A Mother's Love
Page 20
People looked at me as if I were mad when I started to run across the expanse of the station, pushing through rushing commuters, trying to get to the gate through which Sam had disappeared. I shoved people aside. I raced toward tunnels, but there were so many gates, so many trains, so many ways to go and turn. Still, I couldn’t catch her. Once more I thought that if I put Bobby down, just for a moment, I could overtake her. But this was not possible. This was not something I would do.
Standing there with my son in my arms, I lost her again, if, in fact, she was ever there. Apparition, mistaken identity, or the real thing—I would never be sure. Perhaps I’ll come back to this spot, empty-handed and expectant, each Friday, hoping she’ll take the same train. Or perhaps I won’t, for I’ll have other places to be and other things to do. And maybe it’s just this once that she’s taking this train. If I do come back, maybe I’ll find her, and through her find the way to my mother. But for now she is lost to me once again, and no matter where I go or turn, somehow I am alone, even though I hold my son in my arms.
It all comes sweeping over me and—as if it has just happened—I miss my mother. I want to run my life back like a film and rewind it so that she can see me grow up, be with me as I go off to school, leave home, marry. I want to make it all happen again so that she can watch Bobby on an evening when I go to a movie with a friend. I want to start it all over at the beginning as if my life thus far were merely a dance routine still in rehearsal, not one I was expected to perform on the stage.
I want to tell all this to my son. About the night she took me to Moon Mountain and we slept beneath the stars. I miss her, but not really the one I lost. Rather I miss the one I never had, the one I am trying to become. But he is too young to understand. I put him on the ground and he walks haltingly, holding my hand. He is light, as if he could float, rise away, above me, like a hot-air balloon. But he doesn’t go. Instead, he stays, clinging to my fingers, and I clasp his. It is a gentle holding, not a desperate grasp, in this carefully poised balancing act.
Returning to where I dropped my bags, Bobby toddling beside me, I sigh, gazing upward, tears in my eyes. Then I notice the ceiling. The stars and constellations of the zodiac shimmer in the dome of the station, and I find myself standing, for the first time in so many years, beneath the night sky. Cancer, Pegasus, Orion, Taurus. Hercules, the Immortal Child. I can still name them all.
Now with my son’s hand I trace the shapes of the constellations, the way the ancients did, the ones they used to navigate their course, as if in so doing I can recover the past. I draw a crab, a horse, an archer, a bull. I move his hand gently across the sky and whisper into his ear the names of the constellations, the ones I recall, and wait as he struggles to repeat them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Morris was born and raised in Chicago. Her previous books include Vanishing Animals and Other Stories, which was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; the novel Crossroads; The Bus of Dreams, a collection of stories that received the Friends of American Writers Award; and the novel The Waiting Room. She is also the author of two works of travel nonfiction: Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone and Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.