Page 22 of Hard to Kill

I picture myself in the courtroom in Mineola, walking and talking and playing to the jury and the judge and even the gallery, back in my element, totally.

And the tears don’t come.

And then I’m talking to God again, softly but out loud, hoping that this is the night when She’s really listening.

“You’ve got my attention, okay? You’ve had Your fun. I’ve clearly cleaned up my act. Gotten my priorities in order. Now how about You go bother somebody else?”

No answer.

At least I’m finally starting to feel my eyes get heavy with something other than tears, sleep finally on the way. It’s a good thing. Some nights rest never comes and I feel even more like shit the next day, all day.

“Eff cancer,” I say, cleaning up the language just in case God does happen to be listening tonight.

It would be, on Her part, about effing time.

SEVENTEEN

SINCE MY FIRST NIGHT at Meier, I’ve been dreaming about my mother.

I was fourteen when she died of ovarian cancer. Brigid was sixteen. But my sister, as brave as she was being in her own cancer fight, never could handle it with Mom, from the day we’d all gotten Mom’s diagnosis, which was essentially a death sentence. So Brigid would look for any possible reason to be out of the house, look for any excuse to avoid being alone with Mom. She even went out for soccer her junior year of high school.

Dad took on part-time construction jobs in addition to bartending, because insurance was covering only a fraction of Mom’s hospital costs before she finally made the decision that she was going to die at home. She never came out and said it, but I knew it was because of the expense.

Because she was Mom.

So while Dad was working two jobs and with Brigid rarely around, I became Mom’s nurse and caregiver. And best friend. Mostly I was there to talk to her, and listen, and keep her company before she’d drift off again.

“I don’t want you to be sad when I’m gone,” Mary Smithwould tell me, repeatedly. “I’ve been blessed with two wonderful daughters and a husband who loves me. My regrets are small ones.”

I knew her regrets were bigger than that, that she’d always dreamed about being a writer, across all her years as a school librarian. But with being a mother and wife and holding down a job, there was never enough time for her to write.

To the end, she would hold my hand and smile and tell me that if there were one truth she wanted to pass on, it was how precious life is, even as her own was draining out of her.

Then she’d be talking again about her hummingbirds. I sometimes thought she loved the ones that used to come to the feeder Dad built for her when we were still living in Patchogue almost as much as she loved him, and Brigid. And me.

She even nicknamed me Hummingbird, my mother did, because she said I was in constant motion. I had a tiny hummingbird tattooed behind my left hip bone, but she didn’t live long enough to see it. Dr. Ben didn’t even notice it right away when we started sleeping together.

He finally ran a finger over it one night and asked what it was.

“It’s me,” I said, and told him the story.

“I’m the hummingbird,” I said.

Mom’s feeder moved with us when we moved back to the city, a couple of years before she died. An old friend of my father’s had given him a better bartending job. On our tiny balcony overlooking 11th Street, there was even a place for Mom to hang the feeder. The hummingbirds never found it, and though she ended up taking it down, she could never bring herself to throw it away, just packed it in a box with the rest of her belongings, like she was packing for a long trip.

In my dreams, I never picture Mom as sick. She’s in her bed. The drapes are open so she could feel the sun on her face. Mostof the time—not all the time, but most—I dream of her as a young woman, the great beauty she’d been when my father first fell in love with her.

I mention all of this to Dr. Ludwig one day. He’s already asked me if during my stay here I’d like to meet regularly with a therapist. I tell him that I’m strictly here for body and fender work which, of course, goes right past him.

“What do you think my dreams mean?”

“Maybe it’s as simple as you wanting her to be strong for you now,” he says. “And, even more, to be present.”

I rarely wake up sad or anxious after the dreams. Sometimes I realize I’m smiling when I open my eyes, as if my mom were the one sitting next tomybed now.

I’m out for my afternoon walk on one of the trails that goes up into the hills and eventually winds its way back down, mountains and blue sky everywhere, when maybe fifty yards ahead of me I spot a woman I’ve seen around the clinic.

I’m walking much faster than she is and cover the ground between us quickly because I do walk fast, turning even my afternoon walk at a cancer clinic into a competition.

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