I used to call mom paranoid.
‘Having a go-bag is one thing, mom. A go-truck is not a real thing.’
‘Don’t you dare get rid of it, Ursula. It’s an original. Carbon and aluminum lattice regenerative body, pre-autonomy so you can still drive it when the road systems go down. The batteries are fully modernized, and there’s even an original charging cable in the rear box. One day it’ll save your life.’
I was twenty-seven, a few months younger than the truck, and mum was still healthy. We were putting luggage in the trunk of our day-to-day drive - an eighteen-month old Ford with standardized protocols.
Both vehicles could be legally taken onto the Interstate system and into any town or city with a population bigger than an average sorority house. But mom’s prepper truck would drive even if the automatic systems went down, not that they ever had.
‘What about the house?’ I asked, ‘Can I sell the house.’ Mom stared at me over the top of the car, her eyes glistening as if about to cry. ‘It’s a joke. I’ll never sell the house.’ Mom moved us here in twenty-forty, from over east. I think it was after she split up with dad and not long after I was born. She always refused to talk about it.
‘You sell it when it’s time to sell. But I’m serious about the truck.’
We were heading out on a mom and daughter jaunt before I started with my new company. Ralf, my boyfriend, feigned annoyance, but really he’s a sweetie who knows how much mom and I needed the time. Our route would take us across the heartland and all the way to New York, where we’d take a cruise through Manhattan and try to imagine the city before the flooding.
As an associate time off for long holidays wouldn’t be part of the near horizon. When I was little we took lots of trips. Every school holiday Mom would whisk us away somewhere. The first one I remember was being about five and we went to Florida and drove out along the Keys, back when they were still drivable. It was baking hot, even for Florida in the summer, and the aircon surrendered just after Long Key. We put the windows down and, with the booster seat, it seemed I was looking right onto the water, like we were in a boat instead of a car. ‘What if the water comes up on the road?’ I asked.
‘When it does, we’ll be ready for it.” Mom said, with the casual assurance a parent gives and a child accepts without questioning.
On Key West mom raised hell with the car rental company about the air-con and they promised to have a replacement at our hotel by the morning. Listening to Mom on the phone was scary because she never shouted at anyone. She shouted at me, not often I guess, but often enough I remember it happening. But if she was on the phone it didn’t happen. First she’d get past the ‘press one if you want…’ part and then, when she had a real person, she laid out the problem real calm. If she didn’t feel the offered help met her required level she’d say something like, ‘That doesn’t really work for me, because…’ There was always a because, a reason why the solution wasn’t good enough. Then she’d escalate it, ‘This is what I need done.’ Then she’d pause, for a second and ask, ‘Can you do that for me?’
One time she had the CEO of a utility company call her because they screwed up her account so bad, and she kept escalating and telling people they weren’t doing their job.
Whenever she got off a call like that she’d take a deep breath, smile, and make herself a fresh coffee. Though that time in Key West we went for ice cream sundaes.
Thing is, and I remember it clearly even though I was only five, the next day she refused the replacement car. It was newer, better, possibly even a Mustang, instead of the Fusion we had. She refused it because it was purple, and mom hated purple. Anyway, that was the first holiday I remember with Mom.
I didn’t know this one would be our last.
The interstate took us north, then east. We stopped at Reno to eat and, afterward, laid the car seats down. Despite the climate control working perfectly mom liked to wrap herself in a couple of blankets. The side windows darkened, but I set the roof panel for clear.
As we headed out of Reno the city’s lights faded away and a clear desert sky gave us a view of stars that looked like the result of a video enhancement package. We’d talked all the way up the road, now we lay in companionable silence and watched the glory overhead.
‘You never taught me about the stars,’ I gently reproached mom. ‘I know every Super Bowl winner from twenty-forty until now, every M.L.B. and N.B.A. winner and their M.V.P.’s, but nothing about the stars. I’m lucky I can identify the moon.’
‘You never showed an interest,’ she replied.
‘I don’t remember ever being interested in sports.’
‘You loved watching the Olympics.’
‘I liked the swimming and cycling.’
‘Well, you never know when there’ll be some quiz thing as a team bonding exercise at work, and you knowing who won the N.F.L., N.B.A., or M.L.B. in… oh, pick a year, will give your team the edge and impress your coworkers.’
‘Sure. Because in environmental advocacy we spend lots of time doing team bonding quizzes about old sporting events.’
‘You just never know. Look, is that the new international space station?’
I opened a night-sky tracker app and the roof overlaid details of satellites, planets, and major stars that we could see. One of the satellites was the new ISS.
Mom asked, ‘Can you zoom?’
‘The whole sky, or just the station?’
‘The station will do.’
The screen filled to show a pair of counter-rotating torus with a thick spindle in the centre. A long arm extended from each end of the central spindle and, on one of these, a spaceship was docked.
‘That is an amazing thing,’ mom said. ‘You know it’s the second ISS, don’t you?’
‘Yes mom. And I know the first one lasted for over forty-five years. Remember, I was six when the meteorites hit it.’
‘They were no meteorites. Someone destroyed it. I’m still not sure if it was the Chinese, the Russians, or us.’
‘Yes, mom.’ Paranoid and, sometimes, conspiratorial.
’Still. It’s a great thing. They can see everything up there. There’s weather systems they watch that we never hear about. Do you know there are a hundred lightning strikes a second on earth, Eight billion a year. Some of them are more powerful than we can imagine. Lightning which we haven’t catalouged, never mind researched. Lightning which can do unimaginable, mind-bending, things.’
Mom was tired. I could tell by her cadence. And she was drifting into her soliloquy on lighting. Mom hates being anywhere near a thunderstorm, would literally get in the car and drive miles to avoid being caught in one. It’s one of the reasons she chose to live in Southern California, there are so few there. The first time I actually experienced a thunderstorm was when I went to college in Columbia - New York gets a lot of thunderstorms - my reaction to the heavy rumbles and violent crashes got me the nickname Chicken Little for nearly a whole semester.
‘Another thing,’ Mom said, ‘great investment, the ISS. They licence the products of research, they sell power and wifi—‘
‘No-one calls it wifi anymore, mom.’
‘Sure. Still. Invest in the new I.S.S.’
‘I will.’
‘Hmm. Think I’m going to sleep. Wake me up in Wyoming.’
‘Night, mom.’
A couple of taps took the view back to the night sky. Mom’s breathing deepened and became regular, then it became heavy and she started snoring. It was a gentle sound, but loud enough that I’d made sure my ear-buds were to hand.
It’s hard to think of your mother getting older, and this was one of the first times I really considered it. She was thirty when I was born, older than average for a first-time mother. Whatever happened before I came along had left a mark in terms of the silences she kept, but in straight forward health terms she was fit as a fiddle. But she was slowing. Twenty years ago I would have been the one drifting to sleep; ten years ago we would have both been awake until the early hours talking about school, or the environment, or she’d be quizzing me on sports.
That was something which still fried my brain. From as early as I could remember she stuffed my head full of sports trivia. We never watched much, she never seemed that interested in the actual games. But I knew all the results. Unbidden they started scrolling through my head until I fell asleep, wondering what the next two weeks would be like.
My trust in Mom’s health was misplaced. Twenty months later she had me go with her to see a consultant, a specialist in brain tumors.
‘It’s not paranoia if you know it’s happening,’ Mom said.
The consultant had left the room. She claimed it was to obtain a file her system was failing to access, in truth it was to allow mom and I time to talk.
‘You can’t have really known,’ I said.
‘I thought it might be.’
‘But, what about your wearables? They should have been warning you earlier.’ A glance at her hand showed me why. ‘You’re not wearing them are you? No band, no ring,’ I looked at her neck, but she was wearing a roll-top, ‘I bet you haven’t even got a necklace on under that.’ I relied on the data my wearables collected. Like most people, my health insurance demands it. Mom never bothered. I’ve never asked about her insurance, guessing it was some legacy plan she pays peanuts for.
‘You know I never like having anything on for too long.’
‘Mom!’ It wasn’t a shout but the word echoed in the silence of the office. It bounced from plaques on the consultant’s glory wall, reverberated against pictures and notes on her gratitude wall, slapped against the window and collided with the door.
Mom looked at me. ‘We still have time together. It’s not like she said it was tomorrow, or next week.’
‘But she did say it was inoperable. Inoperable, mom. No one dies of cancer like this, not anymore. She said it’s inoperable.’ The word thudded in my head. ‘Inoperable.’
‘It’s just a word. And it’s not a synonym of imminent. Maybe we should go another road trip. It’s been nearly two years.’ Saying yes was easy, though I don’t think either of us believed it would happen. Mom’s tone was the one I remember from asking for ice cream on a cold wet day; it suggested yes but, I eventually learned, meant no.
And, since the collapse of the Southern Greenland ice sheet, my firm had been litigating companies and governments who spent decades denying climate change and working to limit controls on climate issues. We were as deep in work as Miami was under water. Taking time to jaunt round the U.S. wasn’t an option, not with partnership only a year or two away.
Part Two on Tuesday
text by stuartcturnbull picture by AberrantRealities via Pixabay