Amanecer

I

I’ve come to appreciate the little things: the way my milk bursts into a million small bubbles in my espresso machine, or the warmth of my new favorite blanket. I have a man who’s soft spoken and ambivalent in a way only I would find charming. Days blend into weeks and I hardly notice the seasons change.

Outside the air is crisp. I leave the house expectant, a lightness back in my chest where I once carried a stone. At night I dream about a jagged horizon of tall trees and clean air, but wake up to the sweet smell of manured fields from across the road. The weight of his body the only thing I remember before falling asleep and going home. 

I want to take him there one day. I’ve told him off-handed, described what it was like to grow up in a place of soft pastel colors and a wave of dark green that diminishes the sky. To watch a blossom of jellyfish suspended at the edge of the pier brought in with the high tide. The bay an expansive emerald space that kisses the horizon. He pulled me into a lingering hug, his breath fluttered the thin hair on my forehead. I carried his silence as a living thing within my heart. 

I have a small desk next to his in the spare room upstairs, something close to my old drafting desk in simplicity. I’ve arranged my notebooks and drafting pencils, the last of my things, what little clothes I have arranged in a guest closet. We insulated the office by placing down carpet squares, his desktop generates enough warmth to heat the room, and my corner of the window opens out to bare trees. Each day the gap between us widens. His PC purrs. I occupy a small corner in his life, meted out to me with a tense smile and large hand on my lower back. My resolve vacillates every time I feel his gaze as I leave the room.

II

The plane hits the tarmac and my grip tightens on both armrests. A neutral voice crackles from above. I imagine my heart expanding against my ribs as the plane shifts back to the ground, tottering as if it were going to rip apart, me muttering a dozen Hail Mary’s under my breath as everything shudders to a stop. A metallic ping signals a bevy of people to stand in unison and awkwardly flap into jackets once stored overhead. I crumple my cardigan deeper into my backpack and wait.

Every time I go home I’m faced with something familiar and something that challenges my memories. My luggage emerges from baggage claim nearby the shuttle service I’ve used since my university years. I sit at the same grouping of metal tables with matching metal chairs. I watch small birds trapped inside the terminal leave white stains on polished concrete. On the shuttle ride home I ignore the motion sickness building at the back of my throat.

The cul-de-sac in front of Mum’s house is shrunken with a willow tree missing most of it’s limbs on the far left and bushes trimmed too high from neighborhood anxiety. I drag my suitcase to the back of the house following the street that encircles it. She painted it Robin’s egg blue a few years back making it the brightest house in the neighborhood. She mentioned in passing how the homeowners association didn’t approve and shrugged. ‘Water off a duck’s ass,’ she told me with an exaggerated wink.

Light filters through fir trees crowded in the backyard exposing recesses on the ground from hard rain. The place where I used to have my aluminum swing-set is overrun by ferns. I hold my breath at the end of the driveway and imagine myself walking into the expanded living room to Dad napping in the recliner, The O’Reilly Factor turned down low, the cat from my childhood asleep in his lap. Mum most likely power-walking around the neighborhood to hide her smoking from us. Dad and I will pretend not to pick up on her false pretense for exercise. If I went to the pantry for tea I would find her faded box of Richard Simon’s diet plan unopened at the bottom, his face frozen in a forced smile, half hidden underneath a 10lb bag of Science Diet cat food. The wheels of my luggage would chew through faded off-white carpet. My room a bland palette of brown and white accented by the dull gold trim of my mirrored closet. The view from my window would open to a well-kept lawn, the pride of my once simple house proud parents.

There is always a disconnect between what I remember and what I’m confronted with. Dad has been gone for over a decade, but his silence still permeates the hallway the same way it did when he was dying. It’s difficult standing within the ghost of my childhood. A place crowded with dark furniture and meticulously curated memorabilia of a time that doesn’t resonate with who I am now, a stranger browsing someone else’s past.

An oxygen concentrator hums next to the fireplace outside the kitchen, a rhythmic hiss and bubbling connected to a jumble of clear plastic tubing trailing to the expanded living room. Its presence once meant Dad sleeping in the guest room. Over time his skin became waxy and pale. The monster of my childhood became the man I pitied, breathing heavily through sterilized plastic in the smallest room of the house.

Now Mum sits in the recliner Dad once favored, television on low, wearing a tattered blue bathrobe I bought for myself during my first year at university. She’s hooked up to a clear network of tubes, her breathing strained. I never imagined her struggling in old age. I remember when she was small as child, wearing a sweater she found at Salvation Army. She wore it everyday until the collar unravelled. She was the kind of woman who turned heads with the richness of her laugh. She had the kind of authority my introspective nature could never command. I look at old black and white pictures of her and wish I was as beautiful as her. Cigarette in her left hand, exotic almond shaped eyes and a playful gap between her front teeth, she wore colors and patterns that would make me feel ridiculous.

I wake up first to make coffee for myself. Mum isn’t allowed to have coffee anymore, but she keeps a small tin for when I visit. An hour later I hear activity in her room and start breakfast. She shuffles into the kitchen with her rolling walker as I finish. I place the breakfast in front of her. Nothing is said. Neither of us acknowledges each other as we eat. She appreciatively hums and checks her blood sugar levels. I clear my side of the table as she continues to eat, crumbs trickling down the front of her robe to the floor.

‘You are going to do me a favor,’ she always begins, her face stern. ‘You will take me to the grocery store. You will help me buy groceries for the week. Before all that, we will stop for lunch. Do you know what you want to eat?’ Her glucose meter beeps and she sighs. ‘Too bloody high. No wonder I feel rotten. Get my insulin from the fridge. It’s in the door.’

She measures and squirts a little out before piercing her stomach. My mother is shameless. Her indifference is the kind of courage I wish I had more of. No matter where we are and how many people notice, she casually takes out her syringe and bottle of insulin from her purse, administers what she needs and continues talking to you as if you were in on the private ritual. She once told me shame is for the young and ruefully smiled at me. I’m always too cartucha, too modest in her eyes.

‘I never thought I would be this kind of old person,’ she often mused during difficult days. ‘I was young once. I was beautiful once. Sometimes I think I’d be better off dead.’

It’s hard to imagine my formidable mother as anything but a wellspring of obstinance and cheek. She was the driving force between the three of us — she cooked our meals, bought and washed our clothes, ran the house in a traditional sense — now she is a ghost. She sleeps most of the day with my cats huddled around her on the bed, keenly aware of the fragility of her health. She’s fearful of strangers and takes unusual precautions to lock herself in the house.

‘The only thing I ask of you is when my time comes you’ll be here to hold my hand,’ she said one morning. ‘I want to die holding your hand. Will you do that for me? It will be the best way to go.’

I feel so helpless around her. I take extra pains to do her laundry the way I imagine she would have done herself if she had the energy. I pretend not to see her feebleness. The emptiness between us grows, making it that much more poignant. In spite of past hardships, unexpressed remorse we both share, she continues to push ahead towards an ending neither of us can predict.

The house is tense when I leave. Anxious cats flit between bedrooms and Mum becomes unusually quiet. I never know what to say. She’s convinced she’ll die without me. She imagines the neighbors will find her in bed, the cats holding vigil around her, waiting for me to return. She once suggested the cats be put down together as a group because no one would love them or care for them as much as us. What if I don’t reach her in time? I never know what to tell her. 

When she cries, I cry. It’s always been that way. She takes me in her arms and squeezes me with a strength that stuns me. She kisses her fingertips and draws multiple small crosses along my forehead, cheeks and heart. ‘Please take care of yourself,’ she says. ‘Don’t forget your mother. Keep in touch with me more often. That’s all I ask. Call me. Don’t forget me.’ Her eyes moisten and so do mine. I never know what to say to her. All I can do is cry. 

III

Sentimentality and a predilection towards mysticism is common with the women of my family. In my teens my aunt took me to her bruha, a short dark haired woman who could tell my fortune by charting the arrangement of stars on the day I was born. It felt silly, but Tia was in earnest. It was her way of ensuring I was prepared for what lay ahead.

Her house was lined with tin foil and fetid from cat piss. She didn’t neuter them. They ambled near vulnerable furniture with swollen testicles that shook a fine mist as they passed. She didn’t want to rob them of their masculine energy. The tin foil can be replaced, but they would never regain their lost personal energy. Amidst the odor and her jingling plastic jewelry, I found it all so terribly romantic. I still imagine a small old woman braving the sour leavings of her pets to spare them from losing something I never thought vital to their health. Two small pieces of flesh that allowed them to procreate. Her cats were more than sedated small beings who followed me with demure cries for attention. They were whole.

Tia gave her all of my personal information beforehand and had charts made based off of a brief phone call. She used complicated diagrams that charted past movements of stars and planets. She read my palms, kneading warmth back into them with her thumbs. I’m going to live an interesting life. Many loves and many disappointments followed by marriage late in life. Before leaving, she told me I should start learning German. I’ll need it later in life. She specifically told me I’d need it for my 20’s and I ignored her. Oddly enough, she only had a five year margin of error.

I’m restless by nature. Staying in one place for too long doesn’t appeal to me. There always comes a point where my life feels small. No matter where I’m at or who I’ve become I feel I should be discovering something, doing something. The only thing that satiates me are bouts of travel. I want to make my way through Europe and find myself looking out at the Atlantic with a sense of calm. Squeeze water out of a fistful of peat until nothing is left. I tell myself there will always be time, even if the logistics of my dreams don’t always align with my means. Another characteristic of the women in my family. Dreaming so big, so vividly, that when faced with opportunity we’re immobilized by the very ambition that drove us to it.

I carry them with me. Their stories and lingering stale Chanel number five. My mother’s boisterous laugh softened by Tia’s low chuckles. The women of my family are old fashioned and out of touch. Seco como un peo, dry as a fart. With equal parts contempt and awe they’ve watched me. Unhampered by marriage and children, I’ve chased dreams and men, I’ve fallen in love with my ambition. My life has taken on a quality that makes them shudder in disbelief. Their little mouse has become indifferent. They approach me about marriage and I shrug. They mention it’s time to think about children and I change the subject. My viejitas are never satisfied and I’m left adrift. It’s one thing to want something and entirely another to achieve it. They’re focused on the end without thought to what must be done beforehand. While I’m pining to complete my education, they’re dreaming of someone with fat little arms and pale blue eyes.