Unless she wasn’t.
“Your parents are divorced?”
That was a question Asa asked, back in the beginning of us, before I told him about the beginnings of me. It was a reasonable assumption, but I shook my head and spat out a laugh so hard that it startled us both.
“No,” I said. “Ma was never married.”
“Okay,” he said. I could still hear the careful tone of his voice. “Does she have a boyfriend or anything?”
“Oh my God no. My mother is not the boyfriend type.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Look at her! She’s just, she’s not, she’s, I mean, come on, can you even . . .”
Even what, Clara? I asked myself now. But I knew the answer already. Had I ever imagined my mother as a person someone would want to hold, to touch, to kiss? Imagined her causing a man to feel his heart open? Feel his blood quicken? Feel himself moving closer to her, his hands in his pockets because he wanted so much to touch her? No and no and no and no.
But someone had.
* * *
“How go the Words, Winter?”
I could hear the uppercase W of Words in Brown’s voice. He did that whenever he was feeling snarky about my line of work. Sometimes he spoiled for a fight, and if he needled me long enough he knew he could get one. Sunshine shot him a warning glance.
“With difficulty,” I said. “And stop uppercasing the word Words, and don’t think I can’t hear that you’re doing it. Also, I don’t need your scorn.”
“Clara. Correction. I have scorn for those who pay you to write their words, not for the words that you provide.”
“Well, today the words I provided included a eulogy for a father despised by all his kids, a retirement toast for a boss despised by all his employees, and a fiftieth-birthday card from a sister to the brother she’s been estranged from for twenty-three years.”
“Ouch.”
Yes, ouch. It had been a tough day in the word business, a Tough Days for $2000 Daily Double bet-it-all kind of tough day, so tough that I had worked outside on the freezing porch so as not to fill the air of the cabin with the sadness and anger inside those assignments, and the shock and bewilderment inside me. Onward, ever onward. The tough assignments kept coming.
“You guys, I found something out,” I said.
They looked at each other in their silent, telepathic way. You guys was what they were saying to each other. She never says “you guys.”
“And what was it that you found out?” Brown said.
“That there was someone in her life. My mother was in love with someone.”
“No way!” He spluttered out one of those surprise-laughs. “Not The Fearsome.”
“Yes way.”
“What makes you think so?”
“That photo.”
“Whoa! You found a photo? Like, a you know what I mean kind of photo?”
“Stop it. No. That photo, The Mystery, the one you’ve already seen. The one with her wearing that white shirt. It’s the look on her face. She was in love.”
They were both instantly quiet, in the same way I had gone quiet when I looked at the strip of photo-booth photos of the bartender and me. They knew I was right. They didn’t know how they knew, or how I knew, but we all knew I was right.
“Who would it have been, though?” Brown said after a minute. “Don’t you know everyone in Sterns?”
“I thought I did. But whoever he was, I obviously didn’t know him. And he’s obviously not around anymore.”
“What about Annabelle?” Sunshine said. “Did you ask her?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“She clammed up and wouldn’t look me in the eye. Which just confirms it.”
“The Secret Lives of the Sternsians,” Brown intoned, in a PBS-announcer sort of voice. “We’d tell you about them if we could, but they’re secret.”
“Shut up, Brown,” Sunshine said. “Not funny.”
Brown shut up. Not funny. I looked down to make sure the wire was holding me tight together. What was happening inside me was that the past was expanding again, horizons pushing out to make room for new information. My mother, with a man. My mother, with someone who wasn’t me and wasn’t Annabelle. Who? For how long? Why were they not together? What had happened?
Sunshine put down the baby hat she was crocheting, a serious move for her, a woman whose hands always needed to be in motion. “Ask your mother, Clara.”
“She doesn’t know who I am half the time anymore.”
“Ask anyway.”
But I shook my head. I had already said too much. It felt as if I had betrayed her: Brown’s splutter of a laugh and Sunshine’s quieted hands and the soft look on my mother’s face in that photo combined to make my heart swell with a feeling I couldn’t at first name because in conjunction with my mother it was so unfamiliar. I waited for the word to come to me, and as I waited, with the two of them looking at me, I pictured my mother as she looked back when I was in high school, in her jeans and her Keds and her un-made-up face and her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail or a braid or a knot. Not so different from the way she was still, down there in the place where she lived now, where she deadheaded the orchids and trod the hallways back and forth and up and down. I waited for the word to name the feeling inside me, and then it came floating up out of the darkness: wonder. Wonder was the feeling inside me, that my mother had been loved and loved back. That there were rooms within rooms within her, rooms filled with white and light and space, rooms I’d never known about.
* * *
If the place where my mother lived now called, I picked up instantly.
I had given the number its own special ring tone: Old Phone. Old Phone was the sound of the telephone we had when I was growing up, that heavy receiver attached to the long curly cord, the telephone that we never referred to as “phone.”
“This is Clara.”
“Hi Clara. This is Sylvia. I know you were here just last night but today’s been a rough day. Your mom’s been crying on and off all morning. She’s agitated. She’s been looking for her daughter. And a cookie.”
Sylvia pronounced the words carefully, as if the words “daughter” and “cookie” might be foreign to me.
“She keeps trying to get out the French doors,” she added. “She won’t step onto the black paint, though. Which is good. I pulled the curtains so she can’t see out, but still.”
She waited. I knew what that wait meant.
“Okay. I’m on my way.”
It was late afternoon and it had been only one day since I had seen my mother, one day since I had not asked her about the photograph that lived now in the back compartment of my wallet. But Sylvia wouldn’t call unless she had tried everything she knew. I locked up the cabin and stepped onto the porch. Winter in the Adirondacks and chilly, the sun already falling.
As my mother tended the orchids in the Green Room, so did Sylvia and I tend my mother. Tamar, past and present, the fragments thereof. It was an hour from Turnip Hill to the place where she lived now.
Sylvia looked up at me from behind the desk and smiled. The sympathetic smile, was how I thought of that particular kind of smile, a smile I would hate from anyone but her.
“You made it.”
She pointed to the Green Room. Much went unspoken, with Sylvia. She was a few-words woman.
“Ma?”
She didn’t hear me. Maybe she didn’t want to. She was pacing back and forth in front of the big picture window, leaning on her walker. An aide at her side, watchful for falls, looked up and nodded at the sight of me, then slipped past out the doorway. My mother’s walker made its aluminum sound on the tiled floor as tears ran down her cheeks. She was crying. My mother was crying.
How many times, as a child, had I seen her cry? Only twice. That night with the Neil Diamond album, and that other time, when she sat at the table reading my paper about Hong Kong.
Maybe there had been times I didn’t know about. Ma
ybe there were times, say Wednesday nights, after she finished being justice of the peace, at our scrubbed kitchen table, after she was done meting out justice to the DWIs, the petty thieves, the property-line trespassers, the tax-valuation arguers, when the circumstances of life overwhelmed her and she put her head down on the tabletop and cried. Maybe there were other times too, after the love, whoever he was, left her, and she was alone. But what did I know?
“Clara,” she said, and again: “Clara.”
“Are you thinking about Clara, Ma?”
She nodded. I stepped toward her and took her hand. She let me.
“Clara,” she whispered.
“Do you miss her?”
“I lost her,” she said.
Then, in a single swift movement, she lifted the walker in both hands and flung it against the wall and began to wail. My heart was off and running then, speeding yet again, a high-speed chase of one beat after another. Too thin, too dehydrated, too stressed. Two out of three at any given time would bring on an episode, and now the episodes just kept coming.
Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump, my insistent heart jackhammered away. I tugged my mother toward me. Sylvia and the aide were there swiftly and silently, but I shook my head at them. No. Let me.
“Shhh, Ma,” I said. “Shhh. Sit down, Ma,” and eventually she did. The green couch in the Green Room, orchids, heavy on their stems, bowed down on the opposite wall. Sitting was better. My heart could hammer away but there would be no fainting.
“My daughter,” Tamar said. Her eyes were bewildered. “I can’t find her.”
Do not question. Follow.
“I’ll help you find her.”
I breathed in deeply and let it out slowly.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” I said. “We’ll check this room, and then we’ll check the hallway, and then we’ll check the dining room, and then we’ll check your bedroom, and then —” She was nodding. I let my voice turn into a chant. A hum. A prayer. This is what we are going to do, Ma. We are going to find that lost girl. I turned my head and Sylvia was in the doorway, still watching. She gave me a good-job-Clara look and then retreated to the desk with the aide.
“I just have to lie down on this couch for a minute, Ma. Is that okay?”
“Your heart?”
Her voice, until that minute a voice unlike hers, was back. Her hand touched the side of my throat, a practiced, instinctive movement. She was checking my pulse. I closed my eyes and focused on breathing in deeply and letting it out slowly until the beat was a normal person’s again.
“Fix,” she said.
“I know. I know, Ma. Pretty soon.”
“She flew away.”
Follow her, Clara. Wherever she goes, follow her. I pictured a winter day, a lost daughter, wind spiraling her up above furious snow into brightness beyond.
“Maybe she did, Ma.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. We can look for her, though. We’ll just keep looking for her.”
Around the Green Room, one lap, two laps, three. A pause by the orchids each time. Then out into the hall, pause by the desk, down one hallway and then the next, past the silent dining room and the lemonade and juice stand. Pause for a Dixie cup of apple juice each. Into Tamar’s room, where her bed was made and the table lamp was turned on and the curtains were drawn and all the books I had brought her were stacked crisscross beneath the window the way I had stacked them yesterday, as if they were logs for the woodstove and we were back in Sterns, readying our firewood for the winter. Tamar tossed the logs and I made orderly stacks. Logs and books—the ritual was the same.
Reckon your losses. Forgive us our trespasses, that we may forgive those who trespass against us. As she hurt you, so you must have hurt her. Apologize. Remember, Clara, that you don’t know the whole story. No one ever knows the whole story.
“I’m sorry, Ma. You must have felt that you couldn’t tell me things.”
“Like what?”
“Important things.”
“Like what?”
She was parroting.
“You loved someone, didn’t you? But you never told me about him.”
“You loved someone?” she said.
Another kind of parroting, another kind of non-answer. Yes, I did love someone, Ma. I loved Asa, and I love Sunshine and Brown, and I am on the verge—no, the verge has been verged—of loving Chris. And you. I love you, Ma.
“I’m sorry I was so hard on you, Ma.”
“Hard on you?”
“Yes, hard on you. Always badgering you about Daphne back when I was a kid, for one thing.”
She was leaning on her walker. We had made it to the doorway of the Green Room, where the television was on, sound muted. She looked up at me and frowned.
“Who’s Daphne?”
Some things, you couldn’t imagine they would ever disappear, like the memory of your own baby. But they did disappear, apparently, to use the Life Care Committee’s favorite word. And the fact that they disappeared made other things that you wanted to do, like show your mother the photograph and ask her about it, impossible. My heart leaped off the tracks again, began again its jolt and shudder in my chest. Twice in the space of one hour? That had never happened before. Tamar was still looking at me with that frown, waiting for me to tell her who Daphne was, but I put my hand to my chest and her eyes followed.
She pushed herself up. That unsteady gait, no aluminum walker for balance, hands stretching toward me. She put her hand over mine, over the beatbeatbeatbeatbeat that made our fingers and palms quiver. Her hand stayed on mine and I lay down on the couch and looked at the ceiling, at the ugly acoustic tile, until my heart caught mid-sprint and again returned to a steady beat.
“There,” she said, as if my heart had gone missing and was now returned. She was right. I sat up.
We stayed there on the couch for a while, my mother and me, her hand resting on my hand. Twenty years ago would have seen me asking her about my father, about my dead twin sister, about my grandparents, and her silent in the face of those questions. Now I was asking again, and again, and again, about all manner of things that I knew now must have felt to her back then the way rain felt when it was near freezing and driving horizontally into your skin. Cold needles pricking all the exposed places. Did my questions still hurt her? Or was she beyond them?
* * *
“It’s an outpatient procedure,” the electrocardiologist said. “What we do is thread catheters up your femoral veins into the heart, then we provoke an episode so as to get the lay of the land and see where exactly the misfire is happening.”
“Episode?” I said. “Provoke?”
His office was in Utica, down the block from the doctor that Tamar and I had met with. It was just the two of us in the examining room, dusk falling over the Mohawk Valley outside the single window.
“Yep,” he said. “In at seven, home by five. It’s the slam dunk of the cardiology world.”
Slam dunk. Just the way the other cardiologist had described it. Was that the way the cardiology textbook described it? He must have seen a look on my face. “What, you’re not an NBA fan?”
My mother’s voice sounded inside my head. Bullshit. Decide you’re going to be your real self and then be your real self.
“Don’t try to make this a small thing,” I said. “Don’t joke about this.”
He was looking down at his desk, shuffling through the forms they had printed out for me, but at that he looked up sharply. The air between us was different. That was what happened when you cut away the banter underbrush to behold the sparkling river.
“This is my heart we’re talking about here,” I said. “My one and only heart. So give it to me straight. Once you see where the misfire is happening, then what?”
“Then we’ll cauterize that spot.”
“Burn my heart?”
“Cauterize it.”
“You’re going to burn my heart. Say it.”
“Ms. Winter, in ord
er to permanently cure your paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia, yes, we will burn your heart in one tiny, precise place.”
He pushed the stack of papers over to me and I signed on the lines he pointed to. “It’s good you’re doing this,” he said. “You’ll get your normal life back again.”
After the appointment was scheduled and the nurse went over all the pre-op notes with me and the receptionist stamped my parking ticket and I kicked the automatic door opener with my boot because I could—I could walk and run and hike and kick things as much as I wanted—I drove to the place where my mother lived now, where once again she was pacing the halls with her walker looking for the little bird who flew away.
“My daughter,” she said. “My daughter.”
“I’m right here, Ma.”
It was still hard not to use the word remember, as in “Remember me? I’m her. I’m your daughter.” But it was no longer impossible. She had been roaming farther afield this past week, Sylvia had told me on the phone, trying to get outside. Now her daughter was here, walking up and down the halls with her, the two of them and the tennis-balled walker, but she was still searching.
“I can’t find her,” she said. “She’s out there”—we were at the doorway of the Green Room and she jutted her chin at the wide black swatch of paint in front of the locked French doors—“but. But.”
“But,” I agreed, because it seemed right to agree. “You know, Ma, maybe she’s right here.”
She shook her head. No. No, she was not right here. We moved on down the hall to the juice station. Dixie cups only. Because of the remembrance—apple juice is good—and because of the forgetting—but I drank a cup of it just five minutes ago.
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