This forever familiar ride, is anything but familiar today. Today is time standing still, and a stream of blurred Garden State Parkway exits, their mile markings careening past. We rush home in hope of finding out just what this confounding accident Peter speaks of encompasses and why my very well and very vibrant mother has been hospitalized. Just how does a day at the beach turn emergency? I spin with all the hows. It is not that I cannot imagine what has happened, but that I actually can that has me twisting inside.
I am taking the inconceivable drive from East 77th Street, racing toward my childhood home at 52 Hubbard Avenue. It is one hour and ten minutes in the direction of the Jersey shore and is generally more green-ish here and there, than truly scenic. Signature smoke stacks billow and with who-knows-what-we-have-been-breathing-in-all-these-years and coughs-up a well-known stench we have grown accustomed to tolerating.
My sister Danna and I used to try and hold our breath past this portion of the trip on our ventures in to see our Dad who in his newly single days, lives in the city. We never quite escaped its hold or how it lingered in the car and my memories. Newark airport bustle mingles with a few tree stoked intervals and when we hit The Garden State Arts Center, I know we are close.
I am armed with an incredulous duality and a deep knowing that she is in fact dead and somehow hopeful she is comatose, unconscious or please lord, that we are all dreaming. I am secretly praying for temporarily not alive and able, or a version of not yet gone that has me with her once more. I need to think her deeply asleep and very much hope we will all awake from this lunacy that has suddenly become our life. Our story. What is our family without her here to help us through such confusing panic?
Upon entering the house and without a word, I take in the wilt of my stepfather’s sober face, the inward fold of his normally tall and commanding shoulders draping down and forward, bowing in on himself in a decrepit fold. In an instant I want to unknow his reality as much as I do not. I know there are entirely missing fragments of memory caused by such shock. This is seared indefinitely in my awareness. Magical thinking sets it course from the very moment of his first call to my answering machine and I keep writing and rewriting the scenes of a death, or catastrophic miscalculation as the ideas and paragraphs and pain unfurl before my eyes. Like words scrolling in front of me in one of those edgy breaks you see in an indy film.
Still, nobody has told me that she is dead.
Or not.
One of the many heinous asks tasked to me in the immediate aftermath of my return home, is to accompany him to the beach where she was found unresponsive, to retrieve her car. Her giant sedans were always signature Ellen. The current whip is a silver Buick LaSalle with navy seats and trim. I think it replaced the French vanilla Cadillac. My petite realtor of a Mom, always chose to lease these long and luxe affairs to accommodate the families she shuffled and chauffeured from listing to listing in hopes of landing them their dream home.
The “boats” as she coined them, always had so many fun new toys inside like drink holders, automated locks, digital readouts, stellar stereo systems and deep, deep, plush electronic seats. It was her virtual office, and the center console eventually housed the bag that held her remote phone. We were never allowed to use her “work” phone, but it was a badge of badassery and success that she was one of the first we knew to have one. Favorite family songs are belted in Mom’s car, teenage confessions made and the nonsense of the day she loves so very much rehashed. From here to there and there to here carpooling, she always made the seconds at the wheel count.
I am not certain why I am asked to go. There has barely been a moment to let such stunning news land, metastasize or become even so much as semi-autobiographical. This returning to the scene for belongings, seems an errand easily tasked to a neighbor or relative. And it is downright cruel, if you ask me. But, nobody is asking. I mean hell, we are barely speaking a word. Who really wants the truth? Nobody can see clearly through the unknown of the moment at hand. Nobody and everybody at this moment is my stepfather.
The car was left at Sandy Hook National Park, where she parked it to spend a day off. I come upon it and wonder now why it was not towed to our home or instead splashed with tickets upon the windshield. Perhaps the police had somehow marked it, or noted the plate number in whatever ancient system they used before cell phones or computers communicated such details. I do think it is unconscious to ask me to return to the scene. Peter is not thinking. Maybe this is just a task to check from his list. Some kind of order amidst this disorderly conduct.
Why have we not headed for the airport to pick up Danna? She is flying, hours alone from Denver, way up in the air with the same wonderings as mine. They have sent Peter’s brother Michael to gather her. He is not a stranger, Danna used to babysit for their family. But this all seems poorly planned and convoluted. Michael is hours late, and Danna waits not wanting to leave the sidewalk for a payphone check in, so she does not dare miss him. Mom would be pissed.
We get to the car. There it is, sitting alone in the sandy rubble of the beach drive. It is locked, but Peter has retrieved her key from a plastic bag evidence bag presented to him from the police who knocked on his door last night to bring it and the news.
He clicks the electronics open. I am on the passenger side and sidle in. This is my seat in Mom’s car. I immediately look for her. The smell is pure mom. The scent of her lingers in the heavy heat of summer. I crack open the glove compartment. There she is again. A box of Jujyfruits candy is open and stashed inside. All that remain, are the black and green. Mom has been known to hold each individual gummy fave up to the light of the movie screen so that she does not mistakenly eat her unfavorited discards. I love the black ones and eat one then and there, like swallowing up a piece of her. In the center console is a receipt.
Burger King
1 small O-ring
1 small Coke
It is from Burger King a few days back. I smile to myself with some sort of happy knowing. Mom was always five or ten pounds away from a version of her perfect body. We had lived through her crazy Rice diets and a fit of fads in her hope to be smaller. She even tries some diet pills illegally shared with her by a family friend Vee, who is a pharmacist. I wish she could have really seen herself without all of that static. She was perfect to us, and those whose heads turned in her presence. Strangers took her in like an exotic creature. I am grateful she treated herself to this drive through moment. I hope there were many. As grown-ups we often share Happy Meals. The small but decadent treats we still admired as a girly trio. As I am quickly rummaging for proof of Mom, the electric door locks flip the button up and down. I look quickly to Peter. Did he hear what I just heard? Incredulously, he admits he does. The key is in the ignition. I know she is near. Here. Not sure if she wants us out of her business or is glad I know that she treated herself to candy and a small onion ring? May this be the first of many signs, because this girl believes. Needs to believe.
I somehow drive her car home the 30 some odd miles down familiar roads never taking in a site. I see the red, yellow and green of the traffic lights. Numbly, I am rummaging down my memories of beach days past. Jumping off the Highlands bridge like fools. Collecting for a keg. Never enough sunscreen. Her spot in the driveway welcomes me back. Still nobody is talking.
Danna is finally dropped off by Michael. We hug and sob upon seeing one another and somehow there is knowing, but hopeful disbelief. She is so young I think. Too young not to have a mother. I have always felt maternal toward my sister, we are five years apart. Today I feel I must be strong for her, not merely with her.
Once when much younger, we nudged cheek to cheek looking into the mirror, staring at our reflection. People often ask if we are twins. We don’t see it. One day one of us says to the other, “can you believe it…”. I think it was me. “Can you believe it? That we are sisters?” It is a sign of affection, of luck, in a belief that something greater and grander than us had a plan to bring these two girls together to be unimaginable best friends, confidants and blood.
As we settle into the probable, I ask, “Is there anything you would have said if you could,. No. No. Me either.” If the last time we spoke to her is to be the last, neither of us holds a regret, or an I’m sorry or a wish I had said. Each call, and we spoke every day, always ended with “I love you.” Forever knowing those are for always the last words we heard will never prove a salve, only a reprieve from guilt or shame. We are good daughters. We were good daughters.
She is at Monmouth Medical Center. We live around the corner from Riverview Hospital, but this was too far from the shore. I don’t recall any formal sit down or official talk. I know that Peter has uttered the words brain aneurism. We are ushered to her room. It is a bland yellow, and the light is blown out like a dream state. My tiny Mom lays in a hospital bed with only a thin white sheet on top of her deeply olive skin. The room is frigid, and I shake from the cold and what I can barely take in.
We have just witnessed what I believe to be her dead body for the first time. It is heaving up and down, the will of machinations and the hope of someone waiting for her vital organs. Her chest rises and falls, machines beep and tubes string through her mouth and nose.
Peter shares that she is in fact brain dead. It is her wish to be an organ donor. He wants our approval or consent in this decision. For whatever reason, we agree to all except her eyes. I am not certain where we think she is going, or what she might be seeing when she gets there, but we agree to this.
My sister recalls that she kissed our mother on the forehead. This was the kind of kiss of affection we had known from her on many a sweet occasion. Often, she would lean in and say, “let me feel your keppy”, Yiddish for forehead. Her lips are a better indicator of us having a temperature than a drug store thermometer. I touched her cold hand. I am certain I had no idea this was a last. She is nude beneath the sheet, and the machine’s robotics crassly reveal her skin. This upsets my sister who glares over at the nurse in the room who seems to care less, and Danna fixes it around Mom’s bare shoulders.
We unceremoniously leave. No pomp or prayer. I am certain we were too numb to realize what was actually happening. All that is left in my mind is that awful hissing of that machine pumping her chest with air.
We stop at McDonald’s on the way home. I wish we had made it to the Windmill, or one of her favorites to honor her and make that a thoughtful part of her parting story.
We order Happy Meals and pick around them in silence.
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a perfect day to die--or at least the one she may have written for herself