First 2500 words 1_20_2014

Chapter 1 Fallen Woman

If you had not fallen
Then I would not have found you
Angel flying too close to the ground

- Willie Nelson, "Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground"

Age 30, Mom age 50

I braced myself before answering. Calls coming from Mom’s section of Texas usually meant heartache. Still I answered because weeks had gone by since I’d heard from her, and because she had no phone to call her back. I was grateful for the merciful new caller ID showing me the unknown Houston number, so I wasn’t completely ambushed. “Hello?’ I flinched in that suspended moment before the speaker’s response sprayed shrapnel through my thoughts.
He was calling collect from a pay phone to say he had found her unconscious at an abandoned gas station. “She was bleeding,” he said, “from her mouth and – and – you know, her bottom.” I squeezed my eyes shut but the truth remained. The pain hit. My temples beat objection, hardly containing reality. I thought I might fall. Yet I stood, held the phone to my ear, immobile, noiseless.
I could picture her there, lying on her side in the gravel. It was summer. She probably wore shorts, wasn’t covered as well as she would want to be, and was in the most vulnerable state. Maybe she wore an old t-shirt, her hair wild, dusty against the slab. Maybe the blood trickled and dried. Was it enough to pool? Had someone kicked her? Had she passed out before falling? Was she there for an hour before he found her? A day?
The Voice broke in again about calling an ambulance that took her to Hermann Hospital, and then remained anonymous despite my asking. I realized he would hang up without revealing himself. “Please!” How did he know who she was? The last time we talked she told me didn’t have any I.D. Having no permanent home, she didn’t have a place to store such things. How did he know my number? How did he know he should call me? Click.
The blessing? At least he called and she was alive. For now. As I prepared to leave Austin to get to her, I was still distraught. Knowing a few facts didn’t help with the kinds of questions I had now. How had my own mother come to this? Should I have done more to help her?


After the phone call that day, I must have packed for the trip and driven from Austin to Houston’s Hermann Hospital. I don’t remember doing that.
I do remember being with my mom. Getting to her was both a relief and a nightmare.

Please don’t let her go without me seeing her, I prayed, and please don’t let her be horribly sick and suffering. One of those requests was answered affirmatively.
By the time I got to the door of her hospital room, it was dark inside and out. The yellow, pie-shaped slice of light from the hallway spilled onto the floor. Mom used to make pie, sometimes cream with yellow filling, or banana pudding with vanilla wafers, and she’d ask me if I wanted to lick the mixing bowl. But I would not find her making anything fun tonight. What I found, partially illuminated, was a barely recognizable shadow of Mom.
I walked gingerly across the room and dragged the cumbersome, institutional chair to her side, only the rails of her bed between us. I wanted to crumple when I saw her more closely.
Once, I tanned a monkey hide as part of a science class. During the tanning process, the skin – the leather – sort of turns a yellowish color and wrinkles, but it’s still somewhat supple at that point. That night in her hospital room, this was what my mom’s hands reminded me of, except her yellow skin was also brown from overexposure to the sun and elements.
That night she reached and clawed with those hands. Were those the same hands that had brushed my hair, sewn my Halloween costumes, put cold rags on my forehead, taught me simple piano songs? Once, she used to push my cuticles back neatly and trim them, filing the nails in a pretty half moon shape. Her own nails were now thick, yellow, splitting, dirty.
She struggled, fought against the railing, fought with her sheets, tried to sit, tried to get out of the bed, called out for help, called for drinks. In my own head, a hundred voices also gave me various orders in reaction. Run! Calm her down! Call the nurse! Let her be! She’s not hurting anyone.
But my loudest thought was “tie her down with the straps. Please. She is weak. She shouldn’t move.” She was detoxing so violently that she was out of touch with reality. Hallucinating. Just strong enough to move and fall out of the bed in her flailing attempts to get me to “bring [her] a brewsky!” Eventually the nurse did tie her to the railings.

The worst mixture of love, sympathy, empathy, disgust, sorrow, nausea. That’s what I felt. It actually swallowed me. I was bound by it as sure as the canvas straps of the hospital bed bound my mother.

Nothing soothed her. Not the Ativan, nor the pain killers. She was wild and virtually psychotic. I was completely helpless; I could not help her. To watch her was torture. So, I did the only thing that I could imagine. I began to sing a prayer that she used to sing to me. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound. She looked up at me, mouth agape. Her eyes attempted to focus. I kept singing: that saved a wretch like me. She began to sing with me, “I once was lost…” I smiled at her, and she at me, “but now am found, was blind but now I see.”
Finally, she slept.
She was dying, the doctor told me out in the yellow hallway. Her stomach was actually eating itself. She not only was jaundiced and had cirrhosis, she needed a new liver. When I asked if she were a candidate to get one, the doctor looked at me like I was a candidate for the psych ward. You see, he explained, she caused her liver failure. Plus she doesn’t want to stop drinking. So many of her other organs are failing. It would be a lost cause. I don’t know how she’s alive right now. I give her, maximum, a week.
The thud of that truth was authentic, familiar. As we waited for the inevitable, the doctor tried to tell her about her severe condition.
“Ma’am, you have acute cirrhosis of the liver, your stomach is basically eating itself, and you have jaundice.”
“I wonder how I got that.”
The doctor explained that almost always it is caused by alcohol abuse, and that very rarely it can be caused by coming in contact with a chemical like a cleaner to which one may be allergic.
I was thinking, this is it. This is the moment of truth. Someone else besides me, someone with a degree in this is officially putting it out there. She will get it.

She piped up, “Well, I wonder what on earth I was cleaning with.”
Mind you, she had no home to clean. The level of denial that an alcoholic can achieve is sometimes astonishing and tragi-comical. It may give a hint as to how much pain someone must be suffering in order to hang onto the bottle at that point.

And so it was the moment of truth. Not for Mom, but for me. I got it, finally. I got it that she would not. I would have to love her just like that, just as she was, or wish something in vain for the rest of what little time we had left.
I started thinking about what our lives had been like, what happened, and what they were like later on.


Chapter 2
Where there's smoke...
Age 8, Mom 28
So Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego came out of the fire, 27 … They saw that the fire had not harmed their bodies, nor was a hair of their heads singed; their robes were not scorched, and there was no smell of fire on them. - Daniel 3:26-27

Most years after school let out, I spent several weeks with family in East Texas. The summer I was eight at Granny and Papa’s house, my cousins, a friend, and I devised a plan. We lay in wait for Granny to neglect her square, vanilla, leather box of a purse then lifted three Marlboro Red cigarettes from her matching cigarette case – one for each of us.
In the heat of the summer, we crouched like barn cats in the scorched grass behind the old, wooden shed. We had stolen some matches, too. My friend had stringy, blonde hair, a tiny, sturdy body and a hard, worn face even though she was only seven. Her lime green shorts were dirty, too short and too worn in the seat, her faded yellow and white striped cotton top fit just barely, but it wasn’t cute. It wasn’t fresh or something a mom who wanted her daughter to have darling clothes would let her daughter wear. She showed us how the tar from the cigarette stained a white Kleenex when she blew a smoky breath into it. It made a nasty orangey brownish spot right in the center as the three of us choked and laughed.
We smoked the cigarettes, and that was exciting. But, as B.B. King said, soon enough “the thrill [was] gone.” Bigger and better became the goal but stealing more cigarettes was out of the question since surely too great a number would be missed.
Now Granny and Papa smoked so much that the whole “living room” was hazy. Papa had a silver Zippo lighter that always smelled like the kerosene he poured into it, and he showed us how he could blow smoke rings. I had such good memories of those times that for many years whenever I smelled smoke I felt sentimental about it. But that wasn’t the end of the tobacco love. Granny also chewed it. Beechnut, to be exact.
We got a good idea. We would steal some of Granny’s chewing tobacco, dry it out for about 24 hours, and then smoke it. We snaked some of the tobacco and some paper towels, found a proper spot in the back bedroom, and spread it out the way some little girls dry out flowers to save. We checked on it every few hours to see that it was drying well and whether we were close to being able to smoke it.
About four the next afternoon it was ready. But wait. What would we roll it in to smoke? We needed some kind of paper. Granny wasn’t too concerned about having a lot of art supplies on hand for us kids, but we had a lot of chicken liver dressing and shelled a bunch of purple hulled peas on the back porch. In any case, there was no paper in the entire house except for Granny’s Redbook magazine. It would have to do.
I was a long way from being the coolest one in the bunch so they had to show me how to roll. And by God, we smoked that dried chewing tobacco in chemical- and ink-treated magazine paper. My friend could really blow some dark tar stains without a filter. Something in me shifted. This time, it felt dirtier. Planned out. More dangerous.
After I had stayed with Granny for about a week, I returned home to Houston and to Mom. I was sure she would figure me out. I was wracked with guilt and could not believe we had gotten away with it for that long, but I tried to tell myself to keep it together because I was sure my cousins wouldn’t tell and didn’t want me to rat them out.

One day passed. It was Sunday, so we went to the Baptist church we had attended for years. I held my secret in, but I was sure that my guilt could actually be seen among the truly holy. It was somehow seeping out like black sludge from under my feet. That night I managed to fall asleep.
In the morning, miraculously, another day began. My smiling mom glided into my room, beautiful brown hair, cute shorts outfit, and asked me with her sweet face if I had fun at Granny’s, and I could not keep holding the guilt in. It was too much against her glory. I let the words sink into my mire. I hoped she wouldn’t hate me or punish me forever but I was ready regardless.
What she did was sit with me, listen to me, take me seriously, look at me full in the face and say, “You did the right thing by telling the truth. And since you did, I will not punish you for this. Last, you must not do this again.”
I didn’t.
I found myself thereafter telling my story, telling the truth – regardless of the consequences – and hoping for the best because sometimes, if you tell the right person, the best happens. They hear you, see what you’re doing right, forgive you for what you did wrong, and hold you accountable for future actions which especially include telling the truth even if you're the only one who can or will.

Chapter 3 Lullaby and Goodnight
Age 9, Mom age 29
From the time I was six until I was eighteen, we lived in Southwest Houston close to the Astrodome. The neighborhood was humble and filled with good folks, nice families. Our home was tiny and had few frills. In that house, my prized possession was my bedroom set. I later learned that my folks had purchased it second hand from the family down the street, arranged for me to spend the night with a friend on Christmas Eve, then moved it, painted it, and set it up for me to have on Christmas morning.
One night when Mom said it was time to go to sleep, I was lying in bed with my spring green and white checked bedspread and matching canopy swathing me. Even with this sweet present from my parents surrounding me, that night I felt scared for some reason. Then Mom came in. She walked into my room gracefully, sat down beside me, and reached her slender hand out to place on mine. She effortlessly sang to me, her voice sweet and rich like brown sugar – once again – “Lullaby, and good night…” I wasn’t scared anymore.
After the song she stood, smiled, told me she loved me, walked to the door to turn the light out and said, “Good night, Irene!” Other nights she sang Amazing Grace. Sometimes she said, “Don’t let the bed bugs bite!” But every night she was there.