Heartbeat

I hear the grandfather clock ticking louder and louder from the front hall, even standing outside on the porch. Or was it simply ticking slower and slower? That clock had been the heartbeat of our home as long as I could remember. It seems only appropriate it would wind down slowly, today of all days. I knew today was the day it would stop.

Mother greets me at the door in a full-length evening gown with an air kiss for each cheek and a glance up and down my unseemly attire. I think attending the end of your tormentor’s life calls for little more than jeans and Doc Martens, but perhaps Mother believes she has life in her yet.

She leads me to the drawing room – yes, I’d grown up in a house with a drawing room – and sits on the chaise lounge, waiting for me to perform my duties. After twenty-five years, I still oblige. She had taught me to prepare her drinks when I was five, and I had been responsible for keeping her glass full whenever and wherever her temper took her ever since.

I serve her a champagne cocktail in the sparkling emerald goblet she prefers. When the sun shines through it, it causes green light to dance all over her face in the ghastliest way. As a child her green face reminded me of the great Wicked Witch, which is how I came to know she was in one of her moods.

Mother motions for me to sit. I choose the velvet sofa across from her, but no sooner do the back pockets of my jeans dust across it before she tsk tsk’s me to remind me my seat is the very uncomfortable spindle chair by the kitchen door. I sit, dutifully, and wait to find out why she’s summoned me. I hope I’m not wrong.

The house’s heartbeat continues strong.

Tick

Tock

Tick

Tock

Growing up with Mother had been a prison sentence I hadn’t earned, but it was the only life I’d known. If other children were given birthday parties, I knew not how to compare myself to them, for I never attended one. If other girls slept in beds with down pillows and pink ribbons, I knew not how to luxuriate, for my bed was little more than a ticking mattress on a hard plank on the third floor of our sweeping Colonial in upper Connecticut. If other girls went to bed with full tummies, it mattered not, for I dined only at the pleasure of Mother. And Mother found little pleasure in anything beyond her cocktail. And finding clever ways to create graphic imagery on my delicate skin with various household objects. I learned to sit still and be invisible. I learned not to ask. I learned not to cry. I learned to not even want.

I mixed her another cocktail. And waited. Mother would not be rushed with the purpose of her letter, demanding I drop everything and rush home today.

Tick

Tock

Tick

Tock

It’s unkind of me, I suppose, knowing the cirrhosis is so advanced she will likely not survive the year, let alone the week. I dare to hope, getting her letter as I did, that she will not survive the day. I want to believe there is something inside of her – something which might have sparked the same moment I did inside her body, just over thirty years ago – that little light that made her a Mother to begin with. I want to believe that same spark might come back to life at her life’s end the way it ignited at my life’s beginning and right the wrongs. I dare to hope she might find love in her heart. Or solace in my existence. Or something more than contempt. Otherwise, I’ve come to see what horrors I can find deep in her near-dead soul today. At the very least, I’ve come to find out if, perhaps, at days’ end she’s written a will and perhaps decided I’m worth more after her death than she’s ever found me worth during her life.

And so I serve her drinks and I wait.

The clock continues to pulse as our meeting drags on.

Tick

Tock

Tick

Tock

I serve her another champagne cocktail. She is a tragic parody, her face awash in theater and death, resigned to her fate. Her eyes have turned yellow as her liver fails her, a startling complement to her green skin in this moment. She is no longer in there, my Mother. I am not sure there was ever a mother in there at all.

She gasps for air, laboring for every breath. Her body is contorted with the disease, long past hope of recovery, and long past any semblance of the outer beauty she curated so carefully in life. Even huddling in my corners as a child I understood the irony of how someone could care so much for their beauty and be so completely ugly. I find her shell of a body grotesque and comical at the same time. There is no gown, no cream, no treatment to hide what she is now. A raging alcoholic. Careless with her life. Careless with her child. A life wasted which has finally come back to claim her in the most painful way possible.

She clearly wants to speak to me, but she struggles. I offer her no solace. Not now. I sit, smugly, in my offensive uniform. Still praying the answer is deathbed redemption. I curse my inner child and its silly optimism. It continues to fail me as I try to sink into a permanent place of not giving a shit about this woman in front of me. And yet…

At last, she speaks.

“As you know, girl,” (I’m not sure she recalls she actually blessed me with a name at birth) “I shall not live forever. God did not see fit to bless me with any children whom I could actually love.” (So it’s not to be a deathbed confession of regret and endearment.) “Instead, God asked me to carry a burden. The insufferable burden of you. And I have done my best. I may not have done what He wanted at all times, but I have certainly done my best. You must know that. After all, you have become a strong woman, thanks to my guidance and lessons.” (Oh, is that what all those beatings were? Guidance?) I grimace. Noticeably.

“Do not squirm, girl. It is unbecoming.”

She begins to cough, and I think it’s going to end, before I can pray the other possibly decent outcome might still be an option.

But she recovers and continues. “Now that my duty to you is done and you are an adult, and my time on this earth is nearly done, I am done with you. I asked you here today to tell you to take everything you have learned in this house and do your best. You need nothing further from me, and you shall get it. I suspect this is the last time you shall see me, so we need not make a fuss. I simply wanted to be forthright about it. My affairs have all been handled, so you need not check in any further. Do you understand?”

I stare at her, blankly, for what seems like hours. I am not surprised, but I am stunned nonetheless. Another coughing fit overtakes her and saves me from having to answer. The champagne cocktail in her hand – the instrument of her death – slips her grip as she falls back on the chaise and lands in her lap. I go to her side, not certain how, or if, I will help. But there is a cushion at the end of the chaise I might use to support her head. Or…I might…

I pick up the pillow, tempted. She doesn’t deserve a simple end. She deserves long, drawn out, agonizing pain. After all, isn’t that what she’d given me? Thirty years of neglect? Hadn’t I been slowly ground down into this shell of a human? Why should I offer her any relief? Why should I end her suffering?

She stares at me through hollow eyes. The cocktail seeps into the cushion, a stain spreading wide on the satin upholstery. She glances at the pillow and back at me.

I set the pillow down.

The clock continues to beat.

Tick.

Tock.

Tick.

Tock.

And I reach inside, and gently still it.