The Castle in the Clouds (Non-fiction Story, Autobiographical)

It’s 90° out, the year is 1993 and I’m nine. Mom told me to stay in the car, but it’s hot and I’m bored and curious to see whether I can break into the school bus at the back of the parking lot. I didn’t want to come here. I don’t want Mom to actually get the plaque. So what if the doctor said so? There’s no need to advertize it.

My skinny little fingers are just small enough to wedge between the black rubber flaps where the bus door meets together. I push; I push with all my might. Sand spread on the pavement rolls underneath the soles of my blue keds, sliding my feet back and my thighs into the edge of the steps onto the bus. Suddenly my toes grip a sandless spot and the door gives way a small bit. I pry the door enough for me to be able to slip through, surprised to see the opener lever that a driver would use change position as I move the door.

Squeezing myself in and climbing the stairs I can see dust being stirred up, like wispy particles of gold reflecting in the sunlight chasing each other through the air. Though I’ve ridden this bus countless times to school, being alone in it seems forbidden, alien, exciting. This is after all an illegal exploration, and for that reason much more amusing than staring at the dusty maroon dashboard of Mom’s ’79 Chevy Caprice Classic station wagon.

The forest green vinyl of the seats is extremely fragrant in the hot stuffy air of the bus parked with all the windows shut in the blaring August afternoon sun. I sit in the drivers’ seat, but the wheel won’t turn for me so I decide to stroll down the aisle. Without the familiar rumbling of the engine and the shouts of other kids I can hear every footstep as the spongy rubber on my keds meets the hard rubber of the slip mat between the rows of empty seats.
            “AM-BER MOR-GAINE! I am giving you to the count of three to get back over here- ONE!” I hear my mother yell her favorite persuasion.

My explorations cut short instantly I duck beneath the level of the windows and hustle myself back to the exit, “I’m coming!” I call back as I shimmy through the cracked door and force it closed. Thankfully my mother had parked behind a large plumber’s van with the windows painted over so she couldn’t see my escape off the school bus from her vantage point. Otherwise I’d have heard an earful for my unapproved escapade.

As I cross the parking lot Mom comes out from behind the van. My mother is a 41 year old petite woman with huge encumbering breasts and copper-red hair that is styled into short frizzy waves, five-foot-two but nearly 200 pounds. She is wearing a brightly colored flower print knit sun dress with big orange buttons all down the front. Her face is rosacea red and droplets of sweat are beginning to form on her forehead. She turns back toward the car and gets in, satisfied by my return at the count of one.

“What were you doing over there?” Mom asks as I click on my seatbelt.
“I saw a dragonfly and it was too hot to stay in the car.” I deftly fib.       

Then Mom pulls the textured blue plaque out of her near duffel sized paisley

shoulder bag. The emboldened bright white print on it is slightly risen and smooth, stamped on the center of the plaque with the unmistakable image of a stick figure in a wheelchair. Before I could stop it the handicapped parking tag went from in the bag to hanging from the rearview.

            “Do you reeeal-lee need to hang that up right now? Isn’t it just for parking anyway?” I plead.

“It’s easier if I just leave it there. What’s the problem with it?” My mother asks as she pushes her key into the ignition and starts the car.

“I just don’t know why we have to show everyone that you’re handicapped. It’s embarrassing and besides you don’t even use a wheelchair, you don’t need that stupid blue tag!” I whine as we roll out of the Raymond Maine town hall parking lot onto pine sided Route 85 toward 302. Calm hot air rushes out of the car with the entrance of a cool breeze as we begin to pick up speed.

“Honey, you know my breathing has been getting worse. The doctors say I have emphysema now. That’s why I’m quitting smoking and we’re moving near Grandma in Florida when the house sells because I think the heat will help some. You don’t have to be in a wheelchair to be considered handicapped; and with my breathing the way it is now I can’t walk as far as I used to without running out of breath. So I do need it; but my being handicapped now isn’t anything you should ever feel embarrassed about.”

Mom says, laying her foot down harder on the accelerator pedal.

“Mum-ma you’re going too fast.” I chide looking at the speedometer.

I was mostly raised in Raymond Maine on Patricia Avenue; a pretty quiet small town residential side road that lead to nothing of interest except the town dump that caught fire somehow without fail a few times every summer. The house I grew up in there, fondly nick-named by my father “the castle in the clouds” was a three-floored pastel green vinyl-sided (barn shaped) gambrel with a large yard surrounded by woods on an awesome hill for sledding.

Three months after the August day described my mothers’ house in Maine was sold. Just in time for me to be able to celebrate my tenth birthday as a going away party. What a great gift, just what I wanted! I can’t remember any of the presents I got for my birthday that year. I only remember wishing I didn’t have to go. I wasn’t comfortable with having strangers moving into my house and moving me out. I didn’t want to be over a thousand miles away from all of my friends and everything I’d ever known.

At the time I’d never been away from my dad for over two weeks. (My parents separated when I was four and had a long drawn-out name-calling divorce that took until I was seven to be finalized legally.) We were leaving for Cocoa Beach before Christmas and it would be seven months later during summer vacation when I came back to Maine. I was nervous about being so far away and sad about having to be apart from my dad for so long. I wasn’t ready to just say good-bye and move on. One however lacks the ability to just put their foot down and say no to such things when they are ten; so powerless to the forces of change around me off to Florida with my well-meaning mother I went. It is now nearly twenty years after leaving, yet for some reason I still dream of “the castle in the clouds” as my home.

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I’m ten and it is August again, only about fifteen degrees hotter. I’ve arrived back at my mothers’ apartment in Cocoa Beach from visiting with my dad over summer vacation.  Mom and I have just gotten home from the airport in her new (used) white Eagle Premier sedan. She has now gained another twenty-five pounds and is moving slower and more laboriously than I’ve ever seen. It worries me. In the parking garage at the airport she was panting, sweating profusely and stopping frequently to use her “fast-acting” steroid inhaler.

“Are you ok mom? Those inhalers don’t seem to be helping you as much as they used to.” I ask with concern as my mother unlocks the bold teal painted door that leads from our parking lot front yard to our eat-in kitchen.

“I’ll be fine after I have a nebulizer treatment. Why don’t you go grab your bags out of the car while I do that and then we’ll go have dinner across the street with Grandma and Uncle David.” Mom manages to get out between wheezes.

The terrain here differs greatly from Raymond. We live on the corner of busy Interstate Route A1A and 8^th Street, the few trees are palm, not pine and we are two blocks from the sunny surf-able beach of the Atlantic Ocean. My home is now a one-floor apartment on the first floor of a two-floor sickeningly salmon pink stucco building; an abhorrently Floridian landmark across A1A from The First Baptist Church that was now also my school. (Christ save me, please.) Across on the 8^th Street side is a pastel pink stucco two-block compound of condominiums that used to be a Pan-Am building before they went bankrupt. Diagonally across A1A is Grandmas’ house. She lives in a row of houses that owe their cookie-cutter shape to having been built by NASA in the ‘60’s to house some of the first astronauts. You might have seen them on an old re-run of I Dream Of Jeannie. Now these homes were owned by middle class families and retirees, some partitioned and rented to surfers that couldn’t afford beachfront but weren’t bothered by a two block walk.

I carry my travel bags into the house as Mom does her nebulizer treatment, which consists of a reverberant sounding machine that turns a bronchial-opening medicine mixed with saline solution into a breathable mist that is pumped through a clear cord to a duck-billed mouthpiece connected to a mini corrugated elephant trunk looking plastic exhale tube. It takes about fifteen minutes to complete a treatment.

“Ready for dinner?” Mom asks, turning off the reverberating machine.

“Yeah the pretzels I had on the plane aren’t really holding me over anymore. Let’s go to Grandmas, I’m hungry.” I reply turning toward the door.

Mom braces herself with her hands on the couch and pushes off on them to get to her feet, slowly raising herself into a standing position. I’ve never noticed her having so much trouble getting up before. We walk twenty feet from the living room to the door in the kitchen and Mom is already starting to huff as she reaches in her purse for the keys to lock the deadbolt before we cross the street.

“You can go ahead of me, just be sure to take care crossing the street and watch out for traffic.” Mom advises me.

“Okay I will.” I say over my shoulder walking in a straight line diagonally across A1A. Traffic holds me up for a moment but I make a fast sprint for Grandmas’ as soon as I see a safe enough space in between cars. Then I turn around to look at Mom. She is looking labored, leaning up against a car, slightly bent over holding herself up with her hands on the hood. After a few seconds she straightens herself up and shuffles slowly another few yards to the telephone pole on the corner and leans on it waiting for a large enough brake in traffic for her to get over the busy highway. I can see that she is sweating and gasping for breath.

She waits a few moments, until there is literally a quarter mile gap between cars then begins to waddle toward me. There is sweat streaming down her face and you can see the raising and lowering of her enormous chest with each exceedingly difficult breath. Despite the ample-seeming breadth in traffic when she started her arduous trip across, a car in the lane closest to me honks loudly, annoyed by having to change lanes because of the slow moving fat woman in their way.

My mother reaches the driveway, drenched with sweat and looking utterly defeated. She is now desperately sucking in gasped bits of breath between airless wheezing, leaning all of her weight onto Grandmas’ new (actually new) sea foam green Mercury Cougar, bending over the trunk searching through her purse for her inhaler. I stand frozen with fear hardly able to believe my eyes. How did it get this bad?

“Jesus, Patty! Are you alright!?!” Grandma asks bursting out of the house, seeming as scared as me.

“I- -“ cough, cough, heeeek, wheeze  “I- -“ hoought, cough, cough, hoought wheeze…. Mom failed to vocalize.

Then she collapsed. Her whole body pitched to the left and slid off the trunk of the car, over the bumper and into a heap on the ground. It seemed to happen in slow motion but I was stunned and helpless to prevent it.

“I’m calling an ambulance!” Grandma announced as she pivoted and hurried back into the house.

I am unable to move for another moment. ‘Oh my God! This can’t be happening!’ are the only words that come to mind. Then I get a hold of myself. I get down on my knees and grab my mothers’ purse and find her inhaler.  Sweat and tears fall down her face, my mother is laying on her side, her skin is starting to turn an unnatural purplish shade and sickening brief wheezes are escaping through her lips in uneven intervals. I stick the inhaler in her mouth and depress the mechanism twice, releasing the spritz into her mouth and lungs. Though still very labored her wheezes slowly start to become more regular.

“Jesus Mum-ma, don’t scare me like that!” I finally manage to say after a moment, trying my best to keep composure, with the tears welling in my eyes starting to fall down my cheeks.

“I’m- - heet-huagh, heet-huagh- - sorry.” Mom huffs hoarsely between wheezing as I start to hear the call of the ambulance in the distance getting closer.

Grandma comes back out of the house with her brother, my Great Uncle David. The three of us help my mother into a lawn chair where she takes another couple of inhaler spritzes. Her skin is a little less purple now, but still far deeper red than normal.

The emergency vehicle sound is deafening as the ambulance turns into the yard. Paramedics pop out of every side of the van, making it seem momentarily like an oversized and under populated clown car. A stretcher is wheeled out, it is brought over beside my mother who gets an oxygen mask placed over most of her face and is then helped up on the stretcher and strapped to it. The stretcher is wheeled back to the ambulance where it disappears behind closing doors.

“Don’t worry, she’s in good hands.” The driver mechanically consoles us quickly before driving off to the hospital.

“Come on inside, dinner is getting cold in there.” Grandma instructs me with a worn look on her face as Uncle David walks back in the house with his head hung low.

“I’m not hungry now! How can you think about food with what just happened to Mom? They just brought her to the hospital and you expect me to just go in and eat dinner!?!” I shout, buckets of tears bursting forth no longer able to be contained.

“There’s nothing you can do about it now, and there’s no reason to make yourself go hungry because of it. Those tears aren’t real; there isn’t anything worthy for you to be crying about now.” Grandma answers sternly before  going back in the house.

            I wish I could say that this was the last time I saw my mother rushed off to the hospital in an ambulance, her skin becoming purple as her blood turned blue from lack of oxygen. I wish I could say that she recovered fully and came home to enjoy days on the beach with me; that’s certainly the memory I’d prefer to have but I don’t. This was the first of many times in the painful last seven years of her life that my mother was rushed off in an ambulance. The last time she went a day without oxygen tubes shoved up her nose drying out the mucous membrane there and turning it into something like raw nerve endings in a pile of scathing hamburg. The first time I watched her collapse and the last time I saw her cross a street without the help of a walker or wheelchair.

            My mother smoked cigarettes for twenty five years and those cigarettes killed her in a slow and painful torturous dehumanizing manner I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy and my mother wished no one else ever need endure.. Crucifixion would be an easy way out in comparison. During her struggles to walk or simply breathe she apologized to me for her shortcomings as a mother because of her disability. Though her choices caused me pain greater than I know how to describe and lead her to the fate that took her from me, I could never hold them against her; instead I try to learn from her mistakes and pass the knowledge on. Sometimes we can’t know the consequences of our actions until they come to pass. I wouldn’t be the person I am now if I hadn’t gone through losing her.

            Five years before she died, at the age of 43 while spending her first year in a nursing home after spending six months in the intensive care unit of Central Maine Medical Center my mother said that when she breathed it was like sucking air through a plugged-up coffee stir. If you smoke cigarettes we want you to imagine that. Then add on to that desperate fight for life-sustaining air the extra hundred pounds you will put on and not be able to work off because of the steroids the doctors will prescribe you to when your lungs go down to one quarter their natural capacity. If you are a cigarette smoker we want you to think good, long and hard about what your life will be like if this happens to you. How it will hurt and affect you, not only you but those who love you. We want you to think about all you have to do to avoid this – Quit smoking cigarettes before its too late!

There is nothing in this world that I want more than to have my mother back. I wasn’t there when she died on the night before the eve of my seventeenth birthday. All I wished for that year was one more hug, and to be able to say goodbye. Over ten years have passed since her last breath, and still there remains a gap in my heart that goes on forever. I want to have her here with me still, just to joke around with or call for advice, to hug. I think about her every day without fail, see her regrets in every cigarette. If there was only one thing I could change about my past it would be to have been there with her when she died, to have been able to say good-bye.

You can’t change the past though; you can only alter the future. So that’s what I did. I learned from my mothers’ mistake. I decided to take the very real possible consequences of my actions seriously and quit smoking the cigarettes I had (retarded me) picked up smoking with the “cool kids” around the time my mother was machine breathing through a tube stuck in a hole cut into her neck (a tracheotomy) and eating green goo fed in a tube up her nose and down her throat to her stomach in I.C.U.. It took me a year of failed attempts to finally conquer my smoking habit for good, but now it’s been ten since I put the death sticks down and I don’t look back. I look forward to a life without the pain my mother endured with loving grace and to dreamtime spent with my mum-ma in “the castle in the clouds.”