Hot Sun

by Robin J. Hall

“Put a lock on your door. The demons are telling me to kill you,” my mother said. I did what she told me to do and put up a small silver latch. It was a clumsy job. She was a tiny woman and I knew from experience that she could not kill me, at least not with her bare hands, while I was awake.

The next day I arrived home from an errand. I found the front door locked. I called out to my mother, but there was no answer. There was no note. I had a nasty rush of fear run through me. The feeling in the pit of my stomach felt like I was watching a continuous loop of footage from the aftermath of an oil tanker spill. A sense of dread that was, many times, my most faithful and trusted companion. It was commonplace and easy to ignore. She had said something about a dentist appointment, I recalled. It would all play out as having a rational explanation. I imagined she had hitched her way into town, as she was prone to do, and let assumption mask my sense that something horrible was on the horizon. I got into the car and headed to work.

My summer job was pumping gas. Though working the cash register provided a moderate sense of anxiety, it was not, shall we say, too taxing on my stress levels. As I neared the gas station, I drove past a terrible scene. There had been an accident with the train that cut across a roadway. Red flashing lights ringed the tracks, and rescue workers bustled around with an earnest intensity that benefited their trade.

The accident up the road was on the lips of every gas station employee. Rarely anything good came out of their mouths.  Sean, the manager, hair greased back and plastered to his head, informed everyone that it was a suicide, and a man had thrown himself in front of a train. He had a definite sense of pleasure in relating the tragedy to us; other people's misfortune excited him immensely. He was a devout Christian in a management position that afforded him a little taste of authority, a perfect storm of annoying.

The accident made it on the news, too. The small dust-covered transistor radio that sat innocuously in the corner crackled out alternate routes for motorists in a husky voice. I settled into counting down the hours, now and again nervously banging the keys on the cash register, hoping I was giving the correct change to customers. The air was thick hot, and sweaty—a veritable meal of carbon dioxide and toxic fumes. As always, I avoided work as best I could. My duty was to do as little as possible; it was my moral imperative, considering they were paying me a pittance.

I lackadaisically pumped gas, stocked the fridge, and carried out my duties as a forecourt attendant with determined carelessness. Intermittently, I would treat myself to a whiff of sweet, hot petrol fumes, breathing in slowly and deeply, luxuriating in that lovely poisonous smell. The gorgeous scent of petrol was the totality of the job's perks. I was flicking through a trashy magazine, procrastinating with aplomb, when Kevin beckoned me over.

Kevin was an aging hippie. He was the epitome of the stereotype: long greasy hair tied in a ponytail and eyes drizzled with a light glaze concocted from a thousand lousy acid trips. He handed me the phone slowly. He did everything slowly,

“It’s for you,” He drawled and drifted into the shadows with a depressive air. It was a perfect summer day, which was precisely the kind of weather he despised. Kevin willingly worked extra night shifts when the opportunity arose. All things dull, damp, and dark were his inspiration.

“Hi,” I said. There was a pause. My breath quickened.

“It’s Margaret,” her voice was taught and quick. Margaret was a family friend. She had long, regal white hair, a lively soul, and made the most delicious apple pancakes. “Your mother has had an accident. I don’t know the details. They found my number in her possessions”. A bolt of sadness ran through me. A calm settled, the conciliatory space and peace looming tragedies bring. I took down the hospital's name and quietly, gently replaced the receiver. I told a lie to my boss, hoping he would not make a connection between my departure and the accident up the road. That connection had been intuitively instant for me. His small mind would rejoice in being one degree of separation from an accident, and he would whisper and gossip and take great pleasure in my pain.

The hospital waiting room was the perfect shade of sterile. An off-white blank slate. A morbid ever-changing canvas onto which tragic news and sad stories invisibly clung. The doctor entered calmly and not one bit flustered. He must have excelled at the “being emotionally unattached” segment of his coursework at medical school. I didn’t have a doctorate, but I’d made repressing my emotions an art form. I smiled cordially and assumed what I believed to be the face of a well-balanced adult able to handle any problem with a consummate, cool head. I nodded politely as he imparted the information with a matter-of-fact tone and estimable professionalism.

“She was trapped under the train for 15 minutes and was conscious when they cut her out. She is lucky to be alive. The only reason she was able to survive was the fact that the train had substantially slowed for a crossing.” Swallow, breathe, nod, and detach. I was satisfied my appearance was that of a resilient, mature individual heroically taking awful news in stride. He must have been impressed with my poise—mutual respect from a fellow professional in emotional detachment.

I waited well into the night as the doctors fixed her broken and crushed everything. Finally, I was allowed to visit her. The nurse gingerly led me in. Five-foot nothing is no match for a freight train. She was unrecognizable as a human, let alone my mom: a swollen mass of mottled blue and red against a backdrop of stark white and surgical steel. A web of unfeeling apparatus, pins, wires, and poles. Machines hissed, beeped, and sucked. A little patch of clean skin was free from grazes on her forehead. I was able to stroke it, gently and pathetically, to nurture her.

“She is one of the worst cases we’ve had in critical care,” the nurse whispered. Perhaps she thought I would be proud of that dubious statistic—some comfort.

I sat on the couch at home with a brown paper bag full of my mom's possessions beside me. I opened it up and emptied it on the floor. Oily rags spilled onto the rug, remnants of her dress, purse, and shoes. Ripped fragments lay on the threadbare carpet. I sat still, looking at the pile of tethers,  “That’s sad,” I said aloud, and finally, I cried. When my crying ran its course, I went to bed. The wind was up. I lay down and then got back up to see if I remembered to lock the door. I was alone. My brother and sisters had made their way into the world long ago, and it had been just Mom and me at home for years. Just me tonight. A twig urged on by the wind scratched my window. A cold draft from one of the countless cracks in the ceiling feathered me. I closed my eyes, and nightmarish visions of murderous intruders gave rise to fear which gave me some respite from the grief. Eventually, I drifted off into the welcoming anesthesia of unconsciousness.

It was fair to say this wasn’t the most carefree summer holiday. I fell into a routine, waking up, visiting my mother at the hospital, pumping gas, then returning home. I liked the idea of being a dutiful son. Some days I would massage my mom's feet. They were terrific feet, thick and leathery. Hard skin with large fissures down the heels formed a myriad of small chasms and canyons. They had weathered a lot in their time.

When she could get out of bed I wheeled her chair for walks in the Auckland domain adjacent to the hospital. Beautiful, vibrant, bright fields of green stretched out over the horizon. A rugby field where I scored a memorable try was visible, a memory that I vainly lauded. Pohutakawa trees with red bottle blossoms punctuating their dark canopy of green needles lined the roadway and dug their thick brown roots like greedy fingers into the soft volcanic soil. Bulging, gnarled brown-barked tentacles writhing over and through each other, searching for sustenance. The hot New Zealand sun was so bright and often made everything appear stark and vivid, a little too natural.

The sunlight burned as you walked, even as the air chilled you to the inside of your veins. It is a cold country with a hot sun. I appreciated the romanticism of this picture; a young man taking his convalescing mother on walks through nature. Idyllic ideas still masked my feelings.

My gas station colleagues did not provide me with adequate emotional support.

Despite my earnest efforts to instigate handball games on the forecourt, they did not want to goof off. They were barely interesting and rarely fun. I found solace in doing informal restaurant reviews of the local fast food joints. I successfully nurtured a forlorn crush on a beautiful chubby girl with pimples, dirty blond hair, and pretty blue eyes that worked at the cinema across the road. That was an unrequited love—my favorite kind at the time.

Mum had always dreamed of having a career as a singer. She believed it would happen. Seeing that sizeable plastic tube entering her throat was especially tragic, but the doctors said there was no alternative and that her voice would never be the same again. After it was removed, and she underwent physical therapy, I bought her guitar and messily strummed “Blowing in the Wind.” Her voice was whispery, scratchy, and faltered, mine also far from angelic, but it was a song we both loved. Our voices were the least of our concerns during such duets. It was fun, and these singalongs were a testament to our friendship. I had to return to college on the South Island before she had completed her physical rehabilitation. She was still unable to walk when I left her.

 She collected me from the airport a few months later on a break from college. There she was, standing and smiling in all that bright sun. We embraced and began to walk back to the car. She had a heavy limp. Survival is not pretty sometimes. Her walk was more of a hobble. She was alive, and her demons were on glorious vacation, but watching her shuffle along in those little, uneven, dragging steps brought a giant, thick lump in my throat for some reason.

“Thanks for picking me up, Mum,” I said. She smiled.

BIO: Robin J. Hall is a 45-year-old father of three and has been published by literary journals Akashic Books, Shooter, The Coffee Shop Blues, and also, The Huffington Post.