SEVEN.

WINTER 2007.

The door to my mother's apartment is unlocked, so I enter. The Steinway, silent and black, takes up most of the living room. In the second bedroom-where she keeps her Clavinova, painting supplies, and the daybed-the radio plays Chopin. It's nine in the morning, the blinds have not yet been raised, but there's light enough for me to see my mother lying on her side on the daybed in her ruby-colored robe. She seems to get smaller every day. My mother, I think, will not die. Rather, she will float away like an autumn leaf. Her eyes are shut, her face slack; her brown hair with its gray roots is wispy and disheveled. I touch her shoulder; she wakes in confusion.

"It's me," I tell her.

Recognition seeps into her red-rimmed eyes. "Oh."

I sit down at the end of her bed, by her feet, which are covered by a cashmere throw that one of my brothers gave her for Christmas.

"I hurt," she says, matter-of-factly.

"Is there anything I can do?" I ask, rubbing her calf.

She says the rent is on her mind. Will I write the check for it? I find the bills on the counter between the kitchen and the small dining table. She explains that I need to write one check to cover both the rent and the meals, which are on two separate bills.

"I understand," I say as I write. I've been handling her finances for almost three years now.

She wants to know the amount. When I tell her, she looks alarmed. "No, that's not right. That's not enough!"

It takes me several minutes to convince her that I have indeed written the check for the right amount, and my voice acquires an edge in the process.

"Oh, you're right," she says, defeated.

I take the check to the front desk-a thirty- to forty-minute round-trip trek for her on her walker, which I manage in about seven minutes. I know she should probably be in a.s.sisted living at this point. We'll have to sell the piano and hope that's enough. I don't know how much longer I can go on being her sole caregiver.

When I get back, I ask if she wants me to help put on her compression hose.

"Yes, but will you put some of that ointment on my toe first?"

I smear the antibiotic over her big toe, which is large and red. She winces when I touch the bottom of her foot, then apologizes for the tears that spring to her eyes. I cradle her head and tell her it's okay to cry when you're in pain.

I am not always so understanding of her tears, which sometimes seem manufactured to manipulate me. She becomes frantic over some nebulous concern, and my heart closes up. Maybe I'm feeling guilty that there's so little I can do for her. Maybe I feel I should be a better daughter. No matter what I do, it's never enough. After I've spent two evenings with her, she'll want a third. No, I tell her. Hank and Emmy need me, too.

One time when I came to see her, she had the awful expression I've come to dread: lips drooping, head slumping, eyes of a genocide survivor.

"This is not my mother," I said in an irritated voice. "My mother is strong."

"Oh, don't be angry with me," she said, sounding weak and pitiful. I took her for a walk, and she pulled out of her gloom. By the time we returned to the apartment, she was almost her old self.

But as the weeks and months go by, her old self fades in and out. It is not only the fear of death that diminishes her, but also the pain of bones crumbling beneath her skin.

"I'm falling apart," she says. "Can you imagine? . . . Of course, you can't."

"I can sort of imagine it, but not completely." I am on the floor, placing a bin of warm, soapy water under the table so she can soak her feet while we play Scrabble. I once attended a workshop by a spiritual leader who said that it is good soul work to bow at another's feet. I bow regularly at my mother's feet. I wash them. I ma.s.sage them. I sc.r.a.pe the fungus from under her nails.

"What would I do without you?" she asks.

Truthfully, I don't know. I have managed to bring her back to life for a while, like when you water a thirsty plant. She was never a hugger, but now when I bend down and hold her, she squeezes back and says, "I feel better when you do that, when you hug me." My affection keeps her alive. Perhaps in some small way, I have redeemed myself after all these years.

When I was nineteen years old, my mother walked into my bedroom and saw me trying to find a vein for a needle full of heroin. My boyfriend was holding my arm, which was b.l.o.o.d.y from the punctures in my skin. There was my worried mother trying to stop me from committing slow suicide. Frustrated with my uncooperative veins and mad at my mother for intruding, I raised both of my fists, intending to bring them crashing down on her head. But my boyfriend grabbed my wrists.

"Don't you hurt your momma," he said.

He was right, and I knew it. I never hurt her physically, but over the next three years I dragged her through h.e.l.l. She paid for the lawyer when I was arrested for robbery. She suffered the indignity of being searched every time she visited me in prison. When I was transferred to the honors camp, she brought me my first freeworld food: homemade shrimp salad. It was so rich I threw it up, but I loved that shrimp salad.

"The other residents here all envy me," Mom says now as I dry off her feet. "Because of you."

I don't respond.

"I'm so lucky," she adds. "I'm the luckiest unlucky person I know."

I am broken and my mother's old age is what's breaking me, I think while standing naked in my bathroom, one foot propped up on the sink, clipping my toenails. The bathroom is dirty: hairs everywhere, beads of mold in the corners. Cleaning the bathroom has become a luxury. Someday I will spend one afternoon a week scrubbing my bathroom, but for now I wipe the sink with a dry Noxema pad, sc.r.a.pe some loose hair from a corner, and hurry out.

My next thought is: it is not a bad thing to be broken. When something's broken you get to see what's inside.

My mother's demands provoke a barrage of mental arguments: I have a family, and I have a right to spend time with them. h.e.l.l, I have a right to spend time alone. I should be able to crawl into bed with a book at 8 p.m. if I want. . . . No, I should be there with her. What if I were in this much pain?

My mother puts on a false happy voice when she calls me. She is the child, afraid her caretaker will abandon her. I am the stern authority figure that she's afraid to cross. She tries to be a good girl, but she also makes sure I see the pain beneath her happy exterior.

Mom has started sleeping in the armchair because she cannot get into and out of bed and she needs to go to the bathroom several times during the night. I buy her a mechanical lift chair so her legs can at least be up at night, but I can't stop the inevitable.

In January 2007, my mother's legs begin to weep. Such a poetic notion, I think, but the smelly, yellowish fluid oozing from her skin into her shoes is hardly the stuff of lyricism. The medicine the doctor gave her a week earlier is not having the desired effect. Now he wants her to go to the hospital.

After three days in the hospital, Mom's legs look normal instead of like elephant ankles for the first time in years. What the hospital folks have neglected to notice, however, is that the urine in my mother's Foley bag is dark and full of blood. The catheter has given her an infection. We don't realize this at the time, of course. When I bring her back to her apartment, we find that for some reason, she can't get her legs to move as she wobbles on her walker. How is she going to get to the bathroom alone?

That night I park her in her chair with the incontinence pads beside her, and go home to get a few hours sleep. First thing the next morning I call the paramedics to come get her. We fear the worst-a stroke.

Back to the hospital we go, first to the emergency room for hours and then to the floor where she was before. New doctors come by. They can't figure out what's wrong. The thousands of tests they administer show no signs of stroke. Mother gets worse. She has a fever. My formerly alert, Scrabble-playing, eighty-eightyear-old mother becomes disoriented and confused. She thinks that she's standing up when she's lying down.

"They're trying to torture me," she tells me.

"Who?"

"Everyone," she whispers.

I cancel my cla.s.ses. When I dare go home and sleep, I get desperate phone calls from her: "they" aren't letting her lie down. They are making her stand in a closet. They are cruel. I have to come get her, she tells me.

Back at the hospital, I find her in her bed.

"Mom, you're lying down already."

"Really?"

"I promise you. No one has made you stand in a closet."

I am at the hospital so much, people begin to think I work there. The woman at the coffee kiosk downstairs tries to give me an employee discount. My mother isn't quite sure where I work or what I do.

"Are you part of the program?" she asks me.

"What program?"

"The program here. Are you going to a meeting?"

"No," I tell her. "I'm visiting you. That's all."

"Oh, I thought maybe you worked here."

"I practically do," I answer. "I finally know how to operate all this G.o.dd.a.m.n equipment."

I have mastered the brakes on the hospital bed, learned where to clip the tubes on the IV stand, figured out how to hang the catheter bag. Though it seems a little crazy for my mother to ask whether I work at the hospital, I can understand her confusion. I arrive in the morning, dressed in my teaching clothes and carrying my briefcase full of papers to grade, and the first thing I do is ask the nurse for an update. Then I'm on the phone, making official-sounding calls to the insurance company, the rehab provider, the primary physician. Her physical therapist and case manager consult with me. I am fluent in terms like "CAT scan" and "Foley bag." I come in for eight-hour shifts or longer.

On the one weekday I don't have to teach, I try to get caught up on my freelance writing in the morning. When I show up at the hospital at eleven, my mother looks ghastly, her covers off, her gown hiked up to her thighs, gray hair matted on her skeleton head. The squares of tape from some test are tacked to her chest, IV needles strapped to her arms. I rush over and hold her and say, "It's all right. I'm here."

She gasps and asks, "Where-where were you?"

"I had to go to the bank, and I had an interview to do for a magazine, but now I'm here, and I don't have to leave."

"It's not just for company," she says with a rasp. "This is real."

It takes her a moment to forgive me for not arriving sooner to pull her from this nightmare. It seems as though she may not make it through the day, as if she is thinking of giving up. I debate whether or not to call my brothers and tell them to get on airplanes. Something tells me to wait. There have been many times in the past two and a half years when it has seemed as if my mother were sitting on the precipice and contemplating the other side. Her eyes are closed, and she struggles to breathe in drawn-out gasps. I adjust her head, rub her shoulders, ma.s.sage her scalp. Finally the antibiotics kick in, and I catch a glimpse of my mother coming back to me. Her breathing slows down and her eyes regain their focus. Nurses and technicians bustle in and out.

"Listen, Mom," I say when we have a moment to ourselves. "You can either let go, or fight to get better."

She ponders the alternatives, her hazel eyes wide and unblinking.

"Fight," she says.

"Okay then."

At six o'clock Emmy calls my cell phone. "When are you coming home?" she wants to know.

"Soon," I say.

Hearing this, my mother invents tasks for me, trying to delay my inevitable departure. But after another hour or so I leave her and head out through the maze of narrow halls cluttered with computer stations and carts, aiming like a bullet for the gla.s.s exit doors. I am both relieved and reluctant to go.

On Sat.u.r.day the fever-inspired dementia has ceased, but the pain medications have my mother in a fog. I step outside her room and find a nurse pounding the keys of a computer, and I ask her to ease up on Mom's painkillers. I want my mother to be pain-free, but more than that, I need her to get her mind back.

When the physical therapist arrives, Mom starts to wimp out.

"I'm too tired," she says.

"I want you to try, Mom," I tell her, giving her a look to remind her of yesterday's decision to fight.

"Okay," she says. Her hands clutch the walker, and the physical therapist and I help her onto her wobbly legs. I hear a noise from her joints, as if her bones are sc.r.a.ping against each other. I cannot imagine her incessant pain or fathom her courage.

"That's good, Mom," I tell her.

She takes a step forward.

Sunday morning I drag myself out of bed. The doctor has told me my mother will be released late today. Just as I am about to leave for the hospital, Mom calls.

"I'm doing all right," she a.s.sures me.

She still wants me at her side, but more than that, she wants what she has always wanted: for me to be happy. And sometimes that desire is strong enough to override her need to have me with her-at least temporarily.

I never liked the children's book The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein, because it reminded me too much of my mother: the way she helped me whenever I needed money; the way she always took my side no matter how wrong I might have been; the way she forgave me, and continues to forgive me, for my sharp tongue. She never put anyone ahead of me. Whatever I needed or wanted, she got for me, if she could. Her generosity has been both a blessing and a source of guilty irritation.

At one point my mother told me that she had reached her life's coda-a musical term for the last section of a composition-and I have made the time bearable for her, sometimes even enjoyable. I wonder if she isn't hanging on for my sake, to give me the chance to ease my conscience for all the years she propped me up with love and money. I wonder, too, if my youthful "troubles," as she calls them, weren't my gift to her: a chance to save someone from selfruin, as she hadn't been able to do for her father or her husband.

I decide not to go to the hospital right away. Instead I take Merlyn for a walk before the rain comes. The weather is typical of Southern winters, bl.u.s.tery and pregnant with possibility. I feel as if I am seeing the material world in all its splendor after having huddled for weeks in a cave. Standing in the field at the top of my neighborhood, I gaze at the pine trees silhouetted against the cloudy sky. Merlyn scouts the brittle weeds for new scents. I take a breath.

The reprieve is sweet but short-lived. An insistent tug, like the ocean's undertow my mother always feared would sweep her child out to sea, pulls at me with an irresistible force. Soon I am heading back to my house where I will grab the keys to my car and speed to the hospital to be at her side.

Instead of sending her home right away, the social worker arranges for Mom to go to a "skilled nursing facility" just down the street from the hospital. It is nighttime, and I have to enter through the back door. That thick odor of antiseptic and age immediately subsumes me. One seemingly abandoned and shriveled woman, ancient as Egypt, watches from her wheelchair as I look for someone who might be in charge.

The attendant, busy eating her dinner, has no idea where I might find a wheelchair. "Just borrow one from that room over there," she says and points vaguely. I find one, but it doesn't have footrests, so my mother has to hold up her weak legs. As soon as I wheel her in, I whisper in her ear: "One night. That's it." I leave her on a cot-sized bed in a small, closed-in room with two other invalids, go home and lie in my big comfortable queen bed unable to shut my eyes.

The next day, as soon as my cla.s.ses are over, I head to the nursing home, pack up my mother's belongings and abscond with her back to the apartment-AMA, against medical advice. Using the walker, she is able to get from room to room. The nursing home experience has been enormously restorative. She'll do anything to avoid going back there.

When I finally get home late that night, Hank and Emmy ask when they might get a chance to spend some time with me again. I shrug. I've developed a rash right over those deep worry lines between my eyebrows. The rash looks like the letter A on my forehead. I'm reminded of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Am I an adulteress or does the A merely stand for "Anxiety"?

I sleep deeply that night, hoping that in the dark place I can suckle at the life source and replenish my depleted soul. The next morning when I call my mother, she tells me she is all right.

"I'll be there in a little while," I say. I have some bills to pay, laundry to do: the little things without which our lives spin out of control.

I move slowly, but finally I am ready to leave. Then the phone rings. I pick it up and hear her desperate cry: "Where are you? I'm very sick!"

I cannot help myself. I put the phone down, and a scream escapes from my lungs. And another scream and another.

"Call your brothers, or I will," Hank demands. I call Jo, and twenty-four hours later I meet him at the Greyhound station and fall crying into his arms.

EIGHT.