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The Mission

by Louise Trudeau

I used to thread myself into a suit and nylons, sturdy heels and hang with the morning crowd, push in on the queue and grab a pole for the ride into a career. Blanked mind and willing eyes, I’d watch lives pass by, rocking myself awake in time to disembark downtown. Work was all encompassing and somehow important—consultant to those already paid handsomely to do a job they needed me to fix. Weekly phone calls back to San Francisco defined my family duty.

Now, I dangle my loafers off a smooth hunk of concrete, a slice of noontime sun cuts across my t-shirt, the engines grumble inside me. People pace in spurts, catching waves of bus arrivals that hit, then slowly retreat. A turning bus reveals its pale-lit face and some city spot spelled out next to a number, each summoning an old scene. 26-Pine Street, the Saturday morning bakery. 2-Montgomery, night-long idea-hatching over a conference table. I rehearse my bus number “9-Tiburon,” to keep from getting lost in memories.

I had moved back to California to be closer, just in case, and created a duplicate career. Until the numbers added up: 36 nurses aids in one year, on 12-hour shifts, covered care for my mother at her home. The work now is just as urgent but less in my control. Complications are expected: aspirating, choking, falling. Once I’d learned how death would appear, I watched for it in every simple gesture. But when, in what precious moment throughout mounting years would that future unfold?

“I’m so happy you could come,” her eyes say to me. She sometimes mouths “thank you,” “me, too,” “I’m sorry,” telling me what I already know.

I advocate for ‘love and kindness’ above all from the nurses, while asking them to lift up Mom’s dead-weighted growing poundage, to endure longer sessions of her dementia, to step in when I am worn out.

“When you spend time with your mother,” her nurses stress, “she does better, a chance she recognizes herself in you.” With Dad dead and Mom here in flickers, the nurses have become my family, their needs now obligations far more pressing and steady.

 

“No puedo trabajar hoy; mi familia me necisita,” hits my ear, composed, insistent from the bank of pay phones off my right shoulder, from a guy in a turned around cap.

There’s the small phrase of that language I can recognize from the nurses, a phrase that has screwed up enough of my evenings, mornings to cancel out my life for my mother’s. “Number 9,” I repeat to myself.

More softly, he layers in warmth, “Si. Yo se. Lo siento. Es importante. Una situacion especial. Gracias.”

He sees it in my head tilt. Then laughs a little as he rehooks the phone.

“You caught me,” he says.

“I did,” I say. “Especial.” Amid after-breaths of heated engines and traffic humming my bones, under crispness of a late spring cloud-spotted blue sky, I smile.

He sits next to me and leans in, whispering. “You look tired.”

I stop feeling the cool of the concrete block underneath and hear only the quiet in my head. “Of waiting,” I confess.

More buses—I don’t know the numbers—lean around and surge through, stopping and starting before us. We chat a stranger’s small-talk. Until he stands, nodding a smile at my eye level. When he turns, he steps up into the 80-Mission. And before the doors close, so do I.