EV Legters

Mercy

My mother called one morning last fall to say she was entertaining suicide, as if it were a houseguest.

“Mom. You’re not serious. Something happen?” She’d never talked like this before.

“Just been thinking.”

“Why? About what?”

“I’ve been going through some boxes. Your room. The attic.”

“Should I drive up?”

“No, no, Ian. A little nostalgia.”

“You’re not depressed?”

“No. Curious. That’s all.”

I was in my last year of law school, waiting on the results of interviews, keeping my father, who lives with me, out of trouble – he has a tendency to think he’s invincible, regardless of how many times he’s, well, vinced. Over the last year, I’d taken him to the emergency room after he twisted his ankle during a pick-up game of basketball with players a third of his age; had broken his arm taking his first and only spin on a neighbor kid’s skateboard; and, the same week my mother called, given himself a concussion while helping some people – strangers – get their hot air balloon aloft. A nurse lectured me on elder abuse.

“Mom, I can come up.” My parents divorced when I was five, after which I lived with her, although my father could often be found sleeping on our couch. She’d kept our house north of New York; I was down in D.C. “I’ll clear a couple things and drive up.”

“Christmas stockings. I embroidered yours, remember? But I haven’t roasted a turkey in years, and we didn’t color Easter eggs after you discovered the eggs we colored would never become chicks.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Remember how I’d make big pots of pasta for you and your friends?”

“Mom?”

“And brownies. I used to melt the chocolate in a double boiler. Do they still make double boilers? I can’t find that funny metal twisty thing for getting the tops off jars. Do you know the thing I mean? You called it a helicopter. You had so many toys. And pictures. I took so many. Boxes and boxes. You should see.”

“What does your doctor say?”

“What does my doctor say? What they all say. ‘Make friends! Get a hobby! Take a walk!’ Do you know how many friends I’ve had? Well, not that many. But still. And hobbies? Do you know anyone who’s had more hobbies? Woodcutting, and embroidery, ceramics, music . . . wrote poetry.”

“Music was more than a hobby.”

“I even tried gardening. Nothing grew. Well, tomatoes. And weeds.”

“You told me they were wildflowers.”

“One year I read to preschoolers. Do you remember that? And walks? Over the years we had dogs and more dogs that I was forever walking. How many walks does one person need? Remember Bailey? Butch?”

“Mom?”

“Did you know I even had a dog in my dorm room? A rescue. A black lab. Got sick. Had to let him go. I took him to a place that said they were no-kill, but I never really knew. When was the last time you played piano?”

“Mom.”

“What?”

“I’ll come up.” It wasn’t the first time she’d sounded at loose ends since retiring from teaching specialty college courses in folklore and fairy tales. She knew all kinds of stories. Believed in some. Maybe her imagination had nowhere to go. Growing up I’d often listened to her rambling through her brain, but her rambles were usually about things benign, like the nature of anthropomorphism, or the ethics of small children on leashes at malls. Pops was still unsteady when he walked because of his clunked head, and leaving new classes and the work – a ten-hour drive round trip – but double boilers and dead dogs?

“You know, Robin Williams died,” she said.

“Yeah. A couple of summers ago. We talked about it.”

“I was surprised. How’s your father?”

“Recovering from a concussion.”

“How can you tell? Was he knocked out?”

“No.”

“Then how can you tell?”

“Mom. Pop’s fine.”

“You always say that. How can you tell?”

She’d lived on her own a lot before she got married, and ever since I left for college (whereas my father has lived with me a lot ever since I left for college, even in my dorm from time to time; like a puppy, he follows me) and she was alone again now that the boarder who’d rented my room had moved out. I’d liked knowing someone was with her.

“Have you looked for a new boarder?”

“Don’t intend to.”

“Why not?

“They get in the way.”

“Get in the way of what?”

“I’m very private.”

“I know. What can I do?”

“Stay there.”

“I’ll come as soon as I can. What do you need right now?”

“Nothing. Thanks, sweetie. I’m good. It’s nice looking back over the years. What are you up to?”

But two days later, another call.

“It’s Emma,” a woman said. “Remember Emma?”

No, oh, yes, the woman who’d moved out.

“I stopped by your mom’s,” she said. “Just to say hello. She was funny. I missed her. But she wouldn’t open the door. Wouldn’t even come downstairs. Yelled down at me from an upstairs window.”

“Did she realize who you were?”

“I don’t know. Talked about ‘damned missionaries’ on her porch. Something about cockeyed beliefs.”

“She hates it when Jehovah’s Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventists or whatever they’re called come into her yard.”

“Yes, I remember, but I’m not a Jehovah’s Witness.”

“No, of course not.”

“I just thought you should know.”

I called three times before my mother picked up. “It’s not as easy as it sounds,” she said. “Guns. Wrists. Pills. Gas leaks. Impossibly difficult. And messy. Would be nice to know how to mix potions and cast spells.”

“Mom. Who’s your doctor? Parker?”

“Robin Williams just wanted to be peaceful, but then took a horribly hard way out.”

Hard way out? “I’m getting in my car.”

“Why? I’m fine. I’m always fine. Anyway, hanging up now. Busy.”

Busy? I took my dad to his follow-up appointment. “Pops, do you think you could stay out of trouble for two or three days?”

“Stop worrying,” he said. “She’s fine.”
“Hello? This is Emma. I tried stopping by your mother’s again. She opened the door, but wouldn’t let me in. Wanted to know if I play piano.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Mom?”

“What?”

“I’m coming tomorrow.”

“Why?” she said. “Is something wrong? Not that I wouldn’t love to see you.”

“You seem . . you sound . .”

“You know, everyone always accused me of being a pessimist. I’m not a pessimist. I’m a realist. I see things as they are.”

As they are?

“You’re lucky,” she continued. “You see things the way they could be. Your father never thinks beyond his next nap.”

“Mom.”

“You don’t have to come, no hurry, but when you do, play piano for me?”

“Of course.”

“I wish you had a girlfriend. You always say no time. It’s so interesting. You’re alive and then you’re not. No wonder people believe in ghosts.”

“Ghosts? Are you seeing ghosts?”

“I don’t think that’s the only in-between option.”

I called my study group, and pleaded with Pops to stay out of trouble. “In fact, don’t leave the apartment.”

All the way up I-95, I replayed our conversations. Imagined identifying her body to some coroner. Saw myself sorting through her belongings, finding things I hadn’t known about, and probably didn’t want to. Rehearsed calls to the police, a funeral home, Pops. I drove faster.

The bell didn’t seem to be working, so I knocked and knocked, and called out, “It’s Ian. Let me in!”

Silence. Silence. When I was a little boy, I wrote a story about playing the piano while she, very old, much older than now, peacefully died in the next room. Creepy, I know, but I worried a lot when I was young about mothers dying, my mother dying. She cried when she read it, and said “That would be lovely. I could do that.” I knocked again.

Footsteps. “Mom? Answer the door. It’s me.”

Nothing.

For years I’d told her to be sure the basement door was locked, but she always left it open ‘in case I forget my keys.’ So I went in that way, through the rotting wooden door, through the spidery, webby crawl space, up the rickety steps to the door to the first floor. I stood there a long time, unable to decide which would be less scary for her, knocking, or just appearing. I imagined her wielding a knife in either case. I called: “Mom? It’s me. Let me in. I’m in the basement. Don’t be scared. Do you see my car in the driveway?”

She opened the door as though it were normal. She didn’t seem the slightest bit alarmed. “Are you hungry?” she asked me.

She looked, mm, delicate, not thin, exactly, but ethereal. Her steady, balanced walk seemed floatier. “Sure,” I said. “Have you eaten? Why don’t I get us both something?” The house smelled odd, too. Not bad, not dusty, not spoiled, the way my own apartment does when Pops has been there alone for any length of time. Her house smelled empty. Like distilled air.

There wasn’t much in the refrigerator or cupboards. I heated up a can of Progresso. Found crackers; they were only a little stale. The table was as it always was, covered with books and magazines, but it didn’t look like she’d been reading any. The television was missing; the piano was closed.

“What have you been doing?”

“This is so nice,” she said over our soup. “How long are you staying? I don’t know where the sheets are.”

“You haven’t sounded quite right on the phone. And Emma called. Worried. Why won’t you let her in?”

“Why should I? She doesn’t live here anymore.”

“Yes, but Mom, have you seen anyone? Gone anywhere?”

“I think I have a flat tire.”

“You do? Why didn’t you call someone? How are you getting food? What’s going on?”

“On? What would be going on? Could you make this soup a little hotter?”

“You’re scaring me.” I took care of the soup.

“How’s school? Must be exciting to be almost done.”

“I suppose. I’ve applied to positions up here. I suppose Pops would come with me.”

“One of Chopin’s nocturnes keeps running through my head. I’d like to turn it off. It’s not working.”

“Not working? Not working how?” When I was little, she’d play piano after I went to bed; Chopin and Bach would drift up the stairs. Then, with her help, I’d taught myself how to play, and then minored in composition, thinking someday I’d do something with it.

“Play something,” she said.

I expected the piano to be terribly out of tune, like she was. I scaled through a few chords. Miraculously, the piano was fine, possibly better than ever.

“Remember that story you wrote?” she asked.

“I do.”

I sat down, called up a piece I’d written in high school – she once said it made her think of a destination she’d like but wasn’t allowed to go to – then played an idea from a quartet I’d done in college that felt, I don’t know, boxed in, predictable, and then, surprised that I still could, I closed my eyes the way I used to, before I sunk myself into law school where I had no time and no inclination to be any more than a professional student, and slipped into improvisation. What came from that had never seemed to come from inside me but from outside somewhere, or, as though my insides were outside, or perhaps there was no inside or outside, no body at all, just the music. A trance, I guess, or a zone, but more ethereal. Sometimes I couldn’t quite recall what I’d played.

I don’t know how long I played that day. A few phrases stay in my head even now, and, as my mother had said about those notes from the nocturne, I wish I could turn them off. But, too, if I turn them off, she might in some way be jeopardized. When I came out of my, my trance, she was gone. Her soup was cold. Nothing was missing. Her coat still hung on the hook. Her shoes were still inside the door. Her car sat on its flat. Nothing whatsoever had been disturbed. I called her name. I went up to her room. I even went down into the basement. I walked around the yard. I called Pops. I called the police. I didn’t want them in the house, but, they said, ‘routine.’ I wept. They questioned me. They questioned Emma. I put up posters. Called the local papers. Asked for help on Facebook and Twitter. I knew my efforts were futile even as I thought I must be crazy. “She’s fine,” Pops said. I didn’t see how. He had no explanation. I could only think of one. I’d played while she dissolved into a place I’d suggested as a frightened child, one she’d thought about, come to believe in, and dreamed into being. Brave, she was, and bold.

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