31 Hours

by Masha Hamilton

NEW YORK: 8:28 A.M.

  MECCA: 4:28 P.M.

  Carol leaned over the sink and splashed water on her face. She peered at herself in the mirror and dabbed some cream under her eyes. Funny, the way time had played with her; sometimes she looked good, maybe ten years younger than she actually was, and other times she looked at least ten years older. Now, although she felt edgy, nervous, and a little sick, she looked okay. There had been seasons, many, during Jonas’s boyhood when she’d barely noticed her appearance. With Jonas gone—Jonas out of the house, she corrected herself—she’d begun paying a bit more attention. It seemed to matter more, though she couldn’t say precisely why. She wasn’t interested in adding anyone to her life, Lorenzo included.

  What she wanted was to give more time to her work. She’d become involved lately in ceramic forms that were art first and vessels second. That took a certain confidence, to put form over function and think it would sell. She was exploring the juxtaposition of female curves with male lines within the architecture of a vase or a set of cups. Female curves, actually, arching away from male lines. A couple friends carried some of her work prominently in Manhattan galleries, and recently a gallery owner in Atlanta had e-mailed, offering to carry six or eight of her pieces. If she focused, she might be able to pull together a show somewhere. She’d been planning a full day of work, but it was more important today to make sure everything was solid with Jonas.

  She went to the closet and pulled out an oversized sweater. Next to the closet hung five pictures of her son, one beneath the other, all of which she’d taken. The top photo showed Jonas at age three, vacuuming, an intent look in his eyes. Then Jonas at four and a half, dressed in a red firefighter’s helmet. Jonas as a clown for Halloween, age ten, and Jonas, thirteen, sitting across the table from her in a restaurant—though she wasn’t in the photo. She remembered the meal, his telling her he finally appreciated avocado, though the expression on his face as he ate a bite belied the claim. The bottom picture was Jonas, just turned seventeen, the high school graduate in cap and gown.

  She’d been the right kind of mother for a boy—damnit, she had. Now she wanted to be the right kind of mother for a young man who felt things so deeply he didn’t know how to process those feelings, where to put them. She still wanted to protect him—from others, from himself—and at the same time give him the space that would allow him to be honest with her, always. She was certainly flawed, but she was trying. She even wanted, eventually, to be the right kind of mother-in-law, though admittedly she wasn’t sure such a thing was possible. She wasn’t by nature anxiety-plagued. She hadn’t been like this, in fact, when he’d been traveling out of the country; as long as he called a couple times a month, she felt fine. It was all out of her control, anyway.

  Now, though, it felt like there was something she could do, even something she should do. Her son needed a mother now, or someone who cared as much as a mother—though why, what for? She had no idea. Her eyes tracked back to the photograph of him in the firefighter’s hat, courtesy of the firehouse they’d visited in the Turtle Bay neighborhood not far from the United Nations. Jonas still had that round, glowing face of a preschooler. His eyes shone, probably with the excitement of the visit. He was smiling, too, but it was a serious smile, as if he already felt responsible for something. She reached out to touch his tiny image. “Hey, kid,” she said, “you don’t have to take it all on alone.” Then, by the light of day half-believing and half-doubting her own intuition, she shook her head and made for the front door, grabbing her coat as she left.

  NEW YORK: 10:47 A.M.

  MECCA: 6:47 P.M.

  Mara, listening outside the door. Ear pressed to it like a nosy parent checking a teenager’s room, except that Mara was eleven, and she was listening to her mom. Stifled, intense soundlessness emanated from the other side of the door, and Mara knew what created that.

  Mara, listening to her mother weeping. It qualified as weeping because it was thicker, fuller, and more private than mere crying. Her mother tried to hide the noise, to trap it in her throat. And so Mara thought of the weeping as an object with physical form that clogged her mother’s windpipe, cutting off normal breath. Mara heard the repeated silence of her mother not breathing and then the sound of little gasping breaths. Mara feared her mother might eventually stop breathing altogether. That was one reason she listened—so that if the weeping halted and actual silence fell in its place, she could pound on the door. She imagined that she might even be able to break open the door—she’d heard of small people finding astonishing powers in extraordinary situations.

  Mara listened, too, because she wanted to know certain things. She needed to know them, actually, here alone with her mother, and she didn’t know how to find out. Asking wouldn’t work because her mother wouldn’t answer. So she listened hard, as if the weeping might tell her. She wanted to know, primarily, how long this might go on and how it would end. Sometimes she tried to think it through as if it were a scientific experiment. Take, as the first ingredient, a mother who rarely goes to work as she used to because the office that used to belong to her and Daddy is somehow only Daddy’s office now, and who rarely goes to the grocery store as if that were too challenging, and who rarely bathes or brushes her hair, and who emerges from her room for no more than three hours a day. Combine that with a disconnected voice on the phone, at once authoritative and tentative, who is the father, living, apparently cheerfully, someplace without the mother. Then add a daughter who spends her Saturday hovering outside a bedroom door in an apartment eight floors above the city, listening to the mother weep. What was the end product? Mara had no immediate hypothesis. She had to take it step by step. Materials, procedures, observations. And then conclusion. Mara was good in science, very good, though her grades had recently begun to drop. For the moment, Mara was balancing homework with Mom-alert.

  If Vic still lived at home instead of in her own place downtown, or if she even had more time between dance rehearsals, maybe Mara wouldn’t feel so responsible, so involved in her mother’s tears. There’d be two daughters to share in this. And of course, if her dad still lived here, Mara wouldn’t be responsible at all. The weeping had begun about six weeks ago and her dad had left a month ago and at that point the weeping had gotten worse. Her father and Vic had to know what was happening with Mara’s mother. But everyone in her family always called Mara “the little angel,” so maybe they thought she spread her wings and floated to some serene place while her mother cried. Maybe they thought Mara didn’t need help.

  Since it was all up to her, Mara had been working to fine-tune her aural senses. That way she could better hear the sounds that had become primary in her life: doors opening and closing, and her mother’s muted tears. Mara’s method: she filled the bathtub just enough to cover her ears and then lay down. Listening through water made the unnecessary sounds go away—the cars passing on the street below, or an airplane overhead. Miraculously, it also magnified the small, necessary ones, the internal sounds. All she had to do was pay attention, and she could make out the hisses of the old couple next door arguing in Russian. She could hear the rumble of the subway that ran directly beneath their building and even, she believed, the voices of commuters talking. She could hear the walls breathe. She would lie there until her skin grew dimpled from moisture and the water began to cool and goose bumps rose on her body. Later she could hear from the other end of the apartment when her mother finally cracked open her bedroom door and quietly emerged, almost shamefacedly, as if she were tiptoeing in after curfew. Then Mara could run to join her for as long as she stayed outside the cave of her bedroom, as long as she could hold the tears at bay. Even when the door remained closed and Mara had to press herself against it for comfort, the listening exercise paid off. Sometimes, it was true, Mara couldn’t hear anything except sirens and traffic helicopters. But in general, the undertone of weeping appeared to grow louder and clearer as Mara’s hearing sharpened.

  Today Mara’s mother had been shuttered in he
r room for the past four hours. With luck, she would come out of the bedroom, blinking as if she’d emerged from darkness, and say, “How about some scrambled eggs?” though it was way past breakfast time. Or she’d ask some question about school, though it was Sunday. Or she’d squeeze Mara’s shoulders and suggest an activity, though they wouldn’t end up actually doing it. She would smile and be cheerful, especially if the phone rang, and Mara would be grateful, but she would not be fooled. It would be a case of barely hanging on, like when Mara had to do chin-ups during gym, and before long her mother would scuttle back into the bedroom and the door would close.

  She’d once overheard her dad’s racquetball partner say kids knew everything. The partner—a tall, mostly bald psychologist—often made silly pronouncements, but in this case she knew he was right. At least, partially right. Kids knew everything about their families—maybe because their families were everything for a while, the entire world squeezed into a few people and a small space. Kids had nothing else to pay attention to, so they soaked it all up. But one point the psychologist failed to make: knowing something was a long way from understanding it.

  This latest weepisode, as Mara privately called them, had been touched off by a morning phone call from Mara’s father that had come as her mother was in the kitchen, putting on water to boil. Her mother gaily answered the phone and then slipped into the bedroom, pulling the door behind her slowly so it closed with a quiet but definite click, and her voice grew too low to catch, and Mara turned off the stove and then debated with herself for about two minutes before she went into the bathroom near the kitchen. An old-fashioned black candlestick phone stood on a small hand-painted table, a whimsical decorative item chosen during more cheerful times. It was the best phone, and the best location, for telephone eavesdropping. She lifted it up carefully, as she’d learned from Vic. Noiselessly, midconversation.

  “Down the street, there’s this pool hall. Back Door Billiards.” Mara’s father’s voice nearly trembled with warmth and intimacy. “A restaurant at the corner sells Jamaican patties, hot and spicy.”

  “For God’s sake,” Mara’s mother said, almost under her breath.

  “It’s all so real, Lynne. Everything else in my life had stopped being authentic.”

  “Everything?”

  Mara’s father sighed. “I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m trying to explain.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  “I’m forty-seven,” he said. “I have to look at this.” For a moment, all Mara heard was her mother strangling on her breath, and then her father spoke again. “There’s this saying around here: De higher de monkey climb, de more he expose. I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe I just, I saw too many monkeys climbing too high. It seems pointless now.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mara’s mother said, and Mara could hear in her voice that she was wrestling with an enormous force, still winning for the moment, still calm or calm enough, but not yet the final victor. “Moving from the Upper West Side, five minutes from the office, into a small, dingy flat an hour and twenty minutes away in Brooklyn doesn’t give your life more meaning.”

  “But that’s what I’m trying to say, Lynne. You’re not listening. The work, the apartment, our little neighborhood—for quite some time now, it’s all felt artificial.”

  “Don,” she said, and Mara could hear that she was straining her patience to its limit, “Jamaican patties and Sunday gospels isn’t your reality. It’s not authentic to you.”

  “Why couldn’t it be?”

  “No. Stop.” Mara’s mother’s voice sounded like broken glass, and Mara could almost see her waving her arms. “Oh. God. Just stop.” The line was silent for a beat, and then she spoke again, and it was clear she’d begun to cry. “You think I don’t know this? How stupid do you think I am? This isn’t about goddamn authenticity. This is a lot more cliché even than that. This is about you banging that,” she caught her breath, “that Caribbean author Vic’s age—”

  Mara yanked the phone away from her ear, not sure what her father meant by “authentic” or the monkeys thing but certain that she was finished listening. She quietly replaced the receiver.

  Since then, lingering outside her mother’s door, she’d been thinking about how to change things for her mother—would a kitten help? Should she throw a party? Maybe buy some cupcakes at the bakery on 81st? It all seemed a bit lame. She was wishing a solution would just pop into her head, the way answers sometimes did on multiple-choice tests, when she heard a key in the door. She wondered, for a breath, if it might be her father, fresh from Brooklyn and here to talk things through with her mother. Sometimes, as her father said, her mother didn’t really listen; she seemed so lost in her own thoughts—always had, now that Mara considered it. Maybe a good set of ears from his wife was all her father needed, and he’d returned to claim it.

  But of course it was not her father at the door. Her father would not simply wander back in at this point. There would be no magic wand; this was not a musical. Mara herself was going to have to figure out how to fix it.

  She moved away from her mother’s bedroom door, still shuttered, and headed toward the living room. “Hey, Vic,” she called out, because only one other person had keys to their apartment.

  “Mar-muffin, the angel.” Vic stood smiling in the center of the room, holding a white plastic bag with one hand, her hair pulled away from her face. Vic was so beautiful she glowed, literally, as though her skin were a thin veneer covering pure gold. Mara was smart, really smart; she knew that. She’d been tested, and though her parents didn’t discuss it because they thought it unhealthy to dwell on, she knew the scores had surprised even them. But she also had wiry, brittle hair and a small, sharp nose. She wore glasses. She had bony shoulders that gave her prominent angel wings, contributing to the family nickname. As to which would prove in the end more useful, being smart enough and very beautiful or very smart and not too attractive, she hadn’t yet figured out.

  “I’m so sorry. It’s been insanely busy. Rehearsals—well, you know. I’ve missed you, though, baby. I brought a loaf of whole-grain and some sawbies,” Vic said, using the word Mara used to say when she was a toddler, before she could say “strawberries.”

  “We already have sawbies,” said Mara, flinging one arm behind her toward her parents’—her mother’s—bedroom, with a play on the words she knew her sister would get.

  “Jeez,” Vic said. And then, “Mom?” And in a louder, more authoritative tone, “Mom.”

  After a long moment, the bedroom door pushed open, the hinges squeaking a little in protest, making Mara think of muscles stiff from disuse. Her mother swept in, arms open. She wore jeans and a fresh, long-sleeved white shirt. Her tangled hair, blond with a few scattered strands of silver, fell to just below her shoulders; her face was splotchy and mirror-shiny at once. “Vic!” she said almost manic-gaily, adding, “Mara!” a moment later, as though Mara had just arrived as well. She pulled both daughters into her arms, rocking them for a moment, and then said in a bright tone, “What time is it, girls? Shall we have some breakfast?”

  “Breakfast?” Vic glanced at Mara. “What’d you eat today?”

  Mara didn’t respond. Vic didn’t know how bad it had gotten.

  Vic shook her head. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s wash the berries.”

  Their mom followed them into the kitchen—as if she were the kid, Mara thought—and sat, crossing her arms on top of the table. Vic pulled a brush from her purse and handed it to Mara. “You brush,” she said, gesturing toward their mother’s head. “I’ll do food.”

  Mara took the brush and pulled out some of Vic’s golden auburn hair, twirling it around her finger and setting it carefully on the table. Then she held the brush over her mother’s scalp for a second. Mara was uncoordinated; that was another thing about her. While Vic was a dancer who seemed to control her body as easily as she might lift a cup to her lips, Mara had trouble cutting along a straight line for school
projects. Sometimes she wondered how she and Vic could be sisters. She lowered the brush and began slowly working on her mother’s hair. Her mother allowed it, even leaned her head back a little, her eyes narrowing as she watched Vic at the sink.

  “Have you gotten thinner over the last couple weeks?” their mother asked.

  Vic shrugged. “Same as always, I think,” she said over her shoulder. “Though Alex has been working us.” She bent to a lower cabinet to find a colander.

  “Hmm.” Her mother tapped her fingers on the table. “Are you . . .” she paused, “. . . seeing anyone?”

  Mara stared at Vic, eager to hear how Vic would answer. She liked catching little bits of a world removed, one in which she didn’t yet have to participate. She was also curious because Mara knew something that her mother, caught up in her own drama, had failed to notice. Mara knew—at least she was pretty sure—that Vic liked Jonas. At another time, a pre-Dad-leaving time, this would have been big news. Vic and Jonas had been friends since high school, when he lived four blocks away and they used to share meals at each other’s houses, do homework together. Jonas had even seen Vic with pimple cream on her nose. No big deal.

  About three weeks ago, though, Vic came to visit and brought Jonas with her, and Mara saw that something had changed. When Mara walked into the living room, they were standing near the window, their fingers barely touching, and they were looking at each other in a certain way that startled Mara, then scared her for a second, and then made her feel like giggling—from embarrassment, mainly. But she was glad. Jonas was sweet. Jonas was the only one who seemed to notice Mara—at one point during the visit, he knelt down to Mara and asked, “How’s it going?” and when she shrugged, he squeezed her shoulder and said, “It will get better. Promise.” Mara thought if she had a brother, she wouldn’t mind him being like Jonas.

  Vic waved her right hand in the air dismissively. “Dancing is taking up all my time right now.”