Quote:
The Sun at the End of Life
When she was wheeled out into the garden the bright sun exploded on her face. She lifted her head up and fixed on the bright disk. She was slow to move, her eyelids fluttered from the sun’s intensity, and finally she closed them and momentarily shut the world off. But the bright glow remained in her inner eye, a glow that seemed to come through a long tunnel.
The courtyard was behind the nine story brick building, and at the far end was an area set aside as a garden for the patients. She was wheeled to the vegetable bed, her favorite spot. Staked tomato plants several feet tall, the level of her head in a sitting position, were in front of her, and round green balls of fruit hung about. One ripened red globe hung low to her left. My how they have grown, she thought. Weren’t they just planted? Just yesterday? Wasn’t it May or June? She was confused. If tomatoes were near picking, it must be August or July at the earliest. These must be an early bloom variety she thought. The woman who wheeled her, a nurse attendant, a black woman, stepped from behind and locked the brakes of the wheelchair.
“Here mama,” she said in an accent. “You be happy here.”
The woman in the wheelchair looked at her and thought for a moment that she recognized the black woman. She had not mentioned her name back at her room, or had she? She had a face vaguely familiar, but the staff here changes so frequently, she thought. The black woman adjusted the collar of the older woman’s dress, a pretty summer print of blue and pink flowers.
“My how pretty you dressed today,” she said.
“Oh thank you,” the old woman mouthed slowly. The black hands seemed tender and benevolent fiddling across her collar bone and shoulders. The black woman had a broad smile and red lipstick and a wide face. “Do I know you?” the sitting woman added.
“Ja. Of course you know me, mama. I’m Tamara.” It sounded so familiar to the older woman. “I’ve been with you many times, Sylvia.”
“Oh.” She knew her name, she thought, but then all the attendants know her name. The older woman lifted her hand and touched the attendant’s face and hair. She had never seen braided hair like that before. Perhaps she had never touched a black woman’s hair before. At least she could not remember doing so.
“You like?” Tamara asked. The old woman, focused on the head of hair, nodded in approval. “Perhaps some day I fix your hair up like dat.”
For the first time that day a smile came to Sylvia’s lips, and then even a giggle as she thought of the absurdity of trying that on her stringy short white woman’s hair. “Oh, poo,” Sylvia replied, pulling her hand back and waving Tamara away.
“Ok, now mama, you sit here and if it gets too hot for ya you call out for Miss Tamara. Or would you prefer the shade?”
“No, no. I want the sun. I want to be right here.”
* * * *
“Mom, what are you doing out here?” She had fallen asleep and this stern voice woke her. This time it was a man, also vaguely familiar. He had a baseball cap on his head and a graying beard closely cropped. She looked up at him, the sun just over his shoulders blurring his features. It was cold and she shivered.
“Brrr. I’m cold,” she mouthed.
“My God,” the man said, feeling the wind come across the enclave of the garden. “Who left you here?” He took off his jacket and put it over her grey sweatshirt. “Who left you here?” he repeated.
“I don’t know.” She said trying to remember. “Who are you?”
The man just stopped in his tracks, looked at his mother’s face, look into her eyes that were so dreamy and puzzled, and then carried on snuggling his jacket around her shoulders. She was getting worse, he thought. That puzzled face questioning struck a blow to his gut. “What do you mean, ‘who am I’? It’s Robert.”
“Robert? Oh Robert. I didn’t recognize you with that beard.” She stretched her hand and touched his face.
“Not recognized me? I’ve only had it for twenty years.” He laughed.
“Your father would never approve.”
“Father, father. I’ll have to ask his permission.”
“Your father passed away,” she said angrily. “Don’t you play with his name.”
Robert was actually surprised at this moment of lucidity. She couldn’t remember her son’s face but she could remember her husband who had died ten years before. And her face pulled tight and blushed.
“It’s ok mom. Let’s get you in.” He got behind the wheelchair and started to turn her around.
“Wait,” she said suddenly, and he stopped the turn in mid spin. “Where are the tomatoes?” The garden bed was bare ground, slightly turned over earth.
“What tomatoes? There are no tomatoes in October.”
“There were tomatoes there just before, I know it Robert.”
“The garden has long been bare, mother.” He spun the wheelchair around while her open hand seemed to lunge and grasp at figments of tomato plant stems. “How long have you been out here?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” They moved rapidly toward the courtyard entrance way back into the building. The automatic door opened and seemed to swallow them in.
“Charles,” Robert yelled. “Charles.” In the hallway there were other patients, all geriatric, in wheelchairs, and a scatter of aids standing between them trying to maneuver the chairs to gather some semblance of order. There were wheelchairs banging into each other and voices overlaying into a cacophonous clamor. “Charles,” Robert yelled a third time above the noise, and a light skinned black man, a sort of head aid, looked up.
“Yes, Mr. Collotto,” Charles replied.
“Who left my mother in the cold?”
Charles looked down at Sylvia and her eyes met his. He had such round, dark eyes, very expressive. She thought she recognized the annular portals, dusky rings that seemed to telescope inside his skull, but she couldn’t register where she had seen him.
“Were you left outside, Sylvia?
“Charles, did you leave her in the cold?”
“Oh Robert, leave the man alone. It was some woman.” She turned around looking for the aid she thought had wheeled her out. But she didn’t see anyone she recognized.
“Yes, I left her,” Charles conceded. “I was distracted.” He made an exasperated motion with his hands, as if to show what an impossible job he had in managing the wheeled droves. “She wanted to sit in the sun. It was warm earlier.”
Robert acknowledged with a haughty look, but he didn’t push the issue further. “Is she ready for her room? He asked.
“Yes, of course, but she’ll have to wait if you want me to bring her.”
“I can take her.” And he wheeled her around and pushed his way into the elevator, the door just having opened as he faced it, and backed the wheel chair in.
When the elevator door opened at the eighth floor Robert pushed her out and turned left and wheeled her into room 824. The room was with two beds and Sylvia had the bed by the window. Her roommate was a woman who had fallen into a coma, her eyes sealed against the world’s stimuli, and she was permanently silent, a body non-expressive. Robert thought his mother was lucky to have such a roomy. She would never be bothered and the woman never had guests either. What was her name? Oh yes, “Giselle,” there on the wall.
He wheeled his mother to the space at the foot of the bed and he then pulled up a chair beside her, a chair that had been left by Giselle’s bed.
“Has Giselle had any visitors?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Your roommate, Giselle.” He nodded his head toward the woman’s bed and Sylvia turned to look.
“Oh. I don’t know. I don’t even realize she’s there. Sometimes I think she’s dead.”
Robert rubbed his eye. He felt a pinch as if something had gotten in. “Well, don’t complain. The dead don’t disturb the living.”
“Take off that hat. What do you think, you’re in a zoo?”
Robert made a face and took off the baseball cap.
“And that beard. How awful it looks. When did you grow that thing? You know your father would be appalled.”
“Mom, dad saw me with this beard well before he died.”
“Oh poo. You used to have such a sweet face Robert. I remember when I gave birth and you finally came out, oh such pain you were, and they handed me you in a blanket, you had such a smooth baby’s face. Not wrinkled at all like most other babies.”
“And Sara?” This was a moment of lucidity for her and Robert thought to push it further and ask about his sister.
“Oh Sara. She was no pain at all. And she had such black hair.”
An hour later Robert got up to leave and asked if she would like to get into bed. She didn’t. “Just put on the TV for me and turn my chair to it” she said.
Robert repositioned her chair and turned on the television and a news cast was on and he kissed his mother on the cheek and said goodbye and she didn’t even respond. She was already absorbed into the TV hypnotized by the moving pixels and Robert walked out, looking over his shoulder one last time and then looking into Giselle’s frozen face.
* * * *
The television flashed bright and less bright. The male news caster joked with his blonde female counter part.
“Well, there is certainly a cool breeze in the studio tonight.” His perfect teeth glistened inside his opened lips. The woman counterpart rounded her eyes.
“Now I believe it’s time for the weather.” Her head turned to a man on her left. “Well, Blitz, are we in for a white Christmas?”
“Jeanie, get ready for the white stuff. I think baby Jesus will need a cover in the crèche tonight.”
“Sounds exciting.”
The weatherman was up in front of a map. “It’s certainly cold enough tonight, as you can see the temperatures will be down around thirty, and the low front will be coming in around ten and release moisture before midnight.” His hands were moving from northwest to east across the map.
Sylvia adjusted the white sweater that was over her shoulders and over her her white nightgown. She felt the cool air that somehow squeezed its way through the shut window. Tamara stopped at the doorway and poked her head in.
“Ja, mama, it’s time for bed, you know.”
Sylvia either ignored it or it didn’t register, continuing to stare at the screen. Tamara disappeared and Sylvia remained alone in the room, Giselle’s bed empty.
“Two inches,” the weatherman continued. “Maybe three.”
By the afternoon it had snowed over a foot. The pains had lasted an hour. She felt the pressure on the cervix, and then the abdomen, and then in her spine. Tom walked through the door, snow across his shoulders and hat. “I can’t get the car out. And even if I could the streets are a mess.” Sylvia looked at him and put her hand over her belly.
She was on the bed, slow going but in painful cramps. She was breathing and sweating. “It’s okay baby. The ambulance is coming.” His face drooped with worried.
There was darkness and a cold sense that walls were around but they were impalpable and then a speck of light appeared and it grew into a disk, light of light, and as the disk grew and came into focus, curves and cut out were apparent, shaped into a bright, singular snow flake. And Sylvia said, “Oh.”
