A Steadying Wind

Claire stepped off the plane onto the jet bridge, and the Kansas wind swirled up through the gap against her cheek, startling and fresh. The weary crowd blindly swam toward baggage claim, jostling and pushing against each other like salmon returning home to spawn. Do any of us know what we’re doing here? Claire thought as she moved with them, sweating in her heavy coat. She looked ahead, holding her purse tight with one hand, dragging her bag with the other and trying to find a clear lane in the human froth.

A large, loud man in a business suit, phone to his ear, pushed past her, his elbow knocking against her shoulder, checking her stride. She hated airports. The fluorescent lights. People’s weird energy. Claire breathed deep and tried to relax her jaw and shoulders. She glanced out of the terminal as she moved with the flow. Seeing the horizon steadied her, and she sought it now. The sky here at the city’s edge looked clean, swept with wispy broom-clouds. The recent winter’s gray-brown grasses by the runway were mixed with new green growth, and bent and swayed in the spring wind. Just a few hours ago she’d stepped into still, early-morning San Diego air to catch her ride to the airport.

Time rushed past with the crowd. She should hurry. Mom might not make it more than another day, the hospice nurse had told her the night before. So Claire had flown, the oldest and the daughter, to help see her to the other side. She was the one left to do it; Mom’s sisters were too old for travel, Dad had been gone twenty years, and Claire’s brother Brian was out of state too, and no help in situations like these. He’d fainted at a funeral when they were kids, she remembered. He’d always been sensitive that way, both fascinated and spooked by death. When she asked him what happened at the graveside, he said he was thinking about the worms eating his uncle.

But Claire didn’t know how to do this task either. Her dread had grown during the flight like a gathering distant thunderstorm, as the miles and states slid by. She’d tried to ignore the feeling and what lay ahead, nibbling a granola bar and doing crosswords to distract herself. She’d read a book at the gate in Denver during the short layover. Instead of the settling of anxiety she usually felt on touchdown in Wichita, her stomach remained in her throat and blood whooshed in her ears, loud as the braking of the plane, like river water surging past. 

Too bad there wasn’t an instinct for helping someone transition to the next world, like there was for the spawning salmon. Claire knew she must return home for this event, but what to do when she arrived wasn’t spelled out. She’d done the easy part, booking the earliest available ticket, packing a bag, setting an early-morning alarm and waking well before it, and kissing her college-aged sons and husband goodbye. “I’ll text when I land,” she’d promised, and she’d kept that promise. 

But this next part? She had no idea what it entailed. What was expected of her? Would Mom be able to hear her? See her? What would she look like in her  dying hours? Would she be in pain, and would it be scary to witness? What exactly was a “death rattle” like? Claire had never been a good nurse, that was the thing. It was the worst part of parenting, she thought, looking after a child in your charge whose body wasn’t working properly. There had been plenty of those days with her kids when she thought she’d come out of her skin, when she wanted to just run out the door, out into the air and the sunshine, and just keep moving, away from that responsibility, away from the whining and the puking and the fevers and the coughing and that awful feeling of not being able to fix things.

Mom had never seemed to have that problem. She was sometimes impatient when Claire got sick—and Claire was frequently sick—but she never seemed scared, and was just as likely to brush it off. “Claire, you’re fine. Get a grip on yourself,” she’d sometimes say after laying a dry hand on Claire’s forehead, if Claire complained of fatigue or a sore throat. And sometimes Mom was right, and Claire was just fine. Mom, on the other hand, was never sick, never seemed to need help or reassurance.

With no baggage to claim, Claire moved her reluctant feet out the automatic door toward the car rental place. The spring wind welcomed her home with a cool clap around the shoulders. Where’ve you been? it seemed to say. Some things you could count on. Strange to say, but the wind was one of the few things she missed about her old home. Though she wished she wasn’t here now. At least she had the forty-minute drive to calm herself before she got to her hometown and had to walk into the nursing care wing where Mom had been lying since her fall two days before. 

When Claire pulled away from the airport and merged onto the freeway, she found it open and wide as always, the horizon distant and smooth, the plentiful clouds in motion, moving with her, the wind pushing the car along. She turned on the radio, which was tuned to one of many local country stations. She turned it back off; music didn’t seem appropriate right now.

As she neared town she found herself slowing. She’d gotten here too quickly. She exited the freeway at the south edge of town. She would drive up Main Street instead of taking the freeway’s shorter route around town. The twenty-mile-per-hour speed limit suited her today. The route hadn’t changed much since her last visit. There was her cousin’s old house with the big porch. And the dentist’s office her family had frequented. She remembered the dentist’s smell of smoke and the mint gum he chewed. 

Claire smiled as she recalled that Mom never told Brian and her about upcoming dentist appointments until they were at the breakfast table on the morning of the appointment. At the time Claire thought that was mean—the shock of the announcement!—but now, a parent herself, she got it. Mom didn’t want to deal with Claire’s anxieties, and she’d spared her days of worry, shortening Claire’s dread to 30 minutes while she and Brian brushed their teeth extra well and drove the eleven miles into Newton. 

There was Lupe’s Mexican Food; the place had been there for decades. The Et Cetera Shop, a good thrift store. JCPenney, where they came sometimes for a new dress or school shoes, Mom’s calloused gardener’s hands counting out the money carefully. The library, a place Claire loved; Mom had brought them there often, and sat and read the paper while Claire and Brian browsed the shelves, finding treasurers to take home. She remembered the smell of the books and the feeling of freedom and possibility. 

Claire’s stomach growled, bringing her back to the present. She hadn’t had lunch, and it was mid-afternoon here. She needed something comforting, predictable. There was McDonald’s, straight ahead. She took the drive-thru, then parked in the lot facing the steady south wind, which blew burger wrappers and a straw across the parking lot and made a whining sound around the compact car’s doors like an impatient dog waiting to come in. She slowly munched the hot, salty fries, one by one, and the burger, in small bites, and drank all the Coke, until there could be no more stalling. The wind fell in beside the car, accompanying her the last two miles to the retirement community.

The parking lot of the nursing wing gave away nothing of the process unfolding inside. Recently planted redbud trees near the door prepared to burst into bloom; they tossed their tender heads in the wind, giving themselves over, unafraid. Claire closed her eyes to gather her courage. She would do what she could, what she’d come to do, which she now understood was just to be here. She stepped through the gusty entryway, breathing deeply, bringing the wind in with her. 

The next morning, as the day lightened, Mom shrugged once, lifting her shoulders from the bed as her final breath tugged free and rose through the quiet air. After a while, Claire walked back out to the parking lot. The young trees’ pinkish-purple buds were opening to a warm spring rain. Claire followed the unpaved path to the nearby creek, lying back on a bench under the blanket of clouds, listening to the morning birds celebrate the day and its gifts. The wind, so gentle now, stirred the treetops, shaking the drops down, and caressed Claire’s face, soothing as her mother’s hands.