by Paula McLain
But how could I be light when the world was heavy? You only had to watch the news for two minutes to know that bad things happened to good people every ticking second of the day. Floods and famines and pestilence—and then the everyday disasters: people hurting other people, lying, cheating, turning on a dime and walking fast the other way. I myself was proof of this. I hadn’t seen my mother since I was a baby and had no memories of her at all. What I knew of her—Suzette—I knew from Berna and from photographs. She had dark brown hair, much smoother and finer than my sandy blond disaster, and dark eyes sitting wide in a heart-shaped face. She was more petite than I was, with small square shoulders and delicately shaped hands—but all of this information was flat and factual. I couldn’t say what my mother’s hair smelled like wet or how she walked or what her voice did when she was angry or sad.
According to Berna, Suzette had come back to the farm with Raymond, unannounced and uninvited, for my fourth birthday. They had brought a copy of Chitty Chitty, Bang Bang and a stuffed turtle that was electrically purple, with a green-feathered hat and startled-looking oval plastic eyes. I remembered receiving these gifts and even the attendant flush of happiness, but my mother remained unavailable to me, a dodgy blank space, a bobbing, swerving lack that made my eyes throb when I tried to think it into some kind of clarity.
When your mother comes back was a phrase that popped up occasionally in my early years with Berna and Nelson. Sometimes it was a warning, as in, “When your mother comes back, she’s not going to like that haircut you gave yourself.” Sometimes a weak promise: “When your mother comes back, she’ll buy it for you.” The “it” was usually something extraordinary, like the baby carriage with real rubber wheels and a folding pink bonnet that opened and closed like a paper fan. Or the white goat I had seen at a county fair. It had long white eyelashes and could do a cartwheel. Cupcake was its name, and my heart fell as I watched it balance on one side of a wooden teeter-totter, because I knew the goat would never be mine.
I didn’t think Suzette was ever coming back, and I didn’t believe Berna thought so either. It was something she said because she thought it made me feel better, I suppose. But mostly it made me feel worse. Against my own good sense, I’d find myself spinning a fantasy that my mother was someplace fabulous—Key West, New York, Alaska—and dreaming hard about me, the kind of dreaming that made magic things happen in stories: blue roses and mermaid-laced sea foam and straw turning into gold. But even before the princess tinge of these fantasies had faded, I would feel sick and sorry. Thinking about or even wishing for Suzette’s mythical return inevitably brought with it the darker thinking of why she had left in the first place. What was so terrible about being a mother? About being my mother? Did I cry too much as a baby, want too much? Maybe I kept Suzette awake at night. But these were things all babies did. Whatever made my mother leave must have been specific to me, then, to some unbearable thing about myself. Letting my mother fully into my thoughts, my dream life, was like hand-feeding the elephant that would come to crush the breath out of me, and yet I couldn’t stop myself, either, any more than I could stop myself from watching the evening news that invariably gave me nightmares.
The years passed with no Suzette, no sign of things changing, and eventually Berna stopped mentioning her name, stopped talking about her altogether. I began to feel relieved. If she really was gone for good, then maybe the worst thing that could happen to me had already happened. And I had survived it—was surviving it even then.
Then Berna got sick.
It was just a few weeks before my fifteenth birthday when I heard the noise, a single loud whump, as I was brushing my teeth for bed. It sounded like a cement bag coming off a truck bed, which was unlikely in the living room on a Sunday night in the middle of Columbo. So I stood at the top of the stairs, toothbrush in hand, my mouth full of too-sweet peppermint foam, and waited to hear Berna set the house right by swearing lightly at Nelson or the dog or whatever chair or ottoman or screen door had caused the commotion. But she didn’t call, and neither did Nelson. The house was eerily mute. And I’ll confess that what I most wanted at that moment was to ignore the noise and the silence and the dropped-cement-bag feeling in my stomach and disappear down the hall to my room. But I knew things had to go another way, knew it the way we always know when something bad has happened, and that we have to walk toward that bad thing as toward a half-open door in a dream.
Moving downstairs in my cotton nightgown, I thought I might gag, the unswallowable toothpaste like egg cream at the base of my throat. In the living room, Berna and Nelson’s chairs were empty and a low light was on near the television where Peter Falk scratched his head in the “one more thing” scene. For twenty or thirty seconds, I let myself believe I was wrong about the wrongness. Maybe all was fine and the same. Maybe I would turn the corner to find Berna and Nelson holding splayed fans of playing cards, the blandness of their faces releasing me to bed where I could listen to KERA on my transistor radio, pressing it to my ear like a seashell.
But in the kitchen, Berna lay slumped in the middle of the braided rag rug by the sink. Her head was on the hardwood floor, neck tilted back slightly, as if she needed to see something over her shoulder. Nelson was looking into Berna’s face and his gaze seemed numb, arctic.
“Nelson. Nelson!” I had to shout to startle him and even then he stayed crouched on the floor beside Berna. His silhouette, with shoulders stooped and shuddering, looked oddly childlike.
I called the police and fetched a thick stack of cotton dish towels to prop Berna’s head, and sat next to her, rubbing her papery hand. Berna was unconscious, her eyes rolled deeply back. Was she dying? Was this what death looked like? I tried to stay focused on what was available, the snarls of string fringe on the striped dish towels, light swinging in a cone over the Formica table, the linoleum square that bore a crosshatched scar, like the number symbol on a typewriter. As a little girl, I had a habit of picking at the scar with my fingernails. Berna would swat my hands and redirect me, but before long I’d find my way back—pick pick pick—finding something pleasurable in the slight snapping back of the linoleum, its rubbery give. If I crawled over to it right then, I wondered, could I be five years old again? Three, two, zero?
It was all really happening. Berna’s hand, clammy as a damp grocery bag, was real, and the wall phone with its low-swaying coil, the wheezing refrigerator, the calendar stuck on a blue lighthouse—August—though it was late October. My bent legs felt needled at, anesthetized, though they would carry me through this night, to the hulking and fluorescent hospital. There, the waiting room was the color of pistachio ice cream and hung with Halloween decorations. Fake webbing had been strung in the corners of the room and studded, here and there, with fat crepe-paper spiders. Near the nurse’s station, a real-looking skeleton wore a pirate’s eye patch and red Santa’s hat. Nelson and I sat for hours, now flipping mindlessly through stacks of old Sports Illustrated magazines, now pacing or looking out the window onto the nearly empty parking lot below, or walking to the vending machine for cans of A&W root beer. And then, near dawn, a doctor came to say that Berna had suffered a major stroke. She was conscious but still very weak. As for her prognosis, it was too soon to tell. We would simply have to wait and see.
The next several weeks spun slowly by. After six days in intensive care, Berna was moved to a recovery ward upstairs, where she looked startlingly fragile, sagging to one side in the metal bed, favoring the arm that wasn’t working the way it should.
“This is all temporary,” Nelson assured me on rides home to the farm. “Berna’s strong, has a lot of life in her. She’ll beat this back with a broom.”
But would she? Berna didn’t look strong to me. She looked like a limp and empty glove. I worried that she’d never return home. What would possibly happen then, no one was talking about that.
We visited her in the afternoons after I was let out of school, Nelson in a neatly pressed striped shirt and dress trousers. He carried
his town hat, his fingertips worrying the felt brim as we waited by the lit “up” arrow by the bank of elevators. Though I’d known him for as long as I’d been conscious of memory, Nelson now looked like a stranger to me, greenish light planing his cheekbones, glinting off his scalp, which shone through the carefully combed and lacquered-down hairs.
I had never thought hospitals were the romantic places they seemed in soap operas, where nurses and doctors flirted over drawn masks, everything in their eyes, where children went to get their tonsils out and ice cream spooned over the wounds and women delivered babies into pink flannel blankets. But Bakersfield Memorial Hospital was even more soggy and sallow than I imagined, with gummy-looking slightly greenish walls and a cafeteria with folding chairs and what looked to be card tables. Behind a glass counter there was cottage cheese and red Jell-O in plastic-wrapped bowls. There was milk in waxed fist-sized cartons and packets of graham crackers, most of which had been crushed in the box and looked like hamster food.
Berna’s recovery room was just off the VA wing, where it wasn’t uncommon to see men in wheelchairs cruising down the hall, easy as you please, with amputated legs jutting from the bottom of their gowns and tucked into what looked like gym socks. How could someone get used to that, to half of themselves missing? Would Berna get used to her slack left hand, the slur that made her sound like she was drunk all of the time? Would Nelson get used to carrying his wife to the toilet? Would I get used to TV dinners with Nelson—sodden fried chicken under tinfoil, triangles of applesauce cake only partly warmed through—while Walter Cronkite’s voice boomed through the living room like a burning bush?
Berna stayed in the hospital for three weeks, and in that time it became obvious to everyone except Nelson that if Berna was going to get her strength back, it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. She was transferred to a long-term care facility with pee-smelling hallways and pureed-squash dinner hours, where old women sat by windows with wrinkled-fruit skin and white, electrified hair, waiting not for visitors but for the day to be done with already.
From the bed in her private room, Berna communicated to Nelson in her slurred way that something had to be done about me.
“I can keep her fine until you come home,” he insisted.
“What if I never go home?” It took her a full minute to push the words out around her tongue.
Finally someone was saying out loud the thoughts that had been with me for weeks, but Nelson dismissed her. “Don’t be silly,” he said, patting the bedrail near Berna’s hand. “Of course you’re coming home.”
“We should call Raymond. Raymond can take her for a while.”
“Don’t you think she’d be better off here?”
“No. It’s time for a change,” she said, spit chasing the words out of her mouth. Nelson daubed at her lips with a tissue and shushed her and told her okay, he’d make the call if that’s what she felt was best.
Meanwhile, I sat in one corner on a plastic visitor’s chair and felt the unmistakable beginnings of a spell. I sucked hard on my inhaler, sending the metallic-tasting mist past my tonsils and down to the wet forest of my lungs. I panted shallowly, bit my bluing lip.
Raymond lived in Moline, Illinois, which might as well have been the moon to me, since I’d never been out of the state of California. The last time my uncle had visited, I’d been twelve or thirteen. He had come barreling up the drive in a dented yellow El Camino with fake wood trim. He wore an old brown T-shirt and worn, tawny corduroys and a braided leather belt over which a slight paunch rested. His hair was too long. Sideburns swooped down from his temples and flared, threatening to take over his still-handsome face. I had always found him a little bit frightening. When he came once a year or so, he would sit in the big chair in the living room, nursing a Coors and what seemed to me a very private suffering. He was never mean, never gruff even, just very quiet. I’d sit on the couch or circle awkwardly near him, trying to guess what he was thinking. If I passed near him, he might reach out to lightly bump my rib cage or he might not notice me at all.
It terrified me, the idea of moving to Moline with Raymond, but no more than the possibility that I wouldn’t. That I would stay here waiting for the next bad thing to happen. I was pretty certain that if Berna asked Raymond to take me, he’d do it—not because he felt any affection for me (we hardly knew each other, after all), but because I was the only child of his only sister. And what about Suzette? Berna’s stroke had brought everything into question again, brought the image of my mother looming onto the horizon like a cloud of worry or dread or longing. Wherever she was, did she know Berna was sick and could die? Would Raymond have contacted her? It was possible he didn’t know where she was living, that she was as much a missing person to him as she was to me. Still, he might talk about her, want to summon her with talking, like a séance. And if we did that, called Suzette like a ghost, would she come?
ALL DAY AND ALL OF THE NIGHT
Eight years earlier, Raymond had been in the shower when the phone rang, water flooding past his ears so that the trill, when he heard it, sounded high and unbroken and ignorable. He closed his eyes, staying under until the water ran cold. Afterward, he stood on the square white bath mat, put his towel on his head, and sighed into its dampness; he was still pleasantly drunk. Stepping into a pair of jockey shorts, he padded through the quiet house. The rooms became darker as he moved farther from the streetlight. He bumped into a door frame with his hip and felt a humming between his ears, as if he were a human tuning fork, a clumsy, rubbery gong. In the living room, he groped his way toward the sofa, sat down, and rested awhile. The apartment was like a tree house in the dark. Along the flank of double-paned windows, leaves pushed in, blotting out the street and the parking lot behind, and light, which came through only when wind moved the branches to allow it in.
The phone had rung earlier too. Raymond had been with a woman then—a film student he’d picked up in the Haight-Ashbury, with a round, pretty face and tan flat feet, and he hadn’t even considered answering. She’d visibly stiffened after ten or fifteen rings, expecting him to get up, maybe, or expecting worse, perhaps another girlfriend or wife. But he’d ignored it anyway, or pretended to, and eventually the ringing had stopped. He knew then it was Suzette, of course it was. And though it had been nearly three months since he’d heard from her, some small and mean part of him was glad she couldn’t reach him whenever she wanted, that she had to wait, the way that he’d had to wait and wonder where and how she was.
Suzette never called when she was happy. That was one of the many unspoken rules between them. She didn’t want advice unless she asked for it. She didn’t want to hear from him unless it was an emergency, didn’t want to know anything about his private life, that he even had a life that didn’t involve her. And when she was happy—wrapped up in some new relationship or job or scheme—she kept it fiercely to herself, as if telling Raymond or even saying it out loud would jinx it, let reality seep in, sink in, drag her down. Raymond understood this, and he hated it. He hated how when he didn’t know where his sister was, who she was spending time with, or what she was doing for money, he walked around in a cloud of dread, thinking about her all the time, even when he wasn’t aware of it, even though he knew, ostensibly, that the reason he hadn’t heard was because things were okay and she was still afloat.
At some point, Raymond gave up and went to bed, and it was more than an hour later, when he was dead asleep, that the phone rang again. This time he bolted to the kitchen to answer it, steering his way through the dark house on adrenaline alone.
She couldn’t speak at first, but when she did, it was to say, “Where were you?” accusingly. “I called before. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Shhh,” he said, knowing better than to try to explain or defend himself. “I’m here now. Where are you?”
“Down south. Oxnard.”
“Why? Who with?”
There was a long pause before she said, “No one. Not anymore.” She lau
ghed a dark, shrill laugh that alluded to a darker private joke, and then began crying softly and steadily, not so much into her end of the receiver as into Raymond’s ear. Whatever distance was between them closed. He could see her as clearly as if he floated just above the phone booth. There was a busy intersection. Cars sped by, their headlights swinging over her backward. Behind the weathered safety glass, her face was pitted with shadows. The phone book had been torn out of its socket; strangers’ names crawled along the hinge work in pencil and Magic Marker and nail polish. Her breath coming through the wire was ragged and snotty, and it made Raymond want to cry too. This was as much a part of their arrangement as anything, how Suzette could break his heart in two seconds flat no matter what harm had already been done. It was hers to break.
“Can you tell me what happened, Suzy? I can’t help if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.”
But she couldn’t stop crying. He sensed that she was afraid more than sad, and hoped she would tell him what of. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, trying to both soothe her and leave her space to fill in with her own words in her own time. As he waited, he reassured himself that it would be okay now. Her breath was coming clearer, and she was sighing. Sighing was a good sign.
Then the operator broke in, a reedy ant voice asking for a dollar and fifteen cents. Raymond looked helplessly at his own phone as if he could will a slot to deposit change.
“Ray!” Suzette’s voice rose with alarm. “I don’t know what to do.”
And just when he was thinking, with frustration, She doesn’t know how to work the phone? the connection knocked closed. “Shit,” he said, and let the receiver fall.
Raymond was still there in the kitchen, pacing between the table and a sink full of empty beer cans when Leon came in from his night out. It was nearly two a.m.