The End of Eve Read online

  Maxito peered around the doorframe into the living room where I was curled up on the couch. “Watch Bell, Book and Candle, Mama?” He’d just turned three and this was his favorite film – the Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak neo-noir about a pretty witch who owns a magic shop and puts a love spell on her unsuspecting neighbor. Maxito played the DVD over and over, laughed at the same blue flame and Siamese cat spell scenes again and again.

  “Sure.” There was time for a movie before shopkeeping and preschool.

  On the camping stove in the cold blue-sky backyard, I made strong coffee and hot cocoa, scrambled eggs with green chile.

  Seven a.m. and my mother hadn’t yet emerged from her room at the far end of the house.

  Eight a.m.

  Eight-thirty.

  Maybe she was dead in there.

  I didn’t want to check.

  Sol steamed coconut milk for more coffee. “Have you seen your mom since yesterday?”

  “No,” I lied. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  I didn’t know if the cure for my life was to lie to everyone about everything or to become brutally honest.

  “How ARE you?” acquaintances would ask when I ran into them at the Tune-Up Café on Hickox. I’d order my Salvadoran plate, nod and say, “I’m fine and great to see you.”

  “How IS your mother?” they’d ask when I ran into them at Healthy Wealthy. I’d place her probiotic cottage cheese and organic shiitake mushrooms in my cart and say, “she’s doing all right.”

  I didn’t want to say too much to anyone about my mother in part because I’d been taught since childhood not to. My stepdad and my Gammie and the few friends who knew the quality of her violence said she couldn’t help the way she was and anyway, Come on, Ariel, she’s tiny, who could she hurt? And I didn’t want to say too much because, inexplicably, I still wanted people to like her. I was afraid they wouldn’t like her. And then my new acquaintances would be like every mop-haired hippie kid I went to elementary school with in the ’70s in California, those kids who used to slap my head when I passed them in the hallways and say, “Hey, Airbrain Ariel, how’s your bitchy mom?” Bitchy because she’d called them a corporate greedy sugar dealer when they just wanted to sell her a box of Girl Scout cookies. Or bitchy because she’d followed them home after they broke a bottle in the street and she’d grabbed them by their shirt collar and told them to “come back, you little brat, and clean it up. I work at San Quentin – that’s where thugs like you end up.” Those kids friended me on Facebook now and wrote on my timeline, “I always admired your mother and I’m so sorry to hear she’s ill,” and I kind of wanted to slap their heads.

  NINE O’CLOCK IN the morning and my mother finally emerged from her bedroom in her leopard-print robe and a Patagonia jacket.

  “Nonna –” Maxito beamed when he saw her. “Bell, Book and Candle! Want to see the funny part?”

  My mother smiled at him and sighed, “Good morning, Maxito.” But when she turned to me she wasn’t smiling anymore. “Why haven’t you put the grandmother clock together?”

  “I haven’t had a chance,” I said. And I hadn’t – consumed as I’d been about whether or not she’d try to murder my child as I slept. “There’s hot water in the backyard for your essiac tea. Do you want me to bring it inside?”

  She nodded slowly. “If you were planning on staying here you would have put the clock together by now. You’re going to leave me here alone to die, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t want to leave her alone, but how much longer could we stay? “We’ll have to figure something out that works for everyone. Okay?”

  I checked my email. I’d applied for a sweet visiting professor gig at the University of New Mexico and here came the good news: Unanimous vote. I was hired. I’d start mid-January.

  Who was I? A mother, a daughter, a professor.

  The snow would be coming soon.

  I HAD FANTASIES of running away like I was 16 years old again. Maxito and Sol and I would pack up our lives into three little backpacks and we’d climb out the window and run laughing into the cold night.

  But we didn’t run.

  Instead I rigged baby gates in the hallway that led to our bedrooms and told my mother I’d done it because I worried about Maxito sleepwalking.

  THANKSGIVING CAME AND we could finally use the kitchen even though it still needed paint and countertops. We roasted the requisite turkey even though no one but Maxito and Ronaldo was eating meat that week.

  CHRISTMAS AND MY mother said the tree I’d brought inside was even more pitiful than last year’s and, “I’m trying to be tolerant, Ariel, because obviously you don’t have any money, but get that fucking thing out of my house.”

  I left it where it was.

  Maia flew in for the week and tried to get us all drunk on mescal and shivered, “It’s stressful here.”

  I wrapped a couple of candles from the shop and put them under the tree for my mother.

  She gave me a can of smoked sardines.

  THE DAY AFTER New Year’s I lit a Virgin of Guadalupe candle, but I didn’t know what to pray for. Maybe God had enough trouble without worrying what happened to us.

  Sol took Maxito to a circus-themed party somewhere at sunset.

  I paged through an unlabeled file on the kitchen counter. New Xeroxed figures with my mother’s name on them. New tumors in the lungs. New tumors in the brain. A new tumor the hospice nurse had circled in red pencil: The one that pressed into the mitral valve, beginning to cut off the blood supply to her heart.

  “How are you doing?” I asked her when she shuffled into the kitchen.

  She put a pot of water on to boil. “I’m dying, I’m sure you’re happy to know.” And then, “I don’t know what your family is doing here in my house.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Your family. My house. I was tired of this shit, tired of making excuses for her, tired of blaming the tumors or anything else. And it wasn’t true that she couldn’t help the way she was. She didn’t treat everyone this way. She was just an abusive bitch who happened to have cancer. I shook my head, looked right at her. “If anyone in your life has ever treated you like family, it’s been me and my kids. If you can’t see that, take it up with God.”

  As I turned away, I heard her low whisper, “You just made a big mistake.”

  I crawled into bed even though the sliver of a moon had barely risen. I thought I’d read or write, but I just took a few good sips of bourbon from the bottle on my nightstand and fell asleep. Didn’t wake when Sol and Maxito came in.

  IN THE MORNING, I made coffee and hot cocoa. I scrambled an egg for Maxito. I didn’t see my mother. Didn’t hear her in her room. Didn’t hear the laundry running. We took Maxito to preschool and went to work at the shop, but it was cold and snowy and no one came in so we closed early, picked Maxito up from preschool early and headed home.

  As we turned onto the dirt road, Sol gasped, “What the mother?”

  Twenty seven giant black garbage bags in the driveway, our red couch behind them. The grandmother clock. My old hobo bird painting propped against the turquoise trailer.

  “Watch Bell, Book and Candle again!” Maxito cheered from his car seat.

  “Hang on, Maxito.” Sol pulled over and I climbed out of the car, blast of cold air and the sound of my own boots on the gravel. I tried the front door, but the front door was locked. My key didn’t work. That’s when I noticed the living room windows were all boarded up. I walked around the side of the house. My mother’s bedroom window was the only one not boarded. It was open and there she was in her green Patagonia jacket, just staring out the window, the screen between us.

  “What’s going on, Mom?”

  She kept staring like I wasn’t standing there on the other side.

  “Mom, what are you going to do?”

  She was quiet at first, didn’t move except to smile at a question like that. “Don’t worry about me,” she finally said. “The devil takes care of his own.”

&nb
sp; SOL WAS LOADING bags and cursing under her breath when I got back to the car. Maxito whimpered in his seat.

  “Don’t worry, baby.” I whispered. “It’s just a game. House bounce.”

  He didn’t look soothed exactly, but he stopped crying. “House bounce?”

  What was there to do? We couldn’t kick the art student tenant out of our apartment on a moment’s notice. We’d given him a nine-month lease. And so it was that the three of us, a veterinarian, a professor, and their three-year-old kid moved into the back room of a candle shop best known for the curse-reversals we did not perform.

  A short trek through a frozen outdoor passageway lead to the toilet and sink we shared with the Buddhist temple that had moved into an adjacent live/work space. We’d worry about where to shower later.

  WE DRAGGED GARBAGE bags in from the car and Sol borrowed a truck from the pizza shop across the parking lot and went back for the couch and clock. I set up the DVD player. “Mary Poppins or Bell, Book and Candle?”

  “Bell, Book and Candle!” Maxito squealed.

  “We’re going to live in our shop now,” I told him like it was as ordinary a place to live as anywhere. “Just like in Bell, Book and Candle.”

  “Yes,” he smiled. “We live in our shop.”

  It was dark by the time Sol had moved the couch and the rest of our stuff in. “We need wine,” she said.

  We did. “I’ll go.”

  She held up a full pink petticoat tutu she’d found in one of the big garbage bags of our belongings. It was mine. The kind of thing people wore in Portland with a pair of motorcycle boots. The kind of thing no one ever wore in Santa Fe with anything for any reason.

  “I dare you to wear this to Healthy Wealthy,” Sol laughed. “I’ll pay for the wine if you wear it.”

  SO, THAT’S HOW I found myself in the wine aisle at Healthy Wealthy – a mother, a daughter, a new visiting professor, not exactly homeless, wearing my full pink petticoat tutu on a January night in Santa Fe, New Mexico, even though it was only seven degrees outside.

  16.

  The Smell of Death

  WINE-TIPSY IN THE DARK OF OUR SHOP WHILE MAXITO and Sol slept, I clicked onto Facebook. My mother had updated her profile to show that she no longer had any children. I unfriended her, then felt like a worm. Did I really just unfriend my dying mother? I poured myself another glass and typed a rambling status update.

  My old friend Teagan commented, Geez, talk about our parents having no use for us the minute we’re not who they trained us to be.

  I LOOKED AT my old hobo birds painting propped against the wall, looked out the window. The dark of the new moon. I didn’t want to sleep with Sol on the red couch in the back room, so I curled up in the giant Mexican equipale chair in the corner of the shop and fell asleep in my pink tutu like some kindergartener who’d just projectile vomited at the talent show.

  Morning was a ringing phone in the pocket of my hoodie. Hospice. I’d left a voicemail telling them my mother was alone and asking them to check on her more often, but I guess the fuzzy intake nurse was also the fuzzy exit nurse, because it was her voice on the phone now saying, “Well, hello there, dear Ariel. I’m calling to let you know that well – as luck would have it – your mother fired hospice yesterday.”

  I sat up in the equipale, tried to smooth my tutu. “She fired hospice?” Who fires hospice? Hospice is free. When you don’t want to see them, you just don’t open the door. I must have been silent for a long minute.

  “Ariel?” the intake/exit nurse tried. “Are you all right, dear? May I be frank with you, Ariel?”

  “Frank?”

  Sol poked her head in from the back room, whispered, “Coffee?”

  I nodded. Please.

  “Yes, dear,” the hospice lady was saying. “You want to be conscious as your mother declines, don’t you?”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to be conscious, but I said, “Sure.”

  “Well, my little Ariel,” the nurse started, her voice all sing-song. “I’ve been in this conscious dying business for a long time and I’ll tell you that most people, when they’re dying, want to pull everyone they love in close and just hug ‘em tight. But there is a notable minority of people who need to be alone. It may well be that your mother will die alone, Ariel. I think you would be wise to prepare yourself for that possibility. Six weeks or one year from now, a worker or a delivery person or a neighbor will knock on your mother’s door and your mother won’t answer the door. That worker or delivery person or neighbor will smell that distinct odor of death and they will call the police and your mother will have died. You’ll get a call from the police. I think you would be very wise to prepare yourself for that call.”

  I didn’t ask the fuzzy hospice lady with her sing-songy voice how one might prepare oneself for that call. I just said, “Oh.” I said, “Well, thanks.” I said, “Take care.”

  Sol brought me coffee in a red mug. “Is everything all right?”

  “It’s fine.”

  WE PUT A note on the shop door that said, “By appointment only.” Sol would sell the candles and make house calls. I’d wake in the predawn and train-commute to the university to teach the college kids how to invent improbable stories. On those still dark mornings as I walked along the tracks to the train station, I told myself that I didn’t have a mother anymore. But I still flinched every time my cellphone buzzed. The call I didn’t know how to prepare for. The smell of death.

  “You did your best,” someone on Facebook said.

  But had I?

  Done my best?

  I felt like a failure.

  LATE AFTERNOONS, THE train home from Albuquerque barreled through desolate reservation after desolate reservation and a voice over the loudspeaker announced that we weren’t allowed to take pictures of what was left of Native land.

  NIGHTS HOME AT the shop we cooked on the old camping stove we grabbed from my mother’s backyard.

  What was I doing here?

  Living with my mother had been its own nightmare, but in that duplex that wasn’t a duplex anymore, at least Sol and I had been united in our oppression. Our problem was my mother and whatever piece of furniture she was screaming for Sol to move. Now I was the only one for Sol to glare at. She lingered at the mime school until she had to pick Maxito up from preschool. She announced that she would no longer accept money for veterinary services, that she would only work for trade – it was a matter of principle and pet health.

  I rolled my eyes. “Chicken eggs and free massages aren’t going to cut it as your family contribution.”

  But Sol didn’t like when I talked to her that way. She crossed her arms and stomped her feet and didn’t say anything. I hated the silence, so I went and bought her a piece of cake from the Chocolate Maven and I said I was sorry and I leaned into her and she patted me on the back and kissed me on the head and whispered, “It’s all right.”

  I crept into the front of the shop to grade papers, lit a Baba Yaga candle.

  SATURDAY MORNING MY cellphone buzzed with a local number I didn’t recognize.

  Could it be the cops already? Had someone reported the smell of death?

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Ariel Gore?” The voice was deep with the softest Texas twang.

  “Yes?” I felt a stabbing pain behind my chest bone.

  But it wasn’t the police. “Ms. Gore? I’m a family mediator and attorney here in Santa Fe. I specialize in child abuse and neglect. I’m calling about Maximilian.”

  Lump like a piece of hot coal in my throat. My first terror, of course, is that something has happened to him, but I glance back and he’s right there on the red couch laughing at Bell, Book and Candle, a bunny mug full of hot cocoa on the table in front of him. But maybe something had happened to him we didn’t know about? “Yes?”

  “I’m calling on behalf of your mother,” the voice said. “She’s worried about Maximilian.”

  I swallowed hard, took a good breath and let it go. “He’s d
oing well,” I said. “He’s well taken care of.” I glanced over at him. His perfect skin. His steady smile.

  “All right,” the voice said. “Well, your mother would like to have visitation with Maximilian once a week. She would like you to bring him to the house to do art. She would not like you to bring Sol. She would like you to go to the house alone with Maximilian.”

  I felt nauseous, but I didn’t want to give this guy anything. I knew enough about family mediators and family court attorneys. I’d spent seven years in a protracted custody and visitation battle with Maia’s dad back in California. She was grown now and he was long dead, but I still woke some nights in the cold sweat terror of that courtroom. No, you don’t give these guys anything. I said, “I’ll have to think about that.”

  He didn’t say anything. I put a Nina Simone CD on the player behind the counter. Maybe Nina Simone could walk me through this. But as soon as Nina Simone started in, Sol appeared and pressed eject, put Johnny Cash on instead. “Well,” the voice on the phone said. “It’s within your mother’s rights to file suit for legal visitation. If she’s concerned about her grandson’s well-being, we will of course feel obligated to make a report to Protective Services about abuse or neglect. I understand that you don’t have immediate access to a full bathroom ...”

  I didn’t think the voice was finished talking, but I was finished listening. “I see,” is all I said. I clicked the phone off, closed my eyes, and for the first time I prayed, “God, please just let her die already.”

  LIVE WITH ME for a year. Then you may ask questions. That’s what my oracle had said. But Sol was the one who picked up the phone in the front of the shop when it rang later that morning, and Sol didn’t ask any questions. All I heard her say was, “Eve, don’t ever call here again.”

  Book Three

  Underground

  17.

  Blindfold

  “YOUR PROBLEM IS THAT YOU DON’T TRUST ANYBODY,” the girl in Albuquerque said as she fastened the blindfold over my eyes.