Nikolina

Published in 34th Parallel Reality Fiction (magazine) Issue 43 (see bottom of website for all issues):
www.34thparallel.net





The call came at six o'clock a.m. on the dot. It was the usual. Mother demanded to know when I would make my next visit, what I am eating that is natural and does not contain gluten, whom I’m dating and whether she has a psychiatric record, why I should invest, and if I have been taking my pain killers for a recent root canal. Mother had not let up in forty years.

"This is Nikolina Abramowitz. Your mother. Why haven't I heard from you?" she snapped in the phone.
"Ma, it hasn't even been thirty six hours. I'll be there today, sixish as promised" I said in a raspy early morning voice.
She didn't like "sixish". It wasn't exact enough for her obsessive tastes.
"Alright, six thirty five on the dot." I said sarcastically, trying to jab her.
I could hear it in the vibrations of her voice--she was about to ask me about my latest love interest but with underlying disdain. I changed the subject to the unseasonably warm weather.
"Seventy degrees in February, can you believe it?"


I had done it. I was successful in deterring her from judging Tiffany, my latest romanic interest. Her usual comment to me on our daily phone calls was that Tiffany was a psychotic taker and "complete treachery" and that her name sounded like a porn actress. I then pretended that the phone conveniently disconnected. Like a well-run machine, mother's subsequent calls that morning rang a jarring tone one after another. I ignored them.


Our meeting soon approached. I visited every other day. If I were a few minutes late, she would scold me but with loving intent . She would obsessively worry if I were late. I was her only son, her only child and the prize of her now fading existence. Better not take the chance on letting her down. I was used to it. I breathed a heavy sigh as I pushed on the gas pedal foreseeing the fight with rush hour traffic and mother's endless questioning. The cars beeped and sputtered along the road. Exhausted from the day's work, their noises became a lullaby that nearly cradled me to sleep.
"Move your ass!" shouted a driver behind me, waking me up from a fifteen second nap and back to the reality of the road and mother.


I passed my high school, now completely remodeled, and imaged that balmy night when I stood by the front door, posing for the senior prom while wearing a location detection anklet. Mother demanded it despite my father's objections. She threatened to leave him that night if I didn't wear the detector. But Dad soon grew weary of her outlandish threats, dramatic outbursts and demands, and found another more compliant wife several years later. Mother never forgave him for it.


Mother had moved in the cellar five years ago. She liked its cocoon-like atmosphere, reminding her of her childhood home, and the feeling of security in case of a thunderstorm, blizzard or tsumani. It was like a bomb shelter. She felt safe from the barrage of unsavory people she had known throughout the years and could quietly retreat into her world of black and white classic films and dark romance novels.


I fought through the maze of overgrown vines and weed-like vegetation that covered the cellar door. "Ma! I yelled. "I'm here. And can't you get the gardener to trim these weeds?" Mother didn't answer. Usually the door was opened slightly, a sign that she was expecting me. I knocked. No answer.


The living room and adjoining kitchen stood motionless. On a typical day, it hissed with a pot of some concoction on the stove, buzzed with the low sound of the TV or oldies music from the radio in the bedroom. This time, silence.
"Ma! Come out, come out from wherever you are. Is this a joke?" my voiced echoed into the stillness. No sound except for my heavy breathing. I sprinted through the rooms feeling my insides beginning to sink deeper and deeper. She was nowhere. Not in the closets, not under the beds, not on the roof. The TV in the bedroom was muted as Ingrid Bergman glowed on the screen in "Gaslight". In the kitchen a plate of a half eaten velveeta sandwich lay next to a glass of soda water and some kosher pickles. It was a picture frozen in the moment, as if in the middle of eating mother was beamed up through the roof by an alien space ship. I stepped outside, called her phone and noticed the gentleness of her voice on the recording. "Leave a message, dear." Her voice lingered in my head.


The neighbors had no information and had not seen her. Mr. Pinsky next door last saw her a few days ago tossing seeds to and talking to a couple squirrels. "Now don't gobble them up, you'll get a stomach ache" he overheard her say to the furry neighbors. She then retreated back to the cellar. Relatives both distant and close had not seen her. Tenants in the upstairs house heard nothing unusual-- just the same comings and goings and a slight creaking of the floor boards.


The police detectives weren't much help. They questioned over and over reminding me of mother. Their sluggish investigation staggered from one idea to another like an elderly women with a walker and without any clear results. Dad naturally had few leads. He spoke to me with a subtle artificial concern. He had blocked mother's phone calls months ago after she left nasty messages condemning him for not taking an active role in my life and for the emotional torment he inflicted. "Drama queen. She put you ahead of everyone else, and in the process alienated her family with nastiness," Dad revealed.
Then there was Tiffany who lived up to mother's expectations by offering only a modicum of emotional support after mother vanished.


I headed to every place I knew mother had frequented in recent years. Her favorite was a weekly "early bird" breakfast at Izzy's diner. I had not been to Izzy's since age seven. Entering the diner I was teleported to a time when I still held mother's hand and played with my matchbox cars on the counter while she nibbled on eggs and toast. Now, a women with dyed wiry hair in her twilight years sat in the same seat that mother did. She chatted with another woman about her hip replacement and reactions to pain killers.

The other woman repeated, "uh huh" innumerable times as if she had heard this story ad nauseum and just wanted to enjoy her eggs. I interrupted their engrossing conversation to ask about mother. They both gasped in shock at the disappearance and tried to console my emptiness and desperation. The woman with the wiry hair brushed a piece of lint off of my jacket, just the way mother did, and told me that women are capricious especially in their later years and that she'll turn up. "It may be a game," she concluded. I wasn't convinced of that. As I left I noticed a scarf mother used to wear on the coat rack. It smelled stale and musty without any hint of mother's drugstore perfume or the lemon air freshener she blasted in her bathroom. I grabbed it and questioned the ladies. It remained unclaimed.


The next day I noticed mother's gardener, Herb, sitting on the curb nearby slicing velveeta for a sandwich. He said he had not heard from mother, but he was expected to show up in the middle of the month. Today was the day, he said, chomping on the sandwich.
"Where did you get that velveeta? I asked as if accusing him. "My mother always eats velveeta!" He looked at me like a puzzled child for a few moments. "I eat it too!" he said as his boyish innocent look turned into an urchin. "What the hell are you driving at, Mac? Can't two people like the same sandwich?" he slammed the sandwich down and stormed off. I stood motionless staring at that half-eaten sandwich. For the first time, tears welled up in my eyes just like when I was a kid and fell off my bike.

I asked the detectives to question Herb. He was known a harmless man, but that "Mac" bit and the sandwich started to eat away at my conscience. Every day mother's image flooded my thoughts, then I felt it begin the wither into a cloudiness. This scared me. I still held hope in the investigation despite the bumbling detectives, like Clouseau in the movies.

I slept nightly on the aging couch at mother's. If she returned, I would be there and welcome her. In the silence of her underground world, I felt her presence. I felt her nagging, her obsession and her warm embrace that never surrendered throughout the years. Milestones of my past appeared before me: the awkward teen years, the post-college daze, the first heartbreak. And there was mother at my side. I remembered how she told me to wear my "rubbers" in the rain and how the neighboring teenagers laughed. I tasted her cooking, her awful frozen vegetable concoctions and smelled her kosher pickles in the air. I heard her telling me Tiffany is "trash and treachery". This time I believed her.


The house creaked and settled. Every sound brought me to hope thinking somehow she had returned. Something rustled in the weeds and leaves outside the window. "Ma?" I uttered. After a thorough inspection of he area, nothing turned up except a knocked over garden gnome. A squirrel must have done it. Sleeping was impossible at this point. I retreated into talking to myself in a calming manner. I sang songs that I remember from my childhood. I told myself that everything would be fine, but somehow I didn't believe it. I felt so very alone.


Days and nights blended into each other seamlessly. Nothing became clearer, only more shadowy. Work, traffic then night at mother's. It was time to prepare for the worst. I reclined on the couch as my face puffed up about to explode with tears. At that moment, Dad called. I hadn't heard from him since our conversation weeks earlier during my most frantic stage. Not even one call to his own tormented son. "The bastard," I muttered not wanting to answer the call. On the last ring, I answered.


"I saw your mother's car the other day parked a few houses down. I think it was hers."
"What do you mean, you think?" I was unwilling to believe anything from him and suddenly hated him, the heartless scoundrel. Mother had been right.
"I checked the plates..." he said coldly. "And what did the police find in the car?"
I expected the worst. Her body? Her left arm detached? Her head in a box? Dad had done it or his new wife. She had no other enemies. Maybe this was a ruse.
"Mercury poison."
I paused trying to absorb it all, feeling a sense of macabre relief. It had come to the end. At least it wasn't something painful or tortuous like severed limbs. But mercury...


Police swept the area with search lights and growling, sniffing dogs. At last they came upon a woman slumped over in her morning robe deep in a thicket in the woods. Her hair tangled with dirt and leaves and a letter to Dad in her hands. Her body wilted as she was lifted like a rubber pencil. Only the faintest glint of life was left in her.


A doctor with a hardened look tried to piece together the scenario. He claimed she was lucky. Mercury poisoning is slow acting, leading to confusion and weakness. She was lucky...he kept repeating. He must have said the word "lucky" fifteen times.
In a brightly lit, sterile room Mother lay still with a barrage of tubes and contraptions winding around her frail body. I held her leathery hand with its protruding veins in mine.
"Ma?" I said softly.
She didn't respond, just looked at me like she always did when irritated. She was about to say something, but wasn't ready.

 
"Why'd you do it? Did you want to take Dad down with you? Did something push you over the edge?"
She remained silent, breathing heavily. Then she began to form what I anticipated as a long confession, a speech that would move heaven and earth.

 
"You really need to visit more often" she said mustering up all her strength. "And answer the phone."

"Will do." I replied gently squeezing her hand.


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