Both the Living and the Dead

Anger chokes me before I even got all the way into the room: mustard yellow. The living room in my house, my parents� house, had been mustard yellow when we moved in, fifteen years ago. No one had liked it � but of course it was an extravagance, a waste, to paint while the old paint was still perfectly good. And here it was, still � two years since I�d seen it last, fifteen years since I started loathing it, and still mustard yellow.

I�d painted my room eight times. The first time I spent two weeks mowing lawns and babysitting screaming toddlers to get the money for the paint and brushes. By the time I moved out, the walls and ceiling were slate black -- chalkboard paint. I lived inside a changing set of chalk murals and scrawls.

By that stage, though, my father hadn�t been able to get up the stairs to see them. Too bad. I wanted so much to have his disapproval.

And I�m still not in the room. I�m standing in the cramped entry cubby, still in my coat, and Brian is � literally � breathing down my neck. (He not only insisted on coming, he stuck enough bandages in his pocket to outfit a troop of accident-prone boy scouts. He points out that I have come home bleeding two days in a row.) �What is it�� he sounds terrified, and only a smidge drama-queen. ��ghosts?�

�Naaah.� I pull off my coat. �No, just the usual.� I thrust my coat at him and leave him struggling with both coats, a tippy umbrella stand, and the temperamental latch on the hall closet door. Not very host-ly of me, but that�s the point. It�s not my house, even if I have a key to it and know about the stupid sticky latch.

I stick my bandaged hand in my pocket and stride in, try to call � �Mom?� I don't get it out.

The hospital bed is still in the corner of the living room. Mustard yellow fills my throat.

I think: surely that�s taking thrift a bit too far. What does she think � if she gets rid of it she�ll need it again? For what? For who?

I think: but �

The room is relentlessly neat. My mother hates mess � she hated the mess of pill bottles and syringes and plastic spittoons that made a sort of sick child�s block-city on the credenza. She hated the erector-set of the traction machine. She hated the bedpans. She hated all the laundry of death. For two years there were sheet on the line every day. Sometimes I think if Dad�s death had been less messy, she would have minded less.

And all that stuff is gone. Except that the loveseat is pushed still (again?) into the middle of the room, and the hospital bed is in the sunny corner. And there�s something, I hear �

There�s a huge crash behind me. I leap three feet � but it�s just the umbrella stand. Bri comes in, fumbling with a fistful of canes and umbrellas, looking sheepish. �Sorry.�

��S okay.�

�Where�s � �

�Mamma?� I call. �We�re here!�

I can�t quite hear what I�m hearing. Can�t get the colour of my throat. I look around. All the mess of sickness is gone from the credenza. There�s a new picture of me, the one the paper took when they ran that profile (Ghost Busters! The New Entrepreneurs). Not newprint, a glossy. She must have called for it. The frame sits in the middle of the china flowers, like an Honoured Ancestor at a shrine. Bri wanders over to it.

�Mamma!� I call again, turning. I tug at my ear as if to get water out of it � there�s a sound in it, like blood pounding, but it�s --

My mother is in the doorway of the kitchen. Looking at me. Silent.

�Mom?� I say. She�s looking past me, now, toward Brian. Oh dear � this could become the grandchildren talk. �I brought � � I turn to get Bri over here so he can confess to being gay, sterile, and Russian.

Bri is standing there. In the middle of the hospital bed. His torso rears centaur-like from the tangle of sheets � sweat-stained sheets, tangled around something invisible. Something that would be the size of a 10-year child.

The thickness in my throat isn�t anger. And the sound in my head is the flap of wet sheets on a line.