Never Coming Back

by Alison McGhee

  My mother might think that she was alone. But she would be wrong. I would be with her, watching over her, in that house made of words.

  * * *

  It was a morning of sun so anemic that I kept glancing at the sky through the window, thinking it was about to storm, but no. Just early winter in upstate New York. My mother and I were sitting on the Green Room couch, me massaging her hands, one finger joint at a time. This had been a recent discovery and so far it was working. Every time she was bewildered or agitated or asking the same question over and over again, that brain-fog look of confusion on her face, I would take her hand in mine and say, “Let’s sit down, Ma. Let me work the knots out.” And she would sit down and I would begin, one finger joint at a time, softly and gently, in hopes of avoiding pain for her. At this stage, we could not tell if something was hurting, and she herself didn’t always know.

  Or that was the way it seemed. How strange not to know if you were hurting, not to know if something was pressing on a nerve or a swollen joint or a bruise. But once, months before, something didn’t feel quite right and I looked down to see my fingers kneading a purple-green bruise on her forearm. “Oh, Ma,” I said, “I’m so sorry. That must hurt like hell. How’d you get that bruise?” But she just looked down at it in mild interest, as if her arm and its bruise belonged to a stranger.

  And the cold. She was always cold, or so it seemed, a condition that had persisted for months now, despite the layers and layers of clothes she would keep putting on even after an aide or Sylvia or I persuaded them off. Multiple socks. Her winter coat. A radish hat made for her by Sunshine. I had come upon my mother huddled on her bed under three blankets, propped on all sides by pillows. “Ma? It’s eighty-six degrees in here, according to the thermostat. Aren’t you hot?” Face pink and hair damp with sweat, she would shake her head no and pull the blankets closer. It seemed impossible that she could be cold, but then who was I to say what was possible and impossible for my mother? Who was I to decide for her? Her world, which might be part of this world but also might not, might be a world filled with chill.

  “Ma, I’m going to run to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”

  Down the hall I went, to the bathroom that I thought of as my bathroom, as our bathroom, with “our” being everyone who walked through the doors of this place to visit someone who lived here and then walked on out again to go elsewhere, an else not here, a place called home. This bathroom had handicap rails but was used only by visitors, those like me who strode in and locked the door and did our business and flushed the toilet and washed our hands and glanced in the mirror and strode back down the hall to our parent or grandparent or sister or brother or aunt or uncle or wife or husband. It took me three minutes total.

  But when I turned the hall corner, there was Sylvia, standing next to the Green Room doorframe, her hand half covering her mouth.

  “Sylvia?”

  Panic in my voice, soft, controlled panic because it behooved no one to panic at full volume in the place where my mother lived now. She didn’t turn her head, but her other hand reached toward me, fingers spread in a warning that meant Shhh, that meant No need to panic. So I slowed and approached the way a pioneer girl might have done if she were trying to walk like an Indian guide in the woods, if she were trying to leave no trace of her presence, nothing to give herself away. I stood opposite Sylvia and pressed myself against the wall, angling my head to see what she was looking at, which was my mother, my small, thin mother, with Eli Chamberlain’s arms around her. He was rocking her back and forth, there on the green couch in the Green Room, with his face pressed against her dark hair and his eyes closed.

  There are times in life when you come across something—a piece of music or a passage from a book or words spoken by a person you love—and something in you responds in an instant, physical way. Your throat swells almost shut, tears spring out of your eyes, your heart draws in on itself in a way that somehow makes it feel bigger. Or broken. Maybe they’re the same thing.

  The both of us stood, Sylvia and I, one on either side of the doorway to the Green Room, watching someone who was not me and who loved my mother in a way that was nothing like the way I loved her now or ever, gather her in and hold her close.

  And she let him.

  * * *

  The ship was in Trebek’s capable hands and we let him guide it through the calm harbor of the first round. Brown and Sunshine were on one side of Tamar, Chris on the other, and me? On the floor, propped against Chris’s legs. Their voices floated in looping, lazy curves in the air just above my head. Winter this and Winter that, Sunshine and Brown telling Chris more stories of back in college, how they used to come drag me out of the piano practice room and haul me downtown for beer and pool.

  “How many times you think we’ve taught Winter to play pool, Brown?”

  “Probably as many as we’ve made her drink beer.”

  Tamar stayed quiet. Where was she now, I wondered, and what was she thinking about? Was she thinking at all? The day would come when she stopped talking entirely. They had told me that at the Life Care meeting. Please say something, Ma.

  “There,” she said, and I felt her move above and behind me. A small movement, a disturbance of the air. Maybe she was pointing at the porthole? Knothole had turned into porthole and we were following her lead.

  “There what, Tamar?” Brown said.

  “There.”

  There on the porthole, the sound on mute, Trebek was standing next to the three contestants at their podiums. Time for the contestant interviews. The heinous interviews. Come, first contestant, lean forward and do your best.

  Then there was movement above and in back of me again. A hand descended on my head, a light touch, like the touch of a baby trying to understand hair. Sunshine and Brown and Chris stopped talking, all of them, at once. It was as if they had received a signal from the universe: Be quiet. Then I understood that the hand on my hair, whispering through it strand by strand, was my mother’s.

  There might have been nights, when I was a baby, that my mother placed her hand on my head. Maybe there were dark nights, nights when I couldn’t stop crying, nights when maybe she couldn’t stop crying either, and she sat with me in the darkness and held me and put her hand on my head and cradled me and rocked me. Maybe she sang to me. She must have sung to me, because my whole life was filled with memories of my mother singing. When she was gone from this earth, her voice would still be with me. Nothing went entirely away. Some part always stayed. Like the silent, unseen electricity running its way up and down the walls of the cabin. The shadow world: indivisible from this outer one in which we moved, and drove, and talked and laughed and held hands.

  Was my mother scared, when I was little? Did she feel alone? Did she feel as if she were on a path leading somewhere she could not predict, somewhere she would have to go whether she wanted to or not? Was the child in her arms a comfort? Or was I a burden, a responsibility that she had no choice but to take on?

  Both. That was the word that came to me, there in the porthole room. You were both a comfort and a burden.

  On the muted porthole, Trebek was chatting with the three contestants. Their faces smiled and nodded, and so did his. Had I ever really looked at Trebek? Was this what he really looked like, an ordinary person having ordinary conversations with other ordinary people who happened to be good at trivia? Maybe this was who Trebek was, an ordinary, friendly man, and I just hadn’t noticed. It was impossible to know the whole story.

  Was I still a comfort to my mother? Was I still a burden? Her fingers whispered through my hair, following strand after strand, beginning at the root and moving down and down and down through the length of it, until the length of it ended and her fingers journeyed back up to the top of my head and began again.

  “What do you think they’re talking about up there?” Brown said.

  “Game theory,” Sunshine said. “Betting strategy.”

  Tamar was quiet, but her fingers kept movin
g. My head felt alive with her touch. Chris was quiet too, his knees solid behind my shoulder blades. Maybe the contestants were talking game theory and betting strategy. Maybe they were talking about the luck of certain shirts, the right tie. Maybe they were talking about their families. Did I know anything about Trebek’s family? No. All these years, I had taken him and his show for granted.

  Tamar’s fingers danced the slowest dance in the world, arranging the strands of my hair in a way that must have made sense to her, because she kept on. She persevered. Then Chris’s hands were on my shoulders, and my mother’s fingers were light and soft in my hair, and my best friends were talking about what exactly was game theory, anyway.

  If time could be frozen, that was where I would freeze it. That moment, in that room, with these people, this couch, this floor, that television. Chris’s hands on my shoulders, my mother’s fingers in my hair. Portal to another world.

  The orchids in the corner hung heavily on their long stems, and the porthole kept up its soundless flickering. The third contestant tipped his head back and laughed a silent laugh while Trebek smiled.

  * * *

  When the call came I knew what it was about before Sylvia had a chance to say hello.

  “She fell, didn’t she,” I said, and “Yes,” Sylvia said, and then I told her I was on my way and I clicked off and then called Chris and Sunshine and Brown. I called Eli too, and left him a message. It was late in the evening and I waited on the porch with the quilt wrapped around me over my coat until headlights came flickering through the darkness and wound their way up the hill. Chris got out and opened the door for me, and Brown drove and Sunshine sat next to him.

  She had fallen while trying to cross the black abyss. She was trying to get outside, through the glass door into the bare, pre-snow stalks of the back garden, invisible at night. She was trying to get to her daughter, lost out there somewhere.

  I pictured the swatch of black paint in front of the locked sliding doors. The aide might have been asleep on the couch, or taking a bathroom break, or watering the orchids, or adjusting the volume on the porthole. The alarm had sounded and Sylvia had gotten there within seconds but not soon enough. My mother had left behind her walker, jumped the black hole and fallen into the abyss.

  I undid my seat belt and slid across the big back seat to Chris, who wrapped his arms around me the way Eli Chamberlain had done the day I went to tell him how sorry I was. The headlights pierced the darkness of Route 28. Soon we would be at the junction of 12. It was a bad fall, Sylvia had said, and the tone of her voice filled in the meaning of bad. Soon we would be on the outskirts of Utica, at St. Luke’s, where they had taken my mother. She was going down a road and I could not follow her.

  I thought about the bartender, how he had pushed those chairs together and lain down next to me the night my heart wouldn’t stop hammering in my chest. How, when it finally calmed, he had taken my hand in both of his and held it all the way to the car. I thought about my mother’s fingers, how in these last months they had described curves and shapes in the air. Her fingers had traveled ahead of her to the land of words and phrases, the place where all her lost words and phrases lived now. They waited there for her.

  I thought about Blue Mountain and pictured him asleep somewhere in a house in the high peaks. I pictured him waking in the darkness of that house, maybe from a bad dream. Or maybe from a good dream. I conjured up a nightlight in a corner of his room, a nightlight shaped like a star. I conjured up glow-in-the-dark stars glued to the ceiling of his room. I pictured him counting stars, counting himself back into the land of sleep.

  I thought about Asa, the day things broke between us. I thought about Eli, how he had laced his arms around his boy and guided him into the truck and driven him away. I thought of before that day, how Asa used to put his arm around me and hold my far hand and, if he thought I was cold, sneak it into the pocket of his jacket. How he alternated first one arm and one hand and then the other arm and the other hand, so that neither of my hands had a chance to get too cold. I thought about the baby I might have had with him, how he might have waved his hands in the air when he cried, searching for comfort. For someone to help him. Someone to feed him, change him, soothe him, rock him. Someone to take the hurt away.

  If ever I made it to the contestant interview, maybe I would tell Trebek about the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains and the White Mountains, how even though they were low and old mountains, they were my favorites. Maybe we would talk about books, and the people who lived inside them. Maybe I would ask him which books he loved as a child.

  Whatever questions came my way from now on, and however I chose to answer them, I would hold a night in my heart. I was four years old and my mother was a girl of twenty-two. She woke me in the middle of the night and took my hand and guided me downstairs and out onto the porch.

  “Look up, Clara,” she said, and I looked up.

  Red and yellow and green and blue, soundless and unearthly.

  “It’s the northern lights,” she said. “The aurora borealis.”

  The dark night sky had glimmered and pulsed with light. I hung on to my mother’s hand.

  Now the four of us, in Chris’s big white car, rounded the final curve of Route 12. The valley spread out before us, shimmering with city lights like a sky fallen to earth. It came to me that my mother had staked her life not on travel, or adventure, or school, or work, or a man to love, but on me. I was the great gamble of my mother’s life, and she had not held back. She had bet it all.

  Acknowledgments

  No book writes itself, and I have many to thank in the writing of this one. Julie Schumacher, whose typically brilliant take on an early draft propelled the book forward, and whose encouragement was, and is always, solace. Nevin Safyurtlu Marino, for so generously sharing her experience; the lovely Margaret Miller, for advice on details of nursing home life; and Rebeccah Berry, Jeremy Moberg and Aria Dominguez, for their kindness. Kathi Appelt, dear friend and fellow writer, whose early enthusiasm and feedback were invaluable. The Alzheimer’s Foundation and related forums on which caregivers write with such honesty and love in the face of great challenges. Several artists known to me only through their haunting and beautiful work, which accompanied me throughout the writing like lamps in the darkness: photographer Todd Hido, painter McArthur Binion, and poet William Stafford, in particular his poem “Remembering Brother Bob.” My inimitable parents and their continuing examples of hard work and good cheer. My beloved agent, Doug Stewart, and his enthusiasm, smarts, Manhattans and all-around awesomeness. My wonderful, funny and keen-eyed editor Helen Atsma, whose insights were so perspicacious and wise that I sat right down and began revising. My copy editor, Amy Edelman, whose brain works in such mysterious and marvelous ways. My three great joys of children, who crack me up and also inspire me with their courage and determination to make the world a better place. And finally, Mark Garry, a.k.a. The Painter, who has lived with this book and others for years, and whose endless reserves of patience, artistic insight and listening ability are matched only by his humor, steadiness and love.

  About the Author

  Alison McGhee writes for all ages in all forms, from novels to poems to books for children. Her best-selling novel Shadow Baby was a Today Show Book Club pick, and her picture book for adults, Someday, was a number-one New York Times bestseller. Her work has won many awards and been translated into more than twenty languages. She has three grown children and lives a semi-nomadic life in Minneapolis, Vermont and California.

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