The Blessings (17 page)

It isn't her parish, Resurrection, but she doesn't want a priest who might know her voice. The parking lot is nearly empty. A few people, old people, are kneeling, heads bowed. Margie steps into the confessional, hears the scrape of the little window.
O my God, I am heartily sorry.
Then she stares at the window and she confesses. Her husband's gambling. Her son's. The debt she's going to pay.
I know it's wrong—
She chokes back a sob.
But I have to help him—I have to protect my son.
The priest dispenses her penance, and Margie is certain she hears judgment in his tone.
I firmly resolve
, she thinks, hurrying back across the parking lot,
with the help of Your grace, to amend my life
.

In the car, Margie feels light and empty, too wrung out to cry. She drives home, the gray sky bruised with dark clouds, wondering what she'll find when she gets there. What her family will have become in the hours since she left. If Joe has been arrested, or Stephen has disappeared. Anything is possible. But when Margie pulls up in front of her house, it looks unchanged. The pile of dead leaves by the curb, the two lights inside: living room, basement. She carries in the groceries. Stephen is in his room, music seeping through the floor. Joe is on the couch, watching TV. He says nothing, but it's done, she can tell, by the look on his face.

Margie unpacks the food and walks up to their room. She waits on the edge of the bed until she hears Joe creaking slowly up the stairs. He enters the room and walks to the closet, wordlessly reaches onto the top shelf. When he turns, he's holding a stained white shoebox. The reality of the box itself is startling: this object from the past existing so concretely in the present. The very box in this very room, tucked among her purses and shoes. Neither of them speaks, as if the room might be bugged. He sits on the bed beside her, mattress sagging, and places the box on his wide knees. His breaths are heavy, heavier than usual, and Margie wonders what exertion was required of him to unearth it. She sees dirt under his nails. As she looks at the box, Margie has to concentrate on breathing. It smells heavy, loamy, like thirty years in the earth. The cardboard looks fragile, wet and soft, as if it might crumble in his hands. It scares her, repulses her, yet something about it is unexpectedly poignant, too—the boy's athletic shoe, Adidas, size twelve. As Joe lifts the lid, tears crawl down his cheeks. Inside the box, Margie is surprised to see the bills themselves have withstood time. He had wrapped them in plastic after all. She is surprised by the sheer number of them too, bundled tens and twenties, though it shouldn't surprise her. These are the bills from the register drawer at Lynch's; of course they would be small. She had prayed that, with time, the money might become neutral, impersonal, lose its realness. But if anything, it is only more real. These are the very same twenties from the register at the hardware store, the very same box Joe's cleats came in that winning season. The same plastic Joe wrapped them in at eighteen, like swaddling a baby. It's almost touching, the care he took.

A
s Ann goes under, the anesthesiologist instructs her to count backward from one hundred. Instead, she recites her family, a litany.
Abby, Alex, Meghan, Margie, Patrick, John—

When Ann wakes up, her three children are in the foreground. A needle is pinching her arm. Meghan is the first to lunge for her, teary-eyed. Alex hangs back, watching. Abby is asking questions of the nurse. Ann loves them for this, for staying always who they are.

“She'll be just fine,” the nurse is saying. Abby nods. She is holding a notebook and pen. “She came through it beautifully.”

Beautifully
: odd word for it.

The nurse squeezes Ann's toe. “Rest,” she says.

Ann closes her eyes. Vaguely she hears Abby asking about the next steps, but she knows what they are. She has the pamphlet at home. No bending, no vacuuming, no stairs. No lifting for two weeks, no driving for three. In four weeks, she'll be good as new.

It was a routine Pap smear, then a call from Dr. Weiss.
Irregular cells
, the doctor said. Ann knew what this meant; they all did. Their brother John had died eleven years before. The endometrial biopsy showed cancer in the uterus, but it was caught early, the earliest the doctor had seen it caught in her career.
You must have an angel watching over you
, she said.

Throughout the night, Ann hears moaning. A woman in one of the nearby rooms is in pain. For the next three days, Ann shuffles up and down the hallway holding people's elbows, practicing walking. She moves slowly past the nurses' station, dragging her IV stand. She glances at the names on the side of each door, looking for this poor woman, but never discovers which one she is.

Dr. Weiss tells her there's no need for further treatment.
We got it all
, she says. Ann thanks her, thinking: Why do some people get lucky? Why do some suffer so much and not others? Her brother John, two small children and a cancer that consumed him within a year. Or her daughter Meghan, struggling with bulimia while other women's daughters fretted over grades and boys and college applications. The normal problems, the usual problems. Why do some people endure so much?

When her body has resumed basic functioning, Ann is returned to the world. Meghan pushes the wheelchair out the hospital doors. The cold January air is a shock. The parking lot is coated thinly with ice. Alex pulls her car around, an old blue Toyota, salt crunching under the wheels. He drives them all back to the house as carefully as he's able. Abby sits in the passenger seat, anxiously chewing gum. Ann sits in the back, Meghan beside her. Her stomach bleats with pain. Ann winces when the car rolls over the lip of her driveway, fire shooting through her stapled middle—“Sorry, Mom,” Alex says—but she is just relieved to be home, out of the car, to be going inside.

All three children are staying in the house while she recovers. They are grown now—even Meghan is, impossibly, twenty-three—but they are all sleeping in their old rooms. Abby, her oldest, managed time away from her job at the museum in Boston, using Dave's old den as her home office for a few weeks. Alex is working on his dissertation at Princeton, teaching chemistry to freshmen; he's staying until the new semester begins. Even Meghan is staying for the first few days of Ann's recovery, even though the apartment she shares with a friend from high school is only fifteen minutes away.

You don't have to do that
, Ann told her.

Oh, Mom
, she clucked.
Are you
kidding
? Yes, I do.

A bouquet arrives from school, a stack of get-well cards her fourth graders made. The same sentiments over and over, obvious prompts from the substitute teacher.
Have a speedy recovery! Get Well Soon!
Alex brings books from the library. Abby and Meghan shop for groceries. Through the haze of medication, Ann hears them talk about dinners, chicken and lasagna and who can make what when. She struggles to listen every time Meghan speaks of food, alert to any signs of her old sadness and urgency—to not hear it is a relief. Ann imagines it always will be.

The exhaustion drapes her like lead. It's like no tiredness she's ever felt, the way the pain of childbirth is like no other pain. She takes Percocet for the throbbing in her stomach, her back and shoulder. But she can't bear to stay in bed, not with all of her children here. So she sits on the couch, holding a pillow to her lap, fading in and out among them. Meghan stays by her side. How many nights did they sit here on this very couch, Meghan curled in a ball, Ann keeping watch beside her?
Do you want something to eat, Mom?
Meghan asks now, squeezing her hand. Ann isn't hungry. She drifts on the hum and rise of her children's voices, the sound of their laughter, their casual bickering—it never stops, she thinks, no matter how old they get.

The rest of the family comes to visit, a continual revolving door of them. Somewhere on the outside, they are coordinating who goes when. Her brother Patrick, sister Margie. John's widow, Lauren, his children. Max with hair wet from swim practice, Elena with that new earring in her nose. Margie brings her older boy, Stephen, who talks mostly to Alex, shuffling his feet. The same age, the boys were destined to be best friends but couldn't be more different; but they are twenty-seven now, and cousins. The differences matter less. Ann sits on the couch while they collect and disperse and collect around her. So unusual, to not be on her feet, doing things. She is a person who does things, but now all she can do is sit and receive them. Like practice for being old.

Is this how Mother feels? However much of her daily life she even retains?
Their mother has been in a nursing home for six months. Before that, she spent nine months at Lauren's—longer than any of them had expected—and they were all glad when Lauren was relieved of the responsibility. But in the home, Mother's mind has declined more quickly. Not enough stimulation, except for the hour a day one of them goes to see her. Her room is tiny, reduced to the essentials: the picture of the grandchildren, one of the old pair of brass lamps.
When am I going home?
she asks again and again. She's confined to a wheelchair now, because of the swelling in her legs; sometimes water weeps through her skin.

Ann pictures her mother's mind as a waterline rising: submerging a few more memories, and a few more after that. Leaving only the oldest layers, the ones with the deepest roots. Childhood and the old neighborhood, the house on Oxford Avenue. Sometimes she wheels herself to the doorway, peering into the hall to see what's happening on the street.

Ann remembers how Mother demurred when Meghan interviewed her for a history project back in high school—
Oh, there's nothing interesting to tell
—but now those same details have become a source of pride. Other things are lost—where she is and how she got there, the recent past, the lower tier of grandchildren: Max and below. Sometimes she forgets that John is gone.

According to the pamphlet
Recovering from a Hysterectomy
, Ann should be drinking eight glasses of water each day. She does so, even though this means endless trips to the bathroom. But Ann is a person who follows instructions, like the advice from Meghan's doctors. She clung to every word. She'd thought, naïvely, that once Meghan's problem had been exposed, it would be cured. She'd had no idea the years, the complexity of it all. Psychologists, nutritional counselors, support groups. The doctors who tried to help her, the therapists Meghan liked and therapists she hated. The worry sending her off to college, thinking she was doing better, then the call from her roommate, a shy girl from Alabama whose name Ann forgets but to whom she will always be grateful—
Is this Meghan's mom?
The panicked drive to the campus in Allentown—Dave doing ninety, snapping at her when she told him to slow down—and then the conversation with the roommate, who had found her passed out in the shower stall. The meetings with the RA, the dean.
A medical leave of absence
, they agreed. Meghan would return the following fall. Then the vigilance when Meghan was at home that spring, Ann studying her like a detective, hovering beside her as Meghan struggled not to throw up, crying, sitting on her hands—it seems half of Ann's life as a mother has been spent sitting, watchful and worried, by Meghan's side—then that summer and the outpatient clinic where, finally, things began to turn.

Meghan has returned to sleeping in her apartment but calls every day. She insists on being the one to drive Ann to her follow-up appointment and arrives bearing gifts: a pound cake from Stock's, a bunch of flowers. As they zip along to the office in Meghan's little car, Ann can't help remembering the other appointments: sitting with Dave in the front seat, an ocean of fear between them, Meghan huddled in the back. Now Meghan chatters brightly as she drives—about her weekly support group, the kindergartners she teaches at a private school in Center City, the new guy she's seeing, a movie date, a text message, an excited swirl of details—and Ann's heart clutches, a reflex. For so long, Ann's life was an extension of her daughter's. Hoping that she was okay, that she didn't get hurt. She reminds herself what her own therapist used to tell her:
She has to learn to manage her own life, Ann
. In the office, Meghan hovers over Ann as the staples are removed.
Healing beautifully
, Dr. Weiss says. Beautiful: odd again. Especially as there is a garish purple scar down her middle. Dr. Weiss prescribes hormone replacement pills and tells her she should be fine to drive next week.
Just short distances, Mom
, Meghan says, and pats her knee.

Ann is in no hurry to start driving again. She's always been nervous behind the wheel, but lately it's intensified. She doesn't like driving during rush hour, on highways, in rain or snow or darkness. When she was married, Dave drove them everywhere. One more of the adjustments of divorce: the small but significant transformations, the reimaginings of yourself. A little over a year ago, when they were cleaning out Mother's apartment at St. Mary's, Ann discovered a canceled check to the city—a traffic violation, eighty dollars, dated around the time she stopped driving. Mother had never mentioned the ticket. Ann respected her wishes and kept it to herself.

She decides to tell Mother about her surgery. Now that it's over and there's no reason to worry, she doesn't want Mother wondering why she hasn't been to visit. Ann makes the call when she knows Margie is there to coordinate phone to ear, make sure the receiver returns to the cradle.

“Hello, Mother,” she says. “It's Ann.” She tells her that she had an operation, but it's fine, she's fine.

“Operation? What operation?” Mother snaps. Lately, she can sound curt sometimes, which is startling. Their mother was always a model of decorum. But she's lost this, too: her restraint, her filter. She'll devour an entire box of chocolates if somebody isn't there to watch.

“A hysterectomy,” Ann says. She pauses, hears her mother breathing, listening. “They found cancer, but it's gone. I'm fine. Just resting. But I can't drive yet. I just wanted you to know why I haven't been to see you.”

“Cancer?” her mother says, and Ann hears the abrupt swell of feeling in her voice. Maybe it had been wrong to tell her. Later, Margie reports that for the next hour it is all Mother asks about. Ann had hoped she would hear it and then forget it, but still there are certain things that stick—that go inside and stay there, get traction on what ground is left. Something wrong with her child. It burrowed right inside.

In bed at night, Ann listens to the traffic on Spry Boulevard. For thirty years, she's listened to these same sounds: the stream of cars rushing by, the pounding beat of a stereo, the gravelly grind of a truck's wheels. Theirs has always been a corner prone to accidents, the intersection of a quiet street and a busy one. Before the age of cell phones, theirs was the house strangers would run to, asking to make a call. Ann thinks of Abby and Alex asleep in their old rooms, wonders if they're listening. Growing up, they'd all become accustomed to the long, sudden squeal of skidding tires—looking up from dinner or TV, pausing, jaw frozen midchew, bracing themselves for the sound of a crash or, more often, the eerie quiet, the smell of burnt rubber, the world picking up and moving on.

Now that the fog isn't so thick, Ann is convinced that something is bothering Alex. When he's typing on the laptop, his eyes sometimes glaze over and wander off the screen. Ann feels guilty now for not paying more attention to her son when he was younger, for assuming he was fine just because he never said he wasn't, because Meghan always needed her more. The day before he's leaving, Ann decides to ask. It's a deal she's made with herself since the divorce: to be more honest. Even though it requires a breath, a steadying of her chest.

“Al,” she says, “is everything okay?”

He glances up from the laptop propped on his knees. His face still contains the shyness it did in childhood, the tendency to drop his eyes, his chin; but beneath his cropped hair, his handsome features are exposed now, a dark hint of stubble on his jaw.

“What do you mean?”

“It just seems like something might be bothering you.”

She waits. Even now, at twenty-seven, Alex might be reluctant to confide in her; maybe it's the surgery that makes him speak. He looks at the curtains, situates his glasses more firmly on his face. “Rebecca and I broke up.”

“Oh!” Ann says, truly surprised. Alex and Rebecca had been dating for a long time—they lived together in Princeton, took that trip to Spain—though Alex rarely brought her home. “When?”