Endings

Endings

I write words on scraps of paper and keep them in a basket on my desk—words that perform soft magic. Some might glow, or give me a thump in my chest, but most act as prompts to get things going when I’m stuck writing. I dump the words on top of my keyboard: celestial, toxin, labyrinth, wings, flutter, aura, realm, bullish, peppermint, other-worldly, crackers, panic, skunk works operation, lime.

There is a lime at the bottom of G’s refrigerator. The green of its skin is light, yellow really, a transition color, or perhaps it’s the result of sitting between the lemon and the kiwi. It is the color of G’s skin now that her liver is bloated with toxins. She is fifty-six years old.

I watch her get out of the airport van having just arrived from Pittsburgh. The Fort Lauderdale sun turns on a switch inside G, its rays drawn only to her, giving her an other-worldly glow. She is oblivious to this the way a saint is unaware of her own aura. 

“Hey girlie,” I say.

“Hey honey. Oh, did you finish?” She keeps walking as if she has just slapped my hands with a ruler. 

She is referring to my novel-in-progress. The word finish flutters between us like a moth.

             G is wearing roomy sweatpants and without looking I know they are Pittsburgh Steelers swag. She and her husband recently bought an apartment in Fort Lauderdale as a getaway. G is a leader in business, a calling opposite to mine. Yet she understands my writing process, the impulse, the debilitating mentality of first draft, the need to be estranged and off kilter to write. I’ve gotten care packages from her, boxes filled with leather journals, coffee, and protein bars. “Go away alone, without my brother, to write,” because she knows I will focus on all else before getting to the page.

Days before her plan to fly to Ft. Lauderdale, G and her husband called me in Manhattan to tell me she had a few weeks left. They went on to other subjects while I sat paralyzed. “We love you,” I managed. She had not told her brother yet, and she gave me the job to prepare him. She kept saying a word I could not even type. “I’m going to die in a few weeks,” she said, adding her own end date. “I figure January 18th.

I get to Fort Lauderdale two days before her, getting things ready, tucking the curtains back. When she arrives from Pittsburgh, their apartment is painfully bright. She claps her hands lightly, not noticing the pile of assorted sandwiches from Croissant Time, the tall birds of paradise in the vases. Her walk has slowed a bit because she has already proved she can walk alone. I believe she is being pulled out to her beloved porch by a celestial buddy. 

I watch her family, windblown and pale. I stay inside and put out the plates and glasses. From my place in the open kitchen, I am an observer, an outsider to G and her sister. They are recalling hilarious memories of their brother. “He’s perfect,” G says. “No, he’s not,” I yell from the kitchen. “He’s just bullish.” G’s sister is rubbing her feet with lotion. I look out the living room window and see an apartment building on North Ocean Boulevard. I’m attracted to the turquoise lettering stuck to its wavy 1950s structure that says, Sea Tower. I look further down and see a young boy riding a skateboard on A1A as if no cars are coming, his arms outstretched like wings. 

There is nothing more important than being here as we wait for G to get on the bus. That’s how her family and husband refer to G’s situation, but I can’t. Writing my novel draft now seems selfish, delusional, unimportant. My characters are frozen. They know I am failing them. Instead, I am sent to Publix with a list: chicken fingers, Club Crackers, Pedialyte, ice pops. I also shop for every ingredient I need to cook our elaborate dinners with as if we are having a party every night. 

G does not have children and is a mentor to my own. When they were toddlers, I went to graduate school after working in publishing, unknowing that my parents would both become ill and pass away during that time. Then came the avalanche of jobs I could manage that were not writing fiction: starting a non-profit author program in Manhattan, contributing to educational boards. My writing couldn’t pay bills, so I wrote for myself as if it was a stimulating affair on the side. The stories I wrote easily swelled with vivid colors, making the mundane extraordinary to me. They were my confidants.

On G’s porch, we face the cadet blue Atlantic rolling so far out into the distance, we are convinced it is a watery path to another realm. We talk, eating Peppermint Patties. G tells me to keep writing. It’s yours. Her tone says that I am ignoring my responsibility. I look away from her focusing on the intercoastal to the right like a waterway buried in a gameboard.

“You’ll be on my dedication page,” I promise.

“Well, now you’ll have to get it done.” She tosses the foil wrapper in the waste basket.

G’s returning breast cancer struck me like some kind of skunk works operation gone wrong. But she had faith that she would get to the right place. 

I am at the mid-point of my novel draft. I think of G, my celestial buddy, with a ruler in her hand. My characters are up and about. I have faith that I will follow them as they reach their own conclusions. And for those moments of panic when I don’t know what will happen next, I reach into the word basket on my desk, that is, somehow, filled to the brim.

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Maureen Pilkington is the author of the award-winning, This Side of Water: Stories (Regal House). Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals, and magazines. She is the founder of Page Turners, a writing program for the inner-city schools in the Archdiocese of New York City. Currently, Pilkington is working on a novel.

Follow her on Twitter @MaureenPilk

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Find out more about her on her website https://www.maureenpilkington.com/

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THIS SIDE OF WATER

In This Side of Water, Maureen Pilkington’s bright debut collection, precise and vivid language delivers flawed characters to their moments of reckoning. A married woman goes to the cemetery to resurrect her father; a young girl at a beach club witnesses her parents’ infidelity; an icy New Year’s Eve leads a devoted husband to violent clarity; a teenager spies on her mother and a Catholic priest; a Russian “dancer” visits her American husband and plays a dangerous game.

In these sixteen stories, the backdrop of water—the Long Island Sound, the sulfur polluted Monangahela River, a koi pond, a basin of holy water, a tear in a boy’s eye—provides a salve for these characters, ferrying them to personal ports of renewal and resolution.

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Tags: feaured, women writers

Category: On Writing