Far away, the hatch closed and was locked for flight at 5:36 a.m. The countdown began. At the T-minus-9 mark they paused the clock and we all turned restless, the temperature of the day upon us. I peeled off my sweater.
“It’s a sailboat holding up the countdown!” called out a man, sitting with his ear to a radio and laughing. “It wandered into the area!”
Fifteen minutes later the same man called out, “There we go; clear to launch!”
A magnificent plume of white light flashed and smoke billowed beneath the cone, rumbling out on all sides. I tensed and held my breath.
“Look, Mom,” said Zachary. “Look!”
“Yes, sweetie, I see it.”
The sleek rocket lifted, detached, hung for a split second as if to fill its lungs, and then rose smoothly, liquidly, as if weightless, its tail fiercely burning fuel, flaming with a dragon’s fury.
Inexplicably, tears sprang into my eyes. I felt a flood of desire and regret that I would never sit inside that capsule and feel that kind of otherworldly power. And I felt something else: a sorrow that my husband was not with me, nor my oldest son, and we were not sharing this together as a whole family. Just as the ground shook from the blast off, I felt some deep sensation that the ground was cracking beneath me, and the rushing realization that, in my effort to escape, to break from the gravity of my family, and to create and keep a buoyant home of my own, I had rushed into my first marriage too soon and was staying in this marriage too long. I had broken off something essential in myself—some spiritual tie to my roots and to who I was, where I came from, most of which I had denied to my sons.
As the plume fought its way upward from the earth, through the bubble of air, I pulled Zachary close. He hugged back.
“Did I ever tell you your grandpa built rockets like that?” I said.
“Like what?” Zachary asked, his wiry monkey-body flinching with surprise.
“Like that one, right there,” I said, smiling, pointing at the fiery speck burning toward the membrane of our atmosphere. In another minute it would pierce through to another realm, beyond ours. I kept pointing until it was smaller than the tip of my finger and, lastly, the pinpoint of a star.
Chapter 30
Batman
The year Rod turned fifty he abandoned his coloring books. Batman, Birds of Paradise, Tom and Jerry suddenly untouched on his desktop, and his box of sixty-four Crayola crayons, worn down to the nubs, forsaken in his top desk drawer.
“He just quit?” I asked, dismayed, holding the cup of Lipton tea and spitting crumbs of a Ritz cracker. “Since when?”
Four of us siblings, spanning seventeen of our mother’s childbearing years, were perched around the Formica breakfast bar in the fluorescent light of my parents’ Florida kitchen. Mom and Dad had left a few moments before to pick Rod up from his group home in the Lake Margaret neighborhood on the other side of Orlando, and, in the meantime, Barbara Ann, Cami, James, and I were sharing hot cups of tea: an unusual sight. We didn’t know each other very well, in part because we lived on opposite coasts, and in part because we had grown up decades apart, in two different eras: Baby Boomers of the Sixties and Gen X-ers of the Eighties. Barb had been seventeen and I fifteen when Cami was born, and by the time James arrived, Barb had married and birthed a child, and I had flown off to college.
“We don’t really know when or why Rod quit. Dad says he’s just done with it,” said Cami, holding the tag of her tea bag with slender, manicured fingers.
“Oh dear,” said Barbara Ann. “Now what are we going to give him for his birthday?”
We all chuckled, the sound rattling quickly and then quelling into silence. We had convened from our different corners of the continent to celebrate this Easter holiday, the most sacred day of the year for our mother. She was moved more by Christ’s suffering and resurrection than by his birth. For her sake, we would all attend service at the Lakeside Baptist Church in the morning, and then sit down to ham, deviled eggs, and strawberry shortcake. I had long since given up celebrating the tortured death of a prophet and, instead, devoted my hallelujahs to the arrival of spring and sprouts and splashes of yellow and purple crocus—the sweet and brave persistence of new life.
Roddy’s day of birth, April 15, fell close to Easter, as did my father’s, April 11. This coincidence had, for a slender moment long ago, delighted my mother—before, as she often said now, “everything changed.”
“Shoot,” I said, biting into another cracker. “I already bought him Batman Returns.”
We all coveted the chance to gift Rod a new coloring book for his birthday. Coloring was one of the few tangible hobbies he still seemed to enjoy, at least up until now. This year, I had shopped early, spending a good hour in Toys “R” Us, leafing through coloring books and scanning Batman story lines. I doubted the plots meant anything to my brother. I suspected his coloring obsession had more to do with filling in empty spaces, his wish to complete the uncompleted. It soothed him in some way. And now he had forsaken it.
“Do you suppose something is upsetting him, something at his group home?” I asked, slipping into my investigative reporter mode, wanting to know the reasons behind anything and everything. But in fact, I was not in the position to note anything wrong with my brother’s living situation, or with his health, or with his emotional state. I was not in the vicinity of his daily life.
“A lot of things upset Rod over there—mostly his roommates,” said Cami. She would know; she often carted Rod to and from Lake Margaret.
The one time I had visited Lake Margaret a few years ago, one of Rod’s roommates, Jerry, had hovered around me like a giant fly, introducing himself over and over and asking me if I was married. The fifth time he stood directly in front of me, blocking my path, and put his face a few inches from mine, forcing me to say again, “No, I’m not married, not anymore.” I knew Jerry pestered Rod to no end, often charging into his bedroom, opening drawers and looking in his closet, stealing the odd pair of socks and, once, a set of brand new pajamas. Or at least that was one theory. The other was that a staff member had lifted the pajamas, which was why my parents now kept Rod’s good clothes at home.
“Maybe he’s just having a midlife crisis,” observed James, dryly, surprising us that he was still in the room. James tended to disintegrate from our family circle, noiselessly vanishing to his bedroom hovel where he kept the curtains closed and played video games until all hours. Since quitting his power-up job at Charles Schwab and moving back home at thirty-one, James rarely emerged from the back of the house, and when he did, he drifted about like a specter from kitchen to garage to patio for a smoke. Most often, when we looked up from our dinner plates, he was simply not there.
At the sound of James’s voice, I looked up. His stool was vacant and the only thing that indicated he had been there a moment ago was his half-empty tea cup. I caught the back of his gray T-shirt and faded jeans diminishing down the hall, leaving us to ponder whether he could be right. Could Rod be going through a midlife crisis, just like the rest of us?
An old familiar grudge bubbled up in me. The notion that Rod would have to endure this part of life, that he could be bummed out and unsheltered from the dark phases and stages of aging, rankled me. Typical, I thought, glancing upward at the acoustic ceiling tiles and beyond, where God supposedly dwelled. Naturally, He wouldn’t see fit to spare my brother this struggle.
In my mind, Rod remained youthful, a perpetual eight-year-old boy, his development arrested at the third grade. As firmly as I knew this was not the case, he always came to my mind at that age, partly because that was when he had been happiest and full of passions. One by one, he had given up his toys as he grew older, as we all did, but he had always kept his coloring books. Lately, he’d swapped to velvet color-by-number, and among all of us siblings, we had cleaned out several craft and art stores in our respective neighborhoods, buying multiple velvet kits in case they went out of stock. I ached as I imagined my little brother now suffering through t
he angst of a midlife crisis, tired of coloring and despondent that nothing new lay ahead.
Thirty years ago, I had aged out of competition, feeling old and beached, done with the best part of my life. I had come to know this was not an ending, but was blind to that at the time. Now, I was crossing another midlife threshold. My sons, healthy young men, were making a go of their lives: independent, industrious, talented, flying solo—exactly where they should be. I wasn’t sure how to be the mother of men. I knew this was my time as a parent to watch them from afar, but how was I to do this without their father? Single again, I had little desire to run out and find another mate. Was this a good thing? I sensed so, but did not yet understand why. It would be another five years before I understood that I was finally giving myself a quiet, steady space to write.
The sound of the front door opened, making us all set our tea cups down and turn. I slipped off the stool as my father, graying at the temples and beginning to stoop, came into the kitchen, followed by my mother, whose once-supple movements had slowed with the ache of her joints.
“Where’s Rod?” I asked.
“He’s here,” my mother said, cheerily, setting her pocketbook on the counter and nodding her head back toward the vestibule.
Following her gesture, I stepped into the vestibule and there he was, standing just inside the door. He wore a bright blue Izod shirt tucked into khaki pants and brown Hush Puppy shoes. As always, he stood with a slight twist to his torso, his right shoulder pulling right as his pelvis pulled left. His eyes were down and he held a wooden pencil to his nose, spinning it as if in deep contemplation, drawing comfort from the tangy wooden scent. I felt a sigh of relief; at least he had not discarded this pleasure.
“Hi, Rod,” I said.
“Hi, Moss.”
Tiptoeing toward him, I circled my arms around his shoulders and hugged him, lightly. His hand gently patted my back. It struck me that he was the one who knew all of his siblings best. We had come of age in two separate families: Barbara Ann and I in front of him, Cami and James after him. Rod was the only one to have lived his entire life in both families; he was our glue.
After supper, as everyone lingered over coffee, my mother chirped on about the Easter service we would attend in the morning. The choir had been working hard on the music and my mother, though no longer able to sing the major solos, was going to perform a small part. Her face was full of pleasure; she was always her most animated and passionate around her faith.
I thought of Rod and his forsaken crayons. Coloring had seemed to be a meditation for him, a kind of prayer, and I couldn’t imagine him giving this up any more than I could imagine my mother giving up her faith. Both were forms of sustenance, manna from heaven.
I thought back to when I let go of my religious faith. It had not been a sudden desertion, but rather a steady kind of flaking since I was a young child, a shedding of skin. I had come of age looking down on Catholics and Jews, yet I had fallen in love with, and married, two of the latter. By blood, both of my sons were Jewish, and had I borne them at the time of the pogroms or the Spanish Inquisition, they would have been slaughtered. Adding insult to injury, my sons were not going to heaven—at least according to my mother and the tenets of the Baptist church. Indeed, they were going to burn in hell.
In my deepest soul as a mother, I could not abide these assumptions and had discarded religion for this very reason. If there is a realm that awaits us after death I will know it soon enough. I had no need to guess at what it might be, or to deny entry to anyone or any beast.
Still, I missed certain elements of worship—the coming together, the song, the Bible’s poetry, the laying aside of tasks for an hour of reflection. I had spent most of my adulthood searching for these elements elsewhere, and, one by one, had brought them into my life. Meditation had become my prayer, writing my reflection, nature my sanctuary.
Now, I worried for Rod’s sanctuary. As children, we had colored together, staking out a spot at the kitchen table, or on the floor of the den, side by side, sharing the crowded box of colors. At first, when he was five or six, Roddy attacked the image, scribbling with one color over every part of the page, fiercely icing it with thick layers of royal purple and pine green, blotting out any semblance of dog or cat or flower. I didn’t mind. I didn’t try to teach him otherwise. Young as I was, I sensed his pleasure in sharing this ritual; it was not about coloring inside the lines, it was about companionship—about being brother and sister. About simply sitting with each other, bent over the same question, like “What color is Batman’s hair, anyway?”
Now, at fifty-four, I slipped away from the table and fetched the coloring book I had so carefully chosen in the toy store and carried it back to the table. Then, sitting beside Rod, I opened the book and asked out loud, “What color is Batman’s hair, anyway?” I didn’t expect an answer.
“Lello,” Rod said, instantly.
“Oh,” I said, taken aback. “Yellow it is, then.”
Plucking out the deepest gold, the color of Grandpa’s poplar honey, I put the tip to Batman’s forehead, marking him with bangs and curls sprouting out from under his skin-tight hood. Out of the corner of my eye, Rod reached for the box with its chorus of crayons. Pulling out the richest, most sumptuous purple, he bowed his head and bent over the paper. For the next hour we colored side by side, brother and sister, like the old days. Together, we resurrected Batman.
Chapter 31
Valentine
In my fifty-sixth year, I moved to an island in the Salish Sea, where I found a small studio nestled down in a hollow, surrounded by towering cedar and madrone trees. Three thousand miles from Orlando, in the opposite corner of the continent, I couldn’t have been farther away from my family without falling into the ocean. I had moved to Washington to be near Barbara Ann, and also nearer to my sons, both of whom were living in Los Angeles. Among its many virtues, my new home had a back porch entwined with honeysuckle and a view of wild daisies scattered across a small field—a place of reverie. Finally, after all of these years, I had my studio, my quiet place to write.
For all of its blessings, my island hovel had no cell phone reception, which was why, on a chilly afternoon in February 2012, I found myself parked at the Winslow grocery, sitting in the one spot where I could get a connection. I wanted to confirm that Rod had gotten my small box of Lindt milk chocolates and a big heart-shaped valentine.
“Oh yes,” my mother spoke with her familiar high trill, “he took your card to bed with him.”
Pleasure slipped under my ribs. I was still raw from divorce, and hearing that my brother cherished my valentine comforted me. I envisioned him during his weekend visit to my parents’ home, in his plaid pajamas, my mother pulling up the covers to his chin and kissing him goodnight. He was fifty-two years old, older than my parents had ever expected him to be. What was he thinking as my mother left the door ajar, the hall light spilling over the covers like starlight, the heart of my valentine in his hands? My brother so rarely showed joy. When he did, it was never as I’d expected. I knew this, and still managed to forget, over and over.
If I were to believe the experts, I’d have to assume my brother did not have empathy. That he was incapable of recognizing someone in distress and knowing how to respond. Yet he has defied this assumption all of his life. Once, when he was a teenager, Rod was sitting on the couch, watching my mother feed my baby brother, James. She laid James down for a moment and turned away to fetch a cloth from the diaper bag. Only a few months old, James had not yet flipped from his back to his belly—until that very moment. In one fell swoop, he arched his back and flipped with such vigor his baby body kept rolling—belly to back to belly—heading for the cliff edge of the cushion and, mere inches away, the rock hard rim of the coffee table. As he pitched over the side, my mother turned and cried out, and at the exact same moment, Rod dove forward and caught James in his arms.
“How about that,” my mother said every time she repeated this story to me.
“How about that,” I said, perched in the front seat of my car, both ears plugged into the phone.
“He misses his sisters,” my mother said, her voice feather-light, a tender soft down of words. “He remembers.”
A sting of regret ran through me, piercing rapidly and inserting a swollen ache that would stay with me for the rest of the day. What does he remember? I wondered. Does he remember when we were together as a family? When his two older sisters were with him at the breakfast table every morning, and again at dinner, and on weekends, a flurry of activity that sometimes riled him, but mostly assured him all was well? Sitting in the midst of it all, he contributed his own level of noise, the rattle and clack of marbles thundering down a marble chute, his own unique sound, the noise of my brother. At home, in the swirl of his family, he was part of the gang, part of the bustle of life.
Now, he was living with roommates he didn’t particularly like, and if given the chance he would move back home with my parents and sleep there, all of the time. His two older sisters were mostly voices over the phone, words and questions he had to listen to, decipher, and respond to, no matter what his mood; the precise thing he hated most in life, aside from looking someone in the eye, was talking.
I had spent so much of my adult life away that I could not get a purchase on what or how he thought of me. In what way did I come into his mind and how long did I linger? I liked to think we talked to one other and, sometimes, I saved him from bullies. I hoped this was true. Or was I a source of loss? Was his internal life a string of losses as I imagined it to be, or did he have some moments of satiation and contentment? When Rod came to my mind it was never as a flapping boy or an angry one. But as the grown brother who once, when I was visiting, stood across the kitchen counter from me, and when I looked up, met my eyes with a frank, open gaze. He didn’t blink or look away, and for a sliver of time we held each other’s gaze across that vast neurological gulf. When I finally smiled with my eyes, he turned away, but I had that moment. I had it still.
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