Ma

Here’s a story I tell my wife on nights when I know I won’t sleep right away. Ellis would loosen her robe a little as she scoots under the blanket. “Well, Jordyn, I’m listening,” she would say, and I would tell her about how my mother died.

—

It went like this: we were making our way down Temescal Canyon trail, trying our hardest not to fall on our asses with all the mud that was starting to condense under the heavy rains that came out of nowhere.

This was 2019, the winter before she got too sick. The hiking was all Mom’s idea. She had come into my room unannounced and said that she wanted to take me somewhere. She didn’t tell me where at first. “Just come,” she said. Her doughy features were assembled into a kind of stubbornness, a fragile angry kind that forbade me from refusing. I followed her with a reluctance that never used to be there when I was a girl. When I was a girl, Mom was soft and laughing.

A hardness had taken over her through the years, but it was not always this way. Even when she was first diagnosed with her sickness, she had put up with it as if it didn’t bother her. Dinner was made, my sisters were driven to school, Dad avoided the topic. Life went on. I think her efforts for normalcy made it easier for me to go out of state for college. And I think I was glad for it too. When you know the truth it’s even easier to pretend nothing’s wrong because you know what you’re avoiding. That winter, before she died, I was scared to admit I didn’t know who she was anymore. That scared me more than actually losing her. And I didn’t want to admit that, either.

It was as if time had drained the light from her body and I could do nothing but watch as she got older and I got younger in the sense that I would always be young in comparison to her. In the sense that there has been and always will be this unnamed distance between us that I don’t remember forming. In the sense that when she died, it was too late.

On that day we were trudging through mud that reached mid-calf and pelting rain and bone-chilling wind. I wondered if she had intentionally chosen this remarkably awful day for hiking on purpose to make me resent her. The woman that was my mother walked ahead of me and didn’t look back. I wanted this woman to notice my irritation, to ask what I was thinking, to answer for the unreasonable hike, to name the feeling in my chest when I saw her windbreaker cling to those thin shoulders.

We got to the parking lot and climbed into the car, dragging mud and rainwater across the seats. Mom didn’t start the car right away.

“Let’s not do this again,” she said after a while, glancing at me half-way.

What were we trying to do again? I wanted to ask. Instead I replied, “Yeah. Christ, Mom, can you start the heater? I’m freezing.”

Two weeks after that, Mom collapsed in the hallway and had to stay in the hospital.

On Monday in the first week of June, I tried holding her hand. It was warm, but had it always been this small? The breathing tube in her nose made a soft rattling sound every so often. Above her dark nostrils her black eyes blinked up to look at me as if she was waking up from a reverie each time and was surprised to see I was still there.

“Hey,” I said softly, “remember that time when we got soaked on that hike? How crazy high the mud was? We never did it again. But I wish we did.”

“I love you, Mom. I wish I said it more often, but I’m saying it now. I was just scared of losing you so bad that I was already preparing for when you wouldn’t be there and I wouldn’t be able to say these things to you.”

“I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know how to talk to you about it.”

“The sickness scared me, but it never scared you, Ma.”

“Besides, you’re more than just being sick, you’re my mom. Nothing’s changing that.”

And then she died.

—

I remembered her coming into my room and saying, “Just come.” She must have known there was not much more time for her daughter to gather the words to talk to her like they did before. She must have seen me sprawled lazily on my bed and thought disapprovingly about how my stomach was out again. When she was gone, she thought, she would not be here to tell me to tuck my shirt in. She must have known all this, but had been pretending to not be troubled for so long and so she didn’t say anything. Not a word to me, not even in her final moments.

—

My wife, who must be tired of this night routine now, would reach out and touch my hand. “She heard your voice before she passed. Even if she didn’t understand, what you said would have made her very happy,” she said gently, then turned off the light and embraced me.

It felt good to be told that and hugged so warmly. But although my body accepted Ellis’ words and drifted off to a sound sleep, my heart knew it was too good to be the truth. Besides, when you know the truth it’s even easier to pretend because you know what you’re avoiding. And the truth was that Ma had spoken her last words to me on that Monday in June. She said “you made me sick.”

And then she died.

Ruoer Su is a freshman studying English. When she is not doing school work, you can find her reading or drawing. Ruoer writes about things that have never happened to her, but she doesn’t believe it makes the stories any less real.