“Claire!”
You’re not pretty.
“Claire!”
You’re not—
I face the mirror. Wet hair hangs down around my waist. My lips are my mother’s lips. My eyes are her eyes. I’ve spent months not looking at myself in the mirror, not wanting to see her, or the her from before.
“Claire!” Izzy shouts even louder, jumping up and down. “You’ve got to come.”
* * *
A few minutes later, I am dressed in semi-clean shorts and a tank top, reaffirming to myself that I am not going to Max’s party tonight, no way, absolutely not. Why am I smelling pancakes cooking? I guess my father is home. He’s making pancakes like he used to on Sundays before the stroke, probably to make up for practically disappearing on us. The buttery smell smokes down the hallway. I’m annoyed and relieved. I’m going to tell him that he’s been acting in a way that is unacceptable. You can’t just go off and abandon your seventeen-year-old with your six-year-old, no matter how responsible both are—you can’t just leave them. Things could happen. I laugh at myself—nothing happened—nothing ever happens to me. I pivot away from the mirror. I can’t bear to look at myself.
Of course, Izzy is giving a speech to our father about what did happen. All the way in my bedroom, I can hear her racing on about going-to-the-beach-and-seeing-Max-and-swimming-in-the-waves-and-Claire-swimming—and there were other big kids there too—what were there names again? One was Barkley—like the doggie on Sesame Street— And guess what? Do you know I’m starting first grade next week? Do you know—? Izzy broke her promise to me. She’s telling him everything. I can’t believe this. I can’t trust her with anything.
Pancakes pop and sizzle. Izzy laughs. My father coughs, burly, nervous. I want to go back to sleep, back to dreams, dreams of flying again. A woman laughs, sputters. My stomach hurts, my head, too. I have to lie down. I can’t possibly eat. I do want to know where my father’s been, but then again, I don’t care. He’s back. I don’t have to take care of Izzy every minute of the day.
I should be thinking about school starting on Wednesday, senior year, or my poetry, or even Max—no, I mean Brent. I should be thinking about Brent. He went to North Lakeshore, didn’t he say that? Maybe he knows Max. But he’s a few years older, so I’m sure he doesn’t. You’re not pretty. I shake Max’s voice out of my head. I’d rather think about Brent. I don’t need a stupid kid like Max in my life. I wipe my palms down my shorts. Should have put on a clean pair. I feel like I’m dredging the bottom of the sea. I must need more sleep, even though I slept twelve or thirteen hours. What time is it? The clock’s in the kitchen. If I want to know what time it is I have to go in there.
“Who wants pancakes?” shouts my father, in a voice I haven’t heard in a long time, happy, loud, boastful—it’s his “I’ve done something good” voice.
“Me. Me. Me,” shrieks Izzy.
“Do you want to go see if Claire wants one?” he asks.
“I’ll go,” says the voice, slowly, the words forced out.
“Don’t push yourself,” says my father.
“Let,” says the voice. “Me.”
I freeze. Pancakes are flipped onto plates. More batter is poured—more pops, sizzle. The house is too humid. Smoke from the griddle floats down the hallway. I cough. I’m choking. Everything is fuzzy. I’m underwater and can’t breathe.
“This is the best morning of my life,” says Izzy.
“Look, look at this,” says the voice, pausing with each word. “This is what I missed.”
I smell coffee. My stomach flips. I go cold. Palms sweat. I feel sick. Airless. I am at the very bottom of the sea.
Smells trigger memories, images, sounds, of her calling your name and the coffee vapors on your hands. Maybe this morning, your father wanted a cup of coffee. I should go back to bed, pull the covers over my head. If he’s home, he can watch Izzy.
“Claire!” screams Izzy. “Claire! Guess what?”
“Quiet, Izzy,” he says. “And you, you sit here.”
My father clears his throat. “Claire?”
I round the corner, hugging the wall. Birds shrill to one another with urgency. Feels like the heat is never going to break, or are the birds warning us that it will break soon, today?
The kitchen is almost the same. The stove and the countertop next to it are a jumble of pancake mix, eggshells, and open milk cartons. The sink is piled high with bowls and dishes. The floor has white powder on it. At the center is the square kitchen table crowded with plates and a plastic jug of real maple syrup and a melting block of butter. Three of the four seats are taken. The fourth is piled high with junk mail and magazines and catalogs. We haven’t needed four seats in three months. There’s nowhere for me to sit. I don’t want to sit anyway. I don’t want to move. And she has trouble rising. Her left side sags. She stands with the help of a cane. Her hair is at her nape, streaked with gray. An effort has been made to brush it. But the hair does what it wants, curling and waving. Her hairbrush is on the windowsill next to her chair, next to what I’ve always thought of as her window.
I yearn to brush my own hair with it. I gather my hair back from my face as if I am revealing something more, but I’m not, only the fact that I have my long hair, and she does not. She sways with the cane.
She says to me in a wavering voice, almost her old voice, “My girl.”
My father watches her struggle to speak. He is wearing the same wrinkled polo shirt he had on the last time I saw him. He must have slept in it. “Isn’t this great, Claire?” he says, his eyes on her. “The hospital insisted it wasn’t medically necessary for her to be in rehab any longer, especially after the insurance ran out, especially when I couldn’t come up with a payment for another month.”
“You were good,” my mother says to him, pausing between each word as if having to jumpstart the syllables. “I will take care. Of us.” She grips the cane until I can see the muscles in her arm. Her skin is white, translucent, the veins reddish-purple. I fear she will fall, but I don’t go to her. I can’t. I am drowning in the sunlight.
And I think: she will have another stroke. It will happen, this time in front of my father, too. Somehow, she leans on the cane, catches herself, and eases back into a kitchen chair with the carefulness of a very old person or, I guess, someone who had a stroke. My father follows her every move as if ready to leap and catch her.
“Pancakes are burning,” I say, gulping for air.
He tumbles over to the stove and inches down the flame.
“Why didn’t you let me know?” I say to him.
“Know what?” he says, trying to flip the burned pancakes, scraping the griddle, sending pieces flying across the stove. Crumbs hit the floor. It is going to be a mess to clean up, for me to clean.
“That she was coming home?” I say, my voice rising in anger. I feel like I’m just keeping my head above the waterline. “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have helped. I would made sure everything was in order. The laundry—I didn’t get to all the laundry!”
“The house is,” says my mother, “spotless.”
“I wasn’t sure, Claire,” says my father, sweating, cutting in between my mother and me. “I was scrambling with the rehab center. I stayed there two nights to make sure I could help take care of your mother. They gave me on-the-job training. But she’s here, and I don’t care if this is the best thing or not, I’m glad she’s home. I’m glad. Aren’t you?” He scrapes the pancakes into the overflowing garbage.
“I would have taken a bath if I had known,” adds Izzy. “But Mommy says I’m fine. I don’t have to take a bath.”
“You have to take a bath, Izzy,” I say.
“Mommy says I don’t. She’s back and she’s the boss again.” Izzy runs over and hugs our mother around her waist.
“Gentle,” says my father to her, as he shoves the garbage down into the pail with more force than needed. “See, I told you, our Claire isn’t a kid anymore. Are you, kiddo?” says my fa
ther, attempting to be funny, pouring fresh yellow batter onto the griddle, splattering it. “Let’s try this again.” My father is someone who always believes in second chances, in do-overs.
“Are you done with your pancakes, Izzy?” I ask, clearing her dish away so quickly she has to grab at one final bite. I wish it could be only me and Izzy. I want yesterday back. I want the beach.
“Don’t you want some, Claire? They’re good. Come on, have some.”
“No.”
“Can I watch TV now?” Izzy asks.
“Go,” I say. I want to say run. Get your bathing suit. Get in the minivan.
“Mommy?” she asks. She races over to my mother and then leaps over to me. I kneel in front of her. I want to bury my head in her blond curls.
“Aren’t you glad that she’s home, Claire?”
I say nothing. I am, but I’m not. I don’t like surprises, maybe that’s it.
My mother is following this; my father is not. This is how it always was. She would know when things were wrong. She would know somehow. But then, maybe I’m imagining this. My mother can’t be the same. It will never be like it was.
“I love you, Claire,” says Izzy.
“I love you more, Izzy. Now go. You don’t want to miss your TV show.”
Izzy hugs me first, and then my father and then her. My mother can hug Izzy back only with one arm. But that’s enough for Izzy, who blurts out, “I love you. I love you. I love you,” at top speed, and she’s off, downstairs, the television on too loud.
I will not look at her, at the other hand, which is folded, immobile across her waist.
“I missed,” she says, “you.” Each word has its own emphasis, like my mother is from another country and practicing her English.
“Isn’t this our dream, our hope?” my father asks me, touching her shoulders as if to confirm that it isn’t a dream. “To have your mother home?”
“Our dream? Did you know I dreamt of her every night? Do you even care about me? You couldn’t tell me she was coming home?” My stomach churns. I run tepid tap water into a cup. I chug it down.
“If only we could,” says my mother with so much exertion that she has to sit back, “live in our dreams.”
She searches for my eyes. “In no time, life changed. But I have more to do.” She takes a deep breath. “Much more.”
I can’t bear to look at her in the kitchen, in her old seat. Near the window, birds, plain sparrows, build nests in our oak tree. I don’t know why I feel trapped as if in someone else’s house, someone else’s kitchen, as if the world is suddenly off-balance.
My father cuts off his happy voice. “Laurie. I’m sorry. I don’t know why she’s acting this way. Claire, can’t you see this is your mother and she’s home. Give her a hug.”
The birds swoop in and out of that old oak tree, a grand tree, gathering sticks and grass. I used to like to climb its branches, sometimes too high, imagining that if I fell, I’d grow wings. I’d fly, too.
She flutters the fingers on her good hand toward me. The other is lifeless. The fingers are curved. The thick nails need to be cut. If I touch the skin it will be dry and scaly. I should have made that 911 call faster, realized something was wrong sooner. Maybe then, she wouldn’t be like this. “I didn’t recognize myself, Claire. Didn’t know who I was. Didn’t know my own name.”
I still don’t know who this person is. I want my mother. I want her whole. Send this one back.
“But you. That day. You saved me. Because of you—and your sister and your father—I will recover.”
It takes me a minute for what she is saying to sink in. To feel like my head is above water. Save her? I was foolish and unthinking—and the birds are swirling, chirping, urgent about a storm coming or winter—and I didn’t save her or anyone. I didn’t act fast enough. Maybe the doctors did. But not me.
Her eyes flutter closed. The words having flooded out of her, a burst of fluency, and she is more exhausted and even paler than a moment before. “Last night, I dreamed of being a bird. Flying. Over the ocean. At night.”
My father hurries to her. “Claire, if I could have found more money for the rehabilitation center, I would have. I want your mother to be a hundred percent, too. But she’s well enough to be home. We’ll all pull together. You’ll still have to do a lot around the house, but you don’t mind, Claire, do you? Your mother is here. Her thoughts are clear. That’s what matters.”
“I want,” she says pushing the words out, “to be home.”
“Your mother will have weekly physical therapy, weekly speech therapy for as long we can, as long as the insurance allows. I’ve been going out of my mind, thinking of ways to make more money. I’m going to get a second job. Any job.”
“Mitch,” she says. “I’m home. Speak to me like I’m here.”
My father drops to his knees. She strokes his head with her functioning hand. He kisses her face and her hands, both of them.
“Can you believe, Mitch,” she says, haltingly, “I dreamed, my dream, of being a bird?”
“Laurie.” He buries his head in her lap. A man of few words, he has abandoned them. I had forgotten how much they loved each other.
I pour myself more tap water, letting my glass overflow and soak my fingers and the countertop. I concentrate on sipping the warm water as if my life depends on it, as if I have never been this in need of a basic sustenance.
Embarrassed, my father jumps up and bangs over to the sink and soaps up the pots and pans with a steel-backed intensity. My mother attempts to turn to me, but can’t easily shift in her chair. From behind her thick purple glasses, her soft brown eyes strain in my direction, wanting me to look at her. I gaze over her head, out the window, at the heat burning off the dew, scorching the uncut grass.
“I’m not what I was,” she says. “You see that. My speech is broken. My heart is not.”
“You dreamed of being a bird?” I ask, holding back my breath, or tears.
“Yes, angel.”
I finish off the glass of water. I’m struggling to come up for air. “So did I.”
Max
Sunday, 9:00 P.M.
This is not the way summer is supposed to end.
No one is showing up at this party. I know everybody has this fear: you have a party and nobody comes. Nobody is responding to my texts. Nobody has left me any messages, anywhere. I’m pacing in front of the living room windows. King is scratching and whimpering behind my bedroom door, wanting to be with me even though I explained to him that he had to be a good dog and stay.
“Why don’t you call one of your friends?” asks my mother again.
“No.”
“Why don’t I call some of the parents, see if something came up? Or maybe everyone is just running late?”
“Don’t. Please don’t. I thought you and Dad were going out?”
“We’re going. Just to the diner. Just for a cup of coffee. Maybe we’ll split one piece of pie between us. I have a campaign to run.”
“How could I forget?”
“Don’t worry. We won’t be gone long. I don’t want you to think at seventeen you can throw wild parties.”
“At what age do I get to throw wild parties?”
“We’re going to be five minutes down the road, Max. We can come home at any time, and we will. Remember last year.”
Last year we got a little drunk and played soccer in the backyard. My mother and father came home while all the beer bottles were in full sight. They had a fit, but I sometimes wonder whether they were angry because they had to see the beer bottles on the deck, see us running into each other, see their son act stupid. Or, were they just concerned it would make the local news: Underage state senator’s son drinks a beer. I should text everyone and let them know: the party is off. Yup, I should take a pill, party by my pathetic birthday boy self.
“What’s going on, Max? Worried about school starting?” She hovers around me, stroking my side, fixing the collar on my polo shirt. “Is something wro
ng?”
“Nope. Nothing wrong.” For some reason, my back stiffens, but not unbearably. Pain is at a minimum tonight. I’d rather it be more, give me an excuse to blot this all out.
“You are so handsome. The most handsome. You know you have that nice pink polo shirt to wear tomorrow. Now I know it’s pink, but it’s a fun boy pink.”
“I don’t wear pink.”
“Maybe you’ll wear it tomorrow—to the meet-and-greet for your father. You’ll look so nice in a pink polo under the white tent.”
“Stop it, Mom.”
“Stop what, handsome boy?”
She means well, but she doesn’t know anything, not a thing about me anymore.
“Okay. Nothing’s wrong. That’s what you and your father think.” She glances outside and throws out her told-you-so smile. A car has rattled up. Maybe I was wrong and she was right.
But it’s only Trish and Peter in a beat-up Toyota, and even my mother knows that these aren’t my real friends. The bigger her smiles, the worse things are.
“Look, Max, who’s here,” she says too loudly.
Peter tumbles out of the car. Trish looks glum, squeezed into a T-shirt one size too small. I’m not sure if she thinks it makes her look thinner, or if she just outgrew it.
My mother whispers to me, “What’s happened to you, Max? To us? You always had a lot of friends.” She’s clutching my arm with her bright nails. “Where are all the nice boys that you’ve always been friends with? Jackson? Andrew? Ethan? Michael, Alex? I can name a dozen boys you’ve been friends with since kindergarten. I can call their parents. What did you do?”
“Not enough.”
“What does that mean?”
Trish brings Peter through our open backyard gate adorned with two dozen helium balloons at my request. I walk away from my mother, through the house to the kitchen, where there are chips and dip and sodas laid out for the party. Trish leads Peter through the backyard, up to the deck. He stumbles anyway, but she is as sturdy as ever. Peter is wearing a pressed checkered shirt and slacks. I’m sure his mother helped him get dressed. He’s waving at me as if we haven’t seen each other in a long time, and even though he’s just across the deck, I have to wave back.
Before My Eyes Page 16