Chapter 9
WHIT
The phone rings twice and stops. Melissa, deciding in the half second between my name on the screen and the swipe.
I have left three messages this week; a fourth would be a pattern.
The next sister goes straight to voicemail.
The youngest's husband answers, careful and low — she's putting the kids to bed, Whit, I'll tell her you called — and he will not, and I say thank you, no rush, and stand in my mother's kitchen holding a dead phone to my ear.
Three sisters, and not one of them will get in a room with me. I keep telling myself it's grief, that grief makes people strange. It isn't grief. It's a verdict, and they have all read it.
So I do the thing I know how to do: I build the case. I provided. I paid. I shielded her from the worst of it, the way our father shielded our mother. The excusing was the love. I have it built. I have exhibits. And then I go and find the exhibits, and they convict me.
The freezer is the first. I open it for ice and it is full, top to bottom, of meals in flat bags in a small, level blue hand I could not have picked out of a lineup a season ago — soup, stew, the chicken thing my mother liked — weeks of it, cooked ahead by someone who understood before any of us that there would come a stretch when she could not step away from the bed long enough to make a meal.
She cooked against her own vanishing into that room, so that neither my mother nor whoever sat up with her would ever go without, and then she disappeared into the work so completely that I am standing here weeks later learning her handwriting off a freezer bag.
I have never once in my life thought that far ahead for another living person.
I keep wanting to argue. That is the reflex I cannot kill.
I have won every hard room of my life by being right — the flaw, the leverage, the sentence that turns it — and I am right about all of it.
I could prove I provided, I meant well, I did what my father did, and I would win.
And it would move nothing, because the one who could rule on it is dead, and because being right was never the thing that was missing.
That is the door I keep walking into. Not that I lost the argument. That there is nothing here to win.
My phone lights and my body turns to it before I can stop it.
Not a sister — a calendar note out of Pruett's office, sent to the whole list of owners without a thought for who's on it: a meeting, the disposition of the house, Melissa and the two younger and a time and a room.
My name is on the list of who owns the place.
It is not on the list of who's coming. The will said the house goes as the four of us agree, and the three of them have simply started agreeing without the fourth.
I found out from an invitation I wasn't invited to.
There is one room I have not gone into. The lawyer said take your time with the personal things, and I have taken his advice the way a coward takes any advice that lets him off — by not going in at all. I circle it all afternoon. The kitchen, the study, the front closet. I do not go in.
It is dark when my legs take me there anyway.
It is exactly as it was left. Her reading glasses on the nightstand, her cardigan over the little chair by the window.
The bed made — stripped and washed and made up tight with the good corners after the body was gone, and I know whose hands did that, because it was not mine and it was not my sisters', who were here for the service and then were not.
And by the light switch, taped there and gone soft at the corners, the chart.
Morphine at two, lorazepam at ten, the rattle drops, the breathing counts running down the margin in a column, every line in the same blue hand.
I read it looking for the night that clears me.
There isn't one. There is only two in the morning, over and over, and a woman awake at every one of them, in a room the rest of us loved her from a distance.
The chair is still pulled to the bed. It's the wrong chair for it — straight-backed, no give, nothing anyone would choose to sleep in — and there's a throw folded over the arm and a hollow worn into the cushion the exact shape of a person who folded into it and stayed.
The wear says months. It might say years.
I have no way to count them, because I was never here for one.
I told her, in the driveway, that she did what anyone would do.
I cannot put that sentence down. No one would do this.
I know, because I tried: every time I flew in I stood in the doorway of this room and my legs went wrong under me and I left.
I could not do ten minutes of what she did here, alone, in the dark, for longer than I ever let myself picture.
My sisters did not do it; they came for the service.
One person did this — and when my mother named her for it, I stood in my own driveway and told her it was ordinary.
She called me the night it turned — the middle of my day, the dead middle of her night — and told me it was close, and I told her to let the girls sleep, that it would be fine, because it had always been fine.
My mother died a few hours later with the one person I'd waved off in the room.
My wife tried to give me the chance to be there, and I called it overreacting. I was an ocean away. I have the flight.
On the dresser there is a drawer with the edge of a stack of notebooks showing. I have circled it the way I circled this room. Not tonight. I do not have whatever tonight would cost.
I sit on the edge of her bed to take my shoes off, and I do not stand back up.
I lie down on it in my coat, my shoes lined up on the floor like a boy's, and I put my face in the pillow because it still smells like her — the powder, the lavender, and under it the smell of the house I grew up in, the house my wife nursed my mother to death in while I called it in from airports.
I wait to feel forgiven. There is no one left with the standing to give it — and then I understand that isn't true.
The one with the standing is alive. She is two hours north, I have to think, in the cottage my mother left her, because where else does a person go.
I spent years teaching her that my name on her phone was a thing to brace for.
If I called her tonight, I would not blame her for letting it ring twice.