Mildred's Might

Mildred’s knees buckled and she grabbed her son’s arm for support. At eighty-four she was too stoic to cry during a public ceremony. Most widows would have. Mildred’s wiring and particular circumstances were different.

“Mom, here, have a seat.”

Mildred’s greatest fear was not that Michael was gone. After all, she had heard all the rumors… Michael was never ill, he “had a heart attack” according to the medic. Mildred suspected that this heart attack never happened during a car accident, but that it was a dalliance with a B-grade starlet that, shall we say, went…. awry during coitus.

Everyone tried to protect Mildred, but her vision was X-ray, and the situation was not looking good. Still, she chose to protect Michael’s memory and reputation, by pretending not to know and she kept up appearances with the public. Dutiful ignorance is how her mother raised her and she had no desire to spotlight or further amplify her public humiliation. She would have been angry if she didn’t feel so full of pity for her late husband.

After all, what is left of a fool who is willing to risk his entire foundation on a sandcastle? A volatile, red-headed B-grade movie actress with Daddy issues?

“Do you want to say goodbye, ma?”

Mildred, realizing there was nothing to hold onto but a faint memory, tried standing to leave but suddenly felt nauseous. She weakly mouthed, “I think we should get out of here, now.” Her son Steve motioned to their driver to open the door on their approach, and they piled in hoping no one would notice.

As soon as they were in the limo, Mildred livened up as if she had just had a shot of adrenaline, “Eccentric writer who went into seclusion after her husband, the great film director, passed.” I can see the headlines now. “She passes her days with their golden retriever and barn owl at Grey Gardens. She is the laughingstock of the Tinseltown.”

She lowers her voice. “Steve, dear, no disrespect to your father, but I think he was banging a B-grade actress.”

“She’s more like a C-grade actress, ma.”

“A-ha! Suspicions confirmed! How do you know about her?”

“Dad was having an end-of-life crisis, ma. You didn’t deserve this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had one or two more skeletons in his closet. The relevant piece to remember here is that he loved you. The unfortunate piece is that he lost his mind, values – the whole prefrontal cortex just disintegrated at the 11th hour. You should never take that personally. You can’t reason with a bull in the china shop who refuses an MRI.”

Steve paused, wondering if this was too much only four days after rigor mortis.

“Ma, I think you should come live with me and Beth in Virginia.”

“Oh, my GOD, you two! Your father isn’t even in the ground and you’re already starting Operation “put mother-in-a-nursing-home-so-we-can-strip-her-of-her-last-hours-of-freedom! It’s a no.”

“Now, you know how I adore you and Beth and your exquisitely boring routines but moving in with you two temporarily on the way to some mediocre living facility is not my idea of oat-sowing. I love Malibu, and you’ll have to take me out of here kicking and screaming. Besides… I have not even had the chance to date as a newly single woman. Norfolk is not the town for an eccentric woman like me.”

“What about the fires, mom!? What are you going to do during the fire season?”

“I’ll come to visit you on my two-way, round trip tickets.

“Let’s do this,” Steve’s wife diplomatically interjected.

“Why don’t you let me stay with you for a week, to tie up some loose ends here, and then you and I can fly out to Virginia for some quality time together. You can get a feel for real life in Norfolk, and Steve will fly you back out to Malibu. This way you can compare lifestyles side by side and have family near you. Trust me, you’re going to want us close by to help process everything in the coming days.”

“Will I, now?” Mildred sniffed.

“Ok, if it will get you off my case and postpone this conversation a month or two, I’ll comply. But please remember I am an able bodied 84-year-old, I do not have dementia, and I’m not signing any contracts under duress!”

They nodded and pulled up to her Malibu estate and Steve darted inside to get his bags for the airport.

“Are you sure you’re going to be ok here for a week, hon?”

Steve’s wife Beth smiled warmly and nodded. “Your mom can write, and I’ll do my yoga and just chill. It’ll be good.”

“She can also vet my male callers,” Mildred chimed in.

“Mom!” Steve was mortified. His mother never changed. On the bright side, he never had to endure a senile mother losing her filter as she aged, because she never even had a filter to begin with.

“Go now. Skedaddle.” Mildred ordered. “We’ll see you in a week.”

“Love you both, be good. Both of you.” Steve eyed his wife before slamming the door.

“Now let’s pour ourselves a stiff drink!” shouted the newly widowed Mildred. “Whiskey, wine, or margarita? I’m having a margarita.”

“Margarita, too please!” Beth asked. “But what is… that!?”

“What do you mean?”

“Up there by the bookshelf… the thing that looks like a cage.”

“Oh! You haven’t met, Delta? Michael’s other pet. Delta the Owl.”

“If you give me an hour or two to loosen up, I’ll tell you a story about that owl. He’s almost like a witchy totem or amulet or something. He is…well, he’s something.”

Soon, they were out on the deck sedated by the beauty of golden hour. They sat in awkward silence sipping for about ten minutes, taking it all in. Beth opened her mouth a couple times, but didn’t know whether she should console Mildred, dive into old memories with her, or avoid the topic altogether.

“Ok, I’ll tell you!” Mildred blurted out… almost as if reading Beth’s discomfort telepathically.

“Lean in.” Mildred yell whispered.

Beth didn’t understand why they needed to whisper with the vast acreage and oceanfront, but she leaned in to play along.

“It’s Delta!” she said.

“What about Delta? You mean that owl?”

“YES! The barn owl. Shhh.”

“Four nights ago…you know, the night Michael passed. I turned over in my bed, barely opening my eyes, and Delta was perched on Michael’s nightstand just staring at me. Like a freak show, penetrating my soul with its owl eyes! Beth, this was the first time that bird had ever escaped his cage. Did he fly upstairs to give me a quick heads up? Was this fowl bringing me a message of foul play? It’s all just a little too coincidental, don’t you think?”

“Oh, Mildred.” Beth laughed. Beth’s father was a military general and she did not have the DNA or reasoning bandwidth to understand animal totems, owl signs, or anything else that might appear in the New Age section of a California bookstore. “Oh…. I don’t know, that sounds very...”

“Well, how else would you explain it!? So, anyway, I sat up like a jack-in-the-box and immediately went to splash cold water on my face, worried that I had hallucinated the whole thing. And that is when I heard the knock at my door. The medic, the sheriff. You know the rest.”

“Beth, owls portend death!” Mildred gasped.

“Maybe so, but I…” Beth trailed off. “You know what, let’s DoorDash some Mexican food to go with this margarita and we can Google, “what does it mean when your owl predicts your husband’s death” tomorrow morning over coffee. Deal?”

“Deal.”

They had a lovely time at dinner laughing and discussing their childhood pets and other mundane, “safe” topics. They laughed as if a funeral was the furthest thing from their mind.

At 9:10pm, as Beth walked to the downstairs guest bedroom she stopped, stepped backwards three steps, and faced the owl directly in the eyes, half-expecting him to talk.

“Delta. Do you know something we don’t?” she whispered. She laughed at her own momentary gullibility and shuffled off to sleep.

Beth could not sleep. It was such an odd day. Her father-in-law’s funeral, Mildred’s early departure, the unspoken scandal, Mildred’s disproportionate levity. Too many oddities left her too unsettled to sleep peacefully, even with the sound of the ocean nearby. She quietly opened her bedroom door to go find her sleeping pills.

Much to her shock, the owl was out of the cage again. This time on the floor beneath the cage. The owl looked directly up at her (as if he were almost expecting her to waken,) and began flapping his wings loudly.

Beth did not scare easily, but this sight truly frightened her. She was petrified to check on Mildred upstairs.

For better or for worse, she decided against checking on her. Instead, she scurried back into her bedroom to try to “un-see” what she saw. Maybe that would make it go away. She shut the bedroom door and noticed the sleeping pills were on her nightstand the whole time. Weird. It’s as if the owl summoned her.

Beth awoke in the morning to the sound of coffee brewing, slowly drifting in and out of delta REM sleep. Suddenly she remembered she had to go check on Mildred, hoping Mildred was still warm and the owl was back in the cage.

“Morning sunshine! Listen, sit down. I have some unfortunate news.”

“Mom, I had the craziest dream last night…” Beth started.

“Later. Listen, we never let Marilyn back in last night when we were sitting outside. Michael’s golden retriever is gone. Our dog is gone.”

Beth turned white. “Holy…”

“Mom, I woke up last night and Delta was trying to get my attention in the hallway. It’s like he knew I was going to wake up and open the door.”

“Oh, my Lord! Are you serious? This is… not good.”

“Mom, I think we should strongly, seriously consider, flying back to Virginia tomorrow. We can ask the neighbors to look for the dog and ask them to watch him for a few days if they find him. I am just getting totally creeped out by this owl business! It’s unsettling.”

“Now what did I tell you? Delta knows things, I’m telling you.”

“Let me go call Delta now and try to change our tickets.”

Mildred roared.

“Oh, of course we are. Of course, we’re flying Delta! I am bringing Delta the Owl on our flight.”

“Mom…get real. This is not part of the plan.”

“Beth, sweetheart for God’s sake, I just buried my husband! I will require my emotional support animal on the flight. Delta will understand.”