How Will I Know You?

by Jessica Treadway

  All she knew was that she felt the old craving—the itch that went back as far as she remembered but that had abandoned her these last few years—to watch something take shape beneath her fingers. It wouldn’t replace Joy and it wouldn’t replace Martin, or whatever it was that Martin had himself replaced. It wouldn’t make her feel like a good person, because it couldn’t undo the things she’d done that she would, now, always regret—and suffer.

  But it was something, and at the moment, it felt like the only thing she could do. She cut off a block, secured the clay on an armature, and began pressing, making indentations, brushing smooth circles with her fingers. She wanted to feel it all; she did not want to use any tools. “I’m glad I’ll have this,” Joy had said, in the last few minutes Susanne spent with her daughter. No, Susanne was the one who would always have Joy’s hands in Colossal Joy. Now she would sculpt her head, her hair, her face, in an effort to always have those, too.

  What was the line Martin had quoted to her once? Art makes the absent present and the dead almost alive? If in the end what Susanne created now didn’t resemble her daughter as much as she hoped, she would not destroy the effort but put it away inside a cupboard, because even a failed facsimile would be better than what she had now.

  After (Further)

  Friday, April 30, 2010

  This morning I met with people from the Mirage Gallery, one of my prizes for winning the Lewison Award last year. I could have had the meeting sooner, and I might have if not for everything that happened in the months afterward, but in the end I’m glad I waited. Before now, I would only have been able to show them the pieces I retained after the fire, the still lifes in American Commonplace. And though I like them enough (and there’s been some interest in showing them), it’s not what I’m doing now.

  Originally they asked me to come to the gallery itself, but when I told them about the size of my canvas, they offered to visit my studio, which is also my apartment, instead. I was nervous but excited: since finding this place in January and setting up my work space, I’ve gotten a good start on the northeast corner of Souls on Board. If I can keep that pace up (and I see no reason not to, given that I’m teaching only two studio classes a semester), I should be able to finish within a few years.

  My original plan had been to paint individual portraits of passengers faced with the realization that they were about to lose their lives. I’d amended that after talking to Joy at her house that day, when she asked me to describe my work; I liked her suggestion to render the people on the plane before they understood what was about to happen. She’d said it would be more poignant—she also used the word “haunting”—and I agreed.

  But since the fire at Grandee’s house and the loss of the portrait I’d begun of my father, I’d also reconsidered my instinct to paint separate panels, each distinct from the others. Was that really what I was after? Or was it more in keeping with my vision to depict the entire airplane cabin in a single scene, re-creating more accurately what my father and the rest of the victims had actually experienced? They may have been thinking about themselves (wouldn’t we all be?) when the first bolt of lightning struck, but they would not have been able to remove themselves or their consciousnesses from the presence and company of the people around them.

  So, instead of a “thirty-six-tych,” I am creating one huge mural measuring twelve by twelve feet. I like the symmetry of those numbers, and my hope is that the effect on the viewer will be all the more dramatic for the single outsized scene.

  The owners of the Mirage agreed. And they all but guaranteed to show it when I’m finished. With that kind of interest, and with the life I’ve built for myself here (mostly, I admit, I am thinking of Samantha when I say that), it’s hard not to spend much of my time feeling euphoric, especially given what I came so close to losing in the last year.

  But I try to curb it, the euphoria, because I know how fast things can change.

  I want to write about what happened last week before I forget it (though so much of me would like to forget) when I flew down to Atlanta and rented a car to drive to the suburb my mother lives in, thirty miles north of Hartsfield-Jackson. I had taken to thinking of her as my mother, which I resisted for most of my life; she’d always been Linda to me, as I tried to protect myself from hoping she would ever be anything more. But once Ramona located her and Linda offered the bail money, I allowed the fantasies back in. The bail money had been returned to her, and I could have left it there, but I wanted to thank her. (Who was I kidding? It would start with thanking her, but it would end up where I’d always wanted it to: I would have my mother, finally, once and for all.)

  I didn’t have a plan beyond actually seeing her and somehow finding a way to express my gratitude for putting up the money. She owns a boutique in the same town she lives in, selling local artists’ jewelry and handmade gifts. What happened to her dream of becoming a pianist? I wanted to know, but determined I would not ask. I found the boutique easily enough, in the middle of a block on a quaint street in her quaint town. Parking a few doors away from the store, which is called Peachtree Gems, I sat for a few minutes watching people stroll up and down the block: all white, except for a Rasta-looking skateboarder who appeared intent on startling the white people out of his way.

  As I stepped inside, a defective-sounding bell gave a faint ring over the entrance, and the woman behind the counter looked up. My mother and I locked eyes, and there was no doubt in my mind that she knew immediately who I was, as I knew her.

  She took in a breath. If not for the fact that I understood what shocked her, I would have thought it was because I was a black man entering this kind of store. I watched her in the second moment make the decision not to acknowledge who I was, and the realization triggered in me an equal mix of relief and despair.

  “Can I help you?” she asked. I knew she was trying to give the smile she would greet any customer with, but it sputtered and died. I wanted to tell her not to try so hard, but of course I could not.

  “J-just looking,” I stammered.

  “Of course! Well, anything I can do.” Then she hustled away from the counter toward the jewelry case, where another middle-aged woman, the only other person in the store, was peering down at the necklaces.

  But I had gotten a good look at her. What was it we shared that sealed the knowledge for both of us? The prominent bone ridges above the eye sockets, giving them a slightly lopsided look as our foreheads overwhelmed the lower portion of our faces. Ha! I’d always thought these features came from some African ancestor of my father’s, but no, it was my white mother’s side. In another circumstance, I would have smiled at the irony.

  “Those are Swarovski crystals,” I heard Linda say to the necklace browser. Her voice still sounded shaky to me, though of course this could have been how she sounded all the time. “Just look at them shine in the light.”

  I moved to a shelf containing homemade Christmas ornaments, the kind Samantha loves. Would my mother wonder why I was buying it? I chose a hanging moon, pewter studded with pastel stones. Bringing it up to the counter, I cleared my throat, and Linda came toward me, now looking down at my intended purchase as she spoke. “That’s a beautiful one.” Then she almost seemed to want to stop herself, but she couldn’t help adding, “You have an excellent eye.”

  I thanked her and pulled out cash rather than my card, to avoid forcing her to look at the name we share. She fumbled to wrap it in tissue, saying “Sorry, sorry” as it tore in her trembling hands. In that moment I heard Violet telling me to man up, ask for what I wanted. In spite of my inclination to escape, I said to Linda, “You know who I am?” the words catching in my throat.

  She took another breath so big I could tell it surprised us both. “Yes. I think so.” Why had she added those last three words? Were they intended to mitigate the way she knew she would then behave—to allow for the possibility that she might, in some fractional measure, be unsure? I had wanted to ask, “Do you recognize me?” but lost my ner
ve at the last moment, the question suggesting as it did the existence of memory as well as raw awareness.

  And the only thing she might remember of me, if she remembered anything at all, was glimpsing the full head of black hair I was born with, before she gave me away.

  But there was Violet in my head again, not letting me withdraw as I would have if it were up to me. “I came to thank you,” I told Linda, reminding myself not to mumble. “For posting my bail. You didn’t need to do that.”

  I forced myself to meet her eyes as I spoke, but she returned the gaze so steadily that I had to break it and look away. My words had disconnected the pretense of politeness between us, I saw too late.

  “You have nothing to thank me for.” I watched her consider whether to leave it at that, or speak the words that so obviously came to her next. She couldn’t seem to resist, and in an even lower voice she added, “If you’re so grateful, I would have expected you to honor what I asked for in return.”

  “What you asked for?” As much as I hated looking stupid in front of her, I had no idea what she was referring to.

  “All I requested when your lawyer called is that if I gave the money, you’d promise not to try to contact me.” She set her jaw in a way I recognized from looking in the mirror. It was the expression I make at myself when I am defying something, in myself or in the world. “And now here you are. You and your father, the one thing I ask you for, you can’t seem to give.”

  It pains me to remember, now, that I laughed. I thought she might have been making a joke, or trying to, because it seemed to me she spoke through an odd smile, and her words struck me with the surprise of a punch line. Before I finished laughing, though, I saw that I was wrong.

  “What do you mean?” I said it before understanding that I might be heading down a road better left unexplored.

  From the eyebrows raised in that high, wide forehead, I saw that it was her turn to be surprised. Was it by my laugher? Or by the suggestion that I really might not know what she was talking about?

  I started to tell her that nobody had told me there was any condition on her posting the money through Ramona and her team. Then the rest of what she’d said caught up to me. “Wait. My father?” When she only tightened her lips in response, I said, “Are you saying he did talk to you?” I could barely get the words out; the task of comprehending and speaking them at the same time was too great. “Before he—before the crash?”

  She made a move as if to turn away from me, but instinctively I reached toward her arm to stop her. Before I could make contact, she pulled the arm away, and it was this gesture—what it did to me, inside—that made me understand, finally, that there would never be anything beyond this moment between us. “You knew about that? All this time I thought he came down here and backed out, because I knew if he’d come to see you, you would have told him it was okay for me to call you, and he would have been happy to tell me that on the phone—” I wasn’t even forming the sentences in my head, and I didn’t recognize my voice in speaking them. “I asked him to come down here for my birthday and talk to you. It was the one thing I asked him for.”

  “I know that. And he did. How could I know he didn’t tell you that?” Her fingers twitched on the counter between us. “Look, he’s not the reason you never heard from me—I am.” Then, as if she’d rehearsed it many times over the years, she added, “I don’t think people who make a mistake, especially when they’re young, should have to pay for it the rest of their lives.”

  A mistake. As if she’d checked the wrong box on a multiple-choice test because she didn’t read the question closely enough, and learned as a consequence to pay more attention.

  “He’s been dead for twelve years!” I recognized that it was a non sequitur, that it didn’t make sense after her flimsy offer of a self-defense, but I didn’t care. “And all this time I thought—” But I saw that there was no point to it, and shut myself up.

  “I know when your birthday is.” Hearing herself say this appeared to distress her, and I was glad to see it. She nodded at the ornament I’d pulled out my wallet to purchase. “You can have that,” she told me, in an urgent whisper. “That and anything else you want, you can just take.”

  She could have been speaking to a thief—someone who’d come in to rob the place. She could have been pleading for her life. Take the money and run, she might just as well have said; her tone was that desperate for me to leave.

  I pushed the ornament aside gently and shook my head, then walked empty-handed back toward the door and into the insufferable heat. From that moment on, I knew, I would always associate the word “mother” with nausea and the sound of a broken bell.

  In the rental car, I opened the window and had to take some deep breaths before feeling sure I would not be sick. The dreadlocked skateboarder came up from behind to shout “Move out, brother!” and thumped the hood as he sped by.

  For the rest of my life, I thought, my chest still heaving, I will wonder if this trip was worth making. If I gained from it more than I ever lost.

  But I was wrong; I had my answer even before my return flight was over. Yes, it had been the right thing to find Linda, because it meant I knew the truth—about both of my parents. If my father had come home that day and told me (and he would have done it so gently, I knew, feeling a prick to my heart) that my mother thought it best for all of us, including me, for her to remain out of my life, I would never have become an artist, or found the life I have today. After he died I was so angry at him—not so much for dying, but for what I was sure was his failure to talk to Linda about me—that I decided the hell with him and what he’d wanted. I would not follow him in his career as a piano technician (reliable, respectable, but also largely invisible, preparing an instrument for someone else to play); I was going to do what I loved even if it wouldn’t earn me a living (his biggest fear for my future), which was to paint.

  Yes, this is you—this, I heard in my head as we prepared for landing, but it wasn’t Violet’s voice I heard this time; it was my own.

  The plane was on time and the journey smooth, Samantha met me at LaGuardia, and an hour after I arrived home, the people from the Mirage called to arrange today’s meeting. Though I’ve only been here a fraction of a year so far, I can already tell I am home.

  Let Down

  The first day of May, the rhododendrons outside the hospital in his relocated hometown were in full bloom. Color, Tom thought as he passed them on the way in, feeling the shock of discovery. He hadn’t been noticing colors. For how long? He had no idea, but he couldn’t remember the last time he registered the pleasure of the reds in nature, the purples and the pinks—how just seeing such brilliance in the world could actually cause something to shift inside your chest.

  Back in November, whenever he’d thought ahead to the day or night the baby would be born, he’d imagined having to hover in the background behind Doug and Helen, waiting for them to decide to step aside and give him space so that he could move forward, toward his wife (even now she was still his wife, though the papers ending that would come through soon) and their new child in the hospital bed.

  But of course back then he was imagining Mercy, in Chilton, not this bigger, newer hospital in the middle of New Hampshire. And he’d worked himself up so much over the vision of being excluded that when the time actually came (not day or night but at the moment between; when he looked it up later, his son’s birth had been recorded at the exact moment the sun set), and Alison said she wanted Tom next to her for the delivery, he felt shocked by the absence of anything other than gratitude, complete and simple and untarnished by the rupture of their breakup or the resentment he would always hold toward his parents-in-law.

  The fact that neither Doug nor Helen was present in the room felt like a gift he did not deserve, even though he was more responsible for it than he could ever let Alison know. Her parents’ disappearance—they’d been gone more than four months now—had taken a toll on her, especially because she could not c
ontact them without risking that they would get caught.

  Tom guessed Florida. Doug had always talked about Florida as a retirement destination, even though Tom thought it was more for Helen’s benefit than his own. He was pretty sure Doug never intended to retire.

  And he hadn’t “retired,” had he? No—he’d jumped bail like a gutless wonder before the DA could determine whether there was enough evidence to add second-degree murder to the charges already filed. “Gutless wonder” had always been one of Doug’s favorite phrases, along with “douchebag,” for the cowards he encountered on the job. Would he think of it in terms of himself, now that he was on the run? Tom doubted it. He’d see himself as a victim of persecution, though he’d never have a chance to accuse anyone of doing the persecuting.

  At first, Alison had been inconsolable. But within a day or two she settled down, and Tom figured her mother had called or otherwise notified her about how she could reach them, if she needed to. She’d seemed once to almost let slip to Tom where they were, but he managed to detour the conversation without her realizing.

  He figured she’d probably confided in Eveline, her AA sponsor. But that was okay: no way the state troopers or the FBI would have any reason to question a middle-aged clerk at the New Hampshire Small Business Development Center. Eveline was the person Alison and Tom had to thank for pointing out to Alison that she didn’t drink because of the “giant waves of dread” she’d described once to Tom—that, in fact, the drinking created the dread. Tom would always be grateful to Eveline for being willing to repeat this until Alison both believed and understood it to be true.