Saying Thanks

Content Warning: this story talks about dying from cancer.

I am planning to surprise my mom with a bunch of paper cranes for her birthday. thirty-nine cranes, because once again and always, she's turning thirty-nine. My dad makes problematic jokes about the growing age gap. He puts on a pouty, broad-browed baboon grin, his claim to fame in the house. My friend Jessica was supposed to help me but she bails last minute, owing to some crisis she had assured me, promised me, was not going to happen. I text her "thanks a lot" and uninvite her from mom's party. What a pain. We are young and emotional and always hurting each other, beginning the Cold War, making up over a box of chocolates. So I still want to make these cranes, but I don't have any paper. I have no choice but to ask Dad and his rude eyebrows to get some paper from the crafts store for a school project. He sleuths out my true intentions in record time. If you tell Dad a fib, that grin finds its way onto your face and gives you away. I say "don't tell Mom", and as per usual he makes a ceremony of the idea that, tough luck, he's just received orders from On High to "tell Mom", and I'm gullible enough to begin pleading with him and his Lord and Master. After giving me his schtick, he relents and goes to get me the paper I need: origami paper, all the available patterns, so I can make a paper crane bouquet.

I seem to take to the art of folding, impressing myself with my trial birds. I complete the first serviceable crane in five minutes. I start the second one and immediately get a paper cut. Now I need a bandaid. I go to the bathroom and there's my dog Clementine just sitting there, unimpressed. I open the cupboard to get a bandaid and she suddenly barks, causing me to jump and knock out a bottle of pills from one of the shelves in the cupboard. the pills fall to the floor and Clementine eats one without a second thought. I freak out and call for mom. "Mom" is a word that tries to escape my mouth every time I feel like the sky is falling.  She came running, and moments later we were on the road to the vet. We didn't have time to put her in a carrier, we just booked it there and hoped they could get that pill out of her stomach. It was late, emergency hours only. There was a puddle on the sidewalk near the "DOGS" entrance. I run and slip, landing stunned but unhurt. I still say "ow" from habit. That little routine got the person at the desk off the phone to let us in quick.

 When they asked what kind of pill it was, mom hesitates before saying "oxycontin", leaving awkward silence in the word's wake. I rarely see mom hesitate I don't know what oxycontin is at the time. It sounds like buried treasure, magic beans, something secret and clandestine. They make Clem yak up the pill, feed her charcoal and fancy vet dog food, put her in a room for the night, and send us home. The ride home was strange; mom seemed preoccupied with something other than Clementine.  

"You and Dad are going to have to get her tomorrow, I have work till five." The way she spoke made me want to keep quiet; I felt like there was something more she wanted to say, and one wrong move would bury that something forever, but I was not one to bear an awkward silence for long. It hurts to see her so upset on her birthday, and I feel responsible for it, so I start crying and apologizing. I tell her about the cranes, and just trying to do something nice for her birthday, and her eyes change and she just says, "Hush", the way only she can. All the ice melts away and Mom is right there again, warm and assured, a shelter, a home. "The best gift I could ever receive is your smiling face, Tabs", she said, tearing up.  

At school, I tell Jessica all about last night, but all she wants to hear is "you're reinvited to Mom's birthday party". We decide to try to make those paper cranes in class. Curious classmates start helping, and once Danny catches wind of the operation, he springs into action. He's an expert origami artist. With a scoff he gets to work, hands lightning-fast, churning out this introductory figure at one every thirty-five seconds. We all step back, and someone times him. It turns into an attraction, how fast can he go? The teacher does nothing to stop this, being just as interested. With everyone so riled up, they are all in the mood to sing "Happy Birthday" for Mom. It's all painfully out of key, and I can't stop smiling. I leave school with thirty-nine perfect origami cranes, then I go with Dad to get Clementine and the whole way he sings "Oh My Darlin' Clementine". The high notes string up his eyebrows, and his vocal cracks merely embolden him. By the time we get home, Clementine is ready to run and hide from Dad's bovine bellowing. 

When Mom comes home, you stay out of the way! She's hungry and as cranky as Fred Flintstone. It's a righteous rage. I wait until the party to show her my crane cornucopia, bubbling from a wrapped shoebox, which of course she makes the highlight of the evening, bragging about me and my talented friends. I had only made one, but she calls me an entrepreneur. I struggle to pronounce the word. It's a small party: just me, Mom, Dad, Clem, Aunt Helen and Uncle Dan, The barbecue never tasted better than it did on that night, but I must have spent most of the time studying Mom's face while she ate and talked and laughed, looking for something there that must have eluded me all this time.

I couldn't find it. Not there at the party beneath her smiles. Not at the hospital behind her eyes. Not at any of the stages. Not as the medicine cabinet filled with new and clandestine potions. Not as she lost her capacities and shrank into nothing. All the regret, the pain, the despair in her life added up to one moment of fear on a ride home from the vet. At that moment, she needed me as much as I needed her. If it was still there after that, she never let me see it.

It's 10 years later. Every week Dad and I go with Clementine to the green hill with the oak tree that shades my mom's gravestone. Every year I place another paper crane down on the stone, which has engraved on it a line from a song whose words Mom chose to live and love by. I watch Dad's face as it expresses something wordless and eternal. Clementine is extraordinarily old for a dog and I have to carry her now. She gives me a wet old-doggy kiss. "Thanks a lot," I say.