by Erin Saldin
Sometimes I think my mom tells me these stories so that I’ll believe her when she tells me she wasn’t always like this: struggling and lonely in a wood-paneled kitchen. I think she wants me to know her as Linda, not Mom. She wants me to know that, even now, she’s not just my mom. And I’d like to know her that way, but I can’t tell her the truth: It’s impossible. At least, right now. Because she is just my mom—the person I curled against in one twin bed after another, in one town after another, her stomach my pillow, my hand in hers. I didn’t understand then that her body was her own, and even though I know it now, it’s still not real to me. We are connected by silver threads, she and I, so translucent you never see them unless the sun is shining in just that way, and we always will be. Her body is not her own because my body is not my own. She’ll never see me as the Ana I know I am. She can’t. I’m hers, just like she’s mine, and it makes us blind to each other.
“Oh,” she says, opening the oven door and placing the potatoes on the rack, “mija, I forgot to tell you. A woman called for you yesterday. Said it was about your abuela.”
“Vera,” I say. My mom’s retained the language her parents used around the house while she was growing up, but over the years it’s been pared down to terms of endearment, a handful of nouns, and the occasional swear word that she thinks I might not understand.
(Sometimes I wish she hadn’t felt the need to leave everything behind, including so much of the language she shared with her parents. She’s told me they learned English when they moved here with her as a child, but they were always more comfortable with the language of their home country. And so I’ve always worried that I won’t be able to talk to them if they ever find us. If they ever try to find us, I remind myself. If they ever try.)
“Vera. I always forget her name.” Mom smiles. “I think the woman was her daughter?”
Why would Abby be calling me now? I haven’t seen her since she first came to town, and frankly, I didn’t think I’d hear from her again. “Did she say anything?”
My mom laughs. “On the contrary. She hardly said a word. But her voice—it was what you’d expect. Like she—like it’s hard for her to stoop.”
“Like she’s not used to asking for things—” I begin, but Mom finishes my sentence.
“Because she hasn’t had to ask.” She laughs again. “Exactly.”
I make a mental note to tell Davis about Abby. She’s the quintessential Weekender, and Davis always likes to know when people fit the mold. He calls himself a cultural anthropologist. As for me, I don’t like to know that people can be only how they appear. Especially if how they appear is kind of awful.
“She left her number,” my mom is saying. “Sorry I didn’t tell you earlier—I don’t know how I forgot.”
Actually, the same thought has occurred to me. I get so few phone calls that my mom practically has the number memorized for me whenever someone does leave me a message. I can think of only one reason my mom would forget. “Mom,” I say, “have you met someone?”
The blush is instantaneous. She giggles, just like a girl. “Mayyyybe,” she says, drawing the word out. “It’s probably too soon to tell.”
I wait.
“Well,” she says finally, “he’s a contractor. Zeke. A pretty regular customer at the spa, actually.” She glances up at me. “You’ll like him, Ana. He’s sweet.”
Sweet. The second guy she’s brought into our lives since I was born, and all I get is sweet.
“That’s great, Mom,” I say, trying to sound sincere.
“Well, you’ll meet him soon, I expect.” Her eyes are hopeful, asking me a question I can’t answer. “He’s taking me to the city next weekend, actually. I already got the time off. He’s got some business there, and he thinks I deserve a break.” She laughs. “And I guess I do!”
“That’ll be fun.” I try to smile, though I don’t feel like it. She just met him, and they’re already going to the city for the weekend? I feel a quick shiver of betrayal when I think about the possibility that she’s been seeing him for a while and not telling me about it. Biding her time. Because optimism is a form of currency with my mom—with work, with money, and I guess even with guys named Zeke. And she expects me to spend it as freely as she does, never mind the fact that it always runs out.
• • •
When I arrive at the Pines on Tuesday, Vera’s not waiting for me in the solarium. I scan the faces in their chairs once, twice, try to push back the panic that’s rising in my throat. I check her room, but she’s not there either. I walk back to the solarium, but if there’s music playing over the loudspeakers (usually Sinatra or Holiday), I can’t hear it. Not over the drumming of my heart.
I go straight to the visitors’ desk and sign in. Try not to sound worried when I ask, “Is Vera around? I don’t see her,” but my voice is high and tinny. I’ve tried to call Abby back a couple of times since I got her message, but she’s never picked up. And suddenly I wonder if she was calling to tell me the thing I never want to hear.
(I talked to Davis about this once. We were hanging out at the Den after Georgie and Erik had gone home, just watching the sunset. He asked how Vera was, and I was surprised that he remembered her name, and I told him that I panic when I don’t see her waiting for me. He paused, then nodded. “Ah. The great fear of all who visit the elderly. Russian roulette. One day—someday—we all arrive to an empty chair.”)
The desk nurse—Gloria—smiles at me. “Hello, Ana. Don’t worry,” she says, and turns her gaze toward the exit. “She’s fine. Better than fine. It probably has something to do with her handsome chaperone.” Gloria laughs. “Youth enlivens us, you know.”
I turn to see a guy pushing Vera toward us. Combat boots, lip ring. It takes me a second because it’s so incongruous, but then I place him: the guy who was with Georgie at Grainey’s. Vera hasn’t noticed me yet, and I watch as she looks down at her lap and smiles. It’s true: She looks younger than usual.
“Hey. Ana, right?” he says, stopping in front of me. “We just got back from a little drive. I didn’t want Vera to miss your visit.” He leans down to Vera. “Grandma, Ana’s here.”
Grandma.
“Of course,” says Vera, lifting a hand, which I press between my own. “Hello, dear.”
“Oh,” I say. “Um, where did you go?” I try to keep my voice steady. I try to keep it together. But. Grandma. I always knew Vera was someone’s grandma. I just never thought they’d come claim her.
“The most lovely place!” says Vera, answering my question. “The ocean!”
The guy and I exchange looks.
“It was beautiful, wasn’t it, Grandma?” He squeezes her shoulder, and she reaches up and grabs his hand.
“The people,” she says, “were all in blue.”
“Well,” he says, “why don’t we get you to your room? Then the three of us can talk.”
“Yes,” she says, “and I can nap until Mother comes.”
We head down Larch Hall, the guy pushing the chair. He leans over and whispers to me as we walk. “Is she always this confused?”
“No,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I don’t get it. I drove her up to the parking lot at the top of Coolidge Mountain so she could see the view. We didn’t even go by the lake. I didn’t notice a whole bunch of people in blue, either.” I can hear the tinny clang of teeth on metal as he bites on his lip ring.
“Maybe she’s tired,” I say.
“I bet she is. She slept in the car on the way back.” He pauses. “But this is strange.”
How would you know?
When we get to her room, she’s already asleep, hands folded on her lap, chin lowered toward her chest. “Catnap,” she says when we wake her. She looks at the two of us and blinks. “Henry,” she says. But then she adds, “And Kathryn. Thank you for coming.”
So now I know his name at least.
He’s about to say something, but I reach down and place my hand on hers. “It’s so good to see
you,” I say. My abuela.
She blinks at me again. One eye is drooping on one side, and it makes her look sad, on the verge of tears. She says, “I’ve been waiting for you to come back. Why did you stay away? I’ve got all this space. Extra bedrooms. I could make one up for you.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll try to do better.”
“What the—” I hear Henry mutter under his breath. Louder, he says, “Grandma. That’s not Kathryn. That’s Ana. Ana, remember? Your friend?” He kneels down so that he’s face-to-face with her. “Ana visits you every week. Kathryn hasn’t been here in a while.”
She studies his face. Then she unfolds her hands and wrings them together. “I’m sure I’ve put them somewhere,” she says.
“What?”
“The nuts. You must be starving.”
• • •
Once the nurse gets her settled in bed, fluffing the pillows so that she’s sitting up, Vera tries to make conversation. Her eyes keep closing, though, so Henry and I finally help her scootch down until she’s on her back. She’s completely asleep within a minute.
“Well,” says Henry, closing the door behind him as we retreat into the hall, “sorry to ruin your visiting time. I didn’t expect her to get so tired. Or confused.” He turns to me. “I would’ve taken her out another day if I’d known. I mean, my mom told me how close you two are.”
“What else did your mom tell you?” The anger that I’ve kept at bay since I saw him come through the doors with Vera is spilling over. Anger and relief—relief that she’s okay, that today wasn’t the day, after all. I know that’s part of it, but I still can’t help the crest of fury that starts at the top of my head and rushes toward my shoulders. “No, really. I’d love to hear.”
He takes a step back. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Pretty easy to pick me out of a crowd, I bet.” The ease with which he walked over to me, pushing Vera’s chair. The only Latina girl in the room.
“Look. My mom told me that there was someone who visited Vera, and I . . .” He stumbles over his words. “You didn’t look like a nurse.”
“I’m sure.” How did I look? How did Abby describe me? Did she even say Latina? Or did she say something else?
I try to calm down. I remind myself of the way he looked with Georgie—like he cares for her. Henry probably doesn’t know that Gold Fork actually has a pretty big Latino population, and how would he? Weekenders don’t think about what they don’t see.
But then he says, “Man, what’s the big deal here?”
“What’s the big deal?” I jerk my chin toward Vera’s door. “What’s the big deal?” My voice is a furious whisper. “Maybe you could start by telling me where you and your mom have been for the past—oh, I don’t know—twenty years. Or why you’re here now. Or where Kathryn is. Or what you think you’re doing with Vera. She’s not stupid, you know.” Tears are pricking at my eyes, and I swipe at them with the back of my hand. “Sometimes she knows who you are.” Then I lean toward him. “And that’s going to make it even worse when you leave.”
“Whoa,” he says, taking a step back. “Sorry.” And he does look sorry, sort of. “I can’t—it’s not easy to explain,” he says. “My mom and Ve—Grandma—they aren’t close.”
“I gathered that.” I’m not letting him off the hook. “So why are you here?”
He won’t meet my eyes. “You should ask my mom that.” It must sound as weak to him as it does to me, because he adds, “Look—I don’t get the whole thing between my mom and my grandma, okay? But my family is no more screwed up than anyone else’s. We have our secrets and our fights, but what is that? Totally normal. Fact is, I hardly heard a word about Vera until this summer, and suddenly, here we are.” He shrugs. “Worse places to be.”
“So why now?”
He shakes his head, exasperated. “Like I said: Ask my mom, okay? She and my stepdad are tying up some stuff.”
“That’s what your grandmother is to you?” I say. “A loose end? A thread?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t need to.”
• • •
I stick around after he leaves, hoping that Vera will wake up. I sit next to her bed, holding her hand while she sleeps, safe in her world of dreams and filtered memories. I want her to wake up and tell me that it’s all going to be okay, that she’s not going to leave me, that it’ll always be the two of us, sitting outside in the sun as she smokes a pipe.
When I first started visiting Vera, it surprised me that she smoked a pipe. The only people I’d seen doing that before were the old men who hang out at Grainey’s right after it opens in the early mornings. And she was so polished, so constrained that it seemed improbable at first. But Vera could pack her own pipe with sweet tobacco and light it herself with quick pops of breath. It gave her such pleasure, then, to puff on it or clamp it between her teeth, making me laugh. Now she forgets that she has a pipe—kept safe at the nurses’ station. She rarely asks for it anymore. But when she does, I push her outside and we sit under the hanging plants near the back entrance. I pack it myself and help her hold it to her mouth. I remind her that she’s still here.
(We only talked about the chapel fire once, while she was smoking her pipe. I’d just started visiting her, and the scar hadn’t calmed to silver yet—it was still a raised red seam down my arm. It was hot, and I took off my cardigan after looking around to make sure no one else was watching. Vera reached over and ran her fingers across the seam like she was reading braille. And then—I don’t know why—I told her everything. When I was done, she put her hand on mine. Some things never leave you, she said. Some things you never forget, Ana. She’d smiled. Not in five years, not in fifty. It was the only time she’s called me by my name.)
But she doesn’t wake up, and I stop at the nurses’ station before leaving to ask them to call Abby. “Tell her something’s different,” I say. “Probably nothing, but . . . different. She’s more confused than usual.” Gloria nods. She’s noticed too.
I bike home in the evening light, something clawing at my neck, my hands. Something’s wrong. It wasn’t just the strangeness of seeing Henry at the Pines, of connecting the little baby in the photo to the guy who is maybe—probably—hooking up with Georgie.
Because even though Georgie and I don’t usually share this stuff with each other—girl talk, my mom calls it, as though what we do with our hearts and bodies is a childish pastime—I still have to think there’s something I’m missing, something I don’t see. Georgie and I’ve never had any use for girls like Kelly, the ones who always look perfect and vacuum-packed and who spend their summers hooking up with as many Weekenders as they can, like they’re trying to build a backlog of memories for the years ahead when they’re shackled to a run-down two-bedroom near the Gold Fork skate park, three babies, maybe, definitely a husband whose voice sounded like a different kind of promise when he told her he forgot the condom. We don’t talk about it much, but I know—that’s not Georgie.
There must be something about Henry that’s worth it.
So it’s not that. It’s this: All I can think about as I weave through Gold Fork’s quieting streets is how jealous I felt when I saw him with Vera. Once the fear that something had happened to her dissipated, I just felt raw envy. Because I’ve always wanted to be able to do those things for her too: Drive her around, show her the town and lake. Get her out. Give her air. Let her breathe.
But I don’t have a car. And now that Abby and Henry are here, laying claim to her time, her life, I’m starting to realize I might not have anything she needs. I might not have anything at all.
Let’s play family! Children on the beach, racing toward one another. Forming their little bands, creating order in the only way they know how. You be the mommy. I’ll be the baby. Everything as simple as this: the designated role, the immediate alliance. And then, the easy dissolution: a real mother, calling, Dinnertime! And just like that, the family scattered across the sand.<
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My mom and I used to play like that on the public beach. I’d be the mommy, and she’d be the squalling infant, kicking her legs in the sand while I pretended to go to the bank. “I have to cash a check,” I’d say, brushing the sand off my legs, “before we can get dinner.” It took a few years before I realized why that made her sad. “Ana,” she’d say. “Mija.” Then: “Mommy. Just go to the grocery store. Just go buy everything, Mommy. It’s pretend.” But I refused. I would only play what I knew.
Sometimes my mom’s friends from work would show up with their families, and the kids would all play together in the water while the moms and dads sat on beach towels and watched us. Big, rowdy families, kids spilling over one another in the water, our skin (tan, white, brown) goose pimpled when we’d get out, and our moms would wrap us in bear hugs and blankets. Those were the best times, when Mom and I pretended we were part of those wild and glorious families.
I’ve been playing family again. And soon, soon (maybe even now) I’ll be alone on the beach with a bucket and a shovel and my single heart.
WHERE ADVENTURE AWAITS
There’s a sign along the state highway leading out of town, just beyond the lumberyard and the Walmart. LEAVING GOLD FORK, it says in flowery font that only a city planner could have found attractive. COME BACK SOON. And then, in smaller font below, because it’s clear that we were running out of space and there wasn’t enough money in the town budget for a bigger sign: ADVENTURE AWAITS!
Adventure awaits. We want the Weekenders to believe this, to spend long months in the city thinking about the what-could-have-beens and the what-if-I-trieds from the summer before. We want them to think of Gold Fork as a place where anything can happen. Where anything does. Where the things that chain them during the year—uniforms and trig exams and failed movie dates that may or may not be dates—are released, and they break free just like the prisoner in the movie that may or may not have been a date and can be whoever they want every night of the weekend.