Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home

Your house is on fire and your children are alone

 A woman dies of pancreatic cancer on a bed in palliative care. This is Earth the Mirror of the Pleiades, her youngest daughter thinks: You look up at something and then down at its reflection and the two things are different – so different they cannot possibly be of the same thing, but they are.

#

Her older sister had called and told her that their mother was on her death bed, and that now was the time to see her, if she ever was to see her again. 

I know you don’t believe in a hereafter, her sister said, so it’s now or never.

Never, she said. There is nothing there.

She put away her phone after the call. 

Her husband asked her who was that? 

She didn’t say. Instead, she asked him if his father had ever given him any advice. 

He shrugged. Sure, he said, isn’t that what dads do? 

After he had gone to bed she phoned her sister back and said that she would go with her to see their mother the next day. 

The following morning they backed the car out of the driveway and drove two hours to palliative care. They drove in silence. After about an hour in the car she saw a dog walking beside the highway between the berm and a barbed wire fence. It had a limp of some sort, but exactly what leg was injured she could not tell from the car. Without looking at them as they passed, the dog slid under the lowest strand of wire on the fence. 

When they reached palliative care, her husband stood outside of the car and waited for her. She had packed a one-hitter in her purse and lit it up in the car. When she was done she reapplied her lip balm and popped two breath mints, and as she got out, he told her that yes, his father had given him some advice: don’t get married, don’t have kids, and don’t work with family. Look at me, he said. I’ve done all three, same as him. Too soon old, too late smart.

I am not sure how long I’ll be, she said. She walked in alone.

#

She and her sister had three things in common: they had never had children of their own, they had both married men who had children from previous marriages, and they had their mother. 

In the room their mother lay in bed, ninety pounds of her so light and inoffensive you would think that she would leave no impression at all, and that the staff would not even need to change the bedding before the next day, the tomorrow coming that brought in someone else’s mother to lie there and bide their last little bit of time in palliative reverie. She was not even sixty yet, but there she lay.

When her mother spoke her voice was the soft drone of bees, and not it seemed, her voice at all. Listen to me, she said, listen to me, but she would fall asleep again and it would be some time before she tried to speak once more.

I am here mom, she said, each time her mother spoke. 

We are here, her sister would say. But the wraith of a woman would close her eyes and be silent.

While their mother slept her older sister asked her if she’d ever prayed for their mother.

No, she said, that’s for you to do. You are the believer in this room.

It would not hurt, her older sister said. Give it to God.

You give it to God.

It works if you work it.

Within families there are old arguments and then there are new arguments but there are always arguments.

When was it over for you? her older sister asked. 

The older sister omitted for the moment any argument about God. 

I’d have to think about it, she said. 

The older sister continued. I always prayed for her, but when I did she always brought up the Mirror of the Pleiades thing. That thing she believed where the Earth and the Pleiades constellation were mirror images of each other. That somewhere, out there in the Pleiades, someone looked towards Earth and saw the exact same cluster of stars we saw when we looked up. She insisted. She knew. That’s when I knew she would never get better. She did not want to get better. Try telling her that there are eight or nine planets here, depending, and only seven stars in the Pleiades. I know. I looked it up. Lord help me, I looked up the Pleiades. I knew that it was out of my hands – out of our hands.

She did not argue. Out of our hands implies into God’s hands, she thought, especially when spoken by her older sister. She wondered if she had been here long enough. Had she done enough so that she could get up and go. She thought about how she could leave while her mother slept on her bed, both of her daughters looking out the window or looking at the walls, looking at anything but their mother and each other. She remembered her mother’s picture then, her picture on the wall of another place, at a different time. 

I knew, she said, I knew for sure when I walked into Taco Pete’s Taqueria for some two-dollar tacos and there was a picture of her on the wall, a blown-up image of this wild-eyed crazy person captured on security camera footage. Do not serve this woman it said, and again in Spanish, No sirvas! I asked, and they told me she had dined and dashed so often, on Taco Pete’s two-dollar tacos, that they had banned her. It’s the first thing they taught new staff. So that’s when I knew. Doctors, doctors, doctors, facilities, facilities, facilities, everything worked for as long as she’d let it. Then she was banned from Taco Pete’s two-dollar Taqueria and I knew she’d let nothing work. I am amazed that they even found out that she had pancreatic cancer. You know how it is with people like mom, they get no care. They can’t even ask for help for themselves. They banish all questions. They live and die in dreadful certainty, their organs failing, their chaotic neurology animating their shaking fingers to point only towards the imaginary like the “Mirror of the Pleiades” and proselytizing on behalf of their own, singular madness. I resigned myself to her dying as a Jane Doe somewhere, and me never knowing. I made peace with that. I used to be afraid, afraid to my very core, that I too, would lose it. I’d believe only in what I made up. I’d become her – or even worse than that, have a child and pass that on, have her. But I saw that picture in Taco Pete’s and I wouldn’t let it be me. Believe it or not, I never feared that again. 

Her older sister shrugged. Prayer, she said. That’s what I believe. That’s what I hope.

She got up and left then, leaving her older sister and her mother in the room. 

Call me if you need me, she said. You know where I am. 

You were always her favorite, the older sister said. You always got to go.

No one is stopping you, she said. Not the Pleiades, not me, and least of all her.

#

The older sister sat in the quiet that came with the absence of her younger sister, thinking of prayer, thinking of her mother’s picture on the wall of the Taqueria. Do not believe anything your sister says, she tells herself. She is still afraid. Pray, she tells herself, pray for all of us, and she prays.

Her mother stirred on the bed, tried to sit up and speak, but again her voice was the flight of bees from some cracked and arid hive and again she made no sense at all. 

Mom, she says. Mother, but the old woman interrupts her, repeating herself, until her daughter, shaking her mother, begins to shout her prayers and the nurse comes running down the hall.

#

On the ride home, after about an hour, near to where they had passed the limping dog on the way down, they saw a man walking in the same direction the dog had been. He leaned forward, his hands inside his pockets, as if walking uphill against the wind, neither of which were his current circumstances. He too was halt of gait, every step he took was hard. 

Look, she said, there’s the dog’s owner. The dog we saw on the way down. 

Maybe, her husband said, but maybe not. It could be that he is just a man walking.

No, she said, that’s his dog, and he’s looking for it.

You seem very sure.

Yes, she said. They have the same, the limp. They are each other’s.

©

Steve Passey is originally from Southern Alberta. He is the author of the short-story collections “Forty-Five Minutes of Unstoppable Rock” (Tortoise Books, 2017), “Cemetery Blackbirds” (Secret History Books, 2020), and many other things. He is a Pushcart and Best of the Net Nominee and is part of the Editorial Collective at The Black Dog Review.