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  • Marly Swick (bio)

The next morning, while it was still dark out, she took a cab to the airport. It was a bleak hour, too much to ask of a friend, even if her mother was dying. The sort of favor you’d ask only of a husband—not an ex-husband—or a wife. She wept quietly in the back seat, hoping her occasional snuffling snorts were muffled by the tinny Bollywood lament emanating from a cd player sitting on the passenger seat next to the turbaned driver. An hour later, when he hoisted her heavy suitcases from the trunk and set them on the ground in front of Midwest Express, he touched her lightly on the arm and said in high school English, “I am seeing that you are very somber. You are going on a long journey?”

“My mother’s dying,” she said, despite the fact that it was the thought of being a newly single woman (with no one to drive her to the airport at 5 a.m. on a raw, rainy San Francisco morning) that had set off the crying jag, more than the dying mother per se.

The driver bobbed his head elegiacally and then reached through the open door of his cab, unhooked some wooden prayer beads from his rearview mirror, and offered them to her. She shook her head as if to say No, no, I couldn’t possibly, at the same time that she found herself reaching out to accept them.

The rented bed had been delivered the day before she arrived. While her father drove her mother to her doctor’s appointment, Trish spent the morning arranging furniture and freshly cut flowers from the back yard. She positioned the bed so her mother could look through the French doors into the garden. She took her old Pioneer stereo, a junior high graduation gift, from her own room and set it up next to her mother’s bed. As she dusted the antique turntable in the silent room, a babble of girlish teenage voices clamored in her ears, a chorus of clueless, self-absorbed, sex-crazed ghosts. Hours and hours on their princess phones complaining about who had the worst, the most pathetic, disgusting, unfair [End Page 46] witch of a mother. Who knew, back then, that those seemingly immortal mortal enemies would someday grow old, weaken, and leave them on their own, unprotected, with no one who even cared enough to repeat, for the millionth time, how breakfast was the most important meal of the day?

Exhausted by her outing to the doctor’s office, her mother allowed herself to be tucked in to the freshly made bed for “a short nap.” The stoneware mug seemed heavy in her hand. Trish watched nervously, afraid her mother was going to scald herself with Darjeeling. But despite her physical frailty, her mother looked sort of terrific. Finally she’d lost the extra weight she’d struggled to lose ever since Trish could remember, one miracle diet after another. You could see the fine bone structure of her face again, the delicate collarbones that Trish recognized from old photographs. After the final round of chemotherapy, no more miraculous than all those torturous diets, her mother’s hair had sprouted again, a feathery silver cap, baby soft. Pixieish. Oddly enough she looked younger without the mane of thick brown hair—“luminized” in recent years—that had always been her greatest vanity. She seemed lighter and brighter than the last time Trish had visited, Easter weekend, when everyone—despite the doctor’s reticence—was still speaking in this relentless, almost bullying tone of voice about her recovery, her resurrection. Her mother seemed relieved. She seemed grateful that they had all stopped pestering her. When she could keep her eyes open, she read the Buddhist books that Carlos, Trish’s older brother, a gay Zen monk and hospice volunteer, had sent her. Carlos had watched many people die, including his longtime partner, Roc. And the one before him.

During the flight to Kansas City and the two-hour shuttle ride to Columbia, Trish had a vision of how things would be when she...

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