“Okay. Take care of yourself,” she says, and hangs up. I wonder whether she will really come.
My head swims a little and I light a cigarette which I remember now was the precipitating factor and now the ashtray is out in the yard somewhere with cigarette butts strewn everywhere but I don’t dare brave the steps again to find it. I take a long drag to anchor myself to the bench and my head throbs. I will need to write the number for Uncle Rodney as he can take Honey if I die until Engin can get her but how he will get her is another question. I have to assume hope pray that there will be some way the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services can find their humanity if Honey is left motherless and her father needs to come and get her even without his papers in order but I’m sure they won’t. I google “mother dead father no green card” and after some grinding on the part of my phone an answer appears in the form of an applicant whose sponsoring sister died and evidently something exists called “Humanitarian Reasons” but it all hinges as usual on the submission of new and different forms and I think how the fuck will he ever be able to get through on the telephone to a person to say “MY FUCKING BABY is there in CALIFORNIA” and I just have to hope he has the good sense to go to the U.S. consulate in Istanbul and throw himself on their mercy and I think I need to make this list as simple as possible I need a process chart a job tree an org chart like I make at the Institute so first Alice calls Uncle Rodney and then he’ll need to come up from Quincy and get Honey and I guess he should be the one to call Engin and then Engin will need to call the lawyer and the consulate about what to do to get Honey and I realize I don’t have a will and wonder if I should make one and briefly hysterically I think that Engin’s only conduit to his child will now be a forest ranger in Plumas County who calls him “Engine” like fire engine even though it’s Engin more like Angler and I don’t bother to correct Uncle Rodney anymore because it’s like he just cannot do it no matter how many times he hears you say it. I consider that if I really thought any of this was going to happen I would be crying but then I think no one ever really expects these things, you physically can’t anticipate them, so how I feel has no bearing on what will actually happen and I need to just make sure everything is organized and at least I have some life insurance through the University.
I pour some of my melting ice on the cigarette and hear it hiss and put the butt on the windowsill and I go inside to find the small notebook I use to scribble Hugo’s various instructions in during our conclaves. I tear out several sheets and I consult the contacts list on my phone and I number one sheet “1” and write “In case of emergency please call my uncle Rodney Burdock at xyz. He should call my husband Engin Mehmetoğlu at xyz and our attorney at xyz.” I laboriously write out the link to the site explaining what to do about Humanitarian Reasons for the green card and I put all the pieces of paper in the middle of the dining room table and I unlock the front door and go outside and finish the screwdriver and smoke what I consider might be the last cigarette of my life so I try to make it count.
DAY 7
I wake up to the cooing of Honey and as soon as I achieve consciousness I feel my head in the hands of an unloving god and my mouth full of acid and ash despite a clear memory of brushing my teeth in the fluorescent light of the bathroom vanity and helplessly swallowing three expired Advil against the knowledge of what was coming. The red numbers on the hotel-style clock on the nightstand read 5:45 a.m. and I think please Honey, please Jesus, please go back to sleep, but her coos are becoming squawks and caws and I sit up and feel a wave of such profound dread that I have to lie down again and close my eyes. What unforgivable things did I do last night, I wonder, and try to still my pounding heart with the true fact that there is nothing unforgivable I could have done apart from the simple folly of drinking to excess at high altitude and falling down the stairs. Whatever devastation I’ve wrought I’ve wrought quietly in the privacy of my own mobile home. The pounding isolates itself to the upper-right quadrant of my head and I feel the egg on my eyebrow and think “I’m alive.” And then I think “unfit mother unfit mother unfit mother,” one of those word pairings of the sort my brain likes to get stuck in its gears.
“Shhhhh,” I say to Honey in her closet wondering whether she might lie back down and soothe herself to sleep. “Shhhhh,” but the position of the tongue to produce the sound allows me to taste the full ruin of my breath. Her caws become shrieks. “Dadadada,” she says. I force myself up and place my legs over the side of the bed. I am wearing only underwear and I look down at my slack white belly and the long thin hairs growing around my bikini line. I lie back down; I sit back up. I shuffle around the enormous bed and into the bathroom and see my eyelid is so purple it is nearly black and it becomes red radiating out from my eye. I drink the glass of water that is sitting forgotten by the sink. I know I have but it feels like I have never had a hangover like the hangover I have now and I can only propel myself out of the bathroom by hunching forward sagging my shoulders like Early Man. Honey’s noises are insistent and I shuffle to the closet and see her bright face like a little night-light in the dark. “Ameeeee,” she says, and lifts up her arms to me. I have heard her say “Amee” before but she’s said it to several people and I’ve never been positive she is referring to me. But this seems very clear and my heart starts bleeding and I pick her up and she is incredibly heavy and I carry her back to the bed and lie down, trying to clutch her to my bosom while she squirms and writhes to sit up stand up try and jump on the bed and my stomach is full of water and baby bees. My head pounds so much I have to sit up and put it between my knees. She stops her frenzy and puts her arms around me and her cheek against my back.
“I’m sorry,” I say from between my knees. “Mommy isn’t feeling very well.” “Ameeee,” she says and rears back and yells with laughter. She scrabbles around to my knees and I lift my head and she puts her hands on each side of my face and gives my mouth a big open-mouth smack and smiles so warmly and brightly that I say “Oh thank you my dearest one,” with genuine gratitude, and then she starts rifling her hands through my hair, grabbing hold of a big hank and yanking down. “Ouch,” I say to her. “Ouch ouch ouch” and I find her hands and extricate the hair and hold them very tightly. “We DO NOT pull hair,” I say, and she flails out of my reach and tumbles sideways off the bed with a loud thump. I spring off and around to the other side and she is trying to get her breath, her mouth open in preparation for what I know will be a tremendous cry. I pick her up and hold her against my body and lean my ass back against the bed and try not to throw up from all the jangling of my body parts and she screams. “My poor monkey,” I say to her. “Poor poor monkey. We got a bad bonk. Yes, that was a very bad bonk. Mommy has a bonk too. Poor lovebug sweet monkey, my little peach blossom.” I lean back to see her face and tears are running down and I wipe them away and wipe her nose with the scratchy white sheet and hug her again while she cries and wonder with desperation rising in my throat how in the loving fuck I will survive the morning. Soon she wants to get down and I set her on her feet and she takes off running from the bedroom into the kitchen.
I follow her with my hominid shuffle my head throbbing at every plodding step and when I get to the kitchen I look through the door to the dining room and see Alice standing there, Alice, utterly forgotten, called in the night, Alice, holding one of the chicken-scratched “In case of my death please call this number” papers I am now mortified to remember spreading across the dining room table before smoking what I believed would be the last cigarette of my short span on earth. She looks at me and I cover my breasts and turn around and shuffle quickly back to the bedroom. “I’m early,” I hear her say. “One second,” I manage to cry out and I’m fumbling around the closet for a T-shirt and sweatpants which I pull on and then emerge. Honey is holding on to Alice’s leg.