The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  “No, I do not,” he nearly shouted. “But I didn’t do everything.” He looked away for a moment, lowered his voice, made it calm. “We pretended I did, Anna, and that was fine with me. All I ever wanted was to make it right if I could. But you and I know the truth. Some little soupcon of responsibility falls on you. I’ll take the fucking rap everywhere else but here, but with you. I want the truth with you.”

  “You keep talking about taking the rap, as though what you had to do were so terrible. Doesn’t it seem to you that I’m taking the rap too, on and on for the rest of my life?”

  “Anna, I did everything I could to make that not happen.”

  “Thank you,” I said bitterly. “Thank you for all you did.”

  He made a noise and grabbed my elbow, yanked me toward him. Pain radiated from my shoulder and I cried out. He let go and stared at me. “Stop it,” he whispered. His eyes were wide, entirely black within, frightened. “Please, please, stop it.”

  “Get out,” I said. And then I shrieked, “Get out! get out of here!” and I leaned forward and swung my arm and body across the table. Distantly I heard the glasses hit somewhere, the beer splatter, but I was moving, yelling. I stood against the wall farthest from Leo, hunched against his coming near me, and yelled in a voice I didn’t know I had, yelled at him to stay away from me, to get away, get away.

  He was across the room and he seemed to be talking for a moment—his mouth moved, he pleaded with his hands; but my voice stayed loud and steady and didn’t stop yelling, it was all I could hear, and after a few moments he was gone away.

  I stood still after he’d left, tensed against the wall, listening to his footsteps going fast down the stairs, hearing the door far below shutting. Then I crossed to the hall door and closed it. I looked around the living room. Beer had splattered against the wall at knee level and left a wide, drizzling stain; and the curved fragments and bits of our glasses lay everywhere on the floor. I was crying quietly now. I squatted in the mess and began to pick up the glass, to lay the glittering curls in my hand. I moved around slowly. I had collected a handful of glass when I slipped a little in the wet spill. I put my hands out quickly to catch myself, and felt the clean pain slice across my palm and fingers. When I stood up and looked, my hand was already covered in blood. I couldn’t tell where the cuts were.

  The next morning I woke early. My left hand was stiff in bandages, but I packed awkwardly, favoring my right, until eight-thirty. Then I called Muth. He wasn’t in yet. At nine-fifteen I called again and we talked briefly. He hadn’t been able to reach Brian’s lawyer the day before, knew no more than he already knew, felt nearly positive everything was in place. He’d get back to me as soon as they’d spoken. I told him I needed to do some work at the lab, he wouldn’t be able to reach me, that I’d call him in the afternoon.

  Then, after hesitating several times, I called Leo to say I was sorry. There was no answer. The thought of his empty studio was a quick temptation. I could leave a note, apologizing, and then I could be done with him, I could move away, I’d never have to see him again. Infected with Sudden haste, imagining him returning at any moment, I found my purse and my keys in the mess of boxes, and left.

  His truck was gone, nowhere on the little side street near the entrance to the stairs. I parked and went in the dark hallway, up the ochre stairway. I knocked and waited a moment, then let myself into the bright, familiar space.

  I’d brought no paper, no pen with me. I fumbled around on Leo’s table in a panic, seeing him mounting the stairs in my mind. There were lists, quick sketches, clippings, all heaped together, but I finally found a blank sheet and a pencil. I sat at the little kitchen table and wrote, quickly, and in a hand I could barely recognize as my own: Leo, I’m sorry. I’m not in good control right now. Maybe in a while we’ll be able to talk about all this. Anna.

  I sat for a moment looking at what I’d written. It seemed not at all what I wanted to say to him. It seemed to me that I couldn’t even begin to know what I wanted to say until I’d seen Molly and understood a little bit of what our life together, apart, was going to be like. I tore the note up into smaller and smaller pieces and threw them into Leo’s trash amid the coffee grounds, the orange peel, the bright red and blue milk carton. For a moment I stood above the big can, feeling an impulse to scoop my hands into the mess, to throw it, to smear myself. But Leo’s phone sat on the table. I picked it up and quickly dialed Muth’s number again, then hung up, realizing it had only been half an hour or so since I last spoke to him.

  I dialed Brian’s number. My breath lifted my chest fast; my heart shook in my throat. He would listen to me. I couldn’t wait any more for Muth. Now Brian would have to listen to me. The ringing began, stopped. There was a little muffled clunking, then Molly’s voice saying slowly, “Hellooo?”

  “Molly?” I whispered.

  There was silence.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello,” she said back. “My mommy and daddy aren’t home.”

  “Molly, it’s Mom,” I said. “It’s your Mommy. In Cambridge.”

  I had to wait a long time for her to answer. “When are you coming here?” she said. Her voice was pinched, shy.

  “I’m coming soon, honey. I’m bringing you a big hug. I miss you so much.”

  Another long wait, then a clunk. “Molly?” I said. “Molly?” I was crying.

  An older woman’s voice came on the line, not Brenda. “Hello,” she said. She had a slight accent, British or Scotch. “Who’s there please?”

  Gently I sat the phone back in its cradle. I stood struggling to get control of myself, not to give way, looking frantically around Leo’s studio, as though to find in it something to hold onto, to give me strength.

  And then I saw the bureau drawer, pulled open. I crossed quickly to it, reached behind the grayish worn underwear. I was holding the gun, cold and heavy.

  It wasn’t until I was in the car, on my way to the airport, that I really thought about what I was doing. I would not use the gun, I thought. I would talk to the housekeeper, or Brian, or Brenda—whoever was there—and explain that I had to see Molly. They would understand. They would let Molly come with me. It was only if they did something, if they were ugly, that I would say I had a gun, I meant it. And if Molly and I had to run, had to hide, fine. It would just be the two of us. I still had some money from my grandfather. I could get a job.

  But there would be no problem. They would see that it was right, that I needed just to see her. Someone would understand.

  Though I felt a kind of deadly calm, tears kept sliding down my face as I drove. I wiped them away carelessly from time to time. I felt no connection with that frightened, grieving part of myself. When I think about it now, it was as though I’d finally pushed the parts of myself into a state where they couldn’t communicate with each other anymore. For days I’d kept my grief, my anger, all of my emotion, deeply buried, so I could keep acting. Now the acting was governed by emotion, but not in any way I could perceive. The acting part of me felt it was as rational, as cool, as when I was wrapping glasses in newspapers and tucking them into boxes. The trip to Washington, taking Leo’s gun, made exactly that kind of sense to me at the moment, in spite of the strangers in other cars staring over at my disheveled weeping face, my talking mouth. After this experience I forever understood the expression beside yourself.

  I was driving carefully, slowly, because the rational part of me understood that I mustn’t be stopped, I mustn’t get caught with the gun in my purse. Courteously, while I wept and talked to myself about what a sensible thing I was doing, I yielded the right of way coming on to Route 93, I let other cars slip ahead of me as we merged from eight lanes down to two at the Callahan Tunnel. In the tunnel, I kept my distance from the car ahead of me. I emerged into the light; and it was only as I pulled into the tollbooth and had to fumble for change through my purse, hunched over it to hide the gun, that I remembered—and nearly wailed aloud at the memory—that other, smaller t
unnel I’d have to pass through in the airport, the checkpoint, like the one in the courthouse, where the gun, either in my bag or in my pocket, would show up, and they’d stop me.

  The car behind me honked. I stopped looking for change and pulled a bill from my wallet, held my bandaged hand out for the coins and bills due back to me. The teller stared at my tear-streaked face as he filled my hand, then looked away.

  In the airport, I drove around the circuit of airlines twice, trying to think what to do. I pulled into the parking lot at Eastern and turned the engine off. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t some solution, some answer. The planes’ roaring takeoff and descent seemed to mock my immobility. In frustration, I banged my head on the steering wheel, once, twice, as hard as I could. The second time I struck the metal inner circle with the bridge of my nose, and the horn sounded, making my heart pound uncontrollably. I started the car again, circled the airport once more, and then drove north, away from Boston.

  My head ached from the blows. The next time I wiped at my face, my hand reached back for the steering wheel brilliantly streaked with blood, I looked at myself quickly in the rearview mirror. There was a cut on my nose. I’d smeared the blood across one cheek wiping my face. But somehow this sight of myself calmed me. I licked my fingers and rubbed my face over and over. On my nose I could still feel the slow steady trickle of blood.

  I was driving fast, too fast. The idea of motion was the only one in my mind. The prospect of returning uselessly to my life in Cambridge seemed unbearable, though I had no alternative plans.

  Then the sign for New Hampshire and Maine loomed green above the highway; and images of my grandparents’ camp began to pull at me. It would be closed up, the heavy wooden shutters hung on the windows, the boat stored under the big house, the pump disconnected. But I could break in, hide out there, no one would know where I was. It seemed clear that I should do this.

  At Newburyport, though, without even thinking about it, I turned off the highway. I drove slowly through the town, past the mansions perched above High Street, past the common, the cemetery. My nose had stopped bleeding now, though the cut was thick with red when I looked at myself. The bruise had begun to rise on my forehead too.

  I took the turnoff to Plum Island, past the tiny airport where you walked across a scrubby field and climbed into the planes unchecked, but flew only in wide looping circles in the sky; across the bridge, past the park warden’s booth. There were twenty or thirty cars in the main lot, but I drove down the rutted dusty road with the marshy stream to my right, the hillocks and dunes on my left.

  Brian and I had come here often when Molly was a baby. We lugged a pack full of equipment and a red beach umbrella which we rotated like a huge flower in the sun to keep her from burning while she napped. I remembered once taking her down to the water’s edge to play. While she stood with one tiny hand resting on my shoulder, I had squatted in front of her and removed her diapers. For a long time I sat beside her, the water lapping at our legs. Over and over I filled the bucket and poured it into her distended belly. Each time she would tense in excited readiness. Each time her eyes would widen with the anticipated shock of the cold water, and each time she would laugh with relief and joy when it was done, abandon herself to a laughter that shook her whole body. She tired of the game before I did.

  I parked the car in one of the tiny empty lots along the road. Through the scrubby growth, the twisted small trees and green grasses, a path led up the dunes towards the sea. I took it, my weighted purse slung on my shoulder. My shoes made walking difficult. “Sure, there’s sand in them,” I remembered Leo saying to Molly as she whined. “What do you think they call them sandals for?” I stopped and took the shoes off. I put them in my purse, on top of the gun.

  From the third dune I crested, I could see the bright dark blue of the morning ocean. And then I spotted a kite, orange and yellow, jerking wildly against its string. There would be people by the water, I realized, picnickers even now when it was cool, fishermen in wool shirts and waders, their long lines disappearing out over the water; lovers lying huddled together against the last wall of the dunes.

  I turned and started walking to the right, parallel to the sea. I dug my heels into the steep hill as I descended. I hiked east up and down two or three wide dunes, and then came down into a sandy bowl, a crater. I sat down next to a scrubby tree. Small birds were in motion all around me, and the breeze hissed through the stiff dune grass. The sun shone down and my head, where I’d smashed it on the steering wheel, throbbed with my blood. I put my arms across my knees, and laid my head on them. I began to weep again, because I’d given up, I realized. I’d come to the end. I would go nowhere. I had nowhere to go. There was no way to retrieve my life with Molly. Whatever it was we were to have, if would be utterly different from what we’d had before; and I didn’t know if I had the strength to shape it. It seemed too full of what would not be: I would not be the name she called in the night or when she was hurt. I would not know the names of school friends, baby sitters. I would miss the odd, funny turns of phrase, the wonderful misunderstandings of the world, I would never have the rocklike comfort of daily life with her. I would be the one she yearned for, as I yearned for her. There was nothing I wanted less.

  I wept until my swollen face ached, not caring what noise I made. Finally, exhausted, I reached into my bag, beyond the shoes, for a napkin, a Kleenex, a scarf, anything to blow my nose on. My fingers touched the cold barrel of the gun. I pulled it out and set it on the sand in front of me. I looked down at its metallic black, gleaming dully between my legs. I picked it up—it wasn’t a large gun, it felt almost comfortable in my hand—and pointed its barrel down towards the center of the bowl I sat in. I pulled my finger on the trigger. There was no give. I looked and saw the safety. I slid it off, pointed again, squeezed. The noise lifted my hand and was lost in the still air, the sand jumped in a plume. My voice trailed off in my throat, and I realized I’d screamed. The bird noise had stopped. I pulled again, and this time heard my yowl with the crack that was fading even as it sounded. I pulled again, wanting really just the release of screaming, then again. But this last time there was no lifting through my arm, no noise but my own and the empty barrel making a workmanlike click. Three, four, five times more the barrel turned with the empty clicking, and then I sat, silent, in the world I’d silenced, the gun dangling uselessly off my arm.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. But suddenly I knew I should leave, leave quickly. Someone would have heard the noise, someone would find me. Perhaps they were looking now. I set the gun down and turned to face the hillside on my knees. I made scoops of my hands and pulled the falling sand out as fast as I could, creating a shallow, shifting hole. I set the gun in it and pushed the cool sand back, smoothed it down. Then, running, stumbling, in my bare feet in the spiky grass, I headed back towards the path.

  When I emerged into the lot, a rusty and bruised-looking Jeep was parked a few feet from my car. A man with binoculars around his neck was climbing out of it. From behind the Jeep padded a slow-moving golden retriever. He barked once at me, then shuffled forward, his tail swinging low from side to side, and pressed his nose to my crotch.

  “Hi,” I said to the man.

  “Stop that!” the man said to his dog. “Sparky! Get over here.”

  I was fumbling with my keys, trying to smile politely and to hide my injured, swollen face at the same time. The man grabbed the dog by the collar and shoved him in the direction of the path. “So sorry,” he mumbled, turning away sheepishly in a posture almost identical to mine. I watched him follow the dog, up the path towards the ocean.

  The car was stifling, the seats burned at my legs. I opened the windows and started driving back. The Jeep’s dust thickened the air for the first half-mile, but then settled. The colors seemed oddly intense to me.

  I drove back to Boston on small roads, back roads, wanting to avoid the speed of the highway and any sense of retracing my steps. By three o’clock or so, I
was in the lab at B.U., holding the rats, changing their water, their food. I was intensely conscious simply of what was: of the restless cages, the ticking lights, my hands, which seemed enormous, moving so competently in front of me. I had a sense of having returned from a great distance to myself. I tried to think of how my hand had looked, holding the gun, its spontaneous kick up with the noise, the spray of sand arcing beyond it, my scream. It seemed to me that that had been someone else’s hand; or that I had been imitating someone else—some more passionate, wild person. I held one of the rats who only ten days or two weeks ago had been so terrified of me he would have killed me if he could, and let him move around in my open palm, sniffing at the Band-aids across my cuts. Gently I touched the hair between his ears, stroked his back. These were my arms, my hands. I looked at them. I needed to clip my nails. I wasn’t used to seeing them this long. I imagined my hands at the keyboard, and had a yearning, suddenly, to play, a yearning for the comfort that would bring—watching my own disciplined hands execute the movements, which, two steps away, made music happen. “Why do we make music?” my childhood piano teacher had asked. She wore tiny gold-rimmed glasses, and she often reached from behind me to correct my hands, her soft bosom pressed like affection against my body.

  “I don’t know,” I’d said. My mother made me make music.

  “We make music to bring beauty into our world, to make it bearable. When you are older, you will see.”

  When I went down the hall to the bathroom, I was startled by my wounded face in the mirror, so distant did the events of the morning seem. My forehead was lumped and purplish, my nose had a raised, red, horizontal nick across the bridge. In the lab again, it seemed to me that some of the rats were ready to run, so I began to do them. I finished five before I got tired and went to check the time. It was eight o’clock. I took the data up to Dr. Fisher’s office. His window was black, the sycamore was only a shadow, and that startled me. It seemed only a week or two earlier that Molly had had trouble falling asleep at her usual bedtime because the light still leaked in around the edges of her shades at seven-thirty or eight.