故事节选:结束了的故事

I LOVE YOU.

I LOVE THE STORIES

YOU MAKE WITH ME.

她花了很多时间和我和哥哥在一起，做姜饼屋，滑雪橇还有剪纸雪花。她教我们做苹果派，还会在晚上大声读 “黑神驹”给我们听——尽管她有在答应了要大声读完一整本书后总是半途放弃的习惯。这个她保存着关于我们的重大事件的盒子里总是被翻的杂乱。她死后我找到其中一件东西，那是我六岁那年送给她的生日卡片。上面写着：
致妈妈
我爱你
我爱你讲述的
所有故事

On a hazy October morning, after months of chemotherapy, my mother and I drove down to New York-Presbyterian Hospital in the near-dark, listening to traffic reports like all the other commuters. The cancer had spread to her lungs and her liver. This wasn’t likely to be a story that ended well. But, in a last-ditch effort, we had enrolled her in an experimental treatment program. I thought, darkly, that the creeping cars around us were like souls wandering in Hades. My mother was quiet. I worried that she resented my fussing about what she was eating and whether my father had given her the right pain medication.

在一个雾蒙蒙的十月上午，结束多月的化疗后，傍晚时我和母亲开车去纽约长老教会医院，一边和所有搭乘公车的乘客一样听着交通报道。癌细胞当时已经扩散到了她的肺和肝，这不像是一个有好结局的故事。但是，在义无反顾的努力下，我们让她参加了一个实验性的治疗项目。我思考着，暗沉沉的天色，周围缓慢移动的车流就像地狱中游荡着的幽灵包围着我们。我的母亲保持着安静。我很担心她会对我过分关心她的饮食而感到不满，还担心我的父亲是否给她拿对了止痛药。

I had often picked my mother up after her chemo treatments, but I had never seen one in progress. It is a brisk business. Needles and bags are efficiently hustled into place, as if it were not poison that is about to be put in the body. The nurses were funny and frank, though they’d just met my mother. As the drugs slid up the IV into her arm, we watched stolid barges plug up the Hudson like islands, the water silver in the haze. I read poems, and she asked me about poetry.

我经常接送她去进行化疗，但我从没有见过任何一个工作人员，这是使人感到轻松的一件事。针和药水袋已经有效的固定好，好像只要没有阻碍就将进入身体。护士们都很有趣坦白，尽管她们和我母亲还是第一次见面。我们冷冷看着那药水顺着静脉输液针流入她的手臂，如同驳船像小岛一样堵住了哈德森河，模糊中似乎镀上了银色。我为她朗读诗，她向我询问如何读懂诗。

“I don’t really understand it,” she said. “I never have. Do you think you could teach me to read a poem?”

I said that I could.

“我不是很理解，”她说，“我从没有读过。你认为你能教我读懂一首诗吗？”

我说我能。