Claudia opened one eye. A bar of purple-flecked soap partially blocked her vision. Confusion settling over her like a prickly wool blanket, she immediately understood that something was gravely wrong.
Normally awakening to the rhythmic slap of water advancing and retreating in an endless dance of dark blue waves along the Maine shoreline, Claudia stubbornly shut her eyes, desperate to cling to the last wisps of her dream. Conjuring a vivid seaside vision, she could feel warm water licking her earlobe, smelling strangely of lavender and eerily out of context.
“Damn it,” she muttered, instantly choking on a mouthful of soapy water. “What the hell?” she spat out for good measure with a satisfied grin.
At age 85, swearing was her new pleasure. And despite her concerning circumstances, Claudia grinned, imagining her caregiver, Mabel, muttering a blessing and pleading with the angels every time Claudia cursed. Just imagining it made her laugh with satisfaction.
Immediately, a sharp stab of pain erupted, like an ice pick punching a hole in her side, lodging its pointed blade deep in her lung. Struggling to catch her breath, Claudia realized not only that she was naked, but her brittle body was sprawled between the shower floor and the bathroom rug.
Surveying her surroundings, Claudia recalled her petulant desire for a warm shower before bed. She loved the blissful pleasure of the hot needles of water sluicing across her back and legs. Not even a glass of expensive sherry could match it. So, she had snuck out of bed tonight and stepped into the warm spray despite Mabel’s admonishment before leaving for the night.
“Ms. Claudia, I bathed you yesterday,” Mabel scolded in her deep New Orleans drawl. “Hot showers don’t help your eczema, and I’m always worried you’re going to fall without my help. I don’t have time for this right now. It’s my one free night to watch the harbor fireworks.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Claudia argued, “I pay you a fortune to attend to me, and I’m not above firing you!”
“Your daughter Rebecca pays me, and she’s the only one who can fire me,” Mabel spat back, grinning a gap-tooth smile at the empty threat and enjoying their harmless sniping.
“If you ever talked to her, you’d know she thinks I treat you like a queen,” Mabel said before gently smoothing Claudia’s hair off her forehead and tucking the down blanket tighter around her slight frame.
Stung by this truth, Claudia reflected on her previous fall twelve months ago. Her attempt to reach a box of holiday ornaments resulted in a badly broken arm. But worse yet, she woke up confused and sore as Rebecca woodenly sat vigil next to her hospital bed.
“Mother, you cannot manage without help, and I can’t provide daily care when I live two hours away. We’re hiring Mabel, and that’s the end of it,” Rebecca curtly explained.
As part of the caregiver agreement, Mabel left Claudia alone one night each month. She would tuck Claudia into bed and drape an emergency call button around her neck before heading out to enjoy a night alone.
“I’m never going to use that goddamn button,” Claudia groused. “You’ll find me flat out dead on the floor before I grab for that.” But tonight, Claudia began to regret her hubris.
Her recent move to mid-coast Maine was a boondoggle if Claudia admitted the truth. But she had come to this glorious place for 40 years, and she would be damned if her advancing age would limit her lifestyle. Yet, she was becoming exceedingly clumsy and lost her balance easily. Worse were the periods of forgetfulness as her memory faded in and out. And her diminishing mental sharpness was occurring far more quickly than her doctors predicted.
“Bastards!” she shouted to the empty bathroom, satisfied by the slight echo that bounced back from the clean white walls and delighted by her use of yet another profanity.
Doctors were her sworn enemies, with their quiet evaluations and hastily scribbled but inaccessible notes. Recently, she snuck a furtive glance at her chart when her doctor turned away. Her blood turning to ice, she read the diagnoses of “likely Alzheimer’s” and “progressive and rapid mental deterioration.”
With Mabel not returning until the morning and in increasing pain, Claudia began to realize her injuries were far more serious than she initially thought. The most pressing issue was getting out of the relentless shower spray, now quickly turning cold. But her body refused to respond. Tonight, her legs no longer moved under her control. Her arms worked just fine, but she could not stand, let alone walk. With a herculean effort, Claudia slowly propped herself on her forearms and pulled her limp and useless body across the zero-edge shower pan like a decrepit soldier in a mud pit crawl.
“Ancient AF Women – Uncle Sam Still Wants You!” Claudia muttered under her breath, conjuring an imaginary Army recruitment poster. Sighing, she said a silent thank-you for the plush area rug she insisted on installing to cover the cold tile.
“A hundred dollars a square foot for fancy French tiles, only to cover them with a cheap-ass rug?” Mabel chastised. “Rich people got no damn sense.”
Shivering from the exertion and cold, Claudia saw a rapidly growing dark purple bruise now accompanying the pain in her side. Propping herself against the white shaker cabinets in a half-slumping pose and gritting her teeth, Claudia tugged at the terry cloth robe hanging above her head. After several tries and ultimately ripping off the fabric loop, she slipped her arms backward through the sleeves, covering her body as much as possible and finally stopping her shivering.
“Shit!” Claudia spoke to no one in particular, feeling slightly less buoyed than usual by her sailor’s mouth. Surveying the scene, she grimaced, seeing her emergency call button uselessly dangling from the towel bar across the room, completely out of reach unless she miraculously sprouted wings. Worse yet, her washrag had lodged itself over the drain, slowly creating an expanding water dam on the floor as the shower continued to run.
Claudia sighed heavily, considering how Rebecca would react once Mabel relayed this recent catastrophe. Ordinarily, a child might be thankful that their mother survived the ordeal with nothing more than a broken rib or two and a bruised ego. However, her relationship with Rebecca did not mirror the regular loving connection between typical parents and children.
“If you fall again, you’ll force my hand,” Rebecca sternly conveyed during their last phone call a year ago. “I will have no choice but to put you in a nursing home. There is simply no other option.”
“There are always other options,” Claudia bristled at the ultimatum. “You just don’t want to consider them. So instead, you’ll shove me into a home and warehouse me there until I die! After all the attention and care I gave to you when you were growing up?”
“You mean all the care my nannies provided and the attention of bullies I got at the boarding schools that destroyed the last shreds of my adolescence?” Rebecca scoffed.
“Those schools were the best that money could buy. Ivy League prep, every one of them,” snapped Claudia.
“Well Mother, you know what they say about karma. But don’t worry, I’ll find the best facility that your money can buy. And I’ll hold my breath waiting for any appreciation,” Rebecca sarcastically retorted and hung up without a goodbye. They had not spoken again.
Sadly, Claudia was unsurprised by the outburst. Their relationship consisted of decades of disappointment and massive communication failures. And lately in her few clear-headed moments, she considered that her unrealistic expectations and short-tempered bouts of criticism played a role in their estranged relationship.
Closing her eyes and drifting back into her memories Claudia recalled the sunlit days of her childhood. Her southern-belle mother called her an “unholy terror,” as Claudia constantly found herself getting into every possible type of mischief. But her father loved her antics and encouraged her to defy the conventional debutante expectations. And she had done just that by landing a scholarship to attend Northeastern University, making her father beam with pride. Law school and an offer to join a prestigious Boston firm a few years later quickly propelled Claudia into the inner circles of the corporate elite on Fleet Street.
“You like my brilliant mind and audacious legal strategies, but you love that I make you millions!” Claudia would crow to the senior partners. In turn, they made her smug, pretentious and pompous.
“Bitch,” the junior associates called Claudia in those early years. Not flattering, but probably true. At the time, she wore it like a badge of honor, convincing herself it was a term of endearment. However, she didn’t miss the irony when she fell for a hot-shot attorney who was the “male-version” of herself, that the same adoring junior associates reverently referred to him as a “baller.”
“Asshole,” she muttered under her breath at the recollection. A whirlwind romance ensued, and they married in Wellesley, honeymooned in Florence, and dutifully produced Rebecca in a year. Unsurprisingly, her master-of-the-universe husband was cheating on her within six months. Even worse, the little slut he chose embodied everything Claudia did not. A simpering graduate from Choate who pledged to serve him shaken martinis, ignore the late hours he kept at the office (likely screwing his paralegal), and dutifully chair the local garden club. Claudia’s marriage ended spectacularly upon this discovery, with a blowout in front of the country club elite, resulting in several shattered bottles of Moët and Chandon and her husband’s new golf cart submerged in a pond off the 6th fairway.
“I’ll never again lose my independence,” Claudia would insist to her close female friends. “There’s not a chance that another man will control my life. I just want to forget everything about our marriage!”
“But even though I despise him, I do love Rebecca; I just have difficulty showing it. She’s so quiet and I can’t understand her for the life of me,” Claudia would protest to her girlfriends.
“It’s just odd that she never wants to play with other children. All she does is tuck herself under the staircase and read or play with her puppy. She’ll never go anywhere in life if she keeps this up.” Claudia lamented.
Suddenly eyeing her daughter peeking around a corner, she would implore her, “Oh Rebecca! Come here and give me a kiss!” Dutifully, Rebecca would brush her lips against her mother’s powdered cheek and quickly shrink away as if the maternal contact stung like a charged third rail.
As the past faded out, Claudia once again opened her eyes to the harsh glare of the bathroom lights. Contemplating their last phone call that ended so spectacularly, she wondered if there might be a kernel of truth behind Rebecca’s anger. Had she replaced hugs and kisses with showers of material possessions, and a multitude of nannies to provide what she could not easily show her daughter? After all this time, Rebecca must know that Claudia truly loved her…but what if she didn’t?
Trapped on the floor in her bathroom but feeling more lucid than she had in months, Claudia noted the dark pool of blood on her left side was now accompanied by an odd crackling each time she took a breath. She desperately needed a distraction to help her ignore the pain and the bizarre feeling taking over her body.
“I can’t do a goddamn thing!” Claudia whispered, an ounce of fear creeping into her usually confident demeanor.
Looking around for options to distract her, she saw her makeup bag within reach on the upholstered vanity stool. Alongside lay the spiral notebook and pen used by Mabel to track Claudia’s daily water intake, blood pressure, and oxygen levels. Not that those details would do any good if Claudia tragically died of an internal hemorrhage or froze to death on the floor. It figured that when her mind felt sharp as a razor, naturally, her body picked this occasion to fail her.
Claudia began ripping out every page of data from the little notebook that recorded the dreary death march of her body. This little journal synthesized her life into the most mundane and insignificant details. Where was the evidence of the spontaneous woman who would catch a flight from Boston and be in New York by dinner? Or the theater patroness who had seen every Tony Award-winning musical on Broadway since 1950?
Claudia’s life used to be big and extravagant. Her friends, too numerous to count, vied for invitations to her famous dinner parties, golf outings or champagne-soaked summer regattas at the Boston Yacht Club. Or at least they used to. But over the years, that life of spontaneity and fun became quiet and dull. Long-time friends jetted to Florida, fell in love with the tropical warmth and did not return.
Despite living only two hours apart, Claudia rarely visited Rebecca’s home in New Hampshire. But with the dawning of the holiday tomorrow, Claudia perked up at writing a short letter to Rebecca and ringing in the New Year with a clean slate. Mabel could mail it in the morning, and if everything went according to plan, Rebecca might soften up and agree to meet for a long overdue brunch.
The little spiral notebook held twenty blue-lined pages with all but the last four filled on both sides. Ripping out the last pages of her medical stats with a flourish, she wadded each offensive sheet into small balls and shot them at the wicker basket across the room. Only three found their mark. Sighing at the abysmal success rate she surveyed the contents of the open makeup bag, as a well-used tube of Elizabeth Arden lipstick caught her eye.
“Why do you insist on painting your old, wrinkled face that hooker color?” Mabel often quipped to Claudia.
Claudia would snap back, “For your information, Victory Red is the most iconic lip color ever made, you silly fool!”
Sighing dramatically, Mabel ultimately took the lip color and would gently apply it to Claudia’s thinning lips, eliciting a smile of delight as Claudia gazed into the mirror. “There you go Ms. Claudia,” Mabel would softly say, “Now you’re ready to meet the Queen.”
Claudia suddenly remembered the story behind her signature lip color. As a little girl, Rebecca begged her to tell it, watching mesmerized as Claudia painted her lips the vibrant shade. Picking up the pen, she smiled and slowly began to write the familiar tale to her daughter in a shaky scrawl.
“Dear Rebecca,
I found myself with extra time on my hands today and wanted to dash off a quick letter to my favorite daughter. Maybe I am becoming sentimental in my old age, but you have been on my mind lately. And don’t fret, I’m doing quite well and safely ensconced in bed while Mabel enjoys her night off. That should allay your concerns and end our silly discussion of a nursing home, once and for all.”
Claudia figured a little white lie for the benefit of her overly worrisome daughter could not possibly send her to hell tonight. Glancing at the once insignificant puddle of water, now spreading halfway across the rug, she decided that the potential of drowning remained a tiny possibility, and as such, she could justify a little literary license.
“Do you remember when I would tell you the story of my Victory Red lip color? It remains one of my favorite memories. You would sit beside me at my vanity and watch me fill in my lips. I recall your beautiful eyes shining in the mirror – eyes that perfectly matched my periwinkle color, ringed with the dark lashes of your philandering father – (oops, sorry sweetheart, no eraser.)
In the 1940s, women believed that “beauty was your duty.” The military asked Elizabeth Arden to create a lipstick specifically designed for women in service. It was a bright, dazzling red that perfectly matched the piping on women’s military uniforms. It symbolized success and confidence, worn by brave women who helped turn the tide of the war. Confident in an ultimate victory, it was worn by millions of women worldwide who embodied tremendous strength and perseverance. It still reminds me of you.”
Claudia paused, wondering if she sounded preachy or overbearing? No, she didn’t think so. She simply recalled the tale she spun around her daughter during the few moments each day that they would sit quietly together.
“Goodbye darling, I’ll be back in the morning!” Claudia would sing out as she grabbed her fur coat from the nanny and whisked out the door through a mist of perfume.
But occasionally, she would glance back at Rebecca and see a glistening of tears in her eyes. Claudia did not dwell on those emotions. Rebecca’s sad and pleading look made her irritable and unbearably uncomfortable. After all, she always returned from each event just as she promised. But tonight, decades later and covered in a damp robe on the bathroom floor, Claudia suddenly saw the scene through the eyes of her young daughter.
“Fuck,” she whispered as her eyes filled with hot, stinging tears.
And there it was…the painfully honest, band-aid-ripping truth that recently niggled around the corners of her mind, now exploding with crystal clear precision. Each of the blocks seemed to fall into place with deafening clarity. Claudia’s desire to protect her heart from the hurt of a failed marriage had ultimately failed her only child. Claudia realized she had spent her days living for the next deal, project, or black-tie event. She never enjoyed the present, and worse yet, she built up an impenetrable wall around herself. Resenting the past and coveting the future, Claudia forgot the fragile feelings of her precious daughter.
Watching the slowly spreading puddle of water begin licking her ankle, Claudia finally started to write earnestly, pouring out her heart like a dam released. The sentences flew out of her fingers, filling the last few remaining notebook pages with apologies, requests for forgiveness and unconstrained words of love. She wrote until the carpet around her became soaked with water, and her hand cramped in protest.
“Bloody hell!” Claudia shouted, shaking the now empty blue pen before hurling it across the room and searching the makeup bag for an option to finalize the letter.
Sighing with relief, Claudia found a whittled-down waterproof eyebrow liner. Picking up the remaining tiny nub, she turned to the final page of the little notebook with a sense of peace. After two sentences, the liner broke, ultimately bringing her letter to its final conclusion. Satisfied nonetheless, Claudia sealed her final words by drawing a massive heart in Victory Red.
~~~
In the dimly lit station lobby, Rebecca watched the officer return to the glass window behind the sterile viewing room where she had stoically made the identification.
“We won’t know for sure till the medical examiner finishes, but she probably threw a clot from the fall. Likely, she went quickly and didn’t suffer,” said the officer without making eye contact.
“Just a few forms to sign, and we can release her belongings to you,” the robotic grey-haired sergeant rasped. “Not much here except a little notebook. The paramedics grabbed it, but it might have got some water damage. She was holding it pretty tight.”
Rebecca sighed and signed the forms. She picked up the plastic bag with the notebook and wordlessly walked away. That evening, with a glass of wine and the glowing logs of the fireplace warming her, she opened the bag to read the little notebook. Each wrinkled page was covered by streaks of wavy blue lines, trickling down to the bottom edge and disappearing. Page after page, each impossible to read.
On the last page, the writing finally became legible. It appeared to be written in a different type of ink with an indecipherable pinkish-red splotch at the bottom.
“Sweetheart, on these pages, I have told you everything I should have said a thousand times before. No matter what tomorrow brings, I can rest easy, knowing finally, there is nothing left unsaid…”//
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura is an emerging writer who lives, works and plays in the beautiful state of Colorado.
She is a member of the Denver-based Lighthouse Writers community and her previous work has been published in the San Antonio Review and The Umbrella Factory Magazine.
Her work can be found at www.learys-literature.com.
About the Author
