"What? What?" I asked, begged.

"Oh," my mother said and moaned. She swung her head mournfully in my direction. She opened her eyes: blue, beloved, uncomprehending as a buzzard. "Now there you go again," she said. "Always interrupting me."

Before this, a couple of weeks before this, when she'd first been admitted to the hospital, she knew everything. She said, "For heaven's sake, open the curtains." She declared, "I'm not using any damn bedpan. I don't care. I'll die first! I still have my dignity, you know." How little she knew.

I sat and watched her for hours, days. I stroked the top of her head. Her hair — she had hair — was sharp and dry like the weeds that grow flat along the cracks in rocks.

"Oh," she moaned. "Don't touch me. It hurts. Everything hurts. You wouldn't believe the pain." She closed her eyes. "Let's sit and not say anything. That's what I want more than anything. Let's just be together and rest." I was twenty-one; my mother, forty. It was cancer, but not the way we'd imagined it would be.

Everything went very quickly, but it took a dreadfully long time.

There was a place called the Family Room where I went when I needed a break. There was a rainbow painted on the wall with a pot of gold at the end of it and a dancing elf doing a jig. Also, an itchy orange couch, a refrigerator, a microwave oven, a coffee pot and a water dispenser with one spout that was hot, the other cold.

I went to the Family Room and drank tea from a pointed paper cup and read the bulletin board.
There were signs advertising groups for people with AIDS, with chronic fatigue; for parents of premature babies or twins; for drug addicts and anorexics.

I stood and read those signs each day as if I'd never read them before. I stood perfectly still and erect and I was acutely aware of my stillness, erectness. Grief had suddenly, inexplicably, improved my posture. It had also, more understandably, made me thin. These things combined to give me the sensation that I had become an inanimate object. Something brittle, like the branch of a tree, or a broomstick.

Usually I had the place all to myself. One day a man walked in.

"Hello," he said. "I'm Bill Ristow."

"I'm Claire. Claire Wood." I shook his hand and held onto my empty paper cup. It was pliant and soft and wet as the petal of a lily.

Bill's eyes were hazel, sunken. He scratched his head with a pinkie finger. "My wife's in six-ninety. She's got cancer," he said. "Are you new here?"

"Kind of," I said. "My mom, she's been here a week. We didn't know anything. She had this bad cold and then all of a sudden it was cancer everywhere." I looked up at him, smiled, stopped smiling, went on. "Like three weeks ago they found it. And now the doctors say there's nothing they can do." I stared at the absurd green bumpers on the toes of my tennis shoes. I didn't know what I would or would not say. I didn't feel like I would cry. I had no control over either.

"Christ," he said and jingled the coins in his pocket. He was making coffee. The water fell one drop at a time into the pot. "Well, kiddo," he said, "I hate to say it, but in a way you're lucky. It's no vacation to drag it on. Nance and I — we've been doing the cancer thing for six years."

He was older but not old — my mother's age. I thought he might have been a wrestler in high school; his body dense and wide, like a certain kind of boulder; his face too — primitive. He wasn't good-looking. He wasn't bad-looking. He took a mug that said WYOMING! from the cupboard and another one with a chain of vegetables holding hands and filled them both with coffee. He handed me WYOMING! without asking if I wanted it.

"You and me have a lot in common," he said.

I didn't say anything. I cradled the coffee in both of my hands. I didn't drink coffee. I didn't like coffee, but I held it anyway. With pleasure.

"I was thinking about the time that I locked myself in the bathroom," my mother said.

"What time?" I sat with my knees pulled tightly up to my chest in the wide bay of the windowsill in her hospital room.

"You remember the time."

"I don't remember any time."

"I was furious with you. You were about six. I don't remember what you did. Probably a combination of many small things." She paused, looked over at me. Her beauty, even then, was like a Chinese lantern hanging in an oak tree. "It was just after I'd finally left your father. Anyway. Nobody tells you how it will be. I was so furious that I wanted to hurt you, I mean do you physical harm. Well, I didn't really, and I wouldn't have, but right then and there I felt capable of it. They don't tell you that when you become a mother — and nobody talks about it — but everyone has their breaking point, even with children. Especially with children." She laughed softly. "So. I went and shut myself in the bathroom to calm down."

"That was probably good," I said passively.

"Oh, were you ever mad! Just seething. You couldn't bear that I wouldn't let you in. You hurled your body against the door with all your might. I thought you were going to hurt yourself. I thought you would break a bone. I had to come out so you wouldn't."

I hopped down from the window and went and stood at the foot of her bed and rubbed the tops of her feet. It was the only place I could get at freely, without the tangle of tubes and plastic bags of fluid and tall carts holding the machines that sat near her head. We were quiet then. My mother fell asleep and I watched her face for signs of relief, which did not come. She held an expression of permanent tension and I could not discern if this was a new thing, or if it had been there all along, masked by the ordinary light of real life. Her chin hung slack, making the flesh beneath it baggy, but her mouth was strangely alert, puckered, and faintly streaked with vomit. I thought of the commercials of starving African children, the flies gathering at the corners of their eyes, the kids too weak to swat them away. How unbearable it was to see that, more so than anything else, more than all the other things, which were so much worse.

I got a T-shirt from my mother's duffel bag, wet it with warm water and wiped her face.

"Thank you honey." She opened her eyes. In slow increments, she turned her head to face the window.