Beams

I left the mass and headed down Telegraph Road, looking to get a quick bite to eat at Kerby’s Koney, one of the eight million coney island grease-trap joints that line roads large and small in Metro Detroit, places to get eggs, bacon and hash-browns for $3.99, or a chicken gyro wrapped in warm pita bread or the most delicious, fat-addled mess that might ever cross your lips: the coney island hot dog, which is best done the way it is in this corner of the Great Lakes State: well grilled Kogel Vienna covered in a savory, thin sauce, a heap of raw chopped onion and a slathering of mustard.

Kerby’s sits alone in a sprawling, forgotten parking lot, surrounded by the developed remnants of the boom times of past decades: A Lowe’s, Best Buy and other big box stores shuttered and vacant, grasses and other vegetation sprouting from openings in their facades and other cracks and corners of the decidedly 1990’s architecture, the kind that used lots of squares and triangles and columns of criss-crossing metal. Tiny, weed-like trees poked out of the top of a lonely Olive Garden, where families would eat lunch after an afternoon of shopping at The Summit Place Mall, which we used to call “Scummit Place” because of its inherent ghettoness. The only thing that remains open at the mall is a Sears that no one really shops at.

            I finished breakfast and headed out to the Box, noticing a boy and his father in the middle of the parking lot, which seemed to stretch to the horizon, un-interrupted, its surface blown clean of all trash, like some asphalt desert. The only thing that cut the cracked plane were the metal light poles that sprung up every 15 parking spots or so. The two were racing radio-controlled cars, which were able to achieve top speed as they had an unabated path toward maximum velocity. The cars buzzed and crackled when they hit a tiny pothole. I hopped in the Box and drove away, cutting through the lot and feeling like I was very alone, a stranger, it seemed, in my hometown.

            But there was actually a different motivation for me being on this side of Pontiac than just painting my insides with grill grease. As I made my way back onto Telegraph, I pulled into the county’s patchwork of professional buildings. Deep in between them was a facility for the terminally ill, for the uninsured, for those who needed to turn to the government for help in their most desperate hours of dying – or living, if you can call it that. It was a wretched place that I knew all too well. I’d first come there when I was just 7 years old, the baptismal visit of my mom, who after having spent all the money she had on in-home care and private nurses had to come here for the final act, the long, slow closing of life’s curtains around her. She had nothing and imagining what must have gone through her mind when she was wheeled into her room – a room she would never really leave – still frightens me.

            I’d driven to the facility several times over the years, stopping in the parking lot for a minute or two to gaze at the one-story brown brick building, before driving away, too scared, I suppose, to enter it again, to find out what I’d feel there. When I was a boy, it always seemed 10 times bigger on the inside than it’s short sprawl across a greened open space. But such is the perception of a child. Everything seems larger than life, especially if they are tinged with very adult, very intense emotions. It’s then that perceptions can become monstrously large.

            My father would bring me here after mass every Sunday. We would stop in the lot and he’d throw the car in park and ask me every time if he wanted me to have him come in with me to see mom. My hands pressed under my knees and squeaking on the leather seats of his Cadillac Eldorado, I said no every time.  My parents having divorced several years before, I had taken it upon myself to shield my mother from my father. She belonged to me and no one else, and I wanted to keep it that way.

            And he let me go in alone each and every time, times that would eventually number in the hundreds. I’d walk up and struggle with the heavy doors and then sign-in at the front desk before heading down into the bowels of the place by way of its one stairwell. Along the short route to mom’s room, I’d pass the twisted faces of stroke victims, their bodies tied and tethered to hospital beds; lonely old ladies with gray straw-like hair, sitting in wheelchairs, staring at me as I walked past; the old and the worn, drool dripping from their agape mouths.

            The whole experience was scary, for sure. But as the months and years went by, this place gradually became just like any other. It stopped being a place of frightening faces and random screaming and became simply a place where my mom lived. It became her home, and, in a way, mine, too.

            And so I sat in the Box, wondering if this time I had the courage to enter this place. I put my hands on the steering wheel and squeezed and twisted them on the pliable plastic covering, noticing how it moved subtly. Then I looked at myself in the rearview mirror, looked straight into my eyes, trying to look as deep as I could. There was something in there that began to look back at me and I could feel it coming out of my pupils and bounce back into my vision. Whatever it was, we stared at each other for a few brief seconds. I had to go in, I told myself. It was what I had to do, for to ignore the pleading pull that I felt emanating from inside that building would have been to ignore the order of the universe that had captured me at that moment.

            I took a few breaths and left the Box, waiting for a couple that had just pulled into the parking lot to exit their vehicle and head inside. I wanted to enter just behind them to see what the sign-in procedure was before I made my way down into the past, the unknown, the thrilling idea of touching a spiritual place laid dormant in my mind.

            The couple held the door for me and I walked into the lobby for the first time in over 20 years, my heartbeat so rushed and hurried with anxiety that I swore it would squeeze through my ribcage and section itself into two or three pieces before falling between a few organs. I looked at the sign-in sheet, brightened by a column of bright sunshine that cut though the doors.

            In the time-in section, I wrote down 12:50 p.m., my name and then stopped when I came to “Patient to see.” I thought to myself, should I just write down some average, innocuous name and call it good? Mary Smith? Joseph Baker? Or how about a name so complicated that it had to be real, like Genoveve Commensoli or Sofia Maripovich? To hell with that, I said. I was here to see one person. It’s the way it had always been, and always will be here, in this white-washed place of sheer sadness.

            “Lynda Killian.” That’s what I wrote down. I wrote it like I meant it because I did. And I can’t remember ever being so proud to write my mother’s name, I really can’t. For a fleeting moment, I thought I actually would see her. As I made my way around a corner and toward the stairwell, I felt like I was being held and taken by some kind of hand, some spiritual force. I didn’t feel my legs or my feet. I could barely see through the fluorescent lit hallways, the fog of the past had shrouded my clear sight. I was, literally, stepping back in time for the first time in my life, stepping with feet moved by memory.

            The walls screamed white and the stench of urine and disease and dying hung in the air. I headed down the stairs and opened the door to the lower level, where mom’s room sat near the end of one of the several corridors that shot off of a central nurses station. The same sad, drooping faces pierced themselves into my eyes, breaking through the fog. The same drooping bodies hung off of beds that had been wheeled out into the hallways, a respite, I thought, from the monotony of being forced to live in one place, see out the same window, stare at the same wall or ceiling tile.

            I was led by instinct. At the nurses station, I turned left and walked down the hallway where I knew my mom’s room jutted off from. As the length of the corridor came into full view, I noticed a woman seated at the end of the it, shooting a glare at me like I didn’t belong here, like I should go away from this place. If she only knew, I thought, I could have shared with her why I was here. But my mouth didn’t work. I was so captured with emotions and thoughts that speaking words would have been impossible. I was speaking with my heart.

            I came to mom’s room and turned to look inside. Her spot in the four-bed room, next to the window, was vacant. A small wooden cabinet was bare, ready to receive the belongings of some other unfortunate soul. The bulletin board where my school-work and handmade Christmas cards had been pinned into was blank. The floor beneath the bed where I would climb in, holding my mom, was shinned prickly bright. A black man laid with his back to me in a bed closer to the door, watching television. His gown had come loose, exposing most of his back. He was so thin that his skin stretched around his ribs like brown leather on the outside of an internal cage. I watched him breath for a few minutes, and every shallow inhalation stretched his skin tauter, revealing more bone and greater dips of skin. How many more breaths did this man have? I’d seen enough last ones here, even in that room.

            I thought about entering and standing for a while by where mom’s bed had been. But my feet would not cross the threshold. I was not being led in. I had been led to a spot where I could see in and nothing more.

            But I could hear her speaking to me. She could only say two words, “Right” and “Here.” Over and over, as I told her about school or how my baseball game went or how life was at home with dad, she would say those words. “Right here,” she’d say, words that meant volumes, I’m sure, in her mind, but came out perpetually in that binary way. Words that meant “I’m so proud of you” and “make sure you do your homework when you get home from school” and “I love you” and so many other things too numerous to describe.

            But still, those two simple words were said with a sincerity that can only come from a mother’s mouth to her child. Her right side paralyzed from the cancer in her brain, her right eye blind and right ear silent, she would outstretch her left arm and pull me into her, and I’d fall on her half-alive body.

            “Right here,” she’d say, and then smile at me, a smile that looked out of place on someone in such circumstances. Those in her shoes would every right to hate the world, despise the cards they were dealt and take on a disposition of perpetual sadness. That would be OK and everyone would accept it. 

            But my mother was not that way. I was the best thing that she had in her life, her one greatest creation, a life that would continue long after she had given up and let herself go, away from the pain and lonely nights of wonder. She smiled in the face of death, I think. She smiled right at it and right through it. Her urge to stay with her child meant that she would endure years of suffering, alone most of the time, just to see me for a few hours a week, a respite from the heavy hand of her disease, a chance to crawl out of her situation, a time when she could do what she was the best at: be a mother.

I’d grasp her right hand, curled up tight into a claw, and I’d study the yellow, waxy goop that would accumulate under her fingernails. I’d pull up a finger and then, as if there was a spring in it, it would pull back and into place in the claw. I would hold it tight.

            The last time I saw my mother alive was on Mother’s Day, 1989, an early spring day when the sun seemed to burst in the sky above the Earth. The nurses and orderlies wheeled all the souls in the facility out into a courtyard to enjoy the warm weather, until the yard looked like a outdoor hospital, a random collection of beds and wheelchairs and old, tattered people steadying themselves on a nurse’s arm, their eyes squinting at the explosion of natural, non-flourescent light.

             The air smelled of warmth and dirt and evaporating moisture. My mother lay on her bed, her face turned toward the flaming light. She always loved to lay in the sun and bake, her body becoming a deep bronze that many would envy. It was only until a few years ago when I learned of our Native American blood that I understood where this color change came from, rooted deeply in her skin and in our pasts.

            The rays of sun poured on her, and her face glowed in a buzzing yellow illumination. She let her arms hang at her sides, her twisted body fully relaxed, sinking into the white sheets.

            “It’s so nice out here, mom,” I said. “It’s so warm, so nice.”

            She didn’t respond. It was the first time in my life that my mother ignored me.

            She was in another place, another plane of existence. She was floating on the warmth that was rising from the sun soaked cement. She was drifting to a place that had been waiting for her for a long time. She was allowing herself to fall off the ledge of her existence.

            I left shortly thereafter, leaving my mom alone in the yard, a slight smile on her face, the kind that can’t be contrived. I looked back for a second or two, and the sun’s gleaming light on her bed’s metal rails shot all around her. I left her there, face turned firmly toward the sun, toward goodness, toward her destiny.

            Mom died later that Mother’s Day. I think she felt an opening in the warmth of that early spring sky and she decided it was time to walk through it. I think she was just sick of being sick, and she let herself be carried away on the rays of sunshine that danced all around her. She wanted to go home.

            As I made my way out of the facility, I could barely control myself. A bomb of emotions had exploded in me and were looking for a way out. I signed-out and shot through the doors and into the early June sunshine and let them out, becoming a mess of yelps and squeaks.

            I opened the Box, sat down and cried an explosion of tears, a deluge that tapped into a well that I never knew existed. I cried and cried, wept and wept, feeling cleansed by the entire experience. I was not sad, I was actually happy. There was a feeling of prickly warmth that just swirled around me for about five minutes. Once I squeezed every last tear out, I stopped and looked into the rear-view mirror that I had just before I made the decision to go inside the facility, to chance an encounter with the past.

            It was only then that I saw that I was smiling, and didn’t even know it.