The Real Mother

by Judith Michael

  Carrie nodded.

  “Nothing to tell me?”

  She shook her head.

  “I can find out from Mother, you know; it will just take longer and be a lot harder than if you tell me now.”

  “There wasn’t anything,” Carrie said loudly. “I mean, he said something about being a good son and a good brother and wouldn’t Mom be proud of him, and he was smiling, like he was really happy. Except… later he wasn’t, so much.”

  “Wasn’t…?”

  “So happy.”

  “When was that?”

  “Just before he left.”

  “And what happened just before he left?”

  “Nothing, he just changed.”

  “But what was he doing? What was Mother doing?”

  “She was reading my stories, turning the pages, reading a little bit, and she looked in the front and the back for kind of a long time, and then she looked at Mack for kind of a long time, and he looked at her.”

  “That’s all?”

  Carrie shrugged.

  “And then he left?”

  “He said he hadn’t read the magazine ’cause I grabbed it first. And then he said he had to go; he called us friends and neighbors, which was pretty weird. And he left, and I stayed for a while, and… that’s all.”

  “Okay. I’ll be back soon.” Sara kissed her, but she was furious. Damn him, damn him for upsetting everything he touched. How dare he visit their mother? Tess didn’t want to see him; she wasn’t ready to see him; who the hell did he think he was, barging in on her? And what was Carrie worried about? Or afraid of? She acted almost afraid. Damn him, couldn’t he leave them alone? Couldn’t he just leave?

  “Are you all right?” she asked Tess as she walked into her room. “Carrie said Mack had been here; did he upset you?”

  Tess pointed to the clock on the wall.

  “I know it’s dinnertime, but I wanted to see you first. Are you all right?”

  Tess gave her half smile, and Sara sat down, holding her hand. “He upset you.”

  Tess shook her head slightly. She pointed to her pencil and Sara placed it in her fingers. Tess hesitated, then wrote, frst.

  “First. You were upset at first? I don’t blame you; he just showed up, without calling? Well, he does what he wants, doesn’t he? But did he say what he wanted?”

  Her mother wrote, and Sara, watching her, realized Carrie had been right: Tess’s hand was steady, almost firm. Something had happened to give her the strength or the will to control her hand instead of giving in to weakness. And boredom, Sara thought, and frustration, helplessness, so many fears. But now it’s as if she’s more sure of herself, at least sure enough to try.

  Mack, she thought. He was here and she’s fine. She endured. That might be it. Maybe, somehow, she even got the better of him.

  Amazed, she watched Tess write proud.

  “Proud? Of something he’d done? Or he wanted you to be proud. Is that right?” She waited for Tess’s small nod. “So he told you how busy he is, and how successful, and all the things he’s done for Doug and Carrie, and how much they love him. And he smiled and was charming. And if he talked about me it wasn’t flattering.”

  Tess wrote again, d, u, g. She stopped, and then, forcing herself, wrote the whole word. Drugs.

  Sara nodded. “I know.” After smelling marijuana in his room his first day back, she had told Mack not to use drugs in the house, and he had said he would not. It was odd that Tess knew about it, but she could imagine Mack wanting to shock his mother, or prove to her that he could do whatever he wanted, with her out of the way.

  “He’s not a very nice person,” she said, voicing it aloud for the first time. “At least, not all the time. Or maybe I just don’t like him, or trust him, or both. He might be unhappy, inside, and I’m sure I should be nicer to him, but it’s hard, for me at least. Maybe I’m not a nice enough person. Carrie and Doug like him, I think, at least most of the time. I don’t know about Abby. Are you tired?”

  In an instant Tess had changed: she had shrunk into her chair, drifting away, as if the effort of communicating, or thinking about Mack, left her exhausted and uninterested. As if she’s gone back to giving up, Sara thought, angry because if Tess did give up, they would truly lose her. “You have to keep trying,” she said, and let her anger show. “That’s what keeps you alive. If you think I’m going to let you just decide to die, you’re wrong. We can rethink that if things get a lot worse for you, but until then you’re still our mother and we need you. And you need us, and we’ll help you, but you have to keep trying.”

  Tess gazed at her. “We need you,” Sara said again. “We need each other. Isn’t that what a family is all about?” She waited until a slow smile lifted Tess’s lips, and her eyes turned brighter.

  Sara sighed. “Thank you. I love you, we all love you. And you’re getting better; I can see it. Anybody who can take a visit from Mack without confusion is a true survivor. Now get some sleep; I’m going home. I’ll stop by tomorrow, and we’ll all come and take you someplace special for dinner.” She kissed Tess on both cheeks. “I love you.”

  But perhaps I’m really not a nice person, she thought, driving home. I didn’t help Pussy when she asked for it, and I never tried to understand why Donna lied so much, and I get angry at Mack for no obvious reason. Why in the world would I be angry at someone who does lovely things for Doug and Carrie and Abby? Maybe I’m jealous. Maybe I just don’t want anyone interfering with me in bringing them up. Maybe I’m just being selfish.

  And why was I in such a hurry to think of Reuben as some kind of villain? I never gave him a chance to explain anything.

  Well, come on, how much room for explaining is there, when the wife you didn’t know about shows up on the doorstep while you’re in bed with her husband?

  I can’t answer that because I never tried to find out. I just walked out.

  Well, but she was walking in.

  And after that I never called.

  He only called once, and didn’t explain anything.

  He said he was working on it, changing things.

  Easy to say, isn’t it? And you did call, after you’d seen Lew Corcoran at the Carrano Village site. And he never called to thank you. So you were right.

  Or he was busy juggling complications in his life, trying to figure them out, but I was so angry (and hurt; I was hurt) I never even thought of that. From the minute his wife showed up, I stopped believing in him.

  Narrow-minded. Judgmental. Mean.

  Oh, cut it out, you’re not that bad.

  I hope I’m not, she thought, pulling into her garage and turning off the ignition. I really was hurt. I really did have reasons…

  “How’s Mom?” Carrie asked as Sara came into the kitchen.

  “Fine. Tired, but I think okay. I told her we’d all visit her this weekend.”

  “Not Mack.”

  “No, not Mack.”

  “Hi, Sara,” Abby said. She was sitting at the round breakfast-room table, a dinner plate before her, scraped clean.

  Sara kissed her. “You look better.”

  “Carrie told me I should be, so I guess I am.”

  Sara swung on Carrie. “I thought I told you—”

  “No, I am, Sara, really,” Abby said. “It’s okay. I’m not mad at Carrie. I mean, she said I was acting like a heroine in one of her stories, and if she wrote it that way, you’d say she was being overdramatic and she should tone it down. And she’s sort of right, you know. I mean, I feel really awful, but…dinner was good,” she finished lamely.

  Sara broke into laughter. Either she was too protective of Abby or not protective enough of Reuben—

  “Oh, by the way, Reuben called,” said Carrie casually. “He said he’d call back about ten.”

  Sara caught her breath. After thrashing around about him in the car, she had no idea what she thought now—of him or herself—and how could she talk to him until she knew what she thought? Having doubts about herself and her
behavior did not mean she suddenly trusted him again, or could dismiss or excuse what she still saw as dishonesty and fabrication. She was not even sure if she really wanted to.

  If she wanted to? Of course she wanted to; she missed him every day with an intensity that did not fade with time, but only deepened. Why would she lie to herself? She wanted to be with him. Now. Tomorrow. Next year. All the years.

  But still she could not imagine how they would begin. Two hours to mull it over, she thought, but, in fact, snatching her own dinner, talking to Abby and helping Carrie and Doug with homework left her no time to mull anything, and she was folding laundry in her bedroom when he called, exactly at ten.

  “Sara, I couldn’t come to you until I’d closed some chapters of my life. I’ve wanted to call to thank you for—are you well?”

  She gave a small laugh, almost overcome at the impact of his voice. “Yes, thank you.”

  “And your family?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think about them. And you. There is so much to explain, to ask you to understand, and forgive—” He stopped, and they let the silence stretch out. “Thank you for your message about Corcoran,” he said at last. “It helped us look in new directions. I want to tell you about it. There is so much for us to talk about.”

  “A world to talk about,” Sara murmured.

  “And time. If you’ll believe that.”

  If I can believe it.

  “Sara, you’ll know everything; I promise you that. But not on the telephone; I want us to be together. Will you give me that much?”

  She closed her eyes. His voice wound around her; she felt its weight, its solidness like a great cape, and wondered if she had been cold all the weeks since she had left his house. “Yes,” she said.

  “Thank you.” He turned almost formal, and Sara remembered he had done that on his first telephone call, months ago, when he invited her to dinner. There is a time for emotion, she thought. We are not there yet. “I have to be in New York next week,” he said, “just for a day or two. Is there a way you could come with me?”

  “I don’t know.” She wanted to. This, too, she understood, that if they were to find each other again, it would be best to make a beginning away from everything here: work, responsibilities, the reverberations from their last night together.

  She could take a day or two from work; she had vacation time accrued, and nothing urgent was on her desk; early September was always a quiet time.

  But she had never left the three of them when she traveled. (But—it suddenly struck her—she had not traveled. Since moving back home, she had not left Chicago. Three and a half years of work and family: her job, the four of them together, the house, and, increasingly as Abby could take charge, the attractions of the city.)

  Now, nearly sixteen, Abby could take charge for more than an evening. The three of them would be in school all day, and alone for only one night. Yes, Abby could do it, but, in the throes of recovering from her own conflicts, she was not in the best shape right now for taking responsibility.

  Mack, Sara thought, but immediately rejected it.

  “I’ll try,” she said at last. “What day are you going?”

  “Monday morning. We could be back Tuesday afternoon.”

  “I should know by tomorrow.” She thought about saying I want to, and then, whether it was wise or not, she said, “I want to.”

  “Thank you for that.” There was nothing else to say, and everything, and, caught between those two poles, they were silent.

  “I’ll call you,” Sara said at last, and Reuben had to leave it at that. He sat still for a moment in the silence of his library, a hushed enclave cut off from the sounds of the city, cursing himself for the mistakes he had made: his willful blindness in marrying Ardis, his childish clinging to illusions about their marriage, his defensive determination to skate on the surface of relationships from then on, avoiding any chance of anguish, even anxiety.

  I would not have done that in my work. He knew that absolutely: he would have identified his mistakes and figured out ways to avoid making them in the future, reorganized and forged ahead in a direction holding more promise than the last. I would not have given up, crawled whimpering into a hole, denying even the possibility of commitment. I would not have put a person I valued—loved—into a position of humiliation and pain. Idiot. How long does it take a man to grow up?

  Oh, come on, he thought. I’m not that bad. He could see Sara smiling at him. Exaggerating again.

  He paced from the library through the living room, dining room, kitchen, sunroom. When he reached his study, he put on a CD of a piano sonata he had, in his teens, tried to master. I never told Sara I studied piano for fifteen years, played in a jazz trio in college, still play now and then. I never told her so many things. And there is so much I don’t know about her. If I hadn’t been so stupid, we would have had all this time to get to know—

  Give it a rest, he ordered himself. There’s a luxury in self-abnegation and I don’t deserve that.

  He laughed aloud. It was hard to give up the wallowing pleasures of self-pity. Sara would understand that; they could laugh about it together.

  He wrote an e-mail for his travel agent to read first thing the next morning, to book two plane tickets to New York on Monday, returning late afternoon Tuesday. He could cancel them, if necessary, but writing the instructions made it seem a fact that Sara would be with him. He had two meetings scheduled in Manhattan, but he would keep them short. The rest of the time would be theirs.

  He gazed unseeing at his bookshelves, imagining Sara in his bedroom in the pale wash of light from a single lamp, her head on his shoulder, her warm body within the circle of his arm, her skin, like his, cooling after lovemaking, her hand on his heart, her breathing slowing, matching his.

  He could not remember ever wanting anything as much as he wanted Sara Elliott in his life, interwoven with his life, inseparable from his life. More than anything he wanted to know that they would begin and end their days together, their separate lives merging seamlessly into their shared life, their voices entwined as, together, they managed their worlds, the small, immediate one, the larger, more complex one.

  He went to work: an antidote to dreaming, to flailing oneself for mistakes, even to reciting a litany of resolutions for improvement.

  At his desk he reviewed what he and Isaiah had learned so far: Corcoran Enterprises, owned by a company in New York City in which Lew Corcoran was a minority shareholder, had obtained a provisional license from the Illinois State Legislature for a riverboat gambling casino on the Fox River, subject to obtaining an appropriate site. Sara’s message had made it clear that Corcoran had chosen the Carrano Village site in River Bend: on the river, plenty of land for related businesses, perhaps even a shopping mall, and parking.

  Everything else was a guess, though two conclusions seemed obvious: Corcoran was fomenting the demonstrations and letters to the newspapers that were preventing any progress on the village; and somehow he had influenced the River Bend City Council to delay action on annexation.

  Somehow, Reuben thought sardonically. Somehow, in these cases, meant money: under-the-table gifts, contributions to political campaigns.

  The problem was, he and Isaiah had no proof of any of this. There was no evidence that Corcoran had been in River Bend at the time of the demonstrations, or at any other time, except once, when Sara had seen him there. No one Reuben had interviewed in the town, or in neighboring towns, had mentioned Corcoran; they spoke only of “the kid,” a mysterious manipulator whom, perhaps, Reuben had seen hovering in a grove of trees, vanishing when he saw Reuben looking his way. But even that was not clear.

  Still, with what they had, they were moving ahead. Reuben was working on a brochure, a sheet of paper folded so that he had four sides. The front was complete: a photo of the property as it was now, wild-flowers and grasses, the trees still green but a little faded in the shorter days of September, the stream that cut through the land a narr
ow ribbon of silver, and, in the distance, the sunlit gleam of the Fox River. Below the photo was one sentence, in bold letters: HOW DO YOU WANT THIS LAND TO LOOK TOMORROW?

  Inside, on the left, the photo of the land had been altered with a computer-generated montage. The flowers and trees had vanished; in their place, a five-story riverboat casino was jammed against the banks of the Fox River, connected by an enclosed bridge to a sprawling casino and office building onshore. The silver ribbon of stream was still there, alongside one of the asphalt parking lots surrounding the land-based casino on three sides. One of the lots stretched all the way to a long strip mall of shops near the highway. Reuben had taken the photo soon after he received Sara’s message. It was a development called Casino Village, built ten years earlier on the Mississippi River, and it was busy twenty-four hours a day with gamblers from Iowa and Wisconsin, as well as Illinois.

  A new definition of village, Reuben thought contemptuously as he sat at his computer placing Casino Village on what would be the village green of Carrano Village West.

  On the right side of the brochure was a picture of Carrano Village as Isaiah’s artist had drawn it for architects, engineers, and early investors: groups of houses separated by wide swaths of green space, with trees and bushes, flowers, ponds, a clubhouse and indoor sports center, a golf course, tennis courts, a swimming pool, playgrounds, and softball fields. In the distance, near the highway, were shops designed to look like gabled houses.

  Beneath the picture of the casino, bold letters read: A LICENSE FOR A NEW ILLINOIS CASINO IS PENDING. COULD IT BE IN RIVER BEND?

  Beneath the picture of Carrano Village, was the question: OR COULD RIVER BEND HAVE GREEN SPACE, LIGHT, AND AIR … AND GOOD NEIGHBORS?

  Reuben was working on the text for the back page, a brief description of Carrano Village West, a very brief description of Casino Village on the Mississippi, and a paragraph comparing them, particularly how they fit in with their communities. He was checking to make sure he had made no accusations nor named any names, when the telephone rang. He looked at his watch—11:00 P.M.—and snatched it up, thinking it might be Sara, with an answer about their trip.