NO MOTIVE

by Luanne diBernardo

There was nothing more she could do and so that’s what she did, nothing. Variations of it, like the nothing of watching television, her eyes blinking themselves across the room like a fly in search of a worthy landing, hopeless. The nothing of walking past bedrooms that refused to feel empty, the air still fattened with anguish. The nothing of laundering clothes, of dusting furniture, the nothing of feeding herself when hungry or not, her pangs unnoticed for years now. The nothing of washing her face, of walking the hall where she never noticed the threadbare path insisting she search for something since gone, where nobody waited to be stretched, wiped, or bathed in a room where nothing, not anything, remained to be done, to the couch where if she rested or not it just wouldn’t matter.

Irene would be sixty-seven in about as many days, a number she hadn’t given thought to until filling out her sons’ admission forms, Conor and Kirk, forty-four-year-old twins with the same ruddy freckles, same crimson curls, even the same degenerative disease, two who lived longer than anyone reasoned, not her words. She barely noticed their abilities lessen, her duties multiply since they turned nineteen, twenty-one years of caretaking, no use to think about how or if she might
manage one more hour, one more year, not so much as one moment’s thought to her own deterioration, or to the possibility that her children’s lives might have been any different, her own life an afterthought.

Her calendar crossed nine months since her boys had been moved, nine months that Forest Lakes Nursing Home had been doing what she had done for so many years, at least until the seizures grew closer, their heads bent low like swans left sleeping. Food moved through feeding tubes and through to their veins, while beneath the boys’ beds hung bladders of urine, emptied now by nurses and not their mother, though she visits them daily. Daily, though there’s nothing, not one thing left
that Irene can do, and so she does what she does.

The gun she takes from what was once her husband’s dresser, the only drawer unchanged these twenty-three years since his unexpected death. Her hands move to touch his short-sleeved T-shirts, reluctant to waken their hope. Her fingers, precise in their movements, disappear between the folded shirts then return without pause, the pistol not nearly as frightening as the injectors she used to stab her sons’ buttocks, the next day their thighs, always one blackening, always one yellowing. The gun in her hand looks small and uncomplicated, easier to use than the pulleys and lifts that inhabit her home. Irene finds herself drawn by the size of the bullets, how small and good they feel in her hand, how beautifully they slide into each perfect chamber, if only a catheter found a bladder as well. She loads five chambers because five are empty, finds herself moved by the few left in her hand, like sea glass, smooth and cool.

Sea glass, she muses, when in the same manner an ear can pop clear, her mind gives way to a minuscule crack, a jagged rupture that dares to expose what long lay buried. A crack so devastatingly clear that, for a moment, Irene is staring at something unbearable, a sensation more real than the pleasing weight of her husband’s gun pressed into her lap, against her groin. She sees him, her then-alive husband on somebody’s motorcycle, a self-proclaimed freebird like Kirk, with his basketball, his August flirtations. Irene watches, cannot look away from her husband’s back, his body less muscle than movement, his forearms stretched forward to clutch the bike’s handles, his movements motored by impulse, desire. His smile unmatched, unforgettable, though somehow she had managed. Their sons, one like him, one like her, wait on the beach, their
skinny legs bent beneath them like hinges for raising them close to, then down from, their castles of sand. Through this unforeseen crack, Irene watches closely their boyish arms, how they move the way boyish arms are meant to, unknowingly; how, she wonders, could she ever have looked away? For this moment she sees what she didn’t see then, how the pale brown sand catches light against Kirk’s damp thighs, against the blades of her boys’ young wings, daintily dusted with gold from their hole dug to China.

Irene sees it all with microscopic clarity. The sun, selfish when it steals behind clouds leaving nothing for cover, the boys uncaring, she shivers, they stay. She feels what she is certain she didn’t feel then, the cold, cruel drips from her heavy, dark hair (how, unwilling to forget, it held the lake). The pull of her skin slowly drying, her breasts shrunken firm and away from the cups of her cold, damp swimsuit, the close, fine hairs of her face tickling free from bondage, the absolute christening of sun, of wind, on her wet and naked skin. She takes in the lake with painful remembrance, how it roars in rhythmic crescendos, urgent rushes that deafen what might be heard, the ingenuous likelihood of a motorcycle returning, unbearable to now recall.

It is with thoughts from those places that Irene recalls her sons in their nursing home suite, fire- and sun-proof curtains behind them, worn linoleum their feet never met, that smell. Where nurses steal time to swathe their prickled skin or wheel them to the Activity Room where more able patients will do what they can, where Conor and Kirk will do nothing, their torsos strapped to the back of their chairs. Their minds, she prayed, were staled or calcified, inconceivable to think they might be aware of even one moment, or worse, that through some jagged crack of their own, they might, like her, remember.

It is with thoughts from those places that Irene gets up from the blond veneer bed that was meant to be temporary, a loan from Kirk’s mother their first year of marriage. Beside it, a wooden dresser with wooden knobs she always meant to replace with pulleys of iron or faceted glass. Over the dresser stares a square mirror with its years of brazen judgments, until now, she thinks while noticing not the way it reflects, but rather how it condones her movements, to the point she almost considers looking back before moving away from the temporary scape of dresser, bed, and mirror, a room she knew well, completely
unchanged into something she barely recognized.

It is with thoughts from those places that Irene leaves her house and drives the seven miles that still feel foreign, her hands on the wheel of a car passing buildings she’s never entered, past trees never seen, past streets not yet paved. Past corner after corner of look-alike marts built for last-minute pleasures. She stops for lights at intersections that only serve to stall her progress, though for once she isn’t rushing.

It is with thoughts from those places she enters the nursing home lobby, to the pasteled paintings of seascapes, of seagulls, to the Maalox-pink drapes, the peach-flavored walls that left her more queasy than chemo, the treatments she took in a room of paisley, with skylights, with floor lamps instead of fluorescents, with music and plants and magazines that haven’t already expired, a room for the living. Treatments that asked less than thirty minutes, a selfish hal-hour with doctors who nodded to nurses who stopped for a smile. To her they spoke of an end in sight, her guilt eased only when doubled with pain, her ribs left weak, her penance renewed with each convulsion, her conscience clear for one more night.

These eighteen months later, Irene passes through her sons’ benign lobby, her body renewed by remission, not her words. For once she hears nothing—not Agnes’s tormented pleading, or beyond the nurses’ station, not Olive who cries for her mother, or Buddy who warbles “Tennessee Waltz” from one of many misaligned wheelchairs. Not Mary, who hails garçon! to anyone boarding her cruise ship, if only a ruse for Irene’s two sons.

She passes them all, each foot grounded, flat as permanence. If asked, she would say that she had no thoughts, no mind left to know what allowed her to act in ways a mother should never—to prick and poke the flesh she bore, to pipeline fluids from paralyzed organs, to mimic movement despite limbs numbed by atrophy. She would say that she had no thoughts at all, too ashamed to acknowledge all she recalled from the lake, the remembered caress of leftover sand mixed with evening’s damp sheets on their sunburned skin. No mind for thinking about what she does next, just one foot in front of the other until she passes the fire extinguisher that signals the bend towards Kurt and Conor’s room.

She approaches the skirt of her sons’ doorless entry—inside, two boys, never men, now strangers. Her hand moves the way her feet once moved, on their own, a necessary function, and so effortless as she aims for the head that was Conor’s, not one moment’s pause before sighting the head that was Kirk’s. She waits and she watches, uncertain, their bodies unchanged by what she has done, as if nothing at all just happened. Only that blood flows freely from both boys’ heads, for once not out through a needled vein, for once not pressured into a vial, their blood long tired, futile.

As if nothing at all just happened, she turns from the still-pumping pumps and the still-breathing tanks, away from their room and back down the hall past the fire extinguisher. Nothing, as she passes through the stagnant air, through Agnes’s chant, “Help me, help me, Mr. Odairs, Christopher Robin is saying his prayers,” to whomever might listen. Not Irene, who returns to the pale peach lobby where she sits and waits, for the first time unafraid, for the first time not guilty for what she has done. Somewhere in the distance the wail of sirens screaming for someone who waits for their arrival, finally not Conor, not Kirk, though her body remembers to stiffen, Irene unaware. Unaware how her hand still wraps the graceful machine that responded each time, her fingers still clenched as if her life depended on it.