“Tonight was pret-ty crazy,” I replied; Shosh nodded, but her eyes told me she knew something was amiss. “Yours?”
“I just sat here. And waited.” Silence.
“Just waited, that’s all?”
{Flint strikes iron.} “I just… waited.”
“Anything to pass the time?”
{Sparks fly.} “I kept myself busy by worrying.”
“About…?”
{Lands in tinder.} “My daughter, who I love more than anything.”
My mother only spoke the words ‘my daughter’ on the very rare occasion she was feeling hyper-maternal. “I’m fine,” I tried to reassure her. “I’m… safe. Alive. And home. I’m safe.”
{Tinder burns.} “You had a night at the club.”
“I did…”
“I… trust you… to keep yourself safe—but I couldn’t shake this feeling that something… bad was gonna happen.”
I nodded. “You’re a mother, you have thoughts like that. It’s natural. Nothing happened, though.”
“You’ve got some red spots on your throat.”
“Yeah, I… (um…) do.”
{Fuel and oxygen together mix.} “You care to tell the story behind those, Andrea?”
((Shit, she called me ‘Andrea’. She’s pissed.)) “I, uh… got drunk.”
“Yeah? And then what?”
“I asked… a man about his job.”
“Tell me what happened, Andrea.”
“I made him mad.”
“What did he do?”
“He… choked me.” ((Shit…))
{Fuel glows.} Tears in her eyes twinkled darkly as she nodded. “But you fought the guy off.”
“No… I… passed out.”
Trembling, she shrieked, “He killed you?”
“He didn’t, I survived, I’m alive as you can see, perfectly alive, heart beating, I’m here, I’m fine! You have no reason to fret, okay?”
But fret she did. “I saw you here.”
“You saw me… ‘here’?”
“Across the universe, I spotted you, I saw your soul on the loose.”
“I didn’t die, he just knocked me unconscious.”
“Bull. I felt your soul depart your lifeless body.”
“What can I say? You had my near-death experience for me. Any other questions while you’re in the interrogating mood?”
“Yeah. Did they catch him?”
“He didn’t try to run. I think they pulled him off of me.”
{Fire, dim, crackles.} “Tell me they beat the ever-living shit out of the guy who did this to my daughter.”
“They didn’t, but they were about to kick him out and ban—” With how her rage threatened to blaze I might as well—
{Squirt a little lighter fluid onto the flames.} “They ‘kicked him out’?! They didn’t call the fucking cops on him?!”
“I… I asked for them to… let him… stay.”
{flame leaps and lashes / it laps and it licks} “You what?”
“I convinced the bouncers to let him stay. So I could question him. I wanted to find out where the guilt in his face was coming from.”
{The jerry can tips over.} “Oy vey iz mir,” she murmured, placing her thumb and index finger on either temple. “Ikh hob geboyrn a Shmendrik an a kop!”
“I don’t know what that means,” I mumbled, “because you never taught me Yiddish.”
{Gasoline drips, gushes, pours, streams into the flames.} “That’s so unfair!” she mocked. “You deserve to know how to speak it, too! Here’s your first lesson: ‘Ikh’ means ‘I’, ‘hob geboyrn’ means ‘birthed’, and ‘a Shmendrik an a kop’ means ‘a headless idiot’—therefore: ‘I birthed a headless idiot.’ You enjoying learning the language of your people?”
“I have a head, Shosh, my head is why I needed to know his secret, his secret that he wanted to confess, and I had to hear it, I need to know—you know I can’t stand not knowing secrets. Which is to be expected because—I’m a detective for God’s—!”
{Ignition.} “No more.”
“No more what?”
“Being a detective, Andrea.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, incredulous that ((You, of all the people on this earth, dare to tell me I must wake from my dream come true?))
“If you can’t ask someone questions without them trying to kill you, I don’t want you risking your life for foolishness.”
“But Shosh—”
“‘Mother’.”
“Shosh, I drove him to violence—besides, detective is my dream job. All these years you’ve wanted this for me, and now all of a sudden you’ve decided it’s too dangerous for—”
{Fireball.} “I was wrong!” she screamed. “I was so wrong to put all these ideas of law and order in your head! By reading you those stories, by watching all those movies with you, by sending you to school for a degree in criminal justice—I was teaching you to throw caution to the wind! My child’s life matters, and I’ve seen you stoop to znus—to perverting your body, and now you’ve put your actual neck on the line for… for the sake of pretending to be a great detective!” She came down gradually. “No more. Find a new job. Even cleaning the toilets at McDonald’s for starvation wages is better than being ready at any moment to willingly throw your life away for a stranger who would sooner spit in your eye for being a peace officer than thank you for risking your life to save his ass. Your police career is over, you’re resigning first thing tomorrow morning. Seek employment elsewhere.”
I examined her face: dead serious, on the verge of tears, and more frustrated than I’d ever seen it before. “Are you… actually… (scared?)”
With the edges of her countenance tearing and crazing she cried, “Oy vey, you coulda died permanently! Of course I’m scared, you might die again any day now, and for the last time!”
“I’m fine. I lived. I survive—”
{The whole damn house catches fire.} “You’re all that’s left of me!” she cry-screamed. “I’m dead, I don’t have myself anymore, and you, my daughter, are all that’s left of my world, and I don’t wanna lose you, too!”
My mind struggled to digest her words, so (in order to distract myself from the impending mental dyspepsia) I asked, “Is there a Heaven?”
She remained silent.
“Mom. Why aren’t you in Heaven?”
{Ashes and coals, gray and black with a neon heartbeat crazed throughout.} “I… have no idea whether there will be anything more to my afterlife; Jews speak of HaʾOlam Haba— ‘the World to Come’ —but the details of what happens after we die generally receive little attention or discussion. If there is some form of paradise after death, I don’t know why HaShem would exclude me… unless I—did—something—wrong. Either I’ve sinned… or… or this… this is my eternal fate.”
With reassurance as my intent, in a naïve attempt to prevent the fatalism growing in her eyes from seizing her forever, I told her, “If there’s a Heaven, we can meet there—when my time comes. Would it be so awful for you if that moment came a little sooner than you were expecting?”
Her face scrunched in agony. Her body trembled. Tears poured from her eyes. Her arms wrapped around me. Her chest heaved. Her throat sobbed. ((What did I say to upset her?))
Her death had changed her, somehow; she had never been this worried all the days she breathed. My Shosh in life had joked that she was Superman after we narrowly avoided running off Interstate 8 into ravines of giant fallen pebbles 40 feet below; she bandaged me and smiled and laughed after a .22 LR bullet ricocheted, ripped through my forearm, and left an impression in my bra band—had I aimed an eighth of an inch below the bullseye, it might have bypassed my arm and underwear to bury itself next to (if not in) my heart. And now, in her death… she was afraid for my life.
Her sobs had faded by the time I asked, “Shosh?”
She grunted pathetically.
“Are you a ghost, or a hallucination, or… something else?”
She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “You won’t like my answer.”
“Okay… I think I know which it is.”
“No, you don’t know. Cuz I don’t know either.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine, Shosh.”
She sniffed. “If you found out you were hallucinating… would you take the crazy pills?”
“Never,” I reassured her. “But don’t call them ‘crazy pills’, that phrase dehumanizes people with mental health disabilities.”
“If you say so.” She squeezed me, and I squeezed back.
“I don’t know how I’d handle losing what remains of you. Even if you don’t actually exist.”
“I’m sorry I died.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I didn’t look both ways.”
“You did, though. You’re a New Yorker, you look both ways every time. You taught me how to cross the street safely.”
“I would be alive if I had used the crosswalk.”
“They were going 20 over the speed limit.”
“It’s my fault.”
“Will you please stop blaming yourself?”
She said nothing.
I closed my eyes and choked back hot tears. “Please? For me?” She made no sound; I could no longer feel her shirt beneath my hands or her arms around my waist. “It was my fault. I’m the one who asked you to fetch the bottle.” I peeked between my eyelids—she was gone.