She was nearly done now, only her legs and feet. Marie inspected her mother’s heels, the back of her calves and thighs, any pressure points, and decided to put on the special boots the doctor gave her to protect her mother’s feet. They kept the heels off the bed, and suspended so there would be no pressure, and thus, no sores.
She checked her mother’s elbows one more time, and finally took the tub away. She cleaned the blue tub with hot water and put it on a rack to dry. She’d need it again in the evening. Or if her mother had an accident. It happened sometimes, and Marie would have to wash her up again if it did.
Her mother wasn’t gone, mentally, it was just physical, her mother’s problem. Sometimes she would hallucinate or show signs of dementia, but it wasn’t often. Not yet, anyway. Marie knew what the future held as her mother’s disease progressed and was ready for it. She hoped.
She went into the kitchen and sat down at the table to rest. It was topped with cheap plastic, with wood particles coming free from the edges. It was probably older than Ruby herself, but it was all they could afford now. Once the house hadn’t looked so bad, Marie knew. Her mother had made a little money from the film she made, and every now and then, she’d still get a royalty check. Not often, but every now and then.
It had been enough, back then, to buy the five-bedroom house with two bathrooms, and two floors. Most of the rooms were empty now, and the doors stayed closed. In the winter it was too hard to warm rooms that were never used anyway. She’d sold the items inside the rooms, to pay for her mother’s care, and to pay the bills. Now, her mother had a disability check, and government medical insurance, but it didn’t pay for everything.
At least Marie was getting paid to take care of her. If she’d had to do it without pay, she might have lost her mind as she struggled to pay bills. Or starved, because there was no way she could do both. Another state program paid for a nurse to come once a day, and check Ruby’s vitals and her overall health. The nurse would stay for an hour, and that was the only real break Marie had from her home.
That was when she’d run her errands, get the shopping done, and escape. Sometimes, she’d go to the library, pick up some books, something she’d read at night, in bed, to help her get to sleep. Some days, she couldn’t relax enough to fall asleep, and reading would always help her out.
“Mar-…,” The loud sound interrupted her moment of peace, and Marie stood up. She smoothed her hand down her still damp jeans and took a deep breath. She knew what that sound meant. A mess had been made.
She picked up a box of gloves, the paper towels she kept off to the side for these occasions and picked up some plastic bags from the grocery store. The smell hit her as she walked down the hallway, a smell that confirmed her suspicions. She’d have to clean her mother up, wash her again, and maybe even change the bed.
She’d put fresh absorbent pads underneath her mother when she’d finished washing her, but they weren’t always enough. She made one stop, in the bathroom she found a jar of mentholated ointment and swiped a couple of globs up her nose, then went into her mother’s bedroom. The sadistic leer on her mother’s face told her this was no accident.
Sometimes her mother was just a cruel, heartless bitch, Marie had to admit. She tried so hard to be a good girl, she thought, she tried to not be mean, to not give in to her mother’s nastiness but sometimes, she hated herself for it but, sometimes she really looked forward to the day this was all over.
Marie pursed her lips and ignored the garbled cackle her mother made as she pulled the sheet down from Ruby’s legs. Even the mentholated ointment couldn’t keep that out of her nose, but she reminded herself not to breathe through her nose and got on with the task at hand. An hour later, just as she heard a knock at the back door, Marie was done. She’d cleaned up the worst of it, washed her mother, changed the sheets and her mother’s nightdress, and had put fresh pads down.
She walked out of the room, determined not to cry. She wanted to, she wanted to so much, but she wouldn’t. She remembered the way her mother had tried to use her good arm, her right arm, to push Marie’s face down into the mess she’d made and felt her eyes well up. How could being born deserve so much cruelty?
She knew her mother said her father wanted her aborted, but the hateful woman never said what she’d wanted before the accident. She’d only ever said it was too late once she’d woken up and the whole world knew about her pregnancy. That no doctor would do it at that advanced state anyway. Marie suspected her mother had wanted to keep her but had changed her mind once her father died.
Marie was a bright woman, had always done well in school, and had made good grades. She was able to deduce, from what her mother had said over the years, sometimes after a few glasses of cheap wine, that her mother had become pregnant on purpose, to trap the man she’d wanted to force to marry her.
But he’d already been married to another woman, and then he’d died. Her plan, her trap, had failed.
It wasn’t the kind of past people would be proud of, for her or her mother, and her mother drank a lot when Marie was a child. She’d probably said things she didn’t remember saying. Marie didn’t mention those things or ask about them, for fear of her mother’s anger. She’d been slapped one too many times to push her luck.
She was 26 now, and she’d spent 8 years in this miserable hell. At first, it hadn’t been so bad. She’d been able to take her mother out with her, or she’d been able to go out on her own. Within a year, however, Ruby had taken to her bed and had refused to leave it. Of course, her left leg and arm wouldn’t move, and the effects on her spine and hips made movement difficult, so Marie couldn’t really blame her, but she’d wondered how much of her mother’s problems were exaggerated.
In quiet moments, like now when she was headed into town for groceries in the old battered car that barely ran but tried, more thoughts would intrude. Her mother had always been cruel. She could be making this worse for Marie than it had to be. It was within the realm of possibility anyway.
At those times, Marie would think that maybe she could be a better daughter. But Ruby could have, also, been a much better mother.
2
Marie turned into the slight bend in the road with practiced ease. She’d driven the road so many times, she could have made each movement simply from the sound of the tires on the road. A deep sound meant she was on the road just outside of her house, a softer sound, like cloth swishing over metal, meant she was on the bend that came just after the house, the part that led into town and the stores.
Then there were the shadows. She knew where each tall Cypress tree stood, each one dripping with Spanish moss, or where each Tupelo tree stood, and where each shadow was supposed to be now. She’d traveled this road practically every day of her life. Each shadow gave her a point of reference as she drove along.
The law said you had to drive with your eyes open though, Marie thought with a shadow of a smile, so she kept them open. She saw the same old ‘for sale’ sign on a trailer off to the right as she made a stop at the crossing that would take her into town. The tobacco shop had new prices up today, though, the bright orange letters were hard to miss. Mr. Theriot still had his crawfish traps for sale on his front lawn, across the street from the small car dealership that always managed to get new stock but never seemed to sell any cars.