Bound

Sam Schieren

Sitting in the window alcove of the mother’s home, the son can almost feel the shed fade grey as another day disappears. The son works at a large accounting firm, but it’s summer so he has little work. Of course, there is always something to do. He could draw the blinds against the falling sun.

The mother’s eyes are too wide open. They’d removed her oxygen mask just yesterday. A commitment. With the mask gone the mother’s murmurs become small eruptions of words—“Oh fuck, oh fuck,”—which the son attends to with the same passive curiosity as the shed and the sun. 

The mother’s skin betrays how much she frequented the beach. The mother loves (loved?) the ocean, more than any place. How the fading horizon, the staggered waves, the sand, hints at something relentless. Once, when the son was ten, days after his father had left for good, the son and the mother went to Point Reyes and sat on the beach for hours, saying only the shortest things while the sun slowly slid underwater.

There is a cat sitting by the shed. The son can just make it out though the window. A grey cat at sundown. Eyes glinting. The cat licks its paw, scratches its ear. “Grooming,” the son says, as if it were an alien word. He often found himself whispering to himself. He says it again, “Grooming.” 

Night begins its occupation. Through the window the son observes the faint and final remnants of the mother’s garden. There are plants in the garden that are still healthy. Months ago she’d asked him to prune, aggressively. “Down to the roots,” she’d said. “Only keep what’s essential.” 

A lamp on the desk at the far end of the room gives off just enough light to see her face. Time has chosen this face, this fearful expression of hers, amidst folds and wrinkles, pinks spots, a basal cell scar. All the equipment in the mother’s room has been removed except one monitor. The son has taped socks over the monitor’s speaker to mute the tones that echo her heart. Less is more. He’s always hated this mantra. Still, as darkness takes the room, socks mute the sound and her eyes close for the first time in hours.

Sitting by the window, the son looks up at the moon and forgets where he is. He is at the beach. He can smell the salt, the moisture, the seaweed decay. But the son is in the mother’s room and in the glow of the moon what the son sees are the imperfect stripes he mowed into the lawn. He mowed them that morning, as he has every Sunday in the summers for years. 

The son reads aloud to the mother from the work of Emil Cioran. “Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much…” “Where’s the map?” the mother says. “If I could find the map…” This is what life has to offer, the son fears. He spreads a blanket over his mother and folds it down to her waist. His own children have made requests: His son asked for the mahogany desk. His daughter asked for the needlepoint work. Everything though—everything kept, that is—will go to his children eventually. “Goodnight, Mom,” he says to the mother and sits at the desk to read.

In the morning the son brings the mother a cold glass of orange juice. The mother is not supposed to drink anything even vaguely acidic, yet for weeks the son has brought the mother orange juice and the mother has seemingly enjoyed it. Reason enough. But for several days the mother has not sipped the juice.  “I’ve got to get off. Get off!” the mother says. Her voice, spiked with panic, then falls to a whisper. “Get off of this…”

“At some point they become too weak to speak, but even then they can hear,” the doctor said during his last visit. The doctor drives a blue sports car with a license plate that indicates he is a doctor. The doctor comes once a week and when he does he uses the phrase at some point so often it feels to the son negligent, contemptuous.

Drink, the son wants to say, drink. Through the window, the son sees the cat again, perched on the shed, swatting at a bug or a bee. And then, as the son feels himself drifting away, practically drifting through the window, like water taken up by the sun, the cat leaps from the shed, perhaps satisfied at having killed the bug. Or was it felt the bee’s sting? The son rises from the alcove, and walks across the room, to the glass of now warm juice and takes a sip. 

Morning passes. The mother has slept away most of it. The son has most of a bottle of red with lunch. The cat lies on the lawn, taking in the day’s warmth. A dead squirrel lays beside it, stiff. The cat belongs to the neighbor and it often leaves such gifts. 

The son eats a late afternoon snack, buttered cinnamon toast, and reads the paper. A former president died. According to the former president’s son, a former president himself, his father’s last words were: “I love you, too.” The son replaces today’s wasted glass of orange juice with a glass of water. “There is so much so in sorrow,” the mother says. She sounds happy, conversational. Who is she talking to, he wonders. The former president’s son must have said, “I love you,” to his father, moments before his father finally spoke.

The son composes banal lines in his head while he watches, hopefully, for the cat through the window. There is only one son. There is only one mother. His mother always wanted a cat. Or so he suspects. She often made remarks about the mysterious nature of cats. When they appeared in the yard she was unable to hide a certain look in her eye of, perhaps, fascination. He remembers that look. In junior high the son brought home a tabby covered in scabs and bald patches. “Out,” his father said, his stubby finger quivering. “Now.” The son still speaks to his father but rarely about this, cat or mother. 

His father was once on TV, in a commercial for a jewelry store. This is what the son remembers: His father excited, yelling, a big grin on his face. “Buy your loved one something to last a lifetime.” This was after his father left. Of course, his mother had seen the commercial too. We handle memories more readily than ideas, writes Cioran. Is this what turned her so severe? “Life is such a habit,” says the mother. He ought to be writing this down.

It is easy to lure the cat inside. It takes only a few spoonfuls of tuna. On some ancient instinct the cat steals up the stairs and slides into the mother’s room. The son finds it at the foot of the mother’s bed. Brilliant, silver. Leg bent at an impossible angle, scratching and licking and grooming. “Grooming.” Cats were holy in ancient Egypt, often mummified, sometimes even buried alive in tombs with the dead.

The cat curls up on a thick blanket at the mother’s feet. The mother’s eyes are closed. Night is filling the room yet again. “Enough,” the mother says, “enough, enough, enough.” The son brings a pillow to the window alcove so he might rest and watch the sky go dark. Before they left the beach on that day when his mother explained that his father had left them, there had been a Green Flash. It was the first the son had heard of such a thing. “Did you see it?” his mother had asked, her voice overwhelmed with quiet wonder. “It only lasts a second.” He hadn’t. He had been looking at his mother. There was a look on her face he will never forget, like she’d seen through to the other side. But he’d told his mother he had. He had seen it. That burning halo, that vanishing trick of God’s. Yes mother, I saw it too. How many times had he returned to that memory on the beach? That lie.

“Keep me?” the mother asks. The cat is already asleep. The son can feel it coming for him too. The dark night, sleep. But he fights it off. Every night he fights it off for as long as he can. To watch over his mother. To not to miss a word. To stay with her as she will with him, ceaselessly.