Fallout

My mother blamed the rugs in K-Mart. Toxic fumes, she said. She said she had to leave the store. My aunt found her standing in the sun in the parking lot, gazing at the sky. Three days later she was dead.

Sometimes I wonder if things would've gone differently if I'd stayed. For three more days, say. But that would be giving myself too much power. Something I sadly lacked in my mother's presence.

I'd been visiting for the weekend. Sneaking beers in the basement with my dog, smokes in the garage with my father. I always brought my dog when I visited my parents. A familiar, a go-between. My mother and I had had a falling out on the phone, the air needed clearing. Not unlike the air in the garage, which wafted thick as fog.

The evening I left -- the evening I didn't stay -- my mother and I sat in the family room after my father had gone to bed. Having gypsied about for a number of years, my parents had moved back to the old hometown, to a white clapboard house on a busy street, where on Saturdays you could watch the old Italian ladies promenade past in their black dresses on their way to mass.

That evening -- the evening I left -- my mother did most of the talking. Backlit by the sunset, her hair was on fire. She might've been speaking in tongues. Nothing out of the ordinary for us, who often struggled to find a common language. Except that evening something was different. My mother was using a different voice. Or maybe it was the other way around. Some voice was using her.

Do I really believe that? No. It just sounds good. What I remember is her voice not being the voice I'd always heard. This was a quieter voice, a slower voice. A voice minus the movie-star, the exclamation-point, the tie-it-up-pretty-with-a-bow.

Like this Christmas card a friend sent, a photo of Robert Johnson, lips around a cigarette, fingers splayed across the frets, eyes locked on the camera. My daughter turns it over whenever she sees it, it makes her uneasy. Not Santa-y enough. Too much black and white. Where's the red and green?

That's it. After a lifetime of red and green, my mother's voice that last evening was black and white. Like she suddenly knew something, something simple and plain, something that came from the same place as the new voice. When she told me about the rugs, that they'd made her sick, that she'd had to leave the store, she didn't put a spin on it. She just offered it up. A reason, not an excuse.

A reason for what?

Afterward she was silent for a long time. When she spoke again, it had grown dark in the room. The sun had gone down, the lamps remained unlit. She said,

"The best thing you can do is to keep telling the truth."

I almost fell off my rocker. My obsession with finding the hard reality behind things was in direct contrast to what I'd always called my mother's rose-colored-glasses syndrome. Oil and water, apples and oranges. Though my mother would never admit it, ours was a conflicted relationship. And then -- at what turns out to be the eleventh hour -- she gives me her blessing. After a lifetime.

When I drove away, the moon was rising. My mother was waving good-bye beneath the porchlight, her hand as white as the moon.

All this happened in October. Peak color.

The week of my mother's funeral, I walked my dog around the old hometown each evening, through a tsunami of fallen leaves, vivid even in the shadows of dusk. Each night I drank wine. Each morning I woke hungover, shellshocked, disbelieving. Repeating an endless loop of lost conversations with her in my foggy mind, until it felt as though she was living inside my head, housed inside my skull, trapped there. Like a fetus.

When your mother dies, it's a crossroads. A bomb drops, into the middle of your life, the middle of you. There is you before, and you after. Ten years -- a lifetime! -- passes in a heartbeat. And then, somehow, here you are. Your heart still beating. Your lungs still breathing. Your head still filled with her sound.