No Motive

88 No Motive Luanne diBernardo There was nothing more she could do and so that’s what she did, nothing. Variations of it, like the nothing of watching television, her eyes blinking themselves across the room like a fly in search of a worthy landing, hopeless. The nothing of walking past bedrooms that refused to feel empty, the air still fattened with anguish. The nothing of laundering clothes, of dusting furniture, the nothing of feeding herself when hungry or not, her pangs unnoticed for years now. The nothing of washing her face, of walking the hall where she never noticed the threadbare path insisting she search for something since gone, where nobody waited to be stretched, wiped, or bathed in a room where nothing , not anything, remained to be done, to the couch where if she rested or not it just wouldn’t matter. Irene would be sixty-seven in about as many days, a number she hadn’t given thought to until filling out her sons’ admission forms, Conor and Kirk, forty-four-year-old twins with the same ruddy freckles, same crimson curls, even the same degenerative disease, two who lived longer than anyone reasoned, not her words. She barely noticed their abilities lessen, her duties multiply since they turned nineteen, twentyone years of caretaking, no use to think about how or if she might manage one more hour, one more year, not so much as one moment’s thought to her own deterioration, or to the possibility that her children’s lives might have been any different, her own life an afterthought. Her calendar crossed nine months since her boys had been moved, nine months that Forest Lakes Nursing Home had been doing what she had done for so many years, at least until the seizures grew closer, their heads bent low like swans left sleeping. Food moved through feeding tubes and through to their veins, while beneath the boys’ beds hung bladders of urine, emptied now by nurses and not their mother, though she visits them daily. Daily, though there’s nothing, not one thing left that Irene can do, and so she does what she does. 89 Luanne diBernardo The gun she takes from what was once her husband’s dresser, the only drawer unchanged these twenty-three years since his unexpected death. Her hands move to touch his short-sleeved T-shirts, reluctant to waken their hope. Her fingers, precise in their movements, disappear between the folded shirts then return without pause, the pistol not nearly as frightening as the injectors she used to stab her sons’ buttocks, the next day their thighs, always one blackening, always one yellowing. The gun in her hand looks small and uncomplicated, easier to use than the pulleys and lifts that inhabit her home. Irene finds herself drawn by the size of the bullets, how small and good they feel in her hand, how beautifully they slide into each perfect chamber, if only a catheter found a bladder as well. She loads five chambers because five are empty, finds herself moved by the few left in her hand, like sea glass, smooth and cool. Sea glass, she muses, when in the same manner an ear can pop clear, her mind gives way to a minuscule crack, a jagged rupture that dares to expose what long lay buried. A crack so devastatingly clear that, for a moment, Irene is staring at something unbearable, a sensation more real than the pleasing weight of her husband’s gun pressed into her lap, against her groin. She sees him, her then-alive husband on somebody’s motorcycle, a self-proclaimed freebird like Kirk, with his basketball, his August flirtations. Irene watches, cannot look away from her husband’s back, his body less muscle than movement, his forearms stretched forward to clutch the bike’s handles, his movements motored by impulse, desire. His smile unmatched, unforgettable, though somehow she had managed. Their sons, one like him, one like her, wait on the beach, their skinny legs bent beneath them like hinges for raising them close to, then down from, their castles of sand. Through this unforeseen crack, Irene watches closely their boyish arms...