Free The Art of Mending by Elizabeth Berg Page B

said, and she stopped smiling. I think she was genuinely surprised at my response. “Why would you wish a thing like that?”
    “Because. We’d go to heaven if we died right now. If we live much longer, we probably won’t. Our sins will get bigger and bigger.” She had turned on her side, facing me. “Anyway, I don’t like it here. I don’t really like it.”
    I’d lain still for a moment. Then I’d said, “Go back to your own bed. You’re creepy. You’re so creepy. I’m telling what you said.”
    “No, you won’t,” she’d said. And she’d been right. I’d always let her bear her peculiar burdens alone.
    IN THE ICU WAITING ROOM, Steve was hunched over a magazine, one leg draped over the arm of his chair. “Where’s Caroline?” I asked.
    “Don’t know. Don’t care.” He looked up at me, shrugged.
    “She just told me something really incredible.” I repeated for him the story Caroline had told me about our mother. When I finished, he straightened in his seat, put down the magazine. “Jesus.”
    “I know.” I supposed he was thinking the same things I had: How did I miss this? How could the mother I had be the mother who did such things?
    The door to the lounge opened and a somber-faced woman entered and sat on the chair closest to the door. She was wearing blue-jean shorts and a sleeveless white blouse, a pair of sneakers with no socks. She carried a large straw purse, and lying across the top of it was a battered teddy bear. She nodded at us, her eyes shining with tears.
    “Hi,” I said softly.
    “Hi.” She picked up a magazine, stared determinedly at it, shivered slightly in the air-conditioning. The room was rich with a unique kind of silence that was full of things that needed to be expressed but couldn’t be. I looked at Steve, pointed to the door, and he followed me out.
    “She must have a child being admitted,” I said. “My God. Can you imagine your child being in the ICU? I’d go crazy if one of my children had to be in there.”
    “Where do you think Caroline went? Speaking of children.”
    “Beats me.”
    He leaned against the wall, crossed his arms. “Well, now I feel like a real jerk. But do you think . . . don’t get mad, okay? But do you believe her?”
    “Oh. . . . No. Probably not. That’s why she left, because I made her feel like I don’t believe her. I’m sure it’s not literally true; Caroline always exaggerates everything so much. But if she—”
    The elevator dinged, the doors parted, and we saw my mother coming down the hall. I watched her, trying to see if there was something about her that would confirm or deny what Caroline had just told me. But she was only my mother, the woman signing my report cards, applauding my first ride on my bike without training wheels, chopping onions with a match held between her teeth to keep from crying, carpet-sweeping the living room, standing at the foot of my bed to hold Anthony as a newborn, her hand protectively cradling his head with great skill and care. I had to talk to Caroline’s husband. If not her therapist.
    My mother had changed clothes, combed her hair, regained her regal bearing. But as she came closer, I saw a look on her face I couldn’t quite decipher. “I just saw Caroline on the way out,” she said. Neither Steve nor I said anything back. “She’s going home, she said. She’s not coming back.”
    “Ah,” I said, as though it made perfect sense. As though it were what I’d been waiting for.
    “I do not understand that child,” my mother said. “I never have and I never will.”
    “She’s going home to her house?” I asked.
    My mother nodded. “I’m going in to see your father. I’m going to tell him something came up for Caroline at work that she’s got to go home and take care of. He doesn’t need to know she didn’t care enough to see him come out of the hospital tomorrow.”
    “Well, she’ll be over, I’m sure,” I said.
    My mother looked at me, angry. “You know what I