“So?” I said. “Is that the way it went down?”
“Well,” she said, “you know your mother.”
“Is that a yes?”
“It’s the way she told me it happened, yes.”
“Why did she break up with him?”
“Because in the wake of what Asa had done she could not see any way to stay with Eli,” Annabelle said. “‘I can’t hurt my daughter. I can’t hurt her more.’ Exact quote.”
But the way she said it, the words she could not see any way to stay with Eli translated and retranslated themselves in my mind as She did it for you and then It broke her heart and then It broke his heart too.
“She thought it was the only way she could spare you yet more hurt,” Annabelle said. “You know your mother, Clara.”
“I don’t know if I do.”
“You’re trying. I’ll give you that. Late in the game or not, you’re trying.”
* * *
Why the army? The Chamberlains weren’t a military family and the military had never been part of Asa’s plan. His plan was to drive truck for Byrne Dairy and maybe buy his own big rig someday and be his own boss, be a long-haul trucker. That way he could see all fifty states. Hawaii he would have to fly to, but it was possible to drive to Alaska, if you had the time, and that way you could knock off a vast portion of the west. A big map of the United States hung on his wall, colored pins stuck in all the states he’d been to so far. Only eighteen. Barely over a third.
In a different life this would have been one of those questions I would ask him, in that imaginary future years and years hence, when everything that had gone wrong was long in the past, and we were sitting on a bench somewhere, setting things right between us. He would ask me about college and I would ask him about the army and what it had been like all the years up until his deployment, and from the filling-in of generalities we would narrow down and down and down until there was enough ease between us that we could tell each other that we had truly loved each other, that it had been real, and how sorry we were, sorry how things ended.
But there would be no conversation years hence, because there was no Asa. First enlistment and training and finally deployment and death. The quickness of it still startled me awake sometimes, my heart thudding in the dark, sweat rippling over me in waves.
There was no one to ask now. No one to fill in the blanks. When Asa broke it off with me, I broke it off with Eli, and we had not spoken since.
“Eli tried,” Annabelle said. “He did try.”
“How?”
“Called her. Drove up to Watertown once, when she was up there working on the trucks. Wrote her a letter.”
“Wrote her a letter?”
She frowned. “Yes, he wrote to her. You’re not the only person in the world who can write a letter, Clara. Most people do learn how to write, you know. Usually in first grade.”
Of course they did. Everyone learned how to print and some still learned cursive, and everyone now used a keyboard and a computer and a smartphone and if you were blind you might still learn how to write Braille but knowing how to write and writing a letter to the woman you loved, the woman who broke up with you, were two separate animals. Annabelle was watching me with her eyes narrowed, as if she were daring me to say something else about writing so that she could leap on it and remind me that I was not the only person in the world who could put words to feelings.
“Annabelle.”
She lifted her eyebrows, still waiting, waiting for me to mess up so that she could pounce. It was exhausting. Could she not see that? Could she not see that I was no longer the woman I had been even a few months ago? No longer the girl I had been in high school, oblivious, unable to see my mother as anything but my mother? Could she not see just how hard I was trying?
“I know everyone learns to write,” I said. “But it’s hard to imagine Eli Chamberlain sitting down and writing a letter.”
“Why is it hard?” she said, after a pause. Her voice lacked the Ha, I’ve got you now pounce it had earlier. Maybe she was trying too.
“I guess because in all the time I knew him I never saw him write anything. I never saw him read anything either. He wasn’t a word person, is what I’m trying to say. At least the Eli that I knew.”
“I would say that is accurate.”
“So if he wrote my mother a letter, then he must have —”
“Loved her,” Annabelle finished. “Yes. He did.”
“What did the letter say?”
“I have no idea.”
“She didn’t show it to you? How do you know he wrote it, then?”
“Because I watched him write it.” She pointed at the kitchen table where I was sitting. “He wrote it right there, on a piece of Twin Churches stationery that I gave him.”
New information. My mind erased the image of Eli Chamberlain sitting at his own kitchen table, the table that he and Asa and I had sat around playing cards many a night, and conjured him up here, in Annabelle Lee’s trailer kitchen, full of the scent of baking and cooking, loud with music.
“Why?”
“Why did he write the letter here? Because, Clara. Because you’re right. Writing is hard for most people. For Eli, especially. Dyslexia, whatever”—she swiped the air with her hand, as if she were banishing the word from the world—“and he was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“That she wouldn’t respond. That she wouldn’t write back, wouldn’t call, wouldn’t ever talk to him again.”
“And did she?”
“What do you think?”
She stood by the table, the solid, unmoving bulk of her. Annabelle Lee, a fortress unto herself, a castle surrounded by a moat full of alligators, defender of all things Tamar Winter. For a long time now I had interpreted her simmering anger as anger at me, impatience with me, annoyance with me, but for what? For not being a good enough daughter? For caring too much about words? For leaving Sterns and never coming back? But now she set her hands on the posts of the chair before her and I saw her differently. As my mother was disappearing, so too was Annabelle’s best friend, her one true friend. Keepers of each other’s secrets.
A memory rose up in my mind: my mother and Annabelle, sitting in a booth at the back of Crystal’s Diner, suspending straws full of milkshake above their mouths. Some kind of contest. Both of them laughing so hard that they dropped their straws and spilled milkshake everywhere.
“My mother hardly ever laughed except with you,” I said. Annabelle nodded, even though she couldn’t picture the scene in my head. She was willing to follow me. “She’s a serious person.”
“Yes,” Annabelle said, as if everyone knew that. “So are you. You were a tough kid to raise. The way you were always words, words, words and smart, smart, smart? She didn’t feel like she was a match for you. She didn’t know how to help you. She said that to me once. ‘My daughter is beyond me,’ is what she said.”
A lump swelled up in my throat. My mother, not a match for me? My mother, not knowing how to help me? I tried to picture a Buddha in my mind, one of those potbellied laughing ones that people like to put in their gardens. Calm, Clara.
“She sent you away for your sake,” Annabelle said. “Do you know that now? ‘There’s too much hurt here for her, Annabelle. It’s a big world out there.’ She figured you were stronger than you knew at the time. And she was right, wasn’t she?”
“She was. Which doesn’t make it easier. Then or now.”
“That’s the way of the world, I guess,” Annabelle said. The exclamation marks were gone from her voice.
“Annabelle?”
“What?”
“Can you —” But what? What could she do? “Can you tell me something I don’t know about my mother?”
“Like what? That she loves Leonard Cohen?” she said, and rolled her eyes because Tamar’s love of Leonard Cohen was something we both knew.
Had I ever seen her groan and roll her eyes like that, the way a teenager would, t
he way I used to do? Annabelle Lee was once a teenager too, Clara, I reminded myself. Of course she had been a teenager, and of course so had my mother been. But most of your life you knew that only in a factual way. You didn’t feel it. Until you saw your mother’s childhood friend roll her eyes at your mother’s Leonard Cohen worship and suddenly she was young again, and so was your mother, if only in your mind. Memory, reconfiguring itself.
“She was addicted to that man,” Annabelle said. “Neil Diamond and Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell too. But Leonard Cohen? She used to refer to him as her future husband.”
“She did not!”
“She did! She used to call him Len! Len, can you imagine?”
Yes. Yes, I could imagine. I shook my head.
“It’s so unfair,” I said. “She never had a chance! She never got to do anything she wanted to do!”
My voice was full of exclamation marks again, chasing one another around the table, angry points of black. But Annabelle shook her head at me again and half laughed in an Oh, you poor dumb girl kind of way. Then she opened a drawer next to the stove and pulled out an envelope.
“This is for you,” she said. “Your mother left it with me, said to give it to you when the time was right.”
Clara. My name on the manila envelope in my mother’s angular, elegant scrawl. Inside was a bank statement to a savings account in my name, with a single cash deposit made a year earlier. A huge amount, many tens of thousands of dollars. Sterns National Bank, Clara Winter, for deposit only.
“The house,” Annabelle said, when it was clear that I didn’t understand.
“What do you mean, the house?”
“You know how the Amish are. It’s cash only, with them. Where’d you think that money went?”
“To the nursing home.”
Annabelle snorted. “She got a long-term-care policy for that. Years ago. I told her she was nuts—those things are way too expensive. But she got it anyway. ‘I don’t want Clara to have to worry about money,’ she said. ‘Ever.’”
I looked at the bank statement, at my mother’s signature and back at Annabelle.
“Am I an idiot?” I said. “My whole life, did I misread my mother?”
“Idiot? You?” Annabelle said. “Maybe in terms of financial forensics, but you were the state spelling bee champ, for God’s sake! No one in the whole goddamn valley would call you an idiot. You’re the farthest thing from an idiot, Clara Winter.”
She strained upward to the high cupboard above the stove and pulled down a dusty bottle of Jim Beam, uncapped it and poured us each a shot. Jim, not Jack. Cut from the same cloth, though.
“You’re a daughter,” Annabelle said, the teenager gone from her voice and eyes now. “That’s what you are.”
* * *
The key to surviving the heinous interview, if and when I ever made it to Los Angeles and onto the show in real life, would be advance preparation. Survival lay in the clues that you gave the producers beforehand. You had to give them only tiny tidbits of your life, impartable information that you didn’t mind others knowing. Fragments chosen with care.
What would I not mind anyone knowing? That I was afraid of doing a headstand. That I was good at French-braiding hair. That I was a piano major in college.
TREBEK: So, Clara, rumor has it that you were a piano major in college?
ME: That’s true, Alex.
TREBEK: And something of an obsessive piano practicer?
ME: That’s true too.
TREBEK: But you never played the piano for your friends?
ME: Nope.
TREBEK: And you no longer own or play a piano?
ME: True and true.
TREBEK: Is that so! Well.
At that point, I would have survived the contestant interview portion of the show, having given away nothing of value, nothing of importance. The viewing public would have no clue that all those years of practicing the piano had ingrained it into me, so that there was a permanent piano in my heart and in my brain, and that sometimes when I woke up at night I closed my eyes and placed my fingers on the invisible keys and played and played and played, until the dark went away and I played myself back into sleep.
My mind and my heart would still be my own. No one watching me during the contestant interview would know how it hurt to drive by the house I grew up in, way out there in the foothills, the house my mother and I didn’t live in anymore, but that I kept doing it anyway. They wouldn’t know that sometimes I drove by Annabelle Lee’s trailer too and sent my thoughts to her through the invisible air, thoughts of how sorry I was that this was happening to her too, how hard I knew it was for her as well as for me.
No one would know how my mother’s brain—that sharp, sharp brain of hers—clicked on and off now. Like a half-broken light switch that you kept flipping even though most of the time it didn’t work anymore.
I had come across my mother talking to a wall. Not a metaphorical wall either. A real wall, made of plasterboard, painted light green, a key strung on twine hanging from it on a hook. The key might be metaphorical—a key to a locked room? A song? Someone’s heart?—but it was also real. It hung in my mother’s room. Sometimes when I came to visit her now, I knocked, then turned the knob so softly that she didn’t hear it. And there she was, talking to a lockless key as if it were her oldest friend. Once I found her singing to that key, a single line from her man Len, three words repeated over and over. So long, Marianne, so long, Marianne, so long, Marianne.
No one would know that on nights like that, playing my way back to sleep on the invisible piano sometimes took hours, from Hanon scales to Chopin to Shostakovich to Bach to the Beatles to Christmas carols. I played as loud as I wanted because who was there to hear what was happening inside my brain? The last song I played now was not the Chopin prelude. It was the one about the baffled king composing hallelujah, my mother’s favorite song.
* * *
“Ma?”
She looked up from the walker. We were doing the circuit, the circuit of hallway and juice and Green Room and hallway and juice and Green Room, and around and around and around she went, where she stopped, nobody knew, except that she didn’t stop. She only went.
“I’m sorry about Eli,” I said. The expression on her face didn’t change. I said his name again: “Eli.” She pushed forward, heading toward the Green Room.
“Ma?”
On she went. Talk to her, Clara. Tell her how you feel. Things that you want to say to her, say now.
“Not sorry that it happened, Ma. That’s not what I mean. I’m sorry that it ended.”
And I was. They could have been together, I thought now. Time would have softened the edges, wouldn’t it? Eased the strangeness of it, the new configuration of family and love and friendship. To me, at least, if not Asa.
I looked back on my childhood now and thought, She had to shield herself from you, Clara. Tamar was a woman of stillness, and her child was a blunt instrument who would throw and throw questions at her while she gathered silence around her like a cloak. And now?
The days were going by, each of them a ticking clock, and my mother’s condition was worsening “significantly faster than we had anticipated.” It was the “what we hoped wouldn’t happen, Clara” scenario. She was “probably quite a bit farther along than we thought when she first came in, apparently,” losing physical strength and balance, losing comprehension, gaining agitation and confusion. Was she with me yesterday, when I last saw her? Did she recognize me? Did she remember that I was her daughter, did she remember my name?
Yes, yes and no.
* * *
“She’s going down fast,” I said to Sunshine and Brown. It was like a mantra. A chant. Sometimes now I just showed up at their house. The demon child descendeth.
“It’s a one-way street,” I told them. “She’s at the far end of the spectrum. They alarmed her chair and her walker and her bed. She’s a human alarm now.”
They let me babble. They didn’t argue
. They didn’t point out the clichés and repetition, the unlike-Clara way the words came out. They offered food. Whiskey. Board games. They offered themselves, the constancy of their presence and their friendship, and it wasn’t enough but it almost was.
“The coffee table is gone,” I told them. “All the books are with her now.”
They nodded. They had been to the cabin and they had been to the alarmed room where Tamar lived. They had seen the disappearance of the coffee table, the appearance of the books-as-firewood. Books to keep her warm. Books to burn. Books never to be read again.
“The only one she ever opens is Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” I tell them. “So which is the book I read to her? Jonathan Livingston Seafuckingull. From Jonathan’s mouth to God’s ear. Those are the only words she wants, apparently.”
Words had power. Bossy little Kandace saw Blue Mountain begin to shrink when she made fun of his name, and she kept making fun, so that he would keep shrinking. Sticks and stones might break your bones but words, words would break something inside the marrow of those bones, something that might not ever put itself back together.
The only way to fight the shrinking and the breaking was to fight. Fight with everything you had. However you could, fight. Fight with words, if you had them. Fight with poems. I did.
I have spread my dreams under your feet, I told Blue Mountain when he came back into the quilt room that day. Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams. You might be thinking he laughed. You might be thinking, He’s a dinky little kid, he doesn’t know anything, he has no idea who Yeats is, he has no understanding of what those words mean. You would be wrong. He stood and listened, those dark eyes on me, until his teacher came back to retrieve him. You can change the air of a room with your words. Even if you say them out loud only inside your head, the air around you will turn deeper, softer, stronger. Maybe Blue Mountain would remember, in some part of himself at some later point in his life, at a time when he most needed it, that someone in his childhood spread her dreams underneath his feet and blessed him with words he could no longer remember.
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