BY MEG ARTLEY
Copyright is held by the author.
ANNIE’S ONLY child, Sam, stood next to her bed. The hospice aide brought him a chair. He sat.
One half of his mother’s face was slack with sleep and age. The other half was swollen from brow to jawbone, her eye an enormous, purple pinnacle. She’d tripped over a crack in the concrete in front of her apartment building, a fall that set everything in motion: a broken hip, a refusal of treatment, an entry into hospice at home. Sam eventually received a call because she’d never taken him off her health care directive.
He held his breath in the long beats between his mother’s exhale and her next inhale, becoming as still as he was in the framed photo on her bedside table, taken a few hours after his second child was born. In the photo, nearly naked Georgia holds Elliot, bundled and beet red, on her belly. Sam perches half on and half off the bed, holding tight to their squirming first born, two-year-old Jack.
That day, Jack was a maniacal clown, desiring only to stomp on his brother’s tiny, conical head. Georgia droned on about every bloody detail of her labour to his mother, even the stitching of her perineal tear. He was at the point of screaming from frustration and flop sweat when his mother reached out to him for Jack. Sam once again felt the raised line between his awe and irritation, remembering how Jack placed his big head on her tiny shoulder, calming immediately, as she swayed, side to side, foot to foot.
***
Sam’s “Hi, Mom” pulled Annie back to the gummy crevice she tried to ignore in the churning and burning of her little life, waiting for the inevitable. She fought the pillow of morphine to tuck her chin, open her good eye, and focus on the presence she felt beyond her bed. These small movements depleted her as much as the cancer treatments did before she abandoned them a year ago.
Her brief glimpse of Sam returned her to that Thanksgiving Day. She arose in the dark to cook cornbread dressing, drove hours to Sam and Georgia’s house, pulling in their driveway just before dinner time. Sam walked from the front door to her car, his hands plugged in his pockets, hunched over himself like it was cold, though it was balmy that evening. He addressed his emotionless speech about a need for boundaries between them to the casserole carrier in her hands. She protested that it had been so long since she’d seen him, that it was a day for family. He asked her to please leave. He wouldn’t even take the food she made.
On her long ride back home, she travelled through the stages of grief she had come to know too often and too early in her life. It was her arrival at a fragile acceptance that made her dump her favorite casserole dish in the backyard bin before she keyed into her empty house.
Annie wanted to share her mirth about it all, to say “boundaries,” to Sam, but she couldn’t open her mouth. Instead, she opened her good eye again, made a slicing gesture with her hand, which exhausted her. Before she could manage a chuckle or a smile at him, she slipped back into the quiet waiting space that held her.
***
At her gesture, Sam felt a spark of indignation and he was relitigating the whole thing. She’d just show up at their door, bags packed for the week, an annoying blur of action, cooking, cleaning, organizing pantry shelves, taking Jack for a walk when he was supposed to be napping, walking Elliot in the stroller when it was spitting rain. Her frequent visits sapped Georgia’s shaky confidence, made him feel guilty he wasn’t doing more for his family.
He phoned to ask that she wait until they invited her to visit, softening his request by telling her of his fears of postnatal depression, describing how Georgia muttered monosyllables to him, how she cried more this time around. It took a lot to unzip his marriage that way. Her dismissal came with a chuckle. She said Georgia would eventually get the hang of it, would eventually “put on her big girl panties.” He hung up on her.
She left voice mails asking what happened, then apologizing. He didn’t return her calls. He figured with time it would all sort out.
Then Georgia was pregnant again. It was a difficult pregnancy; Andrew was born early. There was no way to say, while we weren’t talking Mom, we had another kid.
He’d moved on, without intending to. She’d obviously moved on from him, too. When hospice called, they gave him his mother’s new address.
***
The hospice aide came in the room to check Annie’s pulse and breathing. She told Sam things were progressing quickly now. When the aide left the room, Sam buried his face in Annie’s soft, limp hand. She felt his tears.
He did the same thing when she dropped him off at Boy Scout camp the summer after her husband died. His gesture pierced her resolve for a moment. Despite the loss and the grief that bound them, it was time he found his independence.
It took such effort to push him through the whisper-thin veil of childhood that day. She managed to keep a bright smile on her face, even though she was already drowning in the grief she would feel when he returned. He would no longer cry like this, or want to hold her hand, even in private. He would no longer wrap his arms around her waist so that she would feel his big head on her chest, breathe in his scent at the crown of his head.
There was no car door to slam between them this time. Despite her desperate desire to wipe Sam’s tears, to reassure him of her love, she had to step over that last line between them.
***
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Meg Artley’s stories have been published in The Razor, Black Fork Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Every Day Fiction. Her current labour of love is writing a collection of short stories set in Harlan, KY, U.S. in the 1970s. One of these stories has appeared in Whiskyblot; another will be published in Free State Review in the coming months. When she isn’t writing, she teaches yoga and meditation in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.