the emergency room, leaving me there so that he could park his car.
I explained to the lady at the desk that my mom was just brought in by an ambulance and could I see her, and a maelstrom of questions and answers followed.
At some point, Mr. Ludwig returned and sat with me, helping me attempt to fill out forms. A doctor arrived and said something—a whole bunch of words strung together that made no sense.
Mr. Ludwig had to explain them to me three times before I understood what he was saying.
My mom was having emergency surgery, he said.
PCI. Percutaneous coronary intervention.
It was a way to look inside her arteries and figure out what happened.
He stayed with me for seven hours, uncomfortably asking if there was someone he could call on my behalf. But no. It was always just me and her.
Finally, I was escorted to the area where the beds were. Mom was behind a privacy curtain, dressed in a hospital issue blue and white gown. She had tubes everywhere, an IV, a breathing mask, and she appeared to be asleep. “Is she okay?” I swallowed the words in my throat.
A kind-eyed nurse was adjusting the IV bag. “She’s okay, aren’t you, Miss Birdie?”
Mom’s eyelids fluttered.
“You her daughter?” she asked me.
I nodded, clasping a hand over my mouth so that I wouldn’t completely dissolve into a puddle of tears.
“There, now,” the nurse said. “Birdie, it’s your girl. She came to see you. Show her you’re okay.”
Mom opened her eyes and scanned the area.
When she locked them on mine, she opened her hand up at her side, and I stepped in to take it.
The nice nurse gave me a chair to sit in, and I dropped my head onto my mom’s hip, sobbing, finally able to fall apart now that I knew she was, at the very least, alive.
She ran her fingers through my loose hair, lightly scratching my scalp.
With her free hand, she lifted the oxygen mask off her mouth and whispered, “It’s okay, Pretty Girl. It’s okay.”
The following day, I stopped at her apartment to get her some essentials: a change of clothes, her toothbrush, face wash, hairbrush, and (at her insistence) makeup bag.
I peeked into my old bedroom and looked around, pondering all that she’d been through in the past twenty-four hours.
My bedroom looked back at me, untouched.
Like after I moved out and went to college and later moved to Brooklyn to be in a trendy place I could call my own, the room was just content to collect dust, awaiting my return.
As if it was inevitable—the universe knew it, even the apartment building knew it.
Melody will be back. And they were right; I would move back home just a few months later.
Mom’s degenerative diagnosis saw to that.
Congestive heart failure, stage C, the doctor had said.
The words repeated themselves over and over in my brain.
Quit smoking immediately. Healthy lifestyle.
Prognosis. These were the words Dr. Hartman had used.
For as long as I’d known her, Birdie Paulson had a love affair with Marlboro Lights.
It was a side effect of the music biz, she always said, and in the same breath, she was sure to let me know that if she ever caught me lighting up a cigarette, she’d kill me.
I always worried about lung cancer. I never thought about heart disease.
In fact, I was so naive that I liked the smell of cigarettes, because they reminded me of her.
So in my bedroom that day, trying to think about how on earth my mother was going to be able to successfully quit smoking without any notice, I remembered.
The hacky sack.
I fished it out of my old sock drawer, and I brought it to the hospital.
Mom was never without it from that day forward.
Until she was.
And then it was mine again.
Now, I can’t sleep without the damn thing.
It’s amazing to me how a mother and a daughter can share so many threads of who they are, all the way down to their strangest, most childish quirks.
I wonder if I’ll ever be calm enough in my heart to not need that bit of comfort in order to get any rest. If I’ll ever find a happily-ever-after that soothes my soul and makes me feel safe at night.
Well.
Certainly not this week, I decide, rolling the hacky sack in my palm until my breathing evens out and I drift away.