I cried. But she said it was all right. She wasn’t afraid to die. She was stoic.When?I asked, like some stupid child. Like Mom had any way of knowing exactly when it would happen.
What she said wasSooner or later we all die, Jessie.It’s only a matter of time. And this is mine.
I unlock the door and step inside. I’m inundated with the smell almost immediately. The smell of Mom. Her hand lotion, Crabtree & Evelyn’s Summer Hill. It nearly knocks me from my feet. It’s diffused through the rooms and if I didn’t know any better, I’d think that Mom was still here with me. Heart still ticking, not yet dead. I hear that death rattle, the saliva pooling there in the back of her throat. The nurses’ gentle footfalls, close enough to touch. As if they’re still there, still walking in orbits around me. Lathering lotion on Mom’s hands and feet, turning her every few hours to keep bedsores from forming on her skin.
The smell of the lotion is overpowering. It binds to the millions of tiny little hairs in my nose, bringing me to my knees every time I breathe.Mom.
And I find that I’m looking for her, half-certain that when I turn she’ll be standing there in the arched doorway of the kitchen, sagging body leaning against the doorway because she doesn’t have the energy to hold it upright anymore, a soft cotton hat covering her bald head. Asking how I got along at school today in that way that she does, teeth gritted through the pain that managed to breeze in and past the narcotics sometimes.
How’d you get along at school today, Jessie?
But it’s not real, I remind myself.
The nurses are not here.
Mom is dead.
And only then am I aware of the silence. Of the earsplitting silence that now worms its way through the cracks of our home.
I don’t know where to begin. I searched the entire home already, but I look anyway, starting in my bedroom, planning to work my way down in search of the social security card. I pluck desk and dresser drawers from their tracks. I dig beneath clothes I’ve intentionally left in the dresser drawers, those I no longer need. I lift rugs from the floor and check beneath. I canvass my closet. No luck.
I make my way to Mom’s bedroom, where I see that the liquidator has begun to tag items for sale. Mom’s clothes now hang from a rolling rack beside her bed. I run my hands over a knit cardigan, her favorite. If I’d had my wits about me at the time, I would have had Mom cremated in the cardigan so she could spend all of eternity in it. But instead she wore a hospital gown, white and wrinkled with snowflakes, a single tie on the otherwise open back. The funeral home gathered her body from the hospital within hours after she died. But there was a mandatory waiting period before the cremation could begin. Twenty-four hours, in case I changed my mind.
I spent those twenty-four hours parked outside the funeral home’s doors, sitting on the curb because they didn’t have a bench. And because I couldn’t bring myself to go home without Mom.
The liquidator will take some 40 percent of all sales, which is fine by me. Anything so that I don’t have to be involved in the process, so that I don’t have to watch our possessions walk out the door in the arms of someone new.
I pull open the closet door to reveal a large walk-in. It’s empty now, all of Mom’s clothes moved to the rack beside the bed. Only hooks and a mirror remain—a silver-framed oval mirror that Mom and I used to make silly faces in front of when I was a girl. I’d stand on a chair so that I could see inside, and there we’d stare at our reflections side by side in the glass.
The mirror hangs on the closet wall, an oversight only, for it won’t be long before the liquidator pulls that too from the wall and sticks a price tag on it, snatching memories right along with it, memories of my crossed eyeballs, Mom’s fish face.
I run a hand along the glass, remembering how sometimes we didn’t make silly faces at all. How sometimes I’d just sit on the floor beside her feet and watch as Mom stared at herself, her dark hair and eyes so unlike the dishwater-blond hair that sat on my head, the tufts of eyebrow hair that stuck straight up, same as they do now. Unlike me, Mom didn’t have dimples. My dimples are much more than simple holes in the cheeks, but more like deep comma-shaped gorges. I didn’t get those from Mom. There isn’t one feature on my face that came from her.
Even as a kid, I saw the way Mom looked when she stared at her reflection in the mirror. She looked sad. I wondered what she saw. For some reason I don’t think it was the same pretty face that I saw.
I’m about to leave when I spot something out of the corner of my eye, something I’ve never noticed in Mom’s closet before. Something that would have otherwise been hidden behind the hems of clothes, except that now there are no clothes to taint the view.
I have to look twice to be sure that it’s there, that I’m not only imagining it’s there. What it is is black, metal, covered in louvers. A door. A boxy little door that hovers less than a foot above the hardwood floors.
I drop to my hands and knees and pull on the door’s knob, finding a crawl space on the other side. Acrawl space. I never knew we had a crawl space before.
The space is dark and dingy, the ceiling low. The floor is dirt, covered only by a thick sheet of plastic. I can’t believe I never found this place before. How many times did I dig my way through Mom’s closet for clues as to who my father could be? But as it so happened, I never dug far enough. Instead I gave up when I got to the clothes, taking for granted that there was nothing on the other side but a wall.
Only one time did Mom bring my father up all on her own, without my begging. I was twelve years old. Mom had had a glass of wine before bed. She said to me that night, seconds before she fell asleep, head draped over the rock-hard sofa arm,A long time ago, I did something I’m not proud of, Jessie. Something that shames me. And that’s how I got you.
The next thing I heard was the sound of her half-drunk snore, but by morning I couldn’t bring myself to ask what she’d meant by it.
I reach inside the crawl space and drag something out. What it is, I don’t know. Not until I get it into the closet’s light do I see that it’s a plastic storage bin, and the adrenaline kicks in at the prospect of what I might find inside. My social security card, for one, but more likely, something having to do with my father, which suddenly, in this moment, takes precedence. Something Mom kept tucked away so that I wouldn’t find it.
I tear the lid off, finding photo albums inside. I find myself feeling hopeful, wondering what I’ll find in them. Photos of Mom, photos of my father, photos of Mom and her own mom and dad.
But of course not. Instead it’s me. All me.
I set the album aside to take back to the carriage home with me.
I crawl toward the crawl space, feeling blindly inside for another box. I can’t reach far enough in to grab it, and so I have to crawl in through the door. Inside, the space is only about thirty-six-inches tall. I’m not fully in before claustrophobia settles in. The dirty floors and wooden beams close in around me. The darkness is smothering. The only light comes from behind. I find another storage bin and drag it out backward, through the access panel and onto the closet floor, grateful for a little elbow room.
I open the lid and have a look, hoping that this is the mother lode I’ve been in search of. The answer to all the questions I have. But it’s not. It’s nothing, just a bunch of inconsequential items in a plastic storage bin, which makes me realize this isn’t a secret crawl space at all, but just acrawl space. For storage. For stuff Mom had no other place to put.
