Jessy Reine

Jessy Ayn Reine was born in November of 1986. She was raised by a lake in Connecticut and among the cornfields of southern Pennsylvania. She studied writing at Gallatin, NYU and oil painting at the New York Academy of Art. In 2014 she received a grant from ARTS By The People to hand-bind and self-publish 75 copies of a first work, a novella entitled ”Diary of the Seduced.” She has published short stories with Wilderness House Literary Review, Blaze Vox, and The Quiet American, and was shortlisted for the Tartt First Fiction Award. In 2020 she published an erotic novella with the small press Black Scat entitled The Secret of Geraniums.

from Meadowsweet by the Road

A long flight, then a second one on a little plane in Nevada where there were two single rows of seats and propellers outside the windows heavily spinning. The women on this plane had burning-bright blonde hair, their sons had their heads shaved. They spoke with flutey voices tendered by violence and vague religious inference to silence their children. A man in a cowboy hat, old-fashioned gray whiskers at his cheeks, reading a newspaper. An overweight man sat across from him who probably drove pick-up trucks, everyone with the same hair-cut, working all in warehouses. I was nauseous, the atmosphere invading my body. Something definite was passing, and the time given to me of wiling away hours in the shade of my garden had gone. Gathered in me was deeper patience than I had known, as happens to all who garden. I was at a plateaued age—thirty. The children climbed over me to look out the window at our descent. Tops of palm trees waved like flags, the red earth plumed in a dust. The hard glare of highways cut the land, one cut after another, so many cuts in the red clay. The plane hit its gravel strip hard, and I reeled in nausea. Then, grasping the children through an airport of glass walls to revolving doors which released us into smothering heat, air as if baked and baked in an oven. The sky gray as concrete. Bakersfield.

XII

My aunt Shirley was waiting in the air conditioning of a white SUV at the curb. My mother would have walked in the airport, not taking off her sunglasses, and waved at us with the gold bracelets clacking on her arms. I buckled the children in the back and kissed my aunt on the cheek and shut the door. 

      “Well, sis—” she said.

      I glanced at her. How bronzed and lined her face was. “Well… tell me.”

      “You’re here thank God.”

      “I made it in time.”

      “You made it just in time. But oh God, what you’re walking in to…”

      “What?”

      Aunt Shirley, her face is made-up as if she were going to Vegas later, eyes rimmed heavily black, all the lashes divided and plumped, cheeks massaged fuchsia, fleshy arms glittering and full of motion. We were on one of the roads which parted the desert, cleanly, like a long sword. Palm trees imposing as soldiers on either side; must be they got their nourishment from deep down, the leaves were a dark green, while the trunks were worn away and eaten up. The land smeared away red and destroyed, in open-mouthed silence. But there is a definite stratum of nourishment deep down, for smaller embodiments of the Sequoias grow here. 

      “Tell me,” I said.

      “Well,” Shirley answered, wiping her eye, “she’s on hospice now, you know that? I wanted her to go on a month before any of this happened. She’s so stubborn, but I think she’s been holding on for you and the boys to get here.”

      I was nodding. “What else Shirley? Guys, quiet!” I cried back to the children, who were giddy.

      “Oh let them. It’ll be good to have them in the house, maybe hard on them though, or maybe not.”

      “Is she still moving around?”

      “She gets up in the morning and goes to the couch. And the lady from hospice visits but only once a week. It’s ridiculous. Should be every day. Yolanda and I are worn out splitting up the time to be there. I go every day.”

      “Well I am here now. I got a one way ticket.”

      Shirley’s red eyes rolled to me. “I know, sis.”

      We slip from the avenue of palms into my mother’s old neighborhood. The grass is overgrown here and boggy, snails crawled out of their shells smear their tears every morning on the sidewalk, and people crush them under their shoes. Trees drop their refuse unattended, pine-needles, some stray leaves, as the season of new growth has come. The roofs here are old, made of fired clay, with big, dark spaces into which spiders of the desert can climb and make webs for the season. The walls are stucco. My mother’s house has one of these Mexican clay roofs, and a courtyard that is overgrown. Shirley is completely undone about it. She would like to spray it through with insecticide so it doesn’t threaten her and cut all the winding plants back to their roots. But it is not her house and honeysuckle has claimed the entire southwestern wall of the courtyard. Hummingbirds visit every morning. I will soon see them feeding, in the early hours, before it gets hot. A bougainvillea is in full bloom, its flowers like red-dyed Japanese paper, with its many hands caught in the roof, breaking the end of a gutter. And an unnamed tree, Shirley sneers at it for it attracts the creatures she disdains, that she thinks should all be killed—the bees. So many bees buzz around this tree, from morning till they drop full of satiation in the dusk. Its blooms are yellow glazed with white, and it smells of their honey. I stand before this tree in the dusk, once the sun has dragged its direct light away, and fill my ears with the madness, the passion of the bees. They are oblivious in their passion, as it is only natural to be, swarming indifferently about a nondescript door, my mother’s gate to death. When we come into the courtyard, the children creeping beside us, and cross into the house, we are taken into blue shadow. White rectangles of light wander about the floor. The children run ahead of me. Their grandmother is sitting up straight-backed on the couch. A lady with bottle-blonde hair is holding her limp arm and taking the blood pressure. 

      I will describe her briefly, finally, and leave it. The cancer lives in her neck and her mouth. To open that mouth now—but it is not human like it used to be—death has inhabited it. A black hole, her mouth, all the energy in her body bleeds away from it, is pulled back, like the tides. The activity of dying, for it is like a burning furnace to die, a positive and engulfing and inhabiting activity, wherein the soul shrinks and is a parasite in its own body. The soul faints when the body dies, it faints and evaporates to mere nothingness, and then is freed. It is merciful to be freed. The black tumors hold her neck like murderous hands, they have pressed shut the dirge of her mouth. We extend the anomaly between animal and thing, between blood-rich creature and rock, by extending her life. How is her life possible? She has not eaten in months. Captive is her soul, a nervous, caught little fly spinning about her mobile eyes, caught in her glued down body, which I will see lurch at times in some jagged desperation for movement. Every afternoon baby formula is forced through her stomach lining by a tube that was surgically implanted when the cancer sewed her mouth shut. When we come in, she has just been fed. The living soul in her is flinging itself like a black insect between her eyes.

      Wasted, the light shrinks across the living room. My sweet, oblivious children, tired out from the two plane rides, fall asleep even before the sun has gone. I close the door to our room and step into the living room where my mother is an erect pole, her living eyes darting about. She is able to speak, by barely opening her mouth, but it’s a deluge of nonsense. Shirley has conveniently hung round her neck a little white board connected to a plastic string, upon which with a magic marker she flurries some words. And there is a machine beside her, a humming, energy-sucking thing, which clears out the black bile in her throat through a central tube, like a vacuum cleaner. She has to do this every few moments if we are to speak.

      I don’t know. It may be many months—I see is written on her pad.

      “Many months!” I cry. No, I am not capable of breaking my childhood role with her. In fact, as it is the last opportunity I have to play the daughter, I balloon it to ghastly proportion. As a daughter might cry at her mother and stamp her foot that she wants to go out and not sit up with her at home, I breathe—“mother, I came here on a one way ticket—“ so as to convey to her that the plan is to die, and if she doesn’t do that I’ll throw a tantrum. My life on the other side of the country was receded, I was missing the white catkins dropping from the black cherry tree, there was a husband of sorts waiting at home. I was here to witness the grand, composed moment of her passing, and for God’s sake she better not disappoint me. She parts her black mouth and gurgles, “many months, many months.” Then, rubbing the pad out with her sleeve, scribbles—I don’t think I’ll recover though.

      No, mama, dear. 

      The pad is rubbed out again, her hand flicking—but they are trying one last thing. One more round of medicines.

      Are they! So we must parade ourselves, a desperate, dependent party, into the cancer clinic! This woman clearly in the last stage of betrayal in her body must undergo her team’s chemically-armed ‘fight’ against her advanced course. She was captain of a very energetic team, ensconced in doctors who were pumping her with all they had in stock. She wouldn’t sink into that terrifying nebulous gulf just yet, but hand in wasted hand with science prolong her already ghastly prolonged life. I feel myself spike to a rage. She is decaying right before my eyes. Sink already into the white dignity of your departing ship, mother. But she is not bold. Had she ever boldly embodied herself? Curled up on a lounge chair in the shade of the pear tree on her deck, reading romance novels, her lean freckled legs tucked up, drinking sugary black tea, this life had slipped from her. Contented to dream while others acted, to wear the black of a stage hand, and flee onto stage in-between times. But Prometheus’ flame lights her from below as with everyone else, and she is lit even now, simmering. Perhaps as compensation her death must be a great drama. I glare into her eyes. There, I can see it, mother. Let me see it. You alone are passing, there are no other people passing through the night with you, there are no others to fulfill the roles. It is your drama at last. Embody passion and rage, mother, rage before the lid is shut over you.     

      A yellow fading into night, San Joaquin Valley in the spring. It is May. The sun which lays down its light in these parts can’t elongate so well past the fog of pollution which turns light into a meek, injured version of itself. Here in dust and distortion, where the sun rising and setting is only a general fade, I want you to rage, rage, mother, as once a year maybe, a hard rain suddenly falls to San Joaquin, and clears the sky. My mother’s dog, a chihuahua-dotson, comes hopping up on the couch beside her and lays her head on her foot. Unevenly my mother strokes her neck. 

      But rather, we must tick off all the mundane facets we concern ourselves with. My mother clears her pad again and writes, did you quit your job to come here?

      “No, but I just left, and if I get fired, who cares? Are you going to die more than once? You should be grateful I don’t have a career like my brothers. They can’t tear themselves away for more than three days but I am here to take care of you.”

      She writes—did you take Samuel out of school?

      “Yes.” 

      The bone-driven hand taps my knee. Something the hospice lady said earlier creeps up to my mind: she is young still, her body is not willing. There is plenty of energy in that hand.

      Another rubbing off of the pad: You might have to go back. It’s not the right time.

      “Oh god, I’ll go back now. I’ll just leave. I’ll go tonight!”

      I look into her black and full eyes, black and full of her trapped spirit, and bulging as I have never seen before, because all the flesh of her face is receding. And the mountain bones of her face, the Native American structure, shows itself in painful clarity. She is carved like a praying mantis, and its strange motion of utter stillness and striking action is becoming hers as well.

      Her thumb clears the pad. I don’t want you here when it happens.

      “Why?”

      “’cause,” she says, with her mouth.

      “Well no one else will stay with you. And I’m your daughter, and I think I have a right.”

      She looks at me with her eyes like marbles, and my stomach drops. Something is happening to her. She’s pushed in herself to a corner of her mind, in the most indignant and childish of moods, but at an even further edge is this unfathomable blankness I’d never seen her embody before, because it is not her, but the ocean underneath all of us welling up. She drifts her eyes to the white carpet, her face grimacing, as if there is something to squash there. She ebbs. 

      “Mom?”

      Faintly her head shakes. The tumors at her neck gleam like bloated ticks in the light of her lamp. I’m already used to them; they seem banal. The both of us feel sarcastic about it, my mother doesn’t pay them any mind, and to hell with them, we feel, like the cripple who might play the fool, dragging his own mangy leg about even more dramatically. 

      “Mama?”

      “Wha?”

      “I’m sorry. I wish I had a little more time with you, and that Sam had a little more time with you, and Lily. She hardly knows you.”

      “M’too,” she murmurs.

      The hand comes again, energetic, to my leg. It’s almost as if we were talking while drinking wine, as if we were on the swinging chair on the deck of the house in Pennsylvania, with Sam a baby, like many springs ago. But the high-tide of her waning is engulfing her now, and she is reeling back for sleep. I grab her machine, which is dumb heavy, and put my arm around her waist and we walk to bed. I don’t think I am seeing or feeling clearly. Everything resonates. In the early morning I notice that a black widow, a mother with eggs upon her back, has taken up residence inside the corner of the step which leads to my mother’s bedroom from the courtyard. I crouch down with my son and daughter to watch the ebony spider with the vermillion thumb on its thorax tuck itself up with its fuzzy eggs under the stair. Samuel’s not able to keep any secrets and he tells my husband who, curtly, through the phone demands that I smash it with a broom. “You must be joking!” I laugh at him.

      My aunt Shirley comes, dutiful, every day like she said, and asks me as I lay supine in the hot noon sun beside the tree that crawls with bees—“you miss your husband dear?”

      I open my eyes to slits and look at her through the waving light. “I don’t have a husband,” I murmur.

      “hm?” 

      “I mean, yes,” I tell her. 

      There are isolated incidents, of rain needling into the clay roof and mornings of sudden chill that have me throwing on my shawl and sitting close-eyed out on the lounge chair in the courtyard, when the bees seem to be sleeping. Afternoons in which my children spray the hose profusely all over the place and the puddles evaporate on the concrete in seconds. My mother shuffles from room to room dragging the cord connected to her oxygen machine, her back hunched, a lost, tortured figure shuffling from the bed to the couch and back again, completely without reason, and insane.

      Alone in my room with the light on, everyone sleeping, I write in a notebook with a pen—

      My mother is dying. 

      How long?

      Her eyes are watery with a strange unfocused light. The faintest of smiles comes with effort, her eyebrows are pursed. She weighs nothing. She is emaciated as those who were in concentration camps and as near to death as they. 

      On her boney knees flies land to rest. She does not feel them. 

      This is my own mother, humiliated in body—what had been the substance of her thoughts in the past? But all risen to the surface now, choking on her life. There is only one thing she can do about it now, she can let go.

      I am waiting now for her to let go. How long? My heart whispers, desirous, maybe the evening after my brothers leave.

      But perhaps it will be later. It could stretch on. She still wears her many rings on her fingers and they gleam prettily, even as her fingers become bones. Have I ever seen her naked fingers? Well, I will see them soon.

      She waits for my brothers. She waits for them. They come tomorrow.

XIII

The boys are coming. But first—to the Cancer Center. Certainly it is a new, well taken care of building, they all are, and impressing with an aural efficiency, good funding. Flat-screen TVs hang down from the ceiling in the waiting room. Mother is wheeled up to a second floor, the receptionist greets her warmly, she is known here. A short period of waiting precedes our entry into a little room where mother sits dazed, under the overhead lights with her neck all aflame until the doctor comes in, an Indian man.

      “Hello Belinda,” he says to her, bending down, as though to a child.

      She was always childlike, even as a full-grown woman. When I was small, I’d rush downstairs to see her when I woke, where she would be folded in her flowery nightgown, drinking coffee, reading the paper. Her eyes drift up when the geese settle on the lawn, we lived by the water. Their cries echo through my consciousness even now, from when I was small and my mother was alone with me.

      “Come,” she said. And I crawled onto her lap where she held me with that tense stubbornness of her blood. My father had left for work, or he was traveling, or he was sleeping, he was not there, and perhaps the sheepdog was gently rustling her tail at the door, and if my mother was feeling wry, she’d open it a crack and let the dog bang out, to bark and scatter the geese.

      “Mom.”

      “What?”

      “Did you have good dreams?”

      “I don’t remember.”

      “Why! Why don’t you remember? I remember mine.”

      “Well tell me yours.”

      “We were at grandma’s swimming in her pool and you were watching us on the lawn chair, and we were looking for the ghost of her dead cat, like the boys and I did for real, but in my dream we found the ghost, it was hiding under the big palm tree, and he went flying up into the sky.”

      “hmm..”

      “But I want to hear your dreams.”

      “I don’t remember mine,” she mused, “we can have yours.”

      She is the undercurrent, she stands still beneath the warm rush, the immediacy of her children’s lives, as if she were the seabed itself, and we her frenzied little fish. But what a security to offer, too vast, so smothering—how could I ever gather it together again for myself? Was it with bitterness she lay down her neck over our road? She collapsed beneath her children; we were her excuse to withdraw. But—she also entered our minds—the sacred landscape of the very young. Perhaps it was a grave transgression. But all things are grave. 

      “Belinda,” the doctor repeated. He waited while her watery gaze fastened to his. “Belinda, we must stop treatment. It’s only draining you. Maybe… go to the ocean, be with your family now. Do you like the beach?”

      Meekly, smiling, the woman shook her head, she did not care for the beach, for sand under her feet. She preferred enclosed pools, understood places—her children would map the wildernesses. She is firm and unmoving, without curiosity, landscape of the sea, she is the coral. 

      “Then be with your family now. Your daughter, and your sons. They are coming soon, you said?”

      Yes, she nodded. She hadn’t the emotional capacity here to cry, that was left for the women around her to do, Aunt Shirley and her sister Yolanda. I was not able to cry either.

      We drove back over the hot stream of pavement, between the rows of rigid palms, and pulled up to her clay-roof house. The hospice woman was already waiting on the lawn. Mother was taken out and helped inside. After a few minutes the woman packed up her medical kit and beckoned me, with Shirley springing up to follow. We walked out on the lawn.

      “She is different today,” the woman said, “withdrawing…”

      The hospice woman, Carol, partook in the general look of this area; she could have been seen beeping locked her BMW or Mercedes, for the love of cars in Bakersfield is deep. Huge, powerful vehicles traverse these flat, these circuitous roads. She walked now in high heels. She had the pasty, gently overweight shape of the women of this town. But also a kindness which suited her for her work. People dying in Bakersfield is as momentous as people dying in the more beautiful places of the world. She touched my shoulder. 

      “I’m going to give you my cell. I want you to call me if anything. As it is I’m going to start coming twice a week now, Tuesdays and Fridays, let’s say.”

      “So she’s different,” Shirley pressed. “Today she seems different to you?”

      “Yes. Usually she’s full of conversation. Especially with her boys coming.”

      “Oh yeah, she always called them ‘her boys.’”

      “But today… nothing to say. I think she’s letting it sink in finally. And maybe your coming, Jess, has signaled something, that she can relax her hold on things, though she is young, her organs are young. It will be slow.”

      “Slow…,” I murmured, “how long could it be?”

      “I don’t know. It really depends. A month maybe.”

      “All right,” I said, affected, turning my head aside. I could not pinpoint in myself whether a month were too soon or too far away. 

      “Have you looked over the list of medications?”

      “Oh. Yeah. So I’m to give her the narcotic every evening.”

      “Yes, she’s chosen not to have morphine. But it will probably get worse, and then we’ll talk about it.”

      “She never liked drugs or substances at all.”

      Carol nodded, and patted my arm. “There’s a lot of pain with this particular cancer.”

      “Does everyone who goes on hospice receive these medications?”

      “No, not everyone. But we’re here to ease the transition and make the person comfortable so the last days and hours can be given over to being at peace and with family.”

      “I understand that.”

      “I’ll see you soon.”

      “Goodbye.”

      “Goodbye sis,” Shirley reeled, wiping her eyes, and taking the woman’s hands.

      I watched Carol walk over to her car, over the stubbly grass. No shade this time of day, the windows of all the houses, the eaves under the old tile roofs were very dark, but the pathways between the houses shone. Carol slamming her car door.

      Shirley had gone to sit down again with my mother whose face was slumped, her shoulders folded into the cushions.

      “Hi mom,” I said, coming to sit next to her. “The boys should be here in a few hours.”

      She nodded. 

      How unearthly, or terribly of the earth she looked, for it was all organic, her dying. The cancer had come up within her after all, from her own body, crushing her balance, though this could not have happened all at once. She must have lived long… long without any balance at all. For we are all taken into sickness and swayed back into health, in oscillation, as on waves, through the years, till the balance can no longer be upheld. Even old cacti shrivel up, even the redwoods after so many years of watching. Though my mother’s body succumbed, the mind lives on a different plane, and hers was active, active still. Her pupil-full eye rolled to me. She saw and heard.

            Shirley was rubbing her shoulders in a way I could not have managed. I was cold here, clinical, less sympathetic in my caregiving; I was more fascinated by her steely will to hold on. To Shirley the death process was an enemy, and must be beaten back, even if it were clearly a mercy. She kept trying to reach in and breathe mother back with, “remember, sis, how we used to share wine in the evenings and talk and talk of the kids, and of mom and dad, too.” She breaks easily into tears. I could not cry. I was only watchful as the crow, as aloof and aware. I know that deep feelings run in me, but sometimes, they slip away, as fog used to slip over the lake in my childhood, and hide where the lake heaved unseen, only its active sound reaching me. Where my feelings were, I did not know, but Shirley did the crying, while my mother and I sat still and blank as stones.

      “Belinda,” which Shirley sometimes stiffly called her, “do you want to lay down? You’ve been on the couch a while.” And sometimes Shirley’s voice raised to a falsetto as if she were talking to someone who had recently gone deaf.

      “Mom,” I whispered, “should you go to bed?”

      “She never likes to go,” Shirley said, “she’d rather be up, it’s her routine.”

      But she went this time. We helped her walk while her feet dragged on the floor, and we put her to bed. 

      This bedroom. I think of it as big, maybe others wouldn’t, but there are fantastical elements to this room. It has many corners, is strangely shaped. And so many objects in the shadows cling to my psyche, things I had seen since my infancy. 

      It is a room of carpet, her bedrooms always were. This one is beige, she had talked of changing it. There is a down-step where her oxygen tank rests like a guard. In one oblong corner there is a bookshelf of romance novels with framed pictures and trinkets from my childhood crowded in front of them, all these dead objects sloping with her towards the avalanche of her departure. Two leopards stares out placidly from within a cork picture frame down to her fatal bed. I shoved some things off her bedside table, for her bile-sucking machine had to be brought in and dumped here. 

      “Let’s let her sleep,” Shirley murmured.

XIV

The hum of the oxygen machine, and with the door open sometimes came the rare winds of May in the San Joaquin valley. Her wind-chimes, usually frigid and so rarely singing, were stirred to a low, deep-toned ring. The boys came.

      They came full of bombast, Joseph ahead, with a brave smile on his face, bantering with his brother, Kyle, who is like his mirror, they are twins, the both of them laughing. Samuel ran up to them, Lily a foot behind, and my children were picked up and kissed. The boys clicked along their suitcases and perched them by the wall. They were only staying three days.

      Shirley and I flanked mother. We brought her like an ancient gift into the room, but she swatted us away like we were flies. The cord to her oxygen machine was pulled taut, and she reached out her arms toward her sons. The boys were her guts, her vitals, as she had never achieved successful relationships with any other men. They draped her together in their arms, and held all her vulnerability in some sacred sway for a moment; she closed her eyes. She was sat down snug between them, and their mundane talk, the details of the flight and what they ate for breakfast, were like some rich fat fed to her. She was swooning. She looked hardly conscious. I left them alone and went outside to the garden with Shirley.

      We sat down in utter silence in the lounge chairs, and my children followed too, as if mystically prodded. There was something intense and Akashic happening in there, shoved between her sons.

      Shirley did the proper thing of lighting a cigarette, and I almost wished I smoked. But I sat still with her as the smoke, very blue in the evening, wreathed around us. “Damn,” she finally whispered.