A Day for Dying

“Dad hasn’t phoned since the morning,” Nora says to Freddie. Nora has been worrying about the lack of contact, turning it over in her mind, the entire time that Freddie has been talking about her next exhibition. Half-listening, Nora gathers that the paintings are to depict slaves, and she is thankful that Alistair is not in the room. But then, Freddie knows the rules – she would never discuss a topic like slavery if her father were present. She would have scooped up Jethro and left half an hour ago. Now, Freddie explains that she is applying for a grant to help fund her work.

“Do you think I should call Dad?” Nora interrupts. Alistair has taken on the task of ushering his mother to the next life, and Nora knows that she is an interloper, unwelcome on that long, slow journey.

Freddie shrugs. “If you want,” she grunts, unable to hide her revulsion for a grandmother who asked a pregnant Nora, “Do they come out – normal?” and then clearly concluded that they do not.

“Get that boy away from the stove!” Nora commands, noticing Jethro for the first time in several minutes, and Freddie chases her son into the den as Nora leafs through her phone book for Alistair’s parents’ number. She has owned the book since university. Pocket-sized, with a peeling black leather cover and faded gold lettering, it is now held together with elastic bands. As Nora lifts each tissue-thin page, unsticking it from the next, she sees names written in her cramped scrawl; former classmates, former colleagues, parents of her childrens’ friends, members who have joined and left the church, distant relatives dispersed across the globe. The story of her life is here in this little black book.

Nora squelches her disquiet at the fact that she doesn’t call her in-laws often enough to know their number, and dials. As the phone rings, she pictures the chilly little living room on the other end, the heat turned down to save money, every piece of furniture trimmed with flounces, the upright piano cluttered with brass-framed photographs. Many of the pictures are of Alistair, and buried amongst them will be one or two of his children, but none of Nora.

She is about to hang up when Alistair answers. After over forty years of marriage, Nora still has to catch her breath and still the pattering of her heart when she hears her husband’s voice. His greeting is dull with tiredness, and she knows what he will say next. “She passed tonight. Mom’s gone.”

“So soon?” The words fly from Nora’s mouth and she chides herself. Don’t sound so pleased. His parents’ death may mean freedom for you, but your husband is now confronting his own mortality and the realization that he will be next. Nora feels a flash of relief that she does not yet have to face that abyss: while her father died when she was a teenager, her mother still lives, sturdy and strident as ever, swollen feet rooted under the oak dining room table of her home in Trinidad, that little island at the bottom of the arc of the Caribbean.

“She’s with Dad now.” Alistair’s voice trembles a bit. “She went quietly.”

“I’m glad she didn’t suffer,” Nora lies. Forty-two years ago, in that unchanged and unchanging living room, Fiona MacDougall had poured Nora a cup of tea as she said, “I’m glad you’re wearing a shirt. I’ve seen those topless women on television and it’s quite something.” She had passed Nora a plate of cookies and remarked, “Are you going to put your hair into one of those-“ she gestured upwards – “afro things?” But at the end of the afternoon, Alistair’s father had shook his hand and proclaimed, “You have our blessing, lad.” The MacDougalls would never risk the public scandal of further drawing attention to their son’s unfortunate choice of spouse by disowning him for making that choice.

Freddie is back, and Nora can hear Jethro pawing through his bucket of Lego next door. Nora covers the phone and murmurs, “Your grandma died, Freddie.”

Freddie hitches a shoulder. “So?” she scowls.

Alistair’s voice spins down the line. “Before you ask, she told me about the will.”

“I wasn’t going to ask!” Hurt rises in Nora’s chest. She manages the family finances only because Alistair finds it cumbersome to do so. Money has never been her object.

A jagged sigh spikes through the phone. “She left me the house. All the investments.”

“How much?” Nora has missed the critical word, and only belatedly does it strike her, a hammer swinging against the anvil of her heart.

“She put it in trust for me, Nora. Only me.”

Of course she did, the old bitch.

Alistair fills the silence. “I’ll use it for all of us. You know I will.”

“I know,” Nora manages. Her husband has always fulfilled his obligations to his nuclear family. She cannot fault him for that. She was sure that after his parents’ cool reception, their relationship would be over. But he had already given her a ring, and more importantly, a promise, and she understood that they were still hers, as long as she swallowed, smiled, and pretended that her in-laws were the tolerant people they portrayed themselves to be. Tolerant was right: she was tolerated, but never accepted.

“There’s about three million dollars,” Alistair says.

Nora twirls her finger, making the motion of wrapping the spiraling phone cord around her finger, as she used to do when Alistair called. But beneath her iPhone, there is only air. “When are you coming home?” she asks.

Alistair’s breath is a mournful whistle. “There’s the funeral,” he says. “Cleaning out the house. The paperwork.”

“I’ll help,” Nora says. Alistair can’t handle all that on his own. He’ll fall apart. He’s always been emotionally fragile. Not Nora. Forty-two years ago, she walked dry-eyed out of the home of her future in-laws and never allowed Alistair to see even a hint of her distress. She saves that for when she is in the shower; only when the hot water runs over her face does she allow her tears to join in. The humiliation was worth it - Alistair is a Chartered Accountant and head of a prestigious firm, and his success allowed Nora to stay home with their children.

“Can you really?” She hears the hope in Alistair’s voice and realizes that she will be making the five-hour drive without the usual dread curling through her intestines, that when she steps over the threshold, there will be no eyes noticing her skin colour before anything else.

“Yes,” she says, “of course.”

“But Freddie and Jethro-“ Nora babysits Jethro while Freddie does – whatever Freddie does. Conceptual art, performance art, painting murals, hanging things from trees. Freddie’s contempt for her father blazes through every creation. Freddie warned Nora not to bring Alistair to her last exhibition after it was announced on the radio, but he insisted. When he saw their family picture with his face scratched out and the words TOXIC WHITE MASCULINITY in its place, he didn’t speak to anyone for days, but laid in bed groaning with backaches and headaches. Nora was furious with Freddie, who just kept repeating “I did warn you.”

Nora covers the phone and whispers, “Will you be all right here with Jethro if I go and help Dad?”

Freddie’s face twists into shadow, but she says yeah, and Nora turns back to the phone and says, “Freddie will manage.”

When she hangs up, she says to Freddie, “Your grandma left three million dollars.” She speaks the words with reverence.

But Freddie snorts, “Well, what do you expect? She never spent a cent on anyone.” She adds, “Don’t kid yourself. She’ll make sure Dad gets it all, and neither you nor I see a penny. And you know what? He’ll take it.” She picks up her phone and scrolls through it. Then she looks at her mother, her eyes wide. “Mom,” she says. “Mom, you need to call Uncle Selwyn. Right now.” She looks away, blinking, and Nora realizes Freddie is crying.

For a moment, Nora wonders how Freddie could possibly have had contact with Nora’s brother, and then she remembers: Facebook. It used to secretly bother Nora that her daughter has better contact with Nora’s family in Trinidad than she does, but, as Freddie pointed out, Nora could easily get a Facebook account too. And Nora is opposed to the idea of putting all her business out there on the information highway for the entire world to see. She can only imagine what Freddie writes; sometimes snippets of it are repeated back to her by her family and she finds herself blushing on the end of the phone.

Selwyn never asks Nora to call him. If he is requesting that now, and Freddie is crying, that can only mean one thing.

Nora doesn’t need the little black book to dial Selwyn’s telephone number; it is the same as their mother’s, which she calls religiously every Saturday morning.

“She’s gone,” Selwyn chokes, her macho brother. The one who had barked, forty-two years ago,

“You’re really going to stay in that racist country to marry that man? Who will take care of Ma then?”

“Well, all of you,” Nora had stuttered. But Frederica Mason had had five sons before Nora, and then no more children. The only daughter was not supposed to go abroad to study, and certainly not to marry an American and stay in America. But she did, and Nora’s brothers adapted, their resentment assuaged by the American dollars Nora sent home.

“Ma’s gone?” Nora gasps. “Dead? But she wasn’t sick!” Freddie, still sitting at the table, allows her sobs to burst forth now that Nora knows. Freddie is named after her grandmother, and they bonded on the few occasions that Nora took her family home for a visit. Nora is not crying. Not yet.

“We found her just now. Lying on her bed. So still,” Selwyn says, his voice wobbling.

My mother and my mother-in-law on the same day, Nora realizes. This is a day for dying. I am an orphan, she thinks, almost laughing at the ridiculousness of thinking of herself as an orphan at sixty-one years old, with her own children in their late thirties, and a grandson. How can a grandmother be an orphan? But that is how she feels – unmoored, adrift, spinning through space. My mother is gone, and I am next.

“You’re getting some money,” Selwyn says next, his voice accusing.

“What money?” Nora’s mother doesn’t have any money. That is why Nora sends money home.

“She kept bills under her mattress. Lots of them. Twenty thousand.”

“Trinidadian bills?” Nora asks. Despite herself, she calculates the exchange rate in her head. Twenty thousand Trinidadian dollars is a little less than three thousand American dollars.

“No, yours. American,” says Selwyn. “She left a will saying to give them back to you, because they’re yours.”

Nora’s mother must have been saving some of the money Nora sent her for her daily needs. The thought competes with the knowledge that Selwyn has gone digging for a will before their mother’s body has even cooled.

The money is nothing to Nora, and she knows how privileged that makes her. “You keep the money, Selwyn,” she says, as a sudden weariness overtakes her. She just wants to get Freddie and Jethro out of her house and lie down.

But in refusing the gift, she has flaunted her status, and Selwyn snarls, “No. It’s your money. She wanted you to have it.”

Nora doesn’t need twenty thousand dollars. Not when her husband has just inherited three million. But she is sitting across someone who does need money. And an exhibition about slavery would honour Nora’s mother’s life in a way that Fiona MacDougall would hate. “Freddie,” Nora says. “Your grandmother left twenty thousand dollars. It’s yours. Paint her some beautiful pictures.”