Never Coming Back

by Alison McGhee

  If you say things with authority and calm, if you project a do-not-touch aura around yourself, people listen to you. They back off. You can remain pristine, an island unto yourself. No one will try to take charge of you.

  Not so with the bartender. His hand was on my heart now, right below my breast—two fingers, I could feel them—measuring the pulsing flutter. I opened my eyes to see his narrowed, looking at my chest, which was shaking with the effort of my heart. I closed my eyes again.

  “You’re touching my boob.”

  “I’m touching your heart.”

  “It’s a boob-heart continuum.”

  My breaths were short. I tried to lengthen them out but they stayed quick and shallow.

  “Don’t call 911,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

  But my heart was working as hard as it could, shuddering and jolting with effort. It should have stopped by now, the way it always used to. My heart was a different animal these days. You have to get that fixed. You have to get that fixed. You have to get that fixed. Was it possible to pass out when you were lying down? Stars materialized in the air above me and swirled in patterns like the ones Tamar’s fingers made when she was searching for the right word. Tamar. Tamar trolling the hallways, looking for her daughter.

  “Can you do me a favor? Can you call that last number back for me?”

  I took my fingers off my pulse and pulled the phone out and handed it to him. A tiny sound chimed on the floor. My earring. My hammer earring was down there. “And can you”—but he had already picked it up, and he was putting it in my held-out palm and closing my fingers over it.

  “There you go,” he said, and then, “Hello? I’m calling on behalf of Clara Winter. She’s having car trouble, and ​—”

  —–—–

  —–—–

  “Okay, great. I’m glad. Who knew that seagulls were so calming?”

  He slid the phone back into my pocket. “Crisis averted,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “They started reading to her,” he said. “A book about a seagull named Jonathan, they said.”

  * * *

  Two hours. That was how long it took my heart to stop the crazy.

  Two hours, hours in which all the remaining noise of the bar gradually drained away. In which the front door, with its scraping sound of wood on wood, opened and shut, letting out the last few customers and letting in a blast of cold air each time. In which the sounds of rubber on asphalt and the humming engines of passing cars and trucks faded as they curved away from the curve of the road where the bar was perched. In which Gayle the server came over to check on us, saying, “You guys okay back here?” with genuine concern in her voice, and when the bartender said, “Yeah. Just waiting for her heart to slow down,” she said, “Got it,” as if it were a normal thing to happen in the bar, as if it happened all the time, and then her footsteps retreated across the wooden floor.

  Then came the scrape, scrape, scrape of barstools and chairs being upturned on tables, and the swish, swish, swish of broom on floor, followed by the softer swish of wet mop, and finally the swift jingle of keys being swiped from a hook or from inside a pocketbook. Gayle’s footsteps, the sound of which was now familiar, came closer again.

  “Bye, guys.” And she was gone.

  It was me and the bartender then, waiting on my heart. The overhead hanging lamps, like Gayle’s footsteps, had become familiar, and so had the shadows in the big-beamed ceiling they illuminated. A small constellation of frilled toothpicks clustered in a pool of soft light near an overhang, almost directly above my head. Someone—someones—must have taken straws, stuck the frilled ends inside, tilted their heads back and filled their lungs. Toothpicks, rocketing ceilingward.

  The bartender was whittling, there on the chair next to the bench where I lay flat, heart still hammering. A slender limb, drawn from a bucket of them, lay across his lap and he shaved off slivers. The clean smell of new wood filled the air around us.

  “What’re you making?” I said.

  He turned the limb over, examining it. “Nothing that I know of. Yet anyway.”

  “What kind of wood is that?” Woods of the North for $200, even though I, as the daughter of a woodswoman, already knew the answer.

  “Red pine.”

  Correct. I pointed at the bucket. “And the rest of them?”

  “That one’s scrub oak, that one’s maple, that one’s white birch, that one’s white pine.”

  He barely looked as he rattled them off.

  “Do you have a favorite?”

  “Plywood.” He looked up at me, gauging to see if I was dumb enough to think plywood was a kind of tree.

  “What a coincidence,” I said. “Me too.”

  “Liar. Plywood is no one’s favorite wood.”

  “I beg to differ. Plywood’s what my kitchen table’s made from. Partly, anyhow.”

  I pictured the stacks of books underneath my table, and the books-as-coffee-table, and the books-as-bed in the tiny cabin. The guys at Foley Lumber had sliced a sheet of plywood in half for me and I had lugged it home in the Subaru and muscled it up on top of the books to make the table. One of the bartender’s hands braced the piece of red pine in his lap and the other held his pocketknife as he shaved off paper-thin shims. He was good with his jackknife the way my mother was good with an ax. I watched and I didn’t say anything.

  The bar was quiet around us, and the sound of a single cricket who had made his way inside from the cold drifted through the room. My heart trembled and shook inside me, a rebel, unwilling or unable to stop its frantic beating. I pulled my phone out to look at my favorite photo of Sunshine and Brown, to call up their presence beside me. There they were, their arms spread wide against a backdrop of the Rockies, a cross of snow on the side of a mountain in the distance. Brown’s hair and the scarf Sunshine was wearing to cover her chemo-bald skull blowing wild in the wind. Both of them laughing. I sent them a telepathic message: Hello, my darlings. It’s happening again. Yes, I know I have to get it fixed.

  I held the phone straight up in the air above my head. “Want to see my friends? That’s Sunshine. And that’s Brown.”

  The bartender leaned forward and craned his neck so that he could see. Then he put down his whittling, pulled three chairs together in a row and lay down on them. Me on the cushioned bench, him next to me on hard wooden chairs. Now we could both look up at the phone above our heads without straining.

  “And where was this photo taken?”

  “In Colorado. They hiked up and took the gondola down.”

  I scrolled past to the next. I had a whole album of Sunshine and Brown photos.

  “And where’s this one?”

  “Here. At my place. In the living room slash kitchen slash dining room slash everything room of my house slash one-room cabin.”

  He pointed. “Am I looking at a coffee table slash pile of books?”

  “Nay, sir, you are looking at a books-as-coffee-table. That photo was taken months ago, though. The books-as-coffee-table has mostly disappeared now.”

  He took the phone and brought it close to his face, enlarging the photo to study the disappearing table. Then he swiped to the next photo.

  “Who’s this?” he said. “She’s pretty.”

  It was the mystery photo of Tamar, propped up next to Jack on the little kitchen shelf. Why I had taken it—a photo of a photo of a mystery—I did not know. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t look at it every night when I got home. But here she was, with me in my phone.

  “That’s my mother.”

  “I figured. There’s a resemblance.”

  Was there? I took a long breath and beat, my heart was back to normal. I counted to thirty-two, randomly and because it was my age, then sat up. Blood spun away south, down through my body.

  “Back to normal?” the bartender said, and I nodded.

  The bar was dark except for the lights in the back, where we had been waiting so long. It was past midnight. The bartender p
ut his arm around me outside, by my car. He smelled like soap and leather and lime and denim and wood shavings. Then we went our separate ways, whittled-down piece of red pine in his hand, tiny silver earring in mine.

  * * *

  Asa died when I was living on the Florida Panhandle, during a stretch of time right after I quit being a small-town reporter. If you went to college and majored in piano but didn’t intend to make your life about music, and if you had always loved words, it would be logical to accept a job as a reporter, wouldn’t it?

  Wrong. The job of reporting, like most jobs that used words, was about not the love of words themselves but the usefulness of words. The everydayness of words. Ways to convey information via the alphabet. When I chose reporting, I didn’t know yet that it had nothing to do with loving words. It took me a long time to figure that out.

  Thursday nights back then were when I used to call my mother. Thursdays with Tamar, a routine that began when I was living in Lake Placid and working for the Adirondack Times and continued on to the Panhandle years. She would pick up on the third ring, the way I watched her do all my life. Ring, ring, ring, then snatch it up halfway through. Even if she was standing right next to it when it rang, even though it was a Thursday night at eight o’clock and it could be no one but me, she would wait until it had rung exactly two and a half times.

  “Tamar Winter speaking. How may I direct your call?”

  “Ma. It’s me.”

  “You’re looking for Ma? One moment, please. MAAAAAAA!”

  Right in my ear. Full-blast.

  “Jesus, Ma! Stop it.”

  “Certainly, caller. Ma will be right with you.” Pause. Then, in her normal voice, “Hello? Clara?”

  “Can you please stop doing that.”

  “Doing what?”

  “MA.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. How was your week?”

  “It was okay,” I would say, already tired of the phone call. Of the ritual. Of the way it never changed. “My week was okay.”

  “Anything interesting happen?”

  Her use of that word used to infuriate me. “Everything’s interesting, Ma, if you look at it the right way.”

  Sometimes now I thought back on those calls. Listen to yourself, Clara. Listen to how you used to talk to your mother. You knew so much more than she did, didn’t you? You were so much more sophisticated, so much more world-weary, so much more advanced.

  Had I been a child and still living with her, my mother would never have put up with the way I spoke to her in those phone calls. And I would never have spoken to her that way. That changed when I was seventeen, though, after Asa and I broke up. Words and scorn and distance became my weapons, and did I use them? I did. The young boxer danced around her middle-aged opponent, throwing words and phrases with precision. Lightning blows rained down upon the older woman and she retreated, thin and silent, to her corner.

  * * *

  The Life Care people and the AD and eFAD forum people were united in their advice on nearly all fronts. If you decided to get the genetic testing done, you had to confer with a genetic counselor pre-test. If you were the primary caregiver for someone with eFAD or AD, you had to take care of yourself as well as your loved one. It was called “self-care” and it was critical to the stability and health of all parties.

  And they were right about everything, I supposed, the way that Sylvia was right when she warned me not to use the word remember. None of the advice went far enough, though. The word remember was a two-edged sword. There were things I wished I didn’t remember. Like the way I felt when I saw that look in my mother’s eyes, the night I machine-gunned those words at her in the darkness and she turned the lamp on. Like the feeling in me when Eli Chamberlain guided his son into his truck the day we broke up and then drove him away from me. Like the way my mother had spoken to me one winter break when I was home from college and she came upon me looking through Asa’s high school yearbook, turning by heart to all the pages where there was a photo of him.

  “Clara, it’s over.”

  We were sitting at the kitchen table. She must have seen a look on my face.

  “But ​—”

  “No buts,” she said, and something in her voice made me shut up. “It’s been over for years now. Once a decision is made, you can move only forward. That’s what Asa did. You should too.”

  She was done. She was a say-it-once sort of person. And she was right, which was something I now knew. But I began moving sideways instead, and I kept moving sideways for a long time. From New Hampshire to Boston to Florida, I moved sideways. If I started living in a different country the fall that Asa Chamberlain and I broke up, then I started living in a different universe the day that Tamar called to tell me he was dead. I could still hear her voice, the way she said my name when she called. I had quit reporting and was living in that house on stilts, working on what would become The Old Man and teaching GED classes to prisoners—you would not believe how many prisons there were on the Florida Panhandle—and eating a lot of shrimp.

  I was sitting on a folding chair watching a pot of shrimp when the phone rang. You had to remove them from the boiling water as soon as they turned pink. Otherwise they were tough and flavorless. I didn’t want to answer the phone at all but it kept ringing. What’s the goddamn urgency? I thought, but then something in me shifted, something told me to pick up, and I did.

  “Clara.”

  “Ma?”

  “Clara, Asa died this morning. He died in an explosion in Afghanistan. He was in a Humvee and it blew up.”

  The shrimp, the folding chair, the ringing phone, my mother’s voice. All the hours after it, the days, the fact that Tamar arrived the next evening, having driven all night and all the next day too, to get to me, to haul me back north with her to Sterns, to watch over me until I could talk again, until I could breathe, I didn’t remember.

  He died. I kept coming back to that, even now. Asa was in my heart and my body. I still woke from dreams in which he was walking toward me down a road made of sand, shifting sand, with his hands held out toward me, smiling.

  * * *

  You have to get that fixed.

  But what if something happens to me?

  Every time someone told me I should get my heart fixed—Sunshine, Brown, the cardiologist, my mother—that thought stole into my head. What if something happened to me? Who would take care of my mother? Who would visit her, go to the Life Care meetings, discuss her medication, follow her wheresoever she goeth?

  Her index finger brushed my forearm, tracing the beginning of the inked wire.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “A tattoo.”

  She had seen it before, many times, unlike most people. My ink was a slender line that started high on one inner forearm, wound around my upper arm and then across my shoulder blades and down the other arm, ending just below the elbow. Invisible most of the time. But the thermostat was always set high in the place where she lived now, and I had pushed my sweater up above my elbows.

  My mother turned my arm this way and that, her hand steady, examining again what she could see of the inked wire, and a night when I was four years old came washing over me. She had woken me up to bring me downstairs onto the cold porch because the aurora borealis was pulsing in the night sky. Look, Clara. It’s the northern lights. I was so tired. I leaned against a porch post. She held my hand to keep me upright.

  “Why?” she said now, her head tilted, studying the thin line of wire.

  “It holds me together,” I said. “If I go like this”—and I pushed my sleeves up and twined my arms around each other—“then I can’t come apart.”

  She nodded, as if she understood. Did she, somehow? Brown’s voice came into my head: Ask her.

  “Did you have anything like this, Ma? Anything to hold you together?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it?”

  “Work. Wood. Len.”

  She said “Len”
conversationally, as if he were someone she knew well, a husband or boyfriend or dog or cat—Len, who kept her steady. There had been no Lens in her life though, none that I knew. She was gone again. Gone into a parallel world where someone named Len was holding her hand on a freezing porch, pointing at the heavens alive with color. Sadness washed through me. Follow your mother wheresoever she goeth, Clara. Meet her where she is, not where you want her to be.

  “What do you most like about Len, Ma?” Careful phrasing. No remembers, no corrections.

  “His music,” she snapped. “You know that.”

  We were sitting on the edge of her bed. She picked up her pillow and placed it on my lap with a firm push. A dunce cushion for a dunce. Which I was, because by Len, she must have meant Leonard Cohen. The man whose music she had loved as long as I could remember. Len, her good friend the musician. Len, her old buddy the singer-songwriter. Len, the baffled king composer. She was with me, my mother, right then and there. Ask her, came Brown’s voice again. There is no time, came Sunshine’s voice. What could I ask her about? I cast my eyes about the room. A copy of The Old Man was splayed open on her nightstand.

  “Are you reading that book, Ma?”

  It was a used library copy that had not come from me. Who had given it to her?

  “Sylvia reads it to me.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Like what?”

  “The book.”

  “It’s strange. It’s a strange book.” She frowned. “The girl, she”—she searched for the word then suddenly curved her body forward with her arms over her head, as if she were about to dive into a deep lake, and the motion somehow panicked me, as if we were standing on the actual edge of an actual cliff—“jumps.”

  “Maybe she likes to jump.”

  “No! No! Not jump!”

  Distract. Redirect.

  “Who gave you that book, Ma?”

  She leaned back and regarded me, as if I were a stranger, as if we hadn’t just been talking.