Her hand reminds me of when I was young and had the flu or strep throat and she used to comfort me. Or when we’d lie awake in her bed talking for hours until we fell asleep. I always felt so close to her… right before a new man pushed us apart.
“I want to go home,” she repeats.
“You can’t go back to Golden Springs.”
“I want to go to my real home.”
If Mom is up and talking about her town house, she needs stronger nighttime meds. “Your house burned down,” I remind her through a deep yawn.
“I want to go home to Sutton Hall.”
“What?” The shock of what she just said jolts me wide-awake. When I was a kid, Mom took me to visit Sutton Hall several times. Her memories of the old plantation near New Orleans are wholly different from mine. My memories are vague, faded impressions of wrinkled faces, some warm and others cold. Bright eyes or dark scowls and never knowing why some people frowned and others smiled. Never knowing who to talk to or hide from.
The whole place smelled like old rugs and faded murals. I remember the rhythmic squeaking of rotting boards and ancient rocking chairs. Bumps in the night and wind whistling through the live oaks. Long stringy veils of Spanish moss skimming the slow-moving water of the bayou and the headstones in the cemetery out back. And bugs. Lots of bugs.
I was born in Gilroy, California, the garlic capital of the world, and feel no attachment to that moldy estate in Louisiana.
“That’s clear across the country.” As his only direct living relative, Patricia Lynn Jackson-Garvin-Hunter-Russo-Thompson-Doyle inherited the family money pit after Great-uncle Jasper’s demise. Certain branches of the Sutton family tree are no doubt still turning in their graves behind the house.
“It’s our family home,” she insists. Our home? Just last November she’d insisted just as adamantly that she would rather sell the old plantation to gypsies than let me get my hands on it. We’d been at her attorney’s office signing paperwork, and I’d tried to help explain her options to her. Secretly, I’d wanted it sold now so I didn’t have to worry about it after she’s gone. I knew better than to say the word sell, so I gently mentioned that many of the plantation homes in the South have been renovated and turned into wedding locations and special-occasion venues. Mom has always been fond of “lovely” parties with real linen and a silver tea service, but you’d have thought I’d plunged a knife into her neck. She’d gone all Rattlesnake Patty, and everything got twisted in her head. She accused me of wanting her to die so I could turn Sutton Hall into a bed-and-breakfast. I love a five-star hotel, and I hate cooking, which just goes to show that Mom wasn’t in her right mind.
“It’s my birthright.” The last thing either of us needs is a two-hundred-year-old albatross around our necks and a trust that hardly covers the taxes. “I have the front door key.”
I know she does. I gave it to her after it had been sent to me a month ago. It never occurred to me that the key would unlock a nostalgic desire to move.
“Please, Lou.”
I study her profile through the darkness. My life is crazy enough, and my Alzheimer’s mother wants me to take her across the country to a place where the humidity lies on you like a damp towel and makes it hard to breathe.
“Take me home.”
A part of me can’t help but resent what she’s asking. I know it may seem petty given the circumstances, but the thirteen-year-old girl in me wants to remind her that she never considered my wants and needs before she moved us from city to city because she lost a job again, or got a divorce again, or her boyfriend’s wife was threatening her again. She never considered how difficult her decisions have made my life.
“I know it’s a lot to ask.”
Ya think, Patty? Even if I were to take her seriously, Mother’s care is overwhelming, and I’m not sure the nurse I just hired is up for a cross-country trip already. “How would we get there?” After our disastrous twenty-five-minute drive across town earlier, there’s no way I’m driving across the country. One of us would end up dead or found at a rest stop in Kansas with a note pinned to her coat. I’m not saying it would be Mom, either.
“Fly.”
I chuckle at that. I have flight anxiety, or what doctors call “aviophobia.” A more accurate term is “scared shitless” of plummeting to earth in an out-of-control plane, unable to do anything but scream before I’m incinerated in a massive fireball. Air travel is necessary for business, so to save myself from a full-blown panic attack, I usually have a few calming glasses of wine before I board. Flying with Mother, I’d have to drink a few bottles.
“I have to be near my kin.”
That’s the same “kin” who’d disowned my grandma Lily and my grandfather Bob—aka first-cousin-twice-removed Bob—and forced them to leave Louisiana. They’re also the same kin who welcomed Grandma Lily back only after her father died. Well, most of them anyway. Her frowny-faced brother Jasper usually stayed at his galley house in the French Quarter. On the few occasions that he was at Sutton Hall, the two didn’t speak. His twin, Jed, passed the same year as Bob, so no one knows if he would have been as cold to his only sister.
“That’s a long way to visit your kin, Mom.” I don’t remind her that there aren’t any “kin” left to visit. Not that I know of, anyway.
“I don’t want to visit. I want to live there.”
“What?” That’s insane. So insane I’d have to be out of my mind to agree to it. “We can’t move there.” The thought of actually moving Mom clear across the country is so daunting, my mind recoils with horror. “My life is here. Your life is here. What about Earl?” Suddenly, a visit doesn’t sound so bad. “We can vacation there for a few weeks. Stay at the Ritz, where it’s nice and air-conditioned, and drive to Sutton Hall as often as you’d like. We’ll get a two-bedroom suite with a balcony that overlooks the city.”
“You have to bury me with Momma and Grandmere,” she persists.
“We don’t have to worry about that for a long time.” I know the disease that has taken her memory will take her life, but I don’t want to think about burying my mother.
“I need to rest in Sutton soil.”
Technically, she wouldn’t rest in soil but in an aboveground vault.
“Suttons always return to our soil.” This is the first time I’ve heard of Sutton “soil,” but it would explain why Grandmother chose to be buried in the Sutton cemetery rather than in Tennessee next to the man she’d married over her family’s objections. I’ve always thought that the man who smiled and laughed and overfed anyone in his vicinity deserved better than an eternal blank spot under BELOVED WIFE on his gravestone.
“Please, Lou. I have so much left to do.”
There is fear in her voice, and we look at each other across the pillow. Through the darkness, her eyes are shiny with tears, and she isn’t smiling. Sometimes she cries out of confusion. Other times her mind is clear enough that she knows what is happening to her. I don’t know which is worse.
“You have to help me with my final resting spot.”
That is the last thing I want to do with my mother. No matter her shenanigans, I can’t imagine a life without her. I want to dog-paddle in the river of denial for as long as possible. “Mom, we have lots of time before we have to think about that.”