Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (30 page)

We all laughed. Roberta wiped her eyes and said, “I should just go in there with a damn pillow and get it over with. It’s the only way she’ll leave, that’s for damn sure.”

I chuckled again, shaking my head. And part of me wanted Roberta to do just that. The ugly truth was that this waiting around was getting tiresome.

The next day, I stood in Mom’s room with Tom, the hospice worker. We were looking at the color of her urine, collected in a clear plastic bag at the foot of her bed. Earlier in the week, it had progressively darkened, growing murky and thick, like caramel, a sign of renal failure, one of the surest indications of impending death. But now it was clearing up again, becoming the color of weak tea.

“What does that mean?” I asked him.

“Well, it seems to me that she’s bouncing back a little,” Tom said.

I chewed my lip. “So how much longer do you think she has?”

He looked right at me. “There’s no way to know, really,” he said. “Maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks. With your mother, she’s so strong, we’ve been amazed she’s made it as far as she has.”

I watched her sleeping there, wondering if she was aware of our conversation. I wanted so badly, almost obsessively, to be there when she died, to have that dramatic moment of closure. Why wouldn’t she give me that?

Tom put his hand on my shoulder. “Maybe you should think about going back to New York. I think your mother would want you to be there, rather than waiting around here.”

I regarded him for a moment, and then nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “I think you’re right.”

I made my arrangements to leave the next day—Mother’s Day—and when the time came, I packed up my belongings and loaded up my rental car. I went to Mom’s room to say goodbye, surprised to see that when I kissed her forehead, her eyes opened gently.

“Hi, Tonio,” she said, her voice feeble.

“Hi, Momma. I’m going back to New York, okay?”

She blinked several times. “Okay,” she said.

“I love you, Momma.”

“I love you, too.”

“I’ll see you soon, okay?”

“Okay.”

I kissed her again and walked to her doorway, pausing there for one last look. I signed “I love you” with my right hand. And ever so slowly, she raised her left hand and, trembling slightly, signed “I love you” back.

O
n the morning of May 22nd, a week and a half after I left Joliet, the phone rang. It was Anne.

“Anthony?” she said, her voice tight and clipped. “We think you should come home today.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Well, the hospice people seem to think this is it,” Anne said.

“Okay,” I said.

I had last spoken to Mom a few days earlier. After several attempts to reach her, only to be told by Diana or Terry or Roberta that she was sleeping, I got her on the phone in a rare lucid moment.

“Hi, Tonio,” she’d said, her words slurred, her voice weak.

“Hi, Momma.” I couldn’t bear to hear her like this, to be so far away and not be able to see her, to be unable to hold her hand.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I’m okay, Momma. I miss you,” I said.

“I miss you, too.”

I didn’t know what else to say. To ask her how she was doing seemed absurd. So I didn’t say anything for a moment.

“How’s the show going?” she asked.

“It’s fine,” I said. I didn’t tell her that earlier in the week I had stayed home because I could barely bring myself to get out of bed, let alone perform in front of twelve hundred people. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t know what to do in those moments of grief except stare at nothing. I didn’t tell her that on those days I felt like I was moving underwater, that all things seemed dim and untouchable.

“That’s good,” she said.

I sighed and said, “Well, I should let you rest, Momma.” As if she could do anything else.

“Okay,” she said.

“I love you, Momma,” I said.

“I love you, too.”

But now, after the phone call with Anne, it was time to call the airline yet again and book a flight and get Adam’s travel sorted out and call my stage manager to tell him that I was going home and then pack—for how many days was never clear—and get a car to the airport and go home and see her for what might be the last time, although that was never clear either. Task after task after task. One foot in front of the other.

At Newark airport, Adam and I made it to our gate with time to spare before boarding. We had hardly spoken during the day’s activity, except to cover the logistical details. We sat in the waiting area, grimly watching the CNN feed on the airport monitors. Or at least looking in their direction—I was processing none of what was being reported, thinking instead only of going home. Would this really be the time?

Right before the gate personnel started calling us to board, I had the impulse to check in to see how Mom was doing. I hadn’t called home all day, knowing that Anne or Roberta would have called us if anything had changed. “I’m going to call home,” I said to Adam. He barely looked at me when he quietly replied, “Okay.”

I dialed my calling card information into the phone and then dialed Mom’s familiar ten-digit number. Two rings, three rings, four rings, and then Roberta’s voice said, “Hello?”

I could tell she was crying.

“Roberta?” I said, gripping the cold metal pay-phone cord. “It’s Anthony.”

“Oh, Anthony,” she said. “It’s over. She’s gone.”

The ground tilted. I rested my head against the phone, staring at the floor, watching my tears splash down at my feet.

“When?” I managed.

“She just went a couple of minutes ago,” Roberta said, “right before you called.”

I swallowed. “Okay,” I said.

“Oh, I miss her so much already,” Roberta said, her voice keening.

“I know,” I said.

“It was peaceful,” she said. “She just went to sleep.”

I fought off a sob. “Really?”

“I was right there with her,” she said. “I was holding her hand. She just went to sleep.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“I love her so much,” she said.

“I know,” I said. And then I asked, “Will you leave her there until we get home?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Okay. I just want to say goodbye, you know?”

“Okay.”

I was gripping the phone so tightly. “We have to get on our flight now,” I said.

“Have a safe trip.”

“Okay. See you soon.”

I hung up and held on to the phone, trying to stop my tears. Only another couple of hours and I would have been there. The timing seemed horribly unfair.

I breathed deeply and slowly walked over to where Adam sat. He looked up as I approached.

“She’s gone,” I said. More tears sprang out of my eyes. Adam just stared at me for a moment, nodding ever so slightly, and then he gently stood up and put his hand on my shoulder, his eyes wide, his face almost expressionless. I moved in to give him a brief hug, which he stiffly reciprocated, and then we wordlessly gathered our belongings and boarded the plane.

We sat silently in our cramped airplane seats, next to a fidgety, anxious man, waiting for the plane to taxi and take off. The fidgety man seemed terrified of flying; he kept staring out the window, rubbing his hands on his lap, clearing his throat incessantly. I knew Adam also didn’t love flying, and I hoped this man’s fear wouldn’t bleed over into him.

I couldn’t bring myself to ask what Adam was thinking or feeling or wanting. I felt incredibly alert, even as my chest caved in on itself. I focused on my plastic tray table as it faced me in its upright and locked position. I made sure my seat back was also in its upright and locked position. I checked to see that my carry-on was safely stowed beneath the seat in front of me or in an overhead bin. I even watched the flight attendants as they did their safety demo. I tried to hold back my tears, afraid of freaking Adam out, afraid of making a scene, but there they were anyway.

And then we took off, and as the plane made its lazy turns toward Chicago, my breathing gradually became steady and a kind of spaciousness and peace followed. Here I was floating above everything that had happened today and this year, away from it, able to see just the purest facts of it. My mother was dead, and I was flying with my brother to see her one more time before they took her body away, and then we would hold a funeral and memorial service and that would be that. It was simple, really. There would be people to call and inform, there would be arrangements to be made, there would be family to see, and there would be no more waiting for the end, no more hoping she would at last have some respite from her daily grinding discomfort and pain, no more wondering how much worse it could get before it was all over.

In the air, flying incredibly high across the landscape of the eastern United States, I automatically set about a task that reminded me of my actions in the wake of Jonathan’s death: I looked through my laptop’s address book to figure out who I would need to inform that Mom had died. Who most urgently needed to know? I hadn’t called Todd yet—after getting off the phone with Roberta, I had just boarded the plane. Todd was in Los Angeles, having all kinds of work meetings, but I was sure he’d be able to come to Joliet for the memorial service and funeral. At least, he’d better. Of course he would, why would I even question that? Mom had made it clear he was welcome. (When I had told Mom that I hoped Grandma wouldn’t object to or make a stink about his presence there, Mom had said, quietly, sternly, “She’d better not.”) But who else needed to be told? I wasn’t relishing the thought of breaking the news to people, but I knew that I could and should do it. Not for the first time, I imagined myself playing a scene in a movie in which I informed someone of my mother’s death. It was the sort of event that took place in the movies and on television hospital dramas.

So I checked off the names of those I would inform, sitting next to a silently slumbering Adam. (He had always had the knack for falling into a deep sleep the instant a plane began speeding down the runway for takeoff. He thought it was his way of dealing with his anxiety about flying.) One name jumped out at me: Phyllis Wagner. She was Mom’s old friend from Portland, Oregon, who had come to
Rent
’s opening night. Mom had always had an enviable knack for keeping in touch with her friends—this in the days before e-mail and mobile phones—but none were as close to her as Phyllis. Phyllis and Mom shared a propensity for taking in what Mom called “human strays,” although Phyllis did it officially, as a state-recognized foster mother, specializing in kids with severe medical problems. She often sent long, handwritten letters to Mom, their accompanying envelopes spilling snapshots of her latest children. Many of her kids didn’t make it past their childhoods, and some were just passing through Phyllis’s home on their way to somewhere else, but some she wound up raising as her own. Somehow she and Mom found time to spend hours on the phone laughing and laughing, even when telling stories of the suffering they witnessed all day long.

When Mom had gotten sick, Phyllis hadn’t been able to come to visit her except when they had rendezvoused in New York for
Rent.
I wasn’t sure that Roberta would be calling her, so I thought I should be the bearer of the news.

When we landed and emerged into O’Hare’s harsh fluorescence, I headed to the pay phone and first left a message on Todd’s voice mail that I had to talk to him as soon as possible, and then dialed Phyllis’s number.

“Hello?” she answered after one ring.

“Hi, Phyllis?” I said. “It’s Anthony. Anthony Rapp.”

She must have known why I was calling, because I could hear a hesitancy in her voice. “Oh, hi.”

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but I just wanted to let you know that my mom died tonight.”

She sighed. “Oh,” she said. “Okay.” She caught her breath. “Thanks for telling me.”

I tried to concentrate on my own breathing. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t sure if anyone else would have called you yet, and I wanted you to know.”

She sniffled. “Yeah, well, I do appreciate it.”

And before I knew that I was going to say it, and feeling my face moisten with fresh tears, I said, “I just wanted to thank you for being such a wonderful friend to my mom for all of these years. I know she loved you so much and you were always such a good friend to her.”

“Well,” Phyllis said, “she was always such a great friend to me, too.” I could hear her crying on the other end, but her voice remained as steady as she could manage. “She really was one of my very best friends.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m going to miss her so much,” Phyllis said.

“Yeah,” I said again.

Then Phyllis heaved another big sigh and said, “Well, I really do appreciate you telling me.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“You too, Phyllis.”

I hung up and realized that Adam was probably wondering what the hell I was doing. I found him sitting dazedly in one of the waiting area seats, his long legs splayed out in front of him, staring into nothing.

“I called Phyllis,” I said, wiping my face. “I wanted to let her know.”

He nodded. “That’s good,” he said, quietly monotone. Was his head swimming as much as mine was? Was he taking each moment as it came, or was he shutting it all away? I didn’t want him to explain himself if he didn’t want to, so I didn’t ask.

More silence followed on the ride home, with me driving, since Adam had long ago lost his license due to a speeding ticket he’d never paid. Even though I was the younger of the two of us, I often felt like the adult, the responsible one. Not that I minded; it was familiar, as familiar as the flat streams of headlights zooming by across the median on I-55.

More silence, as we traveled past the good old Louis Joliet Mall, which was a couple of miles before Mom’s house. The town seemed the same as always, just more developed, with even more monotonous strip malls and model homes lining the road.

More silence, as we turned through the six-way intersection onto Gaylord Road, nearer still to Mom’s house. I kept my eyes trained on the pools of light out in front of our car, my hands gripping the steering wheel.

More silence as Gaylord turned into Cedarwood Drive, and we passed our old apartment complex, the one that was partially destroyed by that tornado a few years prior, and we then passed the subdivision where our townhome, which was destroyed by the same tornado, used to be. We finally turned onto Gael Drive, and into our driveway, and I shut off the motor.

How many times had I traveled that same trajectory in my car over the years? Never feeling like this, though. Not like this.

The silence finally broke when we opened the door to Mom’s house and stepped inside. The lights were dim, and already the house seemed empty. Roberta and Anne got up and gave us hugs and kisses and then we sat for a second.

“So she’s in her room?” I said. My face was heating up, but my voice was clear, for the moment, at least.

“Yeah,” Roberta said. “She’s there.”

“I’ll go first,” Adam said.

“Okay,” I said. I gripped the side of the chair. Then I said, “Where’s Rachel?”

“At home,” Anne said. “She said goodbye before.”

“Okay,” I said. I couldn’t look Anne or Roberta in the eye. I clenched and unclenched my jaw.