Done and Done – Day 29: 46,749 – 50,088

The night after the barn fire, Carol was in bed looking over her own medical history, which she’d requested from her doctor. Knowing that cancer had claimed her father and would probably also kill her mother had reminded Carol that she, too, was fallible and vulnerable to disease.

Sean came in as she was sitting up in their bed, with her glasses on, looking through her own documentation at the notes her various doctors had made. She’d made it a point to save every piece of medical information about herself, if only because it was concrete (or rather, paper) proof that she was alive, that she had lived. It felt good to see her own vital signs in ink.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, sitting beside her.

“My medical records. Mom’s cancer reminded me that I need to go in for a physical and get all of my, you know, orifices checked out.”

Carol had broken down and told Sean everything after the police inspector had finally come and left from her mother’s house. It had been late when she’d pulled into their drive, and, like the walking dead, sunk into bed beside him, fully dressed and stinking of woodsmoke and worry. Despite swearing to herself that she’d tell no one about her mother’s health or the fire or her suspicions, she was unable to contain the weighty secrets anymore, and felt them spilling out across her pillow and onto Sean, who accepted them with a patience and understanding that she was sure she didn’t deserve.

“Orifices, huh? Hot. Yeah, I was reading an article that said every man over the age of like, 35, should get his prostate and colon checked every year or every other year.”

“Every year sounds a little over-the-top, but every other year probably isn’t a bad idea. I’m just so glad that we have health care. You know, a lot of people don’t. And they just have to like, hope they don’t get sick. Or, when they do get sick, the big pharmaceutical companies own them. They get their wages garnished for life for things that people with health care barely blink about.”

“It’s true. We didn’t have it when I was a kid, and my mom sewed up a cut my brother had herself. Like, ice, needle, thread, sewed. No anesthesia, no anything. And the whole time she was like ‘you think this hurts? Imagine how much it’ll hurt to not be able to eat because we’re paying off something that I can do myself.’ It was pretty intense. Every night, she’d pray that we wouldn’t get sick, because we’d all have been toast.”

“Right? I remember my dad saying once, like, right before he died that the only thing more expensive than living in America is dying in America. He was up to his eyeballs in medical bills that he knew my mom would get stuck with–and it didn’t help. He still died. They spent their entire savings believing what the doctors told them about his options, and he still died.”

“Maybe that’s why she decided not to get treatment. Like a protest. To finally take control over something in her life, when everything else was forced on her.”

“What’s forced on her? She lives out in the country where she wants to live, she gardens, she does whatever she wants. Nothing’s forced on her except paying bills for services rendered.”

Sean considered his wife for a minute. She was so clever, so kind–but she, and her brother, too, seemed so hard on their mother. Like she was just something that was there, but never someone that would ever go away.

“I mean…” he started carefully, “she’s out there all alone. She’s always just hoping you or one of your siblings will come out and see her. She’s broke, her truck’s always broken down, her own health is going, and she’s buried alive in debt for something that couldn’t save your dad. Why would she want to let more doctors come at her and force treatments on her if they wouldn’t help? She’s never seen anyone not die of cancer. It’s like…what’s the point? She may as well just go with it.”

Carol was kind of amazed. She knew that Sean was probably right–it did sound like her mother’s line of logic–but at the same time, it didn’t make any sense.

“Well…we’re the point. Her kids. Her family. We’re the reason to seek treatment, just like she and all of us were the reason dad did. He got help because he wanted to be alive for us and for her. Right?” She wasn’t even sure, but the idea that her mother had a death wish and that her own children weren’t enough to give her a reason to live was a painful awakening, and one she wished she hadn’t had.

She remembered her father’s slow, painful death. He had been such a giant man, so mythical. His hands had been big enough to circle around her own wrists easily, and he’d often lifted her high in the air, even after she’d finished growing in her teenage years. And yet, under the harsh and totalitarian reign of his illness, he’d become withered, nearly non-existent. His skin was as thin as paper, his eyes lifeless and without humor or even happiness. Carol had often hear people described as looking “like a shell” of a man, but, she thought, he looked like an actual shell. Or, more accurately, a shard of a shell, washed up onto the shore in Northern California, broken and thin. A fragile piece of calcium, bleaching out in the sun after being picked apart by seagulls and the hands of children building sand castles. Barely even anything at all, waiting to be chewed up and made into landscaping. He’d become so lifeless, she thought, he’d become detritus.

And her mother had watched, as the man she loved, her hero, had faded into oblivion, with half a million dollars in drugs coursing through his limp, soggy veins. Of course she hadn’t want to become another needle in a doctor’s biohazard box.

“I mean, you’re probably right.” Sean backed down. He knew he shouldn’t shrink her mom too much, since she wasn’t here to defend herself, and Carol didn’t seem to be very appreciative of it, anyway.

“No, I think you are.” Carol said flatly, and she wasn’t being sarcastic at all. “I really think that’s probably why. It’s not just because she’s stubborn. She just really has never seen cancer drugs treat anything, and she’s never forgiven Western medicine for sticking her with everything she’s got on her plate. Shit. I have to call Amy. We’ve been going at this all wrong.”

—-

In her own home, Amy, too, was thinking about health–but she was focused on the health of her youngest daughter, whom she’d been on the fence about vaccinating against HPV. She, too, was in her bed–but with her small netbook in her lap, her face illuminated by the screen and nothing else, as she silently probed the internet for information about the vaccine and its purported ability to prevent cancer.

Amy had been raised by her mother to have a healthy fear of doctors, of medicine, and of vaccinations. Not because her mother was one of those Jenny McCarthy loons who believed that vaccines caused autism, but because, as her mother had told her, they were just too damned expensive. Amy had received many of them for free at the request of her kindergarten teacher who, concerned for the other children in her classroom, had found a free clinic that offered the various shots for an inexpensive price. But aside from those, Amy had always had faith in the human body’s ability to fight disease and to heal itself. She was quite sure, in fact, that most vaccinations actually weakened the immunity of otherwise healthy children.

She’d had her own children vaccinated because of the stigma of not getting it done, and because her husband was the sort of Western man who believed anyone in a white coat and was mortified at the idea of not wearing a seat belt, let alone not being vaccinated.

But now…now, there was a vaccine that could prevent cancer. Which seemed both too good to be true, and too amazing not to be true. Could she really get her daughter a shot (a series of shots, actually, she learned after just a bit of Googling) that could help extend her life? What parent wouldn’t want that?

And what daughter, she thought, wouldn’t want to get the treatment for her mother that would make her life longer? What kind of a daughter would she be if she never confronted her mother, and simply let her cancer diagnosis lay fallow until it eventually grew and spread and took over her body? Wasn’t that just like standing by and watching a murder happen? Or, at the very least, an assault? Here she was, considering getting her daughter a series of shots that could prevent cancer…shouldn’t she also look into getting the series of shots that might cure her mother’s?

But unlike her daughter, who had her entire life waiting to be lived like a lobbyist in the wings of the capitol building, just waiting to bend the ear of an unwitting, wavering senator who wanted to side with both big business an the everyman, Amy’s mother had probably just a few years left in her–if that. And that was assuming she wanted them, which Amy wasn’t sure she did.

As Amy watched her mother’s barn crackling and splintering under the heat and weight of the fire that engulfed it, she had wondered if her mother had meant to be inside it, but had lost her nerve at the last minute. Had she wanted to lay upon the flames as if they were a funeral pyre, finally relieving her old body and stubborn mind of the discomfort that the last half decade had wrought?

She’d shaken the idea from her head then, but was unable to as she stared into her computer screen. It seemed silly, and yet, it seemed plausible. Her mother was a hard-headed woman, but she was also a sad and lonesome woman, wasn’t she? Wasn’t she someone who had often mentioned being alone? Hadn’t she been trying to give away her belongings and tie up loose ends? Amy had initially chalked it up to a response to her terminal (or probably terminal) diagnosis. But could she had been thinking about taking matters into her own tiny, brown hands? Had she had that kind of spark inside her to allow her body to be whisked away into the sky by a chemical reaction that had the power to level old growth forests and murder thousands? Fire could do so much. Certainly it could have relieved decades of ache from an old woman who lived alone in a world of mild awkwardness and vague depression.

—–

Michael didn’t lose much sleep over the barn fire itself. He dealt with the logistical nightmare that came as a result of such a large event, and even managed to find some insurance money that he was fairly sure his mother would blow on frozen food, but he turned it over to her anyway.

What concerned Michael was the fact that he was quite convinced that his mother had been, if not actively suicidal, hoping that the fire would take her frail body with it. He also became increasingly concerned that she might try it again. What did she have to live for? Her veins, her muscles, her tissue was wracked, he believed, with cancer that would ultimately choke the lift right out of her. She could surely have had mere months left to live–and she had obviously not yet shared the information with anyone in the family. Perhaps she’d thought it would have been easier to make it all go away, instead of going through the usual channels of treatment and hospitalization?

Michael gladly would have paid for her treatment–but he knew that she would never have let him. She wouldn’t have cooperated with doctors, she wouldn’t have tried experimental therapies, and she certainly wouldn’t have been part of clinical tests.

Would she, though, have done something so dramatic to avoid having to make that decision, or worse, confront her children with the choice she’d made?

Probably not, Michael thought. He wasn’t sure what had happened on the day of the fire, but he was quite sure that something had gone wrong, and that she had meant to be in the barn with the photos, and the papers, and the secrets of their family. He was positive that she’d been trying to go with them, which was why, until the day his mother did finally die, he made it a point to call her to check in.

—

If anyone had asked Magdalene not if, but rather, why she’d burnt down her own barn and all of the memories of her children’s childhoods, her deceased husband, her days as a much younger woman, she would have at first waved them away, as if the idea was a crazy one. Why would she do such a thing? She’d have countered. It simply didn’t make sense.

But no one did push her. In fact, her entire family did something very uncharacteristic–they didn’t pick at it, they didn’t prod, and they didn’t try to get to the bottom of her actions. They simply accepted that it was an accident, that their belongings were gone, and that was that.

Instead, her children assumed, conjectured. Sat alone in their homes or with their spouses and pondered. Came up with theories. Batted around ideas. Guessed at motives. And finally arrived at various decisions, none of which would ever be confirmed or denied. Magdalene would ultimately take her reasons to the grave with her, along with millions of cancer cells and a knowledge that she was incurable, anyway, and that doctors knew nothing. In fact, Magdalene died knowing several things: that her children didn’t know why she’d burned down the barn, that they were unaware that she had not sought treatment, and that she had done the right thing. Only two of those things were true.

But if anyone had pushed her–and really pushed her, not pretended to listen the way Michael did or grown overly-concerned the way Amy did–about why she’d done it, and what her plans had actually been, she probably would have eventually answered in honesty, because she was old, and she was as it came to pass, actively dying, and she had no reason to hide anything any longer. But the barn had plenty to hide, including some of her worst fears: that her children were awful, that she’d done a terrible job as a mother, that she’d wasted her life doing what she was supposed to do, instead of trying to figure out who she was supposed to be.

The barn also hid secrets about her–that she couldn’t participate in the world like everyone else. Her health care bills, her incurable disease that left her, it turned out, just another few months to live, her own inability to pay for things on the money she hadn’t ever bothered to save. All of this was there, in those boxes, reeking of age and mildew and shame. She’d realized, almost immediately after taking on the challenge, that those items were better out there, untouched, out of sight, out of mind.

The barn didn’t know some things, though. It didn’t know that she would die exactly as she’d always wanted–in her sleep, eyes closed, in her own home. It also didn’t know that the person who would find her body was one of the neighbors she’d loathed so much, who had become concerned when her mail had begun piling up. But the barn had enough information, she thought, that it needed to be silenced.

Even the police inspector, who did finally come to the scene later in the evening, didn’t push her, because he had no reason to suspect anything other than an accidental fire, despite being copious clues to the contrary. Even an amateur penny arcade detective could have seen that Magdalene had done little to cover the crime–and yet, being that she was a kindly old lady, and being that she was quite sure there was no insurance money (there was. It was recovered quickly after the case had been closed, and she was entitled to enough to build a new, much nicer barn to improve the value of the property, which she didn’t do), no one bothered to find out much about what had happened.

Magdalene had figured that no one would pry too deeply, so she didn’t bother to do much to cover up the fact that she had set the fire. For example, she’d move the ride-on lawnmower, which usually lived in the barn to deter thieves, into the shed–something she never did, which was made clear by the fact that a lot of items from the shed had recently been re-arranged, exposing dust and rust on tools and outdoor decorations. She’d always been concerned about leaving the mower, or anything of much value, in the shed, which seemed so easy to pry into. Had the police inspector who finally did come to the scene asked her what she normally kept in the barn, she probably would have accidentally mentioned that the lawnmower lived there.

Had be been a more hardened detective, or even just actually interested in what happened, the police inspector probably would have also found it strange that the horse, who usually preferred the cool of the barn, was shuttered out into an opposing, and very overgrown (thus, rarely grazed upon) part of Magdalene’s property. He also may have asked about why no one called the fire trucks earlier, and why the fire had been allowed to burn for so long without assistance. But he did not, and so, Magdalene succeeded without being pushed to telling the truth.

And because no one pushed her on the matter, Magdalene never came clean about the real reason she’d decided to burn the barn and all of its contents, save for a few, to the ground. She didn’t tell anyone that she’d had the plan for several days, that she’d saved every piece of junk mail and collected every bill and piece of medical information in the house, and crumbled them all together.

She never told anyone that she’d taken her truck into town and sat in the library, a rather foreign place to her, to research making a campfire. She didn’t tell anyone that that morning she’d moved the horse into the field, collected a few choice items (her husband’s lighter, a few photos she’d saved out, the metal shell canister that Michael had kept his trinkets in but reminded her of Big Bill, one of Amy’s elementary school book reports (about a biography of Amelia Earhart) that had somehow, miraculously, been spared from years of water damage, and one of Carol’s die-cast cars, which she’d saved her money and cereal coupons to send away for.

These little items, all of which Magdalene had specific memories of her children interacting with, were spared from the flames, because, Magdalene knew but never told, because no one pushed her, nothing more could be revealed from them.

They held no secrets–just pleasant memories of Carol eating cereal by the bowlful and next to nothing else for three week, Amy studiously poring over a book and asking her mother to define several of the more complicated words, and Michael going camping with his father in the dead of winter. And that was all. There was nothing sinister. Nothing to be uncovered after years of being buried, because truly, Magdalene thought, why dig up the dead? Dead memories, dead secrets–they were fine beneath the surface, beneath the roof of an old barn. Or beneath a pile of ashes so thick, nothing could escape.