Sandra took the flowers in her hands and slowly trimmed the ends, pulsing the thick handles of the kitchen scissors. The grain of the metal clipped into the stem of a rose, and the snipped bit fell away and bounced as it hit the metal rim of the sink. The rose was a fake thing, a thing of youth grown from a Petri dish.
She remembered herself as a thing of youth: a stop-motion of possibilities animating her body as she kept pace with foot traffic on the Bowery. Now those infinite selves were shorn from her like the stems that bounced into the farmhouse sink that she and Ed would once have been so proud to afford.
Trimmed, the flowers slid into a vase. She placed it on the windowsill where the noon light caught the glass and threw diamonds across the kitchen floor. The AC blew, and somewhere outside a motor droned; distant kids screamed in playful tones that caught in the insulation and muffled.
From the next room, she could hear Momma Eugenia wheezing. Soft numbing words from Ella. Dory's voice piped up—that same manufactured chipper that she’d cultivated their entire lives — positive as Dory. “You think Momma would like the TV on for a little while?” Ella's denial hung in the disapproving silence.
Sandra took a step, trod on one of the little diamonds cast on the floor, thought better of leaving the vase in the kitchen, and picked it back up. She carried it with her and slid it onto the side table, next to where Momma Eugenia was sitting in the TV room.
“Pretty,” murmured Ella, performing the words towards her.
“See Mom,” said Dory, “Pretty flowers.”
Momma Eugenia's lids lifted: a flash of cornea, eyes like rippling milk shot through with a lace of blood. Feeble lines traced a memory of a smile around her mouth.
At the ambulatory office, they'd been made to wait for hours. They took turns with Momma. Sandra and Dory had gone down to the cafeteria together, leaving Ella with Mom. Mashed potatoes and gravy with green beans, served up from a tray of steaming water—she ordered a slice of sausage pizza, “with the vegetables.”
The cafeteria was on the sixth floor, with a wall of windows. As she chewed she watched a hawk sail circles over the parking deck. It rose with each passing, looping higher and higher before angling into the still air and finally disappearing around the corner of another hospital wing.
Back in the office, a nurse slipped a heavy Velcro band around her mother's bicep. A needle found the blue piping of a vein beneath her rice-paper skin. In the chair, Momma Eugenia had looked translucent, a woman made of glass noodles.
The diagnosis was whispered in the hall, the three sisters crowding the man in the white smock. “A week or two at most,” his voice spoke low. “That's the best we can hope for.”
Now Ed stayed later at work. The kids were out to summer camp all day, then snuck in the back door in the late afternoon with the look of dogs who have been caught ripping up the feather pillows while their humans were out at the office.
Momma Eugenia slept on a futon in the TV room. Ella and Dory were over by 9.30 each morning, one or the other — sometimes both. Dory always brought doughnut shop muffins. The nurse would drop in each evening for an hour, bustling with an efficiency that shamed Sandra. Sandra always offered the woman ice cream afterward, leftover muffins, “or a beer,” but the woman said no.
This morning, Momma woke to pain. Sandra could hear it in her voice. She had Ella and Dory on the phone immediately, and then there they were, all of them waiting.
It was two PM when Momma went, her breathing more ragged, the air that rasped into her lungs gone parched before it even passed her lips. They all watched as it happened — when the breathing stopped.
The light had moved, and now it cast in through the Southwest windows and caught the vase where it stood on the little folding table next to Momma, once again throwing diamonds. Bright little sunspots cast across her body so that she had become perforated with the light.
“Momma.” Dory squeezed Sandra’s shoulders, drawing up against her back, “Momma.”
The touch of her sister, the leaving. Sandra’s mind veered, pulled away to reject her reality.
Death startles in its absence: the eyes of milk that had unveiled the pupil with an effort like that of a liquid floating stone, the ligaments in the arms, tensing beneath the blue ropes, the blood that ceased to flow. The lids remained open.
A body of her mother’s, she thought.
Caught breath inflected the space between the sisters. One by one they stepped forward. It was a ceremony; each set of lips touched the forehead with its skin of paper.
Last in line, Sandra traced the cheekbone with her finger and felt the powder cling to her fingertip — powder that Momma Eugenia had insisted on wearing even to the very end.
Tears in her sister’s eyes. Watching the sunspots drift across their mother’s body, draw past it, slowly climb the credenza.
After a time Dory rose and suggested that she fix some lemonade. Ella nodded, and Sandra assented with her eyes, remaining.
The two sisters shuffled toward the kitchen and then, as if bobbing up in the tail of their wake, Sandra rose and turned, her gaze finding the window. She looked for a bird: a robin or an oriole. She thought of the red-winged blackbird.
Her mother had owned a flamenco scarf throughout their childhood that had been the envy of her daughters. The fabric was actually from Sears, not Spain, and had been cut and finished with a few simple stitches. When she'd worn it on Sundays, the girls had called it the blackbird scarf, named for the red-shouldered birds that hunted worms in their yard. Sandra wished she had it now. She wanted to swaddle herself in it, to wrap it around her fist.
All her life, she'd heard that spirits return as birds, but outside the window, the sky was empty and sere, a great blue vastness that seemed impossible to fill, no birds, not even clouds.
How many clouds had she seen in her life and forgotten? Her mind filled with memories, yet she couldn’t clearly picture a single cloud in detail. She could only approximate with her mind's eye. Each had sailed over her, just as her past lovers had sailed through her life and faded, the feeling a thumb tucked into the seam of her skirt, strolling down the Bowery, lost from its owner — just as she herself had faded, in the manner she had been then: Sandra on the Bowery — as had Momma too: feeding her and the other kids mashed potatoes with green peas nested in gravy, or her arm looped around Daddy, Momma looking youthful in a bluebell dress.
No tears splotched Sandra's view of the sky, but the glass looked aged with gravity, drooping. Even it was amorphous with the truth of time. She blinked. She wished for a bird: a blackbird or the hawk from the parking deck.
As she passed her mother, her eyes remained fixed on the door. A premonition of sobs seemed to find their way to her flesh in silence, starting in her belly before she was truly aware of them, and then moving through the rest of her as bare feet can feel the break of a wave on sand, even when your toes are clear of the surf. But the sand was still dry against her feet and no tears came to her eyes.
The photo of Ed caught her eye from the table by the front door. As she swept past it she caught it with her fingers and turned it face down.
The thick climate seal on the door made a sucking sound as she stepped onto the porch. The light enveloped her, pulling her into the great apathy of summer. Lawnmower engines, car honks — the cry of birds somewhere.
The porch seemed as fake to her as the rose, but she strode across it, stepping into the uniform grass that Ed had aerated a few days prior. Her bare toes dug into the dirt plugs.
White heat, the vastness of sky. Her mother had been a guide, a guard, a menace, and sometimes simply a person that she had grown up with. Now it seemed that she was cut off from that growing. Now Sandra was alone at the vanguard.
Something clanged from the green lot in the park that bordered her yard and drew her attention. She turned.
A triangular flag shifted in the limp breeze. It hung from a long pole, driven into the park grass. A few spectators stood around rucksacks, near the border with the gravel car lot. A cluster of eight men milled about in the center of the field. Each wore armor painted with fleur de lis, Teutonic crosses, or dragons. They broke apart and formed into two units.
Numbly, she watched as the men broke lines, roared, and charged. Padded wooden weapons clacked against armor. A brute of a knight drew out in front, slammed into another man, and batted his weapon down.
Fake swords clattered on plastic armor. Men fell, others shouted. A couple of onlookers cheered from their fold-out chairs by the cars.
Sandra wrapped her arms around herself, hugging her ribs. They on the far side of the chain link fence, and her a bystander in her own front yard — she was tiny, a singular speck beneath the vast cloudless sky.
The American linden by the street caught a gust down from the mountain range and she felt the shadow of its limbs reach out and pass across her. The triangle flag fluttered so that she could see the insignia: a blackbird, red streaks on its shoulders.
The knights drew back, roared a battle cry, and charged. The big knight broke through, but he'd taken a hit. He screeched as though his arm had been shorn off and tumbled to the ground, holding the limb behind him, while letting another man drive a faux-sword against his breastplate, as though impaling him.
Tears flowed down Sandra's cheeks: the sobs no longer insulated with sand but flowing over her feet now, breaking across the shore of her body. The blackbird flapped over the field in its heraldry.
How was it that she had come to live here? How was it that she had come to live for so long?
The tears beaded on her cheeks, hot and salty as the great salt lake. She felt the Utah sun on her flesh, kissing the dry, papery flesh beneath her eyes, so similar to her mother's. She felt the wind lifting her hair. The sky above, contained everything and nothing, disinterested and infinite. And she, 56, had things to do, a funeral to plan, kids back from camp in two hours, a life to believe in.
She took another look, fixing her gaze on the larpers. Two swordsmen dueled, feinting with their foam swords like angry geese. Behind them, the two women by the truck shared a cigarette.
Stepping onto the front step, Sandra looked up once more at the mountain sky and remembered when the world used to feel infinite, when every potential reality thrummed in her with equal possibility, crowding for space in the vastness of a future life that seemed in no way knowable. Passing onto the porch she reminded herself that it still was.
