Chapter 12
WHIT
The drawer sticks. It always has. It is the bottom drawer of my mother's dresser, and she used to threaten to plane the runner down and never did, because a drawer that fights you is a drawer that keeps its secrets, she said, and she liked a thing that kept its secrets.
I have walked past it for eleven days. I saw the edge of the notebooks the first night I slept in here, after the house emptied out and there was no one left to keep me from her room — I came in because I could not sleep anywhere she wasn't, and the drawer was open a finger's width, and I closed it.
I have been closing it in my head ever since.
Now the house is empty in the specific way it gets after ten at night, when the furnace ticks and the refrigerator answers it, and there is no one to hear me open a drawer. So I open it.
There are more than I thought. A stack of them, cloth covers, the cheap kind she bought three-for-a-dollar at the pharmacy because she would spend money on other people and never on herself.
They are ordered. She dated the spines in her own hand, the years running back four, and the top one is the newest, and the newest one is thin because she did not get to finish it.
I take the oldest first. I don't decide to. My hands do it. You reach for the earliest photo in a box before you are ready for the recent ones, and my hands know it before I do.
The first entries are long. Her handwriting is strong here.
This is the same hand that wrote my name on the inside cover of every book she ever gave me, firm and slanted and sure, and it fills the page without pause.
She writes about the garden. She writes about the weather off the lake. And she writes about Sara.
Sara learned the pills today. She wrote them out on a card in blue pen and taped it by the light so I could see it from the bed.
She does not fuss. She notices what I need before I know I need it.
I have three daughters and I love them. I did not expect to be given another this late, from outside, owing me nothing.
I read that twice. Then I read it a third time and my mouth goes dry. I turn the page.
Sara caught me in the hall at two in the morning. My legs went. She got her arm under me before I hit the doorframe. She has a mark on it now, below the elbow. She will not let me apologize for it. She says that is what arms are for.
The scar. Pruett said it in the office and I did not know what he meant. I have been married to that scar and I learned it from a lawyer, and here it is, dated, in my mother's hand, the night it was made.
There is a system to the notebooks. I see it once I've read enough to see it.
She wrote about the people who came. She was keeping a record — not a bitter one, not at first, a mother's record, who telephoned, who visited, who sat.
Sara is on nearly every page. The nurse.
The neighbor with the dialysis. My sisters, Sunday by Sunday, on speaker from their cars.
And me.
The first year, I am there. Whit came home for the weekend. He looks thin. He carries too much. I told him to let Sara carry some of it and he laughed and said carrying it is the job. He is his father through and through and I don't know whether to be proud or afraid.
I sit down on the floor with my back against the bed. I did not decide that either.
Whit called from Frankfurt. The connection was bad. He asked after me for a long time and I could hear that he meant it. He said he would be home Thursday. He is a good boy. He is only very busy.
He is only very busy. She wrote that about me. She defended me to a notebook no one would ever read. I put my thumb on the words as if I can press them back into being true.
The entries about me get shorter after that. I don't notice it happening inside a single notebook. It is like the days getting shorter. Not on any one morning. You look up and there is less light than there was, and you cannot say when it went.
Whit sent flowers.
Whit sent a car for the specialist.
Whit called. Ten minutes. He had a meeting.
The lines about Sara are still whole. Still paragraphs. Sara slept in the chair again, the one that leaves the seam on her cheek. I told her to take the guest bed and she said she would not hear the rattle from there. She hears everything. She is the only one who hears.
I keep turning. I am into the third notebook now, the second-to-last year, and I am reading fast because I have started to be afraid of what the reading is showing me, and fear makes you fast the way it makes an animal fast.
The entries about me have become one line. Then half a line. Then a name and a verb.
Whit called.
Whit called.
Same three words, weeks apart, and I remember every one of those calls as proof I was present.
I called. I was on the phone in a car in a city she could not have found on a map, and I said the words, how is she, is she comfortable, tell her I love her, and I put the phone in my pocket and got out and shook someone's hand, and my mother took the two words I gave her and wrote them down because they were all she had of me to write.
I count them. I don't mean to — it's a thing I do now, count the things I can't undo, the days I attended my own mother's dying by telephone, the appearances I sent instead of made. My hand goes down the pages counting the Whit called, and they run out.
They run out.
In the last notebook, the thin one, there is a page with the date at the top in her failing hand, the letters gone soft the way the morphine made them soft, and under the date it says Sara and then a whole paragraph, careful, loving, about how Sara had started humming to her at night without knowing she was doing it, an old song, her own mother's song, and how it was the first time in years my mother had been sung to.
And beneath that paragraph, lower on the page, set apart, in the same soft hand:
Whit —
And nothing.
Just the name. Just the dash. The way you write a heading before you fill it in, and then you set the pen down, and you never come back, because there is nothing to come back to.
She left the space for me. She dated it and she wrote my name and she waited for me to do something worth the line, and I did not, and she died with the line open.
I turn the page to be sure. The next entry is Sara again. And the next. She kept writing. She had things to say until nearly the end. She simply stopped having things to say about her son. My mother stopped writing about me before she stopped writing.
Something turns over in me, low and cold, and it is not grief the way I have been calling grief since the funeral.
Grief has been a thing I have been managing.
Funerals arranged, calls returned, a house sat in.
This is under the grief, the thing the grief was built over to keep me off it.
It rises the way water rises in a boat you did not know was holed, slow, from the floor, and there is no bailing it because there is nothing to argue.
There is no one to argue it to. Every other bad thing in my life I have handled by explaining it — to a board, to a lawyer, to myself, in the calm reasonable voice that has never once failed to make the ugly thing sound like a decision instead of a failing.
You did what anyone would do. I said that to my wife in a driveway.
A man shields his woman from burden, my father said, and I built a marriage on it. I have a sentence for everything.
I have no sentence for a dash with nothing after it.
I put my hand over my mouth. The sound that gets out anyway is not one I have made before, not at the death, not at the funeral, not when she left the ring on the hall table where I would find it beside two invitations I never opened.
It comes up out of the floor of me and I go down over the notebook, over my own name in my mother's hand, and I stay there on the boards of the room she died in, and I let it take me, because for the first time in this whole ruined summer I am not managing anything.
I don't know how long. The furnace stops and starts.
My knees have gone stiff by the time I sit up, and the notebook has a mark on it now, a wet ripple through the last date, and I smooth it with my thumb the way she used to smooth my hair and it does not come out.
It will always be there now. Good. Let it stay.
I look at the name and the dash. Whit —. A space my mother held open and I never filled.
I sit with the dash. My knees, the cold coming up through the boards, the notebook gone soft under my thumb.
I keep waiting for the part of me that makes a plan to start working.
The part that would explain this, or fund it, or fix it, or send a car for it.
It does not start. There is nothing to send a car to.
The woman who wrote this is in the ground, and the other one — the one who got paragraphs from my mother and the same dash from me — is two hours north beside a lake I have never seen.
I don't know what a man does with that. I know only that every answer I have ever had is the thing that killed the line.
I set the notebook down. I do not go to bed.
I have a great deal to learn, and no one left to teach me but the dead, and they have written it all down.