Excerpts, rough drafts, and bits and pieces

Here is a small piece of a story in progress, tentatively titled, Bits and Pieces. I don't know where this is going yet, but I know it is at least a beginning.

My mother told me once that there was so much she should have told me. We were washing dishes and as she handed me a plate to rinse, she looked at me hard and said this. I didn’t understand what she meant and I said tell me now. She shook her head, I can’t. Pulling her eyes away from mine, she went back to washing dishes. There’s just so much I wish I had told you.

I didn’t press her to say more; I didn’t want her to regret having said anything at all, so I let it rest. But this scene has haunted me. When I am alone, driving in the car or lying in in bed in the dark waiting for sleep, it wraps its arms around me. It comes up behind me, when I am sitting on the couch watching television and one of those soft focus Hallmark commercials reminds me to remember the first person who ever loved me on Mother’s Day. It sneaks up behind me, whispering you had your chance. I had my chance to ask. I had my chance to say, no, finish what you started. But I didn’t. I let her words fall into the chasm between us, lying silent.

I try to imagine sometimes what she would have told me had I pressed her to say more, had I not been afraid of hearing what she would have said. Would it have meant more than I could bear? Would I have answered back with words just as heavy? Would those words then outweigh words once said that shouldn’t have been? Would she have told me enough about her, me, so I could somehow see us as a we? Our history, our lives merging together so years later I wouldn’t have to stare at a picture of us together, taken the day of my high school graduation, and ask which part of her is me?

In the days she spent in the hospital after the brain injury that took most of who she was and the two surgeries that took what was left, I spent long periods of time with her, watching. She was comatose at that point, and didn’t look anything like the woman who had entered the hospital weeks before with a headache that made her cry. Her head was shaved and a purple scar ran from in front of each ear, up along her hairline, down to a point in the center of her forehead. Shaped like a heart. There were tubes in her nose and tubes in her neck and she didn’t at all smell like the woman I remembered. There was no hint of tobacco or coffee on her breath. The musky smell of her perfume, gone. Odors that should be offensive, that should make you shrink back when a person’s breath hits your face, were for me a mark of familiarity. Not wholly comforting as a mother’s smell should be to her child, but familiar—recognizable—nonetheless. The smell of cheap perfume and bad habits mark my childhood, but in the sterility of the hospital room, that smell was only a memory. I had to squint just to see her. She could have been someone else’s mother, a stranger lying in that bed. I could have walked past her room without a second glance, not thinking twice about the woman lying in the bed or the girl, not even fully a woman yet herself, sitting beside her. I could have walked past that room and other than a twinge of pity at the pure melancholy of family drama, been fine because that was the kind of person I had become. But this was my mother and these were hands.

Those nights, I held her hands. I would take one between my own, as if pressed in prayer. I turned them over, studying them for the first time, without her studying me. I tried to read their story, but the words might as well have been tea leaves in the bottom of a cup. Scattered senselessly, bitter, shriveled, the flavor and fragrance drained from them. It became harder and harder to see the woman I called mother in the bloated, bruised face of the woman in the bed. Afraid of forgetting what she looked like, feeling guilty because she was becoming a memory while she was still alive, I grasped her where I could find her. In the callouses that were beginning to soften, in the spooned nails that were already beginning to grow. I found her in the sunspots and arthritic knuckles that shaped my youth. Closing my eyes, I allowed myself to be lulled by the rhythmic bleep of the heart monitor, the fluorescent hum of the light above her bed, the electric sound of life sustained.