There was of course The Time Mom Died Scuba Diving. There was a hungry shark and can you blame it? And there was a funeral at sea and we scattered poppy petals for Mom, and Dad wore a snorkel and mask and fins to the wake because immediately afterward he dove into the sea off the coast in Akumal, Mexico, and found that bastard shark. He fought it underwater one-on-one with the serrated hunting knife he keeps by the rocking chair for intruders, and he killed the shark and took a tooth and so did I and now we wear them around our necks, and Dad's has carved in it Bastard and mine says Shark Fin Soup.
There was The Time Mom Died by Toaster Oven. She was getting my frozen pepperoni pizza out of the metal electric trap with a fork when all of a sudden, Zap!
Of course there was The Time Mom Died Falling Off the Merry-Go-Round, and The Time Mom Died by Frogs. I remember The Skydiving Incident clearly, though Crossing South Congress Avenue on May 14th is still hazy because of all the buzzing buses everywhere, and then the one bus that whisked her under.
I can count the ways Mom bit the dust. Trolley Fishing, The Backward-Falling Chair, Losing in a Duel Over a Pair of Sandals, Saving Me from a Rabid Dog. Of course there was That Time Mom Rented the Wrong Movie on the Wrong Night, and also Death By Knives.
When I was seven Dad and Mom were out on the porch and it was raining outside and they were there, sitting, and sitting. And Mom was smoking a cigarette, and I was out there to ask her if my buddy Ryan could come over to play, and I saw her drag on that skeleton bone and I told her, You're going to get addicted again, and I said it serious like an adult even though I was only seven. And she said, I won't, and I thought, But you will, and then she did.
Four years later when I was eleven my mom started working nights at the neonatal intensive care unit. Babies born with their insides on the outside, things like that. I am not kidding. And often babies died on my mom's watch and she would come home in the morning with breakfast tacos and slip into her bedroom as I slipped out for school. And the graveyard shift is what they called working nights.
That last year when she was working at the I.C.U. was the worst, because it was so different than the Mom I was used to. When I was a kid we'd run around Zilker Park and then lie face down on the grass with our arms out, her in her big Snoopy sweatshirt, and she would say, Lucas, look, we're hugging Mother Earth. And we'd hug her. And our neighbors told us once that they could hear my mom laughing all the way across the street. And my mom and I would have Falling Asleep Competitions, and we read The Lorax by Dr. Seuss together, which was our favorite book.
All of this is to say the I.C.U. changed (verb) my mom. Something about the incubators. Something about the little chests trying so hard to do something they were so new at. Something about the sun always being down, the night always being out. You could say she was Changed, like a wolfman, except the transformation was slow and it was permanent.
The Last Memory before the Worst Memory—it has to do with smoking. I was twelve waiting under the elm tree at my middle school for my mom to pick me up. I waited and she did not come, and I waited more. I got comfortable and spread my legs out with my back against the tree trunk and my butt in the dirt. I would have taken a book out of my backpack and read but I wasn't a reader back then, so I lifted my CD player from the bottom of my red pack and listened to something loud. And I waited. And I could have gone to the office to call. And I knew she had just fallen asleep because of the Graveyard Shift. And I knew she'd come get me. But I did not go to the office and I did not call. I just waited with my butt in the dirt and my legs spread out and my back anchored against the elm and my lips firmed up.
After two hours I spotted her dark eggplant of a car at a stoplight. Down the road. I twined my headphones around my CD player and tossed it into my red pack and drew up my knees. Then I sensed the light turn green and I heard a shriek of rubber and my mom's eggplant car came toward me too fast. I saw a cigarette spring from the window, still lit. The muscles in my face went slack and downward and I stood up quickly and found myself on the curb. When I opened the door Mom looked at me with Graveyard Eyes.
"Why didn't you call me?" she said. "You should have gone to the office. I was asleep. I was asleep—you could have called. I'm sorry. Why didn't you call?"
And I didn't look at her I just looked straight through the glove box and I could not say one word.
When I think about the next day I think about crane flies. Crane flies are like mosquitos but much larger, and they have very long legs and they don't bite, and they bob up and down in the air like fishing floats. Crane flies have been everywhere in our house lately. It's the spring rain that brings them. I love crane flies but on accident I keep killing them. They are so so fragile. They are everywhere against windows and above lampshades always glittering around the edges of my vision. I try to catch them and put them outside in the night, but all I do is crush their legs in the gaps between my fingers. Sometimes they die all on their own—on the counter they get stuck in thin slips of water until they drown. I want to say, Hey, stop flying inside there's nothing good for you in here. But they're attracted to light, or they get sucked in by our air conditioning, or they have small brains, and so I keep trying to rescue them and my success rate is about one half, and that is what it's like trying to think about the next day which houses the Worst Memory.
The next day my mom passed away in the bathtub from a blood clot in her lung, and I happened to be home sick that day, which was a Wednesday, October 3rd, 2002. And it was violent and fast, and loud, and I called the ambulance while my dad worked on my mom, and there was a lot of yelling and crying which I had a hard time understanding was coming from my own lungs, and then the paramedics and the firefighters came and one of them told me, "I don't know if you believe in God or Buddha or whatever, but if I were you I would start praying."
Our family friend M.G. came to pick us up in his dark green convertible, though the top was rolled up, and he drove very fast. We came to a red light but he did not slow down, just sped up, and we jerked left and the tires yelled out and we were almost sideswiped, and the oncoming car would have hit my side and I could see it coming, but it was like seeing the world through gauze.
At the hospital they made us wait in a room with a brass placard on front that read, Family Room. Inside sat a therapist whose job it was to try and make small talk with us—we who were waiting to hear if someone we loved had died or not, we who were waiting to hear whether our lives would be changed forever or not. And that poor psychologist tried to make small talk though I can't remember anything she said.
The doctor called my dad out of the room and I couldn't hear anything they said, but it didn't take long, and when Dad came in he choked, "I have bad news," and that was it. And that was it.
(I need to find the line of this story, I think it's deteriorating quickly into something sentimental. And where to from here? Where do I go? What is the main line I'm trying to follow? I liked the energy at the beginning but now I'm not so hot about any of this last stuff.)
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