The Trip Home
The Trip Home
9 Dec, 2014
She got out at the dimly lit bus station-“Soderborough”, the sign said. The bus driver, over the intercom, said” Sodburg”.
She wanted to stretch her legs, buy a machine coffee-get out, away from the falsely fresh bus air.
A few others-there weren’t many on the bus-came after her like released prisoners, wearing night’s hood, apprehensively looking around, checking now and again that the driver hadn’t quietly slid the bus into the gloom of the late Kansas fall, abandoning them to an uncertain freedom.
She also wanted to wash again. She was sure that the other passengers, even the driver and the ticket man, could smell her. She went in to the bathroom and stood at the sink and looked at her face. Dark purple circles under eyes made her look somehow exotic, she thought, but the tired, deeply wrinkled skin gave away no glamour, only use beyond worn use, like a hand farm tool worn down to perfection. Her hair was wiry and gray, uncontrollable so cut severely short.
She got the water hot and washed her hands and arms and tried to scrub her nails. She inhaled the bile smell, the rot, the fecal smell, the dried blood, the repulsive air that anyone around her could not possibly avoid. It seemed to surround her and grow even as she wished it down the drain.
A woman entered behind her, startling her, and she knocked the paper coffee cup off the sink.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, moving hurriedly into a stall.
“It’s okay,” she said to the sink. “Not your fault.” It was strange to hear her own hollow voice.
The hot water felt good. The slightly scented soap somewhat deflected the years and years of decay. She remembered when she had taken the mattress out herself. She had hauled it to a field and poured gasoline on it and burned it. She had watched it burn until it was only a glowing heap. And then days later she had come back out and stomped the ashes and remains into the ground.
She moisturized her lips with a balm she had bought the night before at the station store. What an extravagance, she had thought. Her lips had lost any suppleness, any fullness-only dry, cracked lines, straight, hard, unyielding, any humor or ease drawn out of them after years of being at her side.
She tried to smile. A bloody crack appeared. She dabbed her mouth with tissue. She heard the flush and rolled her sleeves forward.
The woman came to the sink next to her. She was small, smooth skinned, fresh, with her long shiny black hair tied back neatly in a swirling bun.
“Long night,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Going home?”
“Yes.”
“I am going to take care of my mother.”
“Oh.” The smaller woman looked down. She put her hands to her face.
“Ill?”
“Well, if you call dying…”
“Oh, I see.”
“No one else…” she trailed off, leaving the water running in her sink, lost, staring at it swirling. “No one else…”
“Would help?”
“Yes! That is it. She is way out there in the country. My brothers, even my sister…She refuses to ‘go to town’ she calls it, for help. She won’t leave the family homestead.”
“Hum.” The smaller woman looked up at her and waited then gathered up her bag and they both left the bathroom. They walked together and each got a machine coffee and machine Danish.
They walked to the bus. She let the smaller woman go ahead and thought about sitting with her but found her own seat and settled in. She put her coffee and the Danish on the arm rest. She put the pillow, the only thing she had salvaged, on her lap. The smell of death came back. It was in her pocket book and the carry-on bag and her folded sweater. It was coming out with the steam from the coffee.
The bus backed out and then pulled away. The interior lights dimmed. She watched as several intersections passed and the town receded.
She thought of her husband’s last words, years ago.
“You go. She will suck you in and never let you out. Don’t count on me waiting. This is your house-you can have it-she gave it to you. That is that. But I gotta live.”
She felt where the wedding band had been. The skin was rough, the joint above ached.
She finished the coffee and then checked her bag for the key to her house-the kitchen door. No one in the town ever went through a front door unless there was a death. But even then during war times the Western Union men were polite enough to stand outside the kitchen door and wait. Her mother had told her that. There was a way to be tasteful about death.
She felt the key. It was a new one her husband had sent two years ago. He hadn’t come to the funeral. No one had. She had sat alone waiting for tears. None came either. She had felt bitter and absolute emptiness. Maybe a tinge of guilt-and then nothing. Six years of bedside, bathroom sitting attendance with a rare wheelchair trip outside as far as the end of the driveway until she had gotten too cold even in the summer and waved her hand, purple and gnarled to go back in. Bathing her, cleaning her foul stained body, turning her in her stained bed, putting food in a toothless, scowling mouth. Even the slew of words aimed at her, the sundown barrage, she thought of it-even it was a relief from the touching of the body.
“You are the worst daughter anyone ever had.”
“You kept your brother from coming to take care of me.”
“You stole my notebook with his address and phone number.”
“You are keeping me here to steal all my money.”
“I am your prisoner and you are trying to kill me.”
She would offer her mother the phone to call the police-“You paid them off!”
And then, in the morning, sweetness.
“You need to go back to your life. I will be okay here. I can take care of myself now. Just show me how to work the remote again.”
And then the end. She had heard about the last sign of alertness shortly before death. Her mother had wanted to see her garden. There was nothing in it, just dirt clods and a broken fence, but she had wheeled her out and her mother had told her in detail about what vegetables she had planted, who had liked what vegetable, and had described the colors, the years and size of her best yields.
“You liked turnips and no one else did so I grew them over there.”
The next day her breathing had become very slowed and it was a rattling sound. She had turned blue. She had sat there and held her mother’s hand until it stopped and then for some time after that feeling nothing. She had looked at her mother’s face, waiting. Would she suddenly come back?
She called the nurse and the mortuary and went outside and walked into the fallow field that belonged to the neighbor who was nearly as old as her mother. She had looked at the sun barely showing through dark clouds. She had knelt down and felt the dirt, crumbling a piece in her hand. She remembered picking out a piece of dirt from this same field during a battle with her brothers. It had felt hard. She had thrown it and her brother fell to the ground holding his right eye.
“That was against the rules-no rocks!” He had lost the eye. She had had no friends that year. Only Dusty their dog who forgot to get out of the way when the oil man came to fill their tank.
The van had arrived to take her mother. She was sure now. It was over. A body is a distinctly empty thing after death. It seemed odd to afford it so much dignity. Or any dignity. Dust to dust. Didn’t people believe that?
She had had stayed on, sold the house quickly after cleaning it for three days. She had closed her mother’s bank account. A young couple had bought it but had avoided inspecting the bedroom.
Then she packed one bag, called the Taxi man and went to the bus station. Besides shopping at Merritts she hadn’t been out this far for six years. Had she exhaled in those six years? No, everything, she thought, everything, everything was in her.
Just as she nodded off she felt a gentle touch on her shoulder and she jerked.
“I seem to be making a habit of startling you. And apologizing.”
She made a patting motion for the smooth skinned woman to sit next to her. They sat quietly for some minutes and she felt her eyes start to close again.
“You don’t mind me asking…but I kind of thought you might have…”
“I was with her for six years. Sole caregiver. I think the Lord had even backed off.”
“Was it…?”
“It simply was.”
“How did you…?”
“There was no choice.”
“That is how I feel, really, except I want to run away and you obviously didn’t.”
“Of course.”
“But I am not…”
“No.” A few minutes went by. She could see nothing outside the windows. There were no lights. Other than the droning of the tires and the whine of the engine they might not have been moving anywhere.
“You know what I am really afraid of, like in those magazines, is putting a pillow over her and…” She started to laugh and then covered her mouth and then it came out uncontrollably for some minutes, big rolling tears falling over the smooth skin onto her breast.
“Did you ever have those thoughts?’” she managed finally, dabbing her face with a bright pink handkerchief.
“How do you know I didn’t?” She lifted up her pillow and carefully and showed it to the woman then firmly pressed it down on her lap. She looked over at the woman and felt the first smile, the first exhalation, the first words really that she had had since it had started.
“Oh my!” The smooth skinned woman’s eyes flashed and she regarded her with intensity.
“What do we have to do. What do we have to do?”
She took the small woman’s hands in hers, feeling the smooth, tight skin, feeling the pulse, steady, under. And then something like death-or life- flowed one to the other, uninterrupted, unchallenged, as cleansing as the sudden storm that swept down on them and the bus.
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