Imposter
Haven’t figured out which is better. Haven’t figured out which is worse. I’m sitting at Mom’s dining table, listening to the washer work on the small load of her laundry that I put in a few moments ago. Hum and whoosh. Couldn’t the caregiver have done that before she left? Drinking instant coffee. Screen door open to let in the sound of a thousand crows—pissed off about something. And texts lighting up my phone, popping like corn in the last thirty seconds in a microwave. But which is better, which is worse: the “Let me know if I can help” brevity—“if” being the operative word—or the long epistles offering advice based on personal experience: “When MY mom had a stroke … When MY dad was dying …” The latter seems to require a response that at least echoes the time and effort they put into their text. And I don’t currently have the bandwidth for that. It’s like swatting flies. I am doing laundry. Don’t send me an inspirational poem. I am trying to drink this coffee before it goes stone cold. Parsing out the day, thinking about Uber time, how to find the room, whether to bring a book, whether to call my brother, Sam, now or later, whether I should sneak in a visit to my demented husband on the way home. The crows have given way to songbirds.
***
You have the credentials. College educated. Intellectual family. World traveler at ten years old. Career at one of the most prestigious teaching hospitals in the country. But here you sit in a hospital room, next to your mother’s bed, looking into the earnest eyes, gray like a storm at sea, of a young physician who is explaining “comfort care” as you pretend you understand. You don’t. But you agree. You push for it. You KNOW she is dying. You think about when your last dog died at the vet—you said, “If I had a gun, I would shoot her myself.” That’s how you feel. End the suffering. The doctor explains: Remove the IVs. Stop the testing and monitoring. Remove supplemental oxygen.
“So, no glucose drip? No water at all?”
“Yes, that’s correct.’
On your say-so, your mother will be deprived of water—the one thing, other than air, that every creature needs to survive. You get to decide.
Later you will read it in her notes in the portal: “Explained to Daughter:” “Daughter authorized.” Now you watch her as she slowly declines. One day struggling, reaching out. Grunting and moaning. The next day mewing like a newborn kitten. The third day—Is it the third day?—motionless, limp. Her eyes are closed, her breath slow and shallow. Her flesh cleaves to her bones.
“She looks like a high school kid,” your brother marvels. She is so tiny, as you stroke her bare arm, touching her more than, and in ways, you never, ever have done in all your long lives together.
You did this. You are doing this. You decided. The responsible, the expert.
The imposter.
***
The day after my mother died, I went to the care facility where my husband is housed. I hadn’t seen him in a while. I didn’t know how long. Mom’s stroke had stopped time. There was before, and there was—there is—after.
He was slumped on the battered leather sofa, the one his sister and I call the “scabies sofa.” I tried to give him a hug—he didn’t rebuff me, but didn’t respond. I’d gotten there just five minutes before lunch. As a staffer defty relocated him to the dining room, I was allowed to join him at his table, where another man, who seemed to be in only marginally better condition, was already seated. Leo was silent, but this other guy was chatty.
“He knows,” he intoned. “He controls it all.”
I felt a frisson of fear.
The meal was a Sloppy Joe (aptly named), peppers and onions, and roasted potatoes. Leo, draped in a terry cloth bib, started eating with a spoon, but then devolved to stuffing food in his mouth with his fingers. The peppers and onions were slick with oil.
My cell rang: the mortician.
“Is this a bad time?”
I leapt to my feet and hustled out into the hallway, where I settled gratefully onto a non-scabies chair. We talked about biodegradable urns. I saw Leo dart out of the dining room with the soiled terry bib hanging twisted around his neck, two staffers in pursuit.
Other residents wandered out as the meal wrapped up. Robin, one of the sweetest of the “clients,” perched herself next to me and politely listened to my conversation. Leo returned, sans bib and lowered himself gingerly into the chair on my right. Seconds after I hung up, a text came from my lover—easily identified by the ping that I assigned to his communications.
Good time for a call?
Why, yes! I touched his number. When he answered, I told him where I was, and he began to apologize for the interruption, but I reassured him. We chatted. He asked after me and my newly orphaned emotions. He had had a tooth pulled that morning, and had also seen his cardiologist, who gave him a good report on his EKG. I was relieved and told him that I often fear him dropping dead during sex.
“Are you on speaker?”
“No.”
“If I do, they could call you the Blowjob Black Widow.”
I laughed. Robin, who hadn’t left my side, smiled. And beside me, the bent-over shell of my husband chortled along with us.
***
Four days after, I finally return home. I feel disoriented. Where do I really belong now? Ten days in Mom’s empty house have destabilized me. Ungrounded. I have dreams of flying. I write a poem—angel of death, with dry lips. I find I can’t erase the image of the terror in her eyes as I held her during the seizure, as I siphoned the bubbling torrent of spit that kept coming and coming.
Sam calls, and after a few moments of how-are-yous, he brings up the reason for his call. Sam has a wife. Isn’t this always how things go? Wife has great expectations. “You know, Shelly just had her birthday, and Mom didn’t have a chance to write her a check. She literally was reaching for the pen when the first stroke happened.”
This is a fucking lie. Mom and Shelly despised each other, and after a blow-out fight in the hospital a month before, Mom told me—TOLD ME—that she wasn’t going to communicate with her ever again, unless she apologized. No birthday check. No card, even. The apology, as it turned out, never came. But the greed is evergreen.
Sam and his wife have a relationship similar to the MacBeth family’s. Dark energy directs the throne.
I ask, “How much did Mom usually give her? $5,000?”
There is a pause.
“Uh … yeah. Five.”
I am stunned. Blunted.
“Let me look in the checkbook.”
Mom kept good records. Oct ’22: $1,000. Oct ’23: $3,000. I take a photo of the 2023 register, text it to my brother, and tell him a duplicate check is in the mail. I write it and send it.
The phone rings a couple hours later. Sam.
“I think that Mom always gave Shelly the same as me.”
“No—I checked the register. She gave the spouses half of what she gave us kids. Sometimes less.”
A pregnant pause ensued. I could sense Lady Shelly hovering off my brother’s shoulder. Bloody hands clenched at her side.
***
My toenails are painted silver, a sudden impulse before I trysted with my lover, four weeks ago. A thousand years ago. I am sitting with Robin. We ask an aide to take a picture of us together.
“You are so pretty!” I tell Robin.
“No, you are pretty!”
We discover our birthdays are only six months apart.
With tears in her voice, she asks me, “Can you tell me what I am doing in here?”
I can’t.
Leo, slumped beside me, wordlessly points at my toenails. He looks at the ground, because he can no longer look up.
“Pretty, right? Silver!”
He has no idea who I am. I am certain of this. Suddenly, quick as a cobra strike, his hand shoots out and he grabs the big toe, the one that was operated on back in the spring, and twists it—hard—as if he wants to screw it off and jam it in his pocket. Pain induces me to kick him with my other foot.
“HEY!” I yelp. “Quit it!”
He releases the toe, and without a word, shuffles off—a strangely animated pretzel.
Robin, sitting beside me still, remarks derisively:
“Pervert.”
November 12, 2024
Amy Bates
Amy Bates is a writer of poetry and creative nonfiction, living and working in San Francisco. She graduated from Whitman College with a BA, majoring in English Literature, with a minor in French.