by Andrea Marcusa

We spend our last hour in Mom’s house in her bedroom flopped on the queen-size bed while Alexa plays Mom’s latest music obsession, Taylor Swift. My shoulders sink into the pile of pillows, while Nikki, even though she’s thirty-five and two years older than I am, curls like a shrimp beside me. I scrunch up my knees, so my gym shoes scuff the duvet. “She’s still here,” I say. “Flying around flipped out about her grown daughters lying on the snowy white duvet with our shoes on.”

I pull open the drawer to her bedside table and find an old, barely paged through Bible, the one a priest gave to her as a girl in 1960, and some ancient letters from Nikki and me back before email. One is a drawing of a tiny stick figure girl and a huge mother wearing long dangly earrings, carrying a hefty purse and pressing a phone to her ear. Above them both I’ve drawn a huge red heart. On the table rest four half-read books, cringy romance titles like, The Court of Mist and Fury, Radiance, The Kiss Quotient, each with a bookmark made of feathers. On the bottom of the stack, lays a self-help book on parent/adult-child relationships that looks unread and is overdue at the library by two years.

I move to the second drawer and find an embroidered handkerchief with drops of dried blood that I touch, letting my index finger rest there on them, remembering how Mom’s cheeks always flushed in the cold and after a glass of wine.  Almost presciently, Taylor sings, “We all bleed red, we all taste rain. All fall down, lose our way.” I push the handkerchief into my jeans, unsure of what I’ll do with it and reach back into the drawer. There’s a crystal unicorn with its horn broken off and several prisms, like the ones hanging from her window that in sunlight make rainbows on the walls.

I tell Nikki about this force I feel as I lie here and wonder how it can push me down and flood me up at the same time. Nikki nods like she knows what I mean and then rolls over onto her back and stares upwards as if the answer might be in the sky-blue color Mom had specially mixed for her bedroom ceiling. Finally, she says, “You know, if I were to meet Mom as a peer, we might have been friends. She was so damn interesting and entertaining.” I look over at Nikki and say, “But as a mom she was shitty. Why didn’t the universe send us someone more loving, understanding, selfless?”

Then I feel Mom looking down on us in this room that still smells of the verbena soap she used.  An aroma that, like her, I know will fade with time. So, I dig further back in the drawer hoping to discover something more to hold onto, some tangible evidence of our connection, that she and I were here together, mother and daughter, and I discover a half-full box of saltwater taffy, like we used to get at the Jersey Shore. “Mom was eating candy in bed?” I ask.

Nikki and I both sit up and start pulling out pieces, unwrapping pinks, yellows, blues, pale greens and gorging on the sugary gooiness.  We gobble Mom’s candy like we haven’t had a meal in days, and like we are doing it behind her back and could be caught at any moment and spanked.

And then I imagine Mom walking in, plopping herself on the bed with us, thrusting her hand into the box, and fishing around until she seizes her favorite flavor, chocolate. I glance at Nikki and see her mouth full of taffy. Taylor sings, “Goodbye, Goodbye, you were bigger than the whole sky,” and tears start running down Nikki’s face and then mine begin, and I reach over and hug my sister.

The sun hits the collection of prisms and rainbows light up the wall and we hug and cry and comfort each other as we always have, when Mom flew somewhere for work, or was busy with friends, or away with her boyfriend of the moment, or just napping with her door closed tight, and I taste the sweetness of the taffy and the saltiness of my tears, while Nikki and I hug and hug, the gooeyness melting, flooding the back of our throats until it stings.

Image by LAWJR via Pixabay