This Is Not Over Part 13

I haven't done anything wrong. I wrote a review to warn other potential consumers, and I turned her in for violating the law, and she's the one talking to the police? I didn't even know there was ent.i.tlement on this scale. There ought to be a new word for it. Something longer, like "onomatopoeia."

As if I need this on top of a dead father, a needy mother, a stalled job search, and an imminent graduation. I'm at a rest area en route to Eureka to see my father's body, and the only consolation is that my mother is not in the car with us. She's been chugging along in front, sending up smoke signals in her maroon Ford Escort with one mismatched door. Now she's in the bathroom, and I'm watching a toy poodle watering the base of a tree. I know how you feel, oak.

It's been silent between Rob and me for the past hour. We're at a stalemate, a tense "agree to disagree" where my father is concerned. Rob still feels like a burial is the right thing to do-the only "humane" thing to do-and that's only one letter off from "human," and I feel like if I play this whole thing wrong, he'll think I'm half a person.

I spy him exiting the restroom, and I move away, around the building, where he can't see me. I'm actually running away from my own husband. This is what it's come to.

I'll go with my mother to view the body, then we'll go to her apartment where I'll make her tea and tuck her in for the night, and Rob and I will drive back home. If he wants to be generous with our money, we can help her out with next month's rent. That's a better use of the cash anyway. For the living, not the dead. Rob will have to see that, won't he?

Just the thought of Eureka makes my skin crawl. Nothing good ever happened to me there. It was a geographic accident, as much as I was a biological one, and I want to get back to the Bay Area, where I really belong.

I'm missing Professor Myerson's cla.s.s today, which I resent. My mother shouldn't have shown up at my door, dragging me into this, dragging me back. Every time I try to get out . . .

Behind the building, there are two little girls running around, one with long braids, the other with her amber-colored hair loose and strands getting caught in her mouth, both in blowing summery dresses, their high-pitched squeals lost to the wind, but their joy unmistakable. If Rob and I have one, then we're having two, at least. Then they'll never be alone in the world.

". . . cooties!" I can make out that one word, and I smile. I didn't think "cooties" would stand the test of time.

When one little girl tackles the other, and they begin to roll around, and the tackled yells out, "Mooooommmm!" and said mom appears, looking harried, I decide it's my cue to return to the car. I round the building and see that my mother is in Rob's arms, sobbing again. I want to not mind; I want to be as effortlessly compa.s.sionate as Rob is.

I stand nearby but within her line of sight, should she raise her head, and finally, she does. She looks at me and wipes her eyes. "Sorry. We can hit the road again."

"You have nothing to apologize for," Rob says, and my eyes widen. He thinks he gets to absolve my mother, the woman who has never truly acknowledged the million things she, in fact, should be sorry for. Instead, she always does what she was just doing: She cries, she looks pathetic, she invites pity. Weakness is her justification, always. I used to fall for her tricks, but that's over. Still, I can't be upset with Rob; he's just being a good guy.

"We should go," I say, "if we want to get to the morgue before it closes."

My mother nods bravely, a little girl afraid of monsters but willing to try sleeping without a night-light, and I get in the driver's side of our car. Rob glances at me in surprise; he tends to be the default driver. As soon as he's in the pa.s.senger seat, I peel out. "Don't you want to wait for your mom?" he asks. I don't answer. "I got you this." He places a Snickers on my thigh. "You barely ate any breakfast."

"Thanks." I smile, immediately feeling guilty for my momentary annoyance with him. He knows that I only allow myself Snickers on road trips, and cheesy celeb magazines on plane rides. He knows me. He loves what he knows.

I'm in the fast lane, eager to get some distance between my mother and me. Rob keeps glancing back, looking for her car. He probably thinks we should ride her a.s.s to make sure she's okay, but he's being way too cautious. If her car breaks down, she'll text me. Highways go both ways.

I see her whizzing up, dodging cars in other lanes, and then she cuts in front of me at what must be ninety miles an hour. I catch a quick glimpse of her face-she's enjoying herself, showing the world what a Ford Escort with a mismatched door can really do-and I have to laugh at Rob's obvious surprise. He doesn't know this side of my mother, that she can be reckless as well as weepy.

This is the mother who woke me up from a dead sleep when I was nine years old so that we could sit in the car on a stakeout in front of some woman's house and she could make me her confidante. My father never showed up there, which probably just meant she had the wrong woman, but it was a fool's errand anyway. No matter what he did, she would stay with him till death did them part, and it finally has. I'm not about to cry for either one of them.

"I think we should be ready to stay the night," Rob says. "Your mom doesn't seem like she should be alone yet."

"I'll ask Aunt Tanya to stay with her." Aunt Tanya lives in Eureka, too, but one of the nice parts.

He watches my mother's slightly weaving b.u.mper. "It's going to be a lot for her, just seeing the body. They were together a long time. If my father . . ." He can't even finish the sentence. His parents go to the gym together four times a week, and wear pedometers to count their steps, and never put b.u.t.ter on anything, ever. They are united in trying to thwart mortality at every turn. "We should spend the night, and consider maybe bringing her back to stay with us for a while."

"Stay in our apartment? For a while?" I infuse each word with maximal incredulity. "On our couch?" He can't have forgotten that we have a one-bedroom apartment.

"Not a long while. Once she has a job, she could rent a room somewhere close. Hayward, maybe, or San Leandro. She'd be near family, you know? That's important, after a loss like hers." I've noticed he keeps referring to it as a loss, rather than a death. As far as I'm concerned, it's just death.

"My mom is better off making minimum wage in Eureka, where rents are cheap, than in the Bay Area near us."

"Maybe you're right," he says, but I can tell he thinks he is. "You know, this could be an opportunity for reconciliation. No matter what she's done or hasn't done, she's still your mother."

No, she's not.

If my father hadn't died, she wouldn't have tried to fix our relationship. That's not what she's here for. She wants to use me, and I'm not going to let that happen. Rob's too quick to smudge out my past.

Besides, I can't focus on any of that when I'm some sort of fugitive from justice. I bet Miranda's got the police on her side already. She lives in Beverly Hills with her doctor husband, and she probably showed up at the precinct in a mink stole or something.

Rob and I should be talking about Miranda's e-mail right now, making a game plan. An impending visit from the police is a lot more pressing than my father's death. But he thought I should have put the Miranda stuff to bed a long time ago, and I don't want to see the look on his face when he learns about this latest turn of events.

Better not to mention it until there's really something to mention. After all, I didn't break the law, she did.

I turn on the radio and hum along to the first song I know. Rob and I don't talk until we're pulling into the hospital parking lot.

"I'll go in first," he says. "I'll get everything arranged, and then come back out for you and your mom."

He stops by my mother's Escort in the adjacent s.p.a.ce. She rolls her window down by hand. I leave my windows up so I don't have to hear them, though I see by his gestures that he's turned his graciousness on her, full-force, a fire hose of solicitude.

I stare straight ahead. I'm not going to her car. If she wants to talk, she'll have to come over here. Rob is doing enough caretaking for both of us. It's probably what she wished she'd gotten from my father all those years, but then again, if she had, she might have gone looking for some other jerk. My dad's formula of 80 percent callousness/20 percent love worked like a charm. It might have even been more like 90/10.

I play Candy Crush on my phone until Rob gets back, and my mother doesn't leave her car until Rob opens the door for her. He's keeping up a running monologue as we walk into the hospital and take the elevator down to the bas.e.m.e.nt. "We have to decide by tomorrow what we're going to do. They gave me a list of funeral homes we could use if we go that route. If they cremate him, you can still pick up the ashes for $450"-the distaste on Rob's face is evident-"so that's an option. But we have time, that's my point, a little more time, and that's good because . . ." I tune him out.

The morgue attendant is waiting for us in hospital scrubs and a white lab coat, an expression of perma-sympathy on his broad face. The morgue is just a numbered room, like any other.

The attendant escorts us inside, his voice a soothing drone. The room is a little cold but not frigid, with white linoleum floors and pale mint walls, and there are those stacked steel drawers that I've seen on Law & Order and CSI. There's a wall of fans humming faintly. On a stainless steel cart in the center of the room with a sheet over it is what must be my father's body. I'm filled with the fear that I'll feel nothing when I see him, or that I'll be overtaken once again with the slow-burning anger I've tried to outrun. Every time I try to get out . . .

The attendant is asking a question, I can tell by his intonation if not by the actual words, so I nod. I'm as ready as I'll ever be. My mother is leaning against Rob, and I'm standing on my own, moving forward, somehow. The sheet is drawn back, and there he is, looking pretty much as he did three years ago. His pallor wasn't healthy then, he had a certain greenish cast at my wedding, but then, he was drinking heavily. He doesn't look peaceful, exactly, but he's not tormented either.

He should have suffered more.

I hear my mother wailing, and Rob is holding her up, but all I can do is stare. So this is death. A lot like life, isn't it? At least at this stage, a day into the whole thing. That's my father, formerly good-looking, increasingly jowly, his hair long and a little greasy in defiance of his receding hairline. That's him, pa.s.sed out. Sleeping. No, dead.

It's good to have the confirmation. This is over. He's over.

We're back in the parking lot, and I'm in some sort of fugue state, the state of trying not to remember. All that indifference for all those years, and then when he finally noticed me, when he finally paid attention, it was so much worse.

Rob has gotten my mother buckled into the pa.s.senger seat of her car. He literally kneeled beside her and pinned her in with the safety harness, and I a.s.sume he'll be driving her home. I'm milling around, seeing all the people entering and exiting, an ambulance pulling up into its bay. I may be shaking, just a little.

Rob grabs me to him, hard, and I know that he wants me to feel the right something. I'm full of some chemical I've never felt before. It's not adrenaline; it's itchy, and antsy. I want to dispel it, so I say the first thing that comes to me.

"Burn him up," I tell Rob. He pushes me away from him, just as hard as he pulled me in a minute before, and it's involuntary, I know. It's uncontrolled repulsion.

He takes my arm and leads me away, to the pavement in front of the hospital. He doesn't want my mother to hear the rest of this conversation.

"Burn him up," I say again, as if I like his horror. Translation: This is me. Go ahead and leave if you want to.

But I don't want him to. Oh, G.o.d, I don't want that.

"You're in shock."

I feel like I'm on a slalom, I can't stop sliding down. "Let the state pay for it, and then we'll pay the four hundred or whatever, and I'll spring for a little urn so my mother can keep him with her always."

"This isn't you. For the past twenty-four hours, you haven't been yourself. Let's go get something to eat, then we'll sleep on it. No decisions until tomorrow. That seems like a good rule."

"I don't want to stay in their apartment. I want to get as far away as I can, as fast as I can. We need to go home."

But Rob doesn't understand, and I can't tell him.

"We can't always do what we want," he says carefully. "Sometimes we have to take care of other people."

"It's my job to take care of her?" I quit that a long time ago.

"Unless you think she should burn in h.e.l.l, too."

"You're putting words in my mouth."

But there's no explaining further, so I let him take control. I let him pick up food that no one eats, and I let him fawn over my mother, and I let him lay out a makeshift bed on my mother's grungy living room floor amid the thrift store furniture, and I let him spoon me in the darkness. I try to fall asleep to the sound of the kitchen faucet dripping and my mother's keening behind her closed bedroom door. It's as if she wants to throw herself on a funeral pyre. I'd always a.s.sumed that to be the misogynistic practice of a patriarchal culture; I'd never before thought of that as a custom that benefits the widow, a form of euthanasia.

"What if our kids disappoint you?" Rob says into the darkness.

So he still thinks kids are an inevitability. He hasn't changed his mind about me based on what he's witnessed today. That's good news. The problem is, lately I've been changing my mind about them. Instead of seeming like future kids, they seem more like hypothetical ones.

I married Rob to have babies. What'll happen if I decide against them? Will I still want Rob? Will he still want me?

"What if our kids aren't who you want them to be?" he continues. "Will you turn your back on them so completely you don't even care if they're dead, if they rest in earth or burn to ash?"

"No kid could ever be as disappointing as my parents."

"Say they manage to be. Let's say they let you down again and again. They appear to have no redeeming qualities."

"I'll try to love them," I say, "no matter what."

"You'll try?"

He's scared, that's what this is all about, and I can't blame him for that. From his perspective, I've been frighteningly cold where my dad's death is concerned, cold as his body on the slab. "I'll love them," I tell Rob, "because I'll choose to. Every day."

"It's not about choice. It's not an act of willpower. You love your kids because you can't help it. You can't do anything else."

"Why do you a.s.sume that love is going to come so easily to you, no matter what kind of people they turn out to be? That's pretty arrogant."

"It's arrogant to a.s.sume that I'm going to love my kids?"

"Under all conditions, in every circ.u.mstance, yes."

"It's what parents do."

We are so very far apart. "You're a good son, with good parents. Your family has never been tested. So if you face adversity with our kids, you might be the one to crumble. You might be the one to question G.o.d: 'Why did you give me these rotten kids, when I'm such an awesome person?' But me, I'll handle it, like I've handled everything."

He's quiet. "That was mean."

"You get to question my bona fides as a potential parent but I can't question yours? It's supposed to be a given that you'll be amazing and I'm suspect?"

"I never thought you were suspect."

"Before today."

He's quiet again. We both know what that means.

My mother renews her sobbing, and it occurs to me that she conveniently stopped during my conversation with Rob.

"We have to leave tomorrow," I say. It's a matter of survival. "I'll call to check in on her, and maybe we'll drive back up some other weekend, but I will not be her mother." Not ever again.

"Let's wait and see how she is tomorrow-"

"And you're not going to be her father."

In this third silence, I'm seized by terror. I can't lose him. I cannot go backward. He's my future. I knew that the first time we met. Well, within a few dates. Stable but not boring. Attractive but we weren't ripping each other's clothes off. Our relationship was an orderly progression. He was healthy, in mind and body, and I'd be healthy, too, by extension, and through example.

So I give in. "Before we leave, we'll make all the arrangements. We'll get my dad buried."

He's surprised, and then delighted. Is it because he's won? No, Rob's not like that. "Are you sure?"

I say yes, because I have to.

He pulls me to him. Relief radiates off him, like the rays in a child's drawing of a sun. I feel the warmth of it, and I focus on that. He loves me; he doesn't want me to have any regrets someday; he knows what's right.

For the sake of my marriage, and my husband's good opinion of me, I will acquiesce to the burial of my father.

I'll insist on the cheapest burial possible, without a funeral or any sort of service. If my mother wants add-ons, she'll pay herself. But the burial-why fight anymore? It is, after all, Rob's money.

My stomach is churning. I tell myself it's the scent of whatever's rotting in my mother's garbage. But I can't help feeling that I'm conning my husband. I'm letting him believe that he's turned me around in my thinking, that I'm something other than I am.

It makes me feel, for the first time, like I'm in a sham of a marriage. And yet, I'm desperate to preserve it.

24.

Miranda

It is with great regret that I must resign from the Homeowners a.s.sociation. I've been privileged to serve, and I continue to love our community as much as ever. Sadly, personal commitments have interfered with my ability to give it the attention that it deserves. I consider you all friends as well as colleagues. Please don't hesitate to be in touch in the future, and I hope to see you around Santa Monica soon.