A Mother's Love

by Mary Morris

Lies, all of it lies. I spent hours alone, confronting the dilemma of what I’d do when at last she wrote to me. Which letters I would send—the truth or the lies. In the end I wasn’t quite sure what was the truth and what were the lies. They all became blurred into one reality, and by the time I realized I wouldn’t be hearing from her and that I’d agonized for nothing over which letters to send, I wasn’t sure what had happened and what hadn’t. I still wrote the letters, wondering which ones I’d send. Which would make her want to rush home more.

  But after that sighting on Venice Boulevard, I took all the letters, which I’d kept in a bottom drawer, and tossed them away. It didn’t matter which ones I sent. It didn’t matter anymore.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  MARA SAT in the middle of her bed in a flannel gown, a cup of hot cocoa in her lap. I also wore a flannel gown (hers) and had a cup of cocoa. She had put Bobby in Jason’s crib, and Jason was sleeping with Alana in her little bed. I had called that afternoon to say I wanted to see her and talk and she had suggested a sleep-over. “I could use the company,” she said.

  We sipped our cocoa and I said, “Matthew came by again. I’m confused. He wants to see us and I suppose I want to see him. But I’m afraid.”

  “That he’ll hurt you again?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not so much for me. I’m afraid for Bobby. I don’t want to make a mistake for him.”

  She nodded. Her hair was pulled back. “I can understand that. Jason asks for his father all the time. He’s very angry at me. I can’t imagine what it will be like in a few years.”

  “I don’t want Bobby to be hurt …” I hesitated. “Not the way I’ve been.” Mara looked at me strangely. “There’s something I need to tell you,” I said. “Something I haven’t told you or anyone for a long time.” I smiled at her. “I hope you’ll still be my friend.”

  Mara sucked in her lips, leaning back against the pillows. “I’ll probably still be your friend.” She patted my hand.

  “I didn’t tell you the truth when we first met. I didn’t tell you the truth about my family.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I didn’t think you had.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “Too many loose threads. Things didn’t make sense.”

  “I suppose I lied. I’m sorry about that, but it’s just such a complicated story and I don’t tell it to very many people.” I sighed, afraid to begin. Mara looked at me, not saying a word. “I have a sister,” I said at last. “Or at least I had one. My mother—my real mother, not Dottie—took her away when I was seven years old and I never saw either of them again.” Mara didn’t even blink, so I went on. I listened to myself speak as if I were telling a story. “My father raised me and my stepmother Dottie has been like a mother to me and most people think she is my mother, so usually I don’t discuss it. I never wanted to have a child, but you see, when I got pregnant with Bobby, I couldn’t do anything about it. I had to have the baby. I can’t even explain why.”

  “You don’t have to,” Mara said. “I think I understand.”

  “I’m worried that I’m like her. Like my mother, that is. You never see me when I’m alone with Bobby. You don’t know what I’m like when I’m impatient and can’t take it anymore.”

  “We all have our moments.” Now she sat up, putting the cocoa down. “I just think … I really think that you’re a mother. Your instincts are there.”

  “I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I’m not so sure.”

  “You don’t have to be sure. Maybe it’s better if you aren’t. Tell me about your mother and sister.”

  So I curled up beside her, and while I talked about driving home from the track with confetti in my hair and teetering at the lip of a meteorite crater, about the desert after a storm and the neon-illumined avenues of Vegas at night, Mara ran her fingers through my hair. Then I slept as soundly as I had in years.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE NEXT DAY we went to the zoo. Mara’s children raced around the sea lion pool while Mara and I stood watching the sea lions rise and fall. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they,” Mara said, pointing to a leaping pup. I envied them their smooth, underwater glide. They looked so free, even though they weren’t. Alana came over and asked if she could take Bobby up to the glass. “Hold him tightly,” Mara said as Alana lifted him from the stroller.

  The children went off to the side where the seals were climbing onto the rocks, Alana holding Bobby under the arms. “It gets easier as they get older,” Mara said.

  I breathed a deep sigh. “I hope so.” A horde of school children arrived, shouting as a large male seal scampered high on the rocks, barking. For an instant our children were out of view. Then I heard the scream that I recognized as my son’s. It was a cry I’d never before heard from him and I raced to the edge of the pool. “I don’t know what happened,” Alana said, speaking very quickly. “I mean, somebody bumped me and he slipped so I caught him and he just started to scream like that.” Alana was sobbing as I scooped Bobby up. He shrieked again, his right arm limp as I held him.

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” Mara said. “Alana, what happened? What did you do?”

  “Mara, she didn’t do anything. Maybe his arm twisted a little when he slipped. It wasn’t your fault, dear.” I turned to Alana, who had tears streaming down her cheeks. Jason too had begun to wail. “You guys wait here. I’ll take him to first aid.”

  I went to a building on the side where two men sat at the barren table of the first-aid station. They were both big and burly. One was smoking a cigarette, which he put out quickly. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” I said to them. They stared at me because now Bobby was utterly silent, stoical. “Something happened to his arm. He fell down and someone picked him up and he’s been screaming, holding his arm behind his back.”

  One man told me in a thick Hispanic accent to sit with the baby on my lap, which I did, as he moved the arm gently. Bobby leaned into my chest, but not a sound came out of him. “Lady, if there were something wrong with his arm, he’d be screaming his head off now, and he’s not. He’s probably fine.”

  “You think he’s fine.”

  “I think so,” the man said. The other nodded.

  I left the first-aid station with Bobby trembling in my arms. “What is it, sweetheart? Are you really all right?” Why didn’t he cry when the man moved his arm? What was wrong with him?

  But, though he didn’t want his arm touched, he seemed better. He laughed when Alana made a fun face; he waved bye-bye to the sea lions with his good arm. We went downtown to a restaurant for lunch and Bobby slept in his stroller, but the arm still looked twisted. “Are you sure it’s all right?” Mara asked, her voice concerned.

  “No, I’m not sure at all.”

  Mara had to leave after lunch because Dave was coming to see the children, and she didn’t like to be late. If she was late bringing the children, he could be late with the support payments. She touched my hand. “Do you want to go home with us?”

  “No, I’m going to take a walk. I’ll go to a few galleries.”

  “You’ll be all right? Will you be able to get home okay?”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. They left and I sat, thinking about which galleries I would visit, when suddenly Bobby woke up, screaming. I quickly asked the waiter where the nearest hospital was, and he helped me get a taxi. I raced there.

  The emergency room had a long line of people waiting to be admitted. It also had a roomful of patients waiting to be seen. There were about seventy-five people ahead of me in various states of deterioration, which appeared to result from drugs, alcohol, assorted forms of substance abuse, aids, homelessness, minor accidents (several had bleeding heads; it looked as if they had walked into walls). They all sat in rows of folding chairs, staring at a giant screen, watching a quiz show.

  I went to look for a telephone. I called my pediatrician but he was away. The doctor covering for him, whose name sounded like Dr. Maggot, told me to go to the emergency room at
New York Hospital and have an intern there report to him. I couldn’t believe the wait there would be any shorter. Then I called Matthew. To my great relief he answered the phone. “Thank God you’re home,” I blurted. “Something’s wrong with Bobby. I need your help. I can’t do this alone.” I told him which hospital I was calling from.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “It’s his arm. What does it matter what’s wrong with him? I’m at an emergency room and I need help. There are dozens of people in line here.”

  “I could come, Ivy, but not right away. In an hour or so. Tell me, how’s he doing?”

  “Is it something that can’t wait?”

  “I’m in the middle of a shoot …”

  “I think your son has a broken arm and there’s a line around the block that I have to stand in and somebody has to help me.”

  “Look, I’ll come as soon as I can, okay?”

  Of course it made sense to me that he was in the middle of a shoot and he couldn’t reschedule it. His voice sounded concerned. I couldn’t expect him to drop everything. But I knew that if he were really Bobby’s father, he would drop everything. He would just do it. “Don’t bother,” I said. “We’ll be fine.” And I slammed down the receiver.

  I stood very still, knowing something irrevocable had occurred. Friends had told me this would happen, but I hadn’t believed it. I would never again call Matthew. I would never solicit his help or try to win him over. But not for me. For the child. I had heard about mothers who lift cars off their children, who stand in the line of fire. And now it came to me, the story Patricia told me that had become a riddle, the one I couldn’t solve. The one about the mother whose car stalls on the railroad track, her children inside the car. She tries to wave down the locomotive, to get it to stop, and instead the locomotive crashes into her car. What is wrong with this picture? And now I know. You fling the children from the car. Even at risk to yourself, even as the locomotive barrels down on you, you grab what children you can and hurl them clear.

  I returned to the room with the wounded, the injured, the abused, the battered, the drunk and the broken, my son weeping in my arms. I joined the line for I don’t know how long, waiting to reach the intake nurse, who could then give me a number so that I could sit in the room and watch the quiz show. I stood numb, the borders between danger and safety, protection and threats no longer clear, and wondered how the world survived. How did anyone survive? I patted Bobby. “It’s all right,” I said. “It will be all right.”

  At last, arms aching, I arrived. A woman with a beehive hairdo and painted-on eyebrows, sat at the desk with a sharpened pencil flicking people to the right or the left, as if she herself were judgment, as if she were the one who decided what was to happen to us all. “For you or the baby,” she asked without looking at me.

  “The baby,” I said.

  “Go to pediatrics.” She waved me away with her pencil, and suddenly I was saved.

  Pediatrics. Where was pediatrics? I left behind the room of the wretched and the lost and turned a corner to a wall painted with pandas and cats and elephants and giant flowers. Soft music played. The room was light. A doctor was on hand; a nurse smiled. They took me in right away. So it pays in this world to be little and helpless and small, I thought. It is only when we grow up that indifference or worse sets in.

  The doctor, a smiling young resident, touched Bobby’s arm, carefully moved it this way and that. “I could X-ray this, but I think I know what the problem is. Nursemaid’s elbow. The bones have come out of the socket. If you hold him, I’ll pop them back in.”

  “You will, just like that. You’ll make my son well again.”

  He looked at me with sad, understanding eyes. “Yes,” he said, “I think I can do that.”

  He held Bobby’s arm between his hands and gave it first a pull and then a pop like a cork gun. Bobby’s face opened into a startled look; he uttered a piercing scream. And then it was done. The arm moved smoothly again. The doctor and nurse stroked his head. Bobby reached with his injured arm for the animal cracker that was being offered to him. “He’s fine,” the doctor said, now patting my head, for I had fallen, sobbing, onto my son’s hair. “He’s all right. Are you all right?” the kind doctor said. “Are you all right?”

  THIRTY

  SOME BOYS are chasing me on their bikes. I did something to one of them, they say, and they’re going to give me the dirty-girl treatment, but what I did escapes me. Maybe I took a boy’s rabbit’s foot or maybe I said something about one of them, but whatever it is, they’re going to get me. I think, as I look back on it now, that they liked me. I’m sure of it, in fact. But whatever it was I did, they were chasing me. Maybe they thought I was pretty, with my red hair, as they chased me down the broad streets, calling my name, out onto the open road that leads to the desert.

  They chase me for a long time, until my legs get weary and the sweat pours down, but I’m afraid to stop, because I don’t know what they’ll do if they catch me. So I keep pedaling and pedaling, and I can imagine their faces, leering behind me. I take a wide turn in order to head back toward town, and that’s the last thing I remember about them chasing me. I remember only my bike going out from under me and my hands reaching out in front of me, but for what? What are they trying to grab? The air, the ground. They were beautiful, poised, as if I were diving into water and not the side of the road.

  When I come to, my mother is there. She sits in the car, window rolled down, cigarette in her hand. “Get in the car,” she says. “I’m taking you to the doctor. Get in. You’re a mess.” She rushes me to the emergency room, where a nurse with cool hands rubs my brow and a doctor removes the gravel and dirt from my legs and arms and face and my mother paces nervously around the emergency room, saying over and over again, “There won’t be any scars, Doctor, will there? I don’t want her to be scarred.”

  Later that night as we tell the story to my father and Sam, I ask my mother, “Why didn’t you get out of the car? Why didn’t you help me and get out of the car?”

  And my mother looks at me as if I’m insane. “What are you talking about?” she says. “Of course I helped you. Of course I got out of the car. How do you think your bike got into the trunk? You didn’t put it there.”

  That night, wrapped in bandages from head to toe, I sit up until my mother comes into the room to say good night. The window is open and a breeze blows in through the curtains, which rise and fall like ghosts. “I don’t remember you getting out of the car,” I tell her again.

  “What are you talking about?” she asks, amazed. “I rushed right to you. I picked you up in my arms.”

  So why don’t I remember this, even now? Why do I always see my mother sitting in that car, the window rolled down? What difference does it make if she got out or didn’t? What matters is that I remember that she didn’t.

  I rose the next day to a snap in the weather. A heavy fog had settled in; I had always thought of the city as being immune to natural phenomena. Tidal waves could not strike our shores, earthquakes could not shatter our streets. Hurricanes would never break our glass. Of course it was ridiculous. None of us was immune.

  Walking down my street with Bobby on the way to the store, I spotted a man rummaging through the garbage across the way. He was a large white man with a big beer belly, and he was collecting cans in a shopping cart. He appeared to be somebody down on his luck—somebody who had perhaps just lost a job. But what drew my attention to him more was that he had two small children with him, very close in age, perhaps four and five, and he was shouting at them as he dug into the garbage. “I told you not to do that, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you to do what I said?” He handed the little girl several cans. “Don’t you do that again,” and as she was dropping them into the shopping cart, he struck her with his open palm across the side of her head. The little girl shrieked and he struck her again.

  “I told you,” he said. “You’d better do what I say. You’d better not mess around or you’re r
eally going to get it.” He raised his hand again, and both the girl and her brother pleaded with him.

  I had stopped, my hands on Bobby’s stroller. In the fog and gray, it was not that easy to see me, but I stood perfectly still. Anger and indignation rose inside me. “If you lay a finger on that child,” I shouted at him, “I will call the police. If you harm that child, I will testify in court against you.”

  What if he saw me across the street and came over to beat me up? What would I do then? But he did not see me. He did not know where I was or where the voice had come from. His eyes scanned the buildings and then the skies. Dropping his hand, he looked as if he had heard the voice of God.

  THIRTY-ONE

  MARA PHONED at nine o’clock one night. “Listen, Ivy, I have a problem.” She sounded breathless. “I’m at a party in Brooklyn and my baby sitter just called. Jason is locked in the bathroom. He’s hysterical. The baby sitter is hysterical. I don’t know what to do. I’m getting into a cab now, but can you go over there? Call the landlord. Call a locksmith. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  I heard the terror in her voice, so I wrapped up Bobby and rushed with him across the street. From the elevator, when it reached Mara’s floor, I could hear Jason screaming. Oh, my God, I thought, what if he turns on the hot water? What if he scalds himself? The baby sitter, a girl about sixteen, was on her knees by the bathroom door as I came in. Alana was in a corner, sobbing. “It’s okay, sweetie,” the baby sitter kept saying. “Mommy will be home soon.”

  “What happened?” I shouted. The girl’s face was white.

  “He just went into the bathroom and shut the door. He locked himself in. I don’t know what happened. It was an accident. It wasn’t my fault.”

  I touched her arm. “I’m not saying it’s your fault. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout.” I handed her Bobby and grabbed a few of Jason’s favorite books. “Jason, it’s Ivy, Mommy’s friend. Sit on the floor, Jason. I’m going to tell you a story. Here, Jason, reach for my fingers under the door. See if you can touch my hand.” His fingers touched mine in the space beneath the door. I told the sitter to get the Yellow Pages while I read to Jason.