The contractor stepped out of the basement and left me alone with the ammo box, the grocery bag of pill bottles and the spiral notebook of my mother, and I sat on the cold concrete floor in Dayton and read the last entry again. “Marcy, if something happens to me, do not believe what Tina tells you about that night. I did not refuse to go to the hospital. I begged her to call. She said she would, and then she went into the bathroom, and I waited forty minutes.” The handwriting slanted down the page, thin and shaky. It was dated the night before she passed.
I took the notebook upstairs. My sister Tina was sitting at the kitchen table in her robe, drinking coffee from a mug with a chipped handle. For six years she had told me that our mother had refused to be taken to the hospital on the last night, that she had insisted on staying at home, that nothing could have been done. I laid the notebook on the table in front of her, open to the page. She looked at it. Then she looked at me. She said nothing at all, and the refrigerator hummed.
“You were high,” I said. It was not a question. “You took her pills and you took her patches, and when she collapsed you could not make your fingers dial the telephone.” Tina set the mug down very carefully. A tear ran down her cheek and dropped off her chin into the coffee. “Forty minutes,” she whispered. “Mom was a nurse. She knew exactly what forty minutes meant. She sat in that chair and watched me go into the bathroom and shut the door. And I stood in there and looked in the mirror and could not move.”
A hidden ammo box found behind basement paneling gave one sister the afternoon to bring her sister back to their mother in Dayton.
I gave my terms at the kitchen table, with the notebook open and the ammo box beside it. “Tina, I am not going to the police tonight, and I am not going to yell. What I am going to do is tell you what Mom wrote in this notebook, in her own handwriting, in the last month of her life. She loved you, and she saved fifty two thousand dollars for me because she could not stop you from taking the rest. You are going to the treatment center in Cincinnati tomorrow morning, and I am driving you, and I am not leaving until you are checked in.”
Tina put her head down on the table. “I have wanted to tell you every day for six years,” she said, in a muffled voice. “I wanted to say it at the church service. I wanted to say it at the cemetery gate. Every time I saw you I thought, she knows, she must know. I took her pills. I used her card at the casino. I let her lie in that chair. And she wrote about me in the notebook as if I were still her baby. She never stopped. How can anyone love a person like that?”
I reached across the table for the notebook, intending to put my hand over hers, and Tina snatched it first. She jumped up, tore the notebook out from under my fingers, and ran for the back door with it clutched against her robe, shouting that no one should ever read it, that she would burn it, that she would throw it in the river. She made it to the porch. The contractor, a huge quiet man named Marcus Tate, who had come up from the basement to ask about the dumpster, was standing at the foot of the steps and simply held out one broad hand.
Tina stopped on the porch, with the notebook against her chest, and looked down at the hand of the contractor. “Madam,” he said, kindly, to her, “whatever is in there, it is the only thing left of your mother. I have lost mine. I would give anything to hold her handwriting.” Tina stood a long moment on the porch in the morning light. Then she folded, slowly, and sat down on the top step. I came out and sat beside her. She laid the notebook in my lap, and I took her hand.
The money consequences were exact. The fifty two thousand dollars in the ammo box was split in two by my own decision, half for the treatment of Tina and half to stay in an account for her future. The house sold in the spring, and the contractor refused to charge for the basement. Tina was not charged. The casino returned eleven thousand dollars when it saw the notebook, and the pharmacy flagged the old prescriptions and corrected its records. The pill bottles were taken to the police drop box in a paper bag, and I watched the heavy steel door close on them, and felt something in my chest finally let go.
In the name of my mother, Helen Marcus, who passed last year, I started the Helen Marcus Fund. It pays for visiting nurses, medication lockboxes and treatment for families caring for a parent while fighting addiction, in Montgomery, Greene and Miami counties. In the first year we delivered four hundred lockboxes and placed forty one people in treatment. One was a daughter of fifty from Xenia who slept in the room with her mother and her pills. She cried when we handed her the key.
Tina came home from Cincinnati after ninety days, and on a warm evening in May she asked me to drive her to the cemetery. She carried a bunch of grocery store carnations. She knelt at the stone of our mother and laid them down, and she stayed there a long while with her forehead against the stone. I stood behind her under the maple tree with the notebook in my coat. When she stood up, she took it from me, and read the first page aloud. Her voice did not shake.
