Bellagio Blues

~~~~

July 5, 1:24 a.m.

The ambulance rushed three generations of mother-daughter conflict and one tall, efficient and smoothly professional on-call physician to the university hospital. Not quite an hour later, the determined doctor had finally declared Suze's grandmother dead, signed the pronouncing form and gone back to her casino post to complete her turn on the late-night watch, leaving the two remaining women to see each other through the initial shock and pain of their loss and silently wishing them the best.

Somewhere along the line, the casino doctor had asked her mother what happened, Suzanne remembered, and there had been something about burst blood vessels and choking, maybe asphyxiation. This was after they'd arrived at the hospital and the medical staff had stopped the pretense of trying to revive a woman who was clearly well past saving. Now, they just needed a cause-of-death and this whole little mess would be wrapped up, at least from their end.

Once she started talking, Suze's mother unleashed a babbling stream of words. "I couldn't get to sleep. All the damned smoke in there, and her snoring besides. I put the fan up to 'High,' but even that didn't help...she started, like, choke-coughing in her sleep and I just couldn't take it anymore. That must sound terrible-- but, you know, you kinda get used to things and she did it all the time. You know, I'm always trying to get her to give up the damn cigarettes, go the doctor for her emphysema, get on an oxygen bottle or something. Aren't I?" She looked to Suzanne for confirmation, but continued without waiting for her response.

"But, she'd never listen. She always says 'it's just asthma, Delores.' Can you beat that? Fifty years of smoking and she's got asthma. She's always been like that--the queen of Denial." Apparently she realized she'd gotten off track, because Delores resumed her narration. "But, I thought she'd get it settled down eventually, just like always. So, I offered her my extra pillow so she could prop herself up...figured it'd keep her from drowning on it, anyway. And I took a shower, gave her a chance to fall back asleep and stop the damned hacking so I could get some sleep too, you know?"

Suze had been watching her mother speak, quietly annoyed that even now, dead for less than an hour, her grandmother was going to take a lashing from her mother's sharp tongue. As she told her story, Suzanne's mother grew increasingly expressive, gesticulating in big movements, talking with her hands as she did only when profoundly upset. Her eyes took in the motion of hands and arms, and Suze just let them wash over her in all of their comforting familiarity. She felt strangely detached, like she was watching her mother perform but was herself hidden offstage in the wings, silently observing.

Consciously trying to focus her eyes and shake the persistent and unnerving feeling of unreality, she noticed for the first time a long, thin and scabbed-over scratch running down her mother's arm. She wondered briefly why she hadn't noticed it before now, and idly told herself--the self that was still observing and recording the scene around her rather than allowing her to engage with it--she'd have to ask about it later.

~~~~

At least she was done with the whole business of the will. Her mother was, in that regard at least, satisfied. Soon, she'd probably head home, get cracking on those student essays she still hadn't graded. Suzanne heard her mother resume her wheelchair pace and figured it was a good time to get going, while Mom was still pleased with her for confirming what Suze believed she'd already known. Somewhere along the line, she was almost certain her grandmother would have filled her in if she'd asked, but who could be sure with those two?

She'd realized a number of years before that there was no making sense of families, at least not her family. It seemed to her like the people who claimed to hate each other, those like her mother and grandmother who exchanged endless volleys of barbed remarks and backhanded compliments on their best days, relied upon each other in an impossible to define but fundamental way. And they talked to each other constantly, despite living hundreds of miles apart and despite all of the vitriol each spewed both about and to the other. Both of them got along very well with Suzanne and seemed to have mostly supportive things to say to her, but neither called her more than once a week. They phoned each other every day, at least once.

"Oh, Mom. Come on now. I know you're going to miss her when she does go. I'm sure of it."

"You really think so, huh? Well, I don't." Her mother's voice was calm, confident, and frosty. The maternal bitterness she had been rehashing for the millionth time had turned abruptly on Suze, not for the first time. She'd waited just a few minutes too long; Suzanne realized that once again, her mother had set a trap that caught her in the middle of the older women's decades-long battle of wills. And once again, she had fallen right into it. One of these days she was going to learn her lesson and stay out of it.

~~~~

July 5, 4:10 a.m.

She had given her mother a Xanax and put her to bed in her room when they got back, thinking it macabre to take her back to the room her own mother died in only a few hours before. Nerves still jangled and felt stretched tight within her, and something she couldn't quite put her finger on nagged at the back of Suzanne's mind. With her mother safely tucked in, she wandered downstairs aimlessly, shuffling randomly around the casino for a while, try to sort things out a little bit in her head, see if she could figure out how she felt, anything. She doubted it could hurt to try, in any case.

When a green jacketed security guard stopped her to ask if she was alright, she realized she must have looked suspicious; she hadn't realized she'd been pacing and was briefly and mean-spiritedly horrified at the unconscious imitation of her mother. She told him she was fine even thought it felt like a lie and, to reassure him, sat down in front of a slot machine. He smiled briefly before leaving her to resume his post near the elevators.

Sitting there and staring blankly at the carpet, she couldn't stop turning over her thoughts, trying to determine what was making her feel so weird--why she felt guilty, why she couldn't seem to cry even though she'd loved her grandmother.

"Will!" A shrill soprano called out to a friend or lover, apparently one quite some distance away, and the voice snapped her attention back to the casino itself. Will. Will. Will. The name bounced around between her ears, becoming a word.

That was it. It was the will; that was why she felt so strange. How could she have been reading her grandmother's will just last week? It was almost like the act had caused the old woman's death, and that thought made her snap her teeth together hard in surprise. She knew it was impossible, nothing but ridiculous superstitious nonsense, although it felt like the truth. But, she'd loved her grandmother very much and the thought that she'd played some mystical role in her death was too morbid and horrible to contemplate for long. She'd loved her grandmother as much as her own mother, despite the never-ending hostility between the women.

Delores, on the other hand, had not claimed to love her mother--at least, not beyond the level of parental obligation, and mediated by her deep dislike for old Blimpertha. And now the woman she'd not even pretended to love had died, making Delores a very rich woman. Suzanne's stomach dropped; she couldn't even bring herself to finish the train of thought. Even as she shied from the thought, her mind filled with bits and pieces of the last few weeks--scratches on her mother's arms, reviewing the will, that odd flat tone over the telephone. It was like dying; suddenly, she was watching the film-style review of her life, seeing bits and pieces of her recent past flicker across her mind's projection screen like a mystery-thriller montage, the one that comes rights before the big reveal. In the movie of her life, she was catching up with the plot developments she'd not seen or really noticed the first time through.

She told herself she'd long since given up trying to make sense of her family and pushed everything aside firmly--apparently, the Crown of Denial skips a generation. She understood her grandmother's need for denial, a little; only now did she finally realize that Delores lived her own kind of denial. Suzanne wondered if she'd come to do the same, and thought that perhaps she already had. It was too huge to process, required too much of her soul; like a fragile and curious alien artifact, she set her knowledge down and turned her back on it.

Suze found she no longer knew what to call anyone, including herself. Sometimes, the truth is too painful to know; sometimes, all the truth will do is make life unliveable and family unloveable. Knowledge isn't always power--not the right kind of power, anyway--and the truth doesn't always sets you free; sometimes, the truth is a special trap of its own, one you can only escape by ignoring the presence of blood on your hands.

She fished a twenty from her pocket and fed it into the machine. The casino had given her time to think, and she loved it for that. Now, she would pay them back with the little bit of money in her jeans. Time was love and love was money, and that was as close to the whole truth as she intended to get.