Missed Train - Chapter 1

Room

         I don’t say a lot, usually.

         I’ve been this way since I was a child. That is what my father told me, anyway. Before the accident.

         “It’s like having a mouse for a child,” my mother would say.

         “No,” my father would reply, “it’s like having the radio station turned on classical instead of country. She may not have anything to say, but the lack of words is beautiful.”

         This would always make my mother frown, which was one of the only times I was irritated with my father.

         I don’t say a lot right now. But my mother does.

         “Ruthie dear, would you mind putting those flowers on my nightstand so I can see them better?”

         I move the vase of garishly colored gerber daisies from her windowsill to her nightstand and rearrange them a little better. Bright heads of magenta, lemon and tangerine. The colors remind me of brightly colored tums and the smell of nursing homes. The smell of this room.

         “Didn’t the Helping Hearts ladies just do such a wonderful job with my daisies? They are my favorite flower, you know.”          
         
         “I know, mom.”
         
         She lifts her proud, pointed chin. Her sixty-something hair still has streaks of the glossy black it had once been in it. She has it pulled elegantly and austerely back as she had all the years I had known her.
         
         “Well honey, I just don’t understand why you didn’t enroll in classes yet. The good ones are going to be all gone.”
         
         I sigh.
         
         “I’m not going back to school.” I haven’t gone to school for two years.
         
         “Oh.” My mother frowns. “But what about that man you’re dating, then? The one that was studying management? Henry? Harvey…”
         
         “Hayden.”
         
         “Hayden. You two are getting pretty serious, aren’t you?”
         
         “We broke up.”
         
         My mother looks shocked.
         
         I have told her this three times before.
         
         “But why aren’t you with him anymore? You looked so good together.”

         “Because he was a child, mom.” And so are you.
         
         “Oh.” She looks concerned. In that one small frown, I see more sympathy from her than I have in most of my years growing up under her watch. That’s how I know she’s really gone.

         “I just don’t want to see…” she slowly adjusts onto her right side, facing her window, “my twenty-two year old daughter left with no one to take care of her when I leave this forsaken world.”
         
         I close my eyes to absorb the words. When I reopen them, my mother is asleep.
         
         An old fashioned clock in the room strikes the hour. I can hear the same clock in the other rooms in the hallway, the ones with open doors at least, and the one on the wall of the nearby nurse’s station. It is seven in the morning.

         I walk over to the window. The window is open and it smells like rain left from the night. The sun is just coming up, and for a minute golden light is flooding the otherwise gloomy room. I hug my grey wool sweater closer to my body and rub my hands on my arms. It is slightly chilly for mid-September.

         “Ma’am?” A fashionable black woman who looks to be in her later twenties knocks on the doorframe. I see her almost every day. Her name is Dee. When she doesn’t have to wear latex gloves she wears silver and rhinestone rings on every finger.

         “Time to take her morning vitals,” she says with a smile.

         I take a step back from the window and nod. “Go for it.”

         The cheery lady goes to work on taking care of my mother’s needs. The ones I can’t meet.

         My chest feels as though there is a stone on top of it. I take a breath in.

         “Anything changed?”

         “Nope.” Dee flashes a white smile. “She’s not getting any worse right now. It’s good, she is maintaining consistency.”
Which means she’s not getting any worse. But then, she’s not getting any better, either.

         “Thanks.”

         I grab my gloves I left on the end of my mother’s bed and put them on my hands. I grab my work bag off the plastic chair catty corner to the bed, then look back at her one more time.
         
         Maybe some daughters kiss their mothers on the cheek before they leave. Some stroke their hair back. A strand is in my mother’s face. I lean toward her, on the opposite side of Dee, who is taking a quick pulse in her left hand. I lower my fingers until I can almost feel the presence of her aging hair beneath them…then pull back.
         
         “Well, her pulse is steady and strong as ever.” Dee seems pleased as punch as she goes tapping away on the sleeping woman.
         
         That’s her, all right. Not all here. But still as strong as ever.
         
         I turn and leave.