The Night Listener : A Novel

though I meant every word of it, my zealotry served as a convenient distraction, a shield against the unthinkable loss that lay ahead.
    For a while it was easy to believe that Mummie would survive. I wasn’t there, after all, for most of it. I didn’t watch the slow draining of her spirit, the daily indignities that would add up to death. Even in catastrophe she was her usual selfless self, downplaying her pain for others, and turning sassy when her options dwindled. After her mastectomy, she granted an interview with the News and Courier in which she talked breezily about having “the Big C,” an homage to John Wayne that pleased my father no end. Privately she was fond of telling her lady friends (in her bravest impersonation of Auntie Mame) that the only adequate compensation for having a breast removed was having the other one tattooed.
    Meanwhile, she got her house in order. She called me one night to say that she wanted me to have Dodie’s bed, that big mahogany sleigh bed built by her grandfather’s slaves. Billy and Josie had already received family things as wedding presents, she said, so it was only fair that I get something nice, since I would never be married. That her blessing came in the shape of a bed wasn’t lost on me.
    I cried the day it arrived, seeing its familiar dents and the little sack of hand-wrought bolts that my father had labeled with a felt-tip pen.
    And I cried when I first shared that bed with someone else, lying against him in its curvy embrace, knowing that my mother, with her signal sense of theater, had imagined such a scene.
    When the time came, it was Josie who told me to come home. As the female nearest Mummie, she had been entrusted with the grunt work of dying, the messy specifics from which the men, myself included, had been unfailingly protected. Arriving at the hospital on a scented spring night, I found my father pacing the corridor in a state of hearty denial, assuring anyone who’d listen that Laura was going to be fine, that the doctors were just overreacting as usual.
    He looked so tired and terrified that I wanted to put my arms around him, but I knew it would be too much for us both.
    My mother’s ashen face surprised me in a way I hadn’t expected.
    Maybe because of the morphine—or maybe not—she wore an air of serene authority that made her seem like someone else. She held audiences with us all afternoon, individually at first, then with groups, though she asked me to repel several of our relatives; she had endured them for too long, she told me, and she felt no call to do so on this day that was completely hers.
    Her instructions were as precise as a shopping list. She wanted to look pretty, she said, so she asked my sister to paint her fingernails and specified which of the ladies at her beauty salon should do her hair for the big day. Josie was also to find “a nice travelling companion” for my father, though my mother was adamant that Sookie Newton, a local widow with a sharkish glint in her eye, be kept away at any cost. And she told Josie to stay closer to me than ever, since I would need her support in the years to come.
    When my turn came, Mummie greeted me with a parlor trick.
    Seeing me in the doorway, she poked a foot out from under the sheets and splayed her toes in a most unladylike fashion, wriggling them as freely as if they were fingers. She had always been able to do that, she claimed, with a note of pride in her voice. She had done it the day I was born, in fact, to the amusement of the nurses on the maternity ward. I’d never known about this talent, and it stunned me to think that she’d saved something for the very end that could draw us back to the very beginning, when we were first alone together in a hospital room. I laughed and grabbed her foot, ostensibly to stop her wiggling toes, but really to embrace her. And I held on to her foot the whole time we talked, feeling it curl naturally into my hand, as smooth and cool as a seashell.
    And her instructions? This is what I remember: She told me to write “a sweet book” someday, by which she meant one that wasn’t dirty, something like The Snow Goose , she said, that would lift people’s hearts. She told me to go easy on Pap, since, given time, he would see the light. Just as I was leaving and Billy and Susan were arriving she told me to come back early in the morning, because there was someone she wanted me to meet. She had a very nice orderly, she said, a man who liked