The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

  “Who says you’re not in charge of dinner tonight?” Beth asked Susan, and we kept trudging on.

  That night it stopped raining just for dinnertime. We sat around a fire in the lushest of campsites and talked about anything but our blisters, our blackfly bites, sunburn, unaccustomed muscles. I had forgotten what it was like to meet so many new people all at once, in an intimacy rivaling college, freshman year.

  Then it started raining hard again, so we dove into our tents. A river divided the tent into sides, and Susan and I stayed up chattering, voices and teeth both. She lived in Colorado and we conspired to meet up, families together, for a summer vacation next year. We planned adventures out as if anything was possible: a trip down the Amazon, our kids sleeping in hammocks on boat decks at night.

  “So,” she said, “solos tomorrow. Are you nervous? I’m nervous.”

  “No,” I said, and I realized I was looking forward to being alone, as much as I loved all this company. Still, there was trepidation. “I guess I’m more solitary than I thought.”

  Tia and I had been in Hot Springs, North Carolina, when I got my mother’s letter telling me to come home. She sent two oranges “for drink and food in one round,” as if we couldn’t buy them in North Carolina, and a short letter on thick gray paper that said Oren was dying of late-detected Hodgkin’s disease. I sat on the post office steps with Tia, shaking. We blocked the doorway with our tall packs and muddy legs.

  Oren died a month after I got home. I always wished my mother had told me sooner, instead of letting me almost finish the trail. I would have quit; I never cared about making the whole thing, I only cared about the days with Tia, about the birches standing all around us like a rooted chorus. It was the time I’d wanted, but when I got home, I felt like it was lost time instead of something I owned.

  In the morning, I set out alone. This was it, the climax, the period of reflection. I looked at the familiar lichens on the granite. I paraded my way through puddles and couldn’t stop imagining how Iris would attack them, her passion for splashing. There were wild blueberries, mostly expended but a few tiny potent berries, enough to make it worth my while to stop on the outcrop that sheltered them. I took out my sketch pad, left until now, and two charcoal pencils. It seemed sacrilegious to try to capture this world in black and white, but then I began to see it, the way everything could be broken into line, into light and shadow. I sketched the rocks against the sky, a single birch leaf up close, a blueberry’s perfect shape against its twig. I flipped through the pages of my book and found the squirrel, the ruined bird that had graced my step just a few months ago. It felt distant, impossibly unimportant.

  I thought about the complaints I’d registered against my family with these women I hardly knew, of how easy it was to bemoan the state of my daily life. Belonging to this group felt a little like betraying my family—my other group, my only group for the past years. It felt something like what I’d sought in childhood: some other team, not just my mother, my father, all those boys. I’d complained about Carra, worried over her accident, her not telling me about the boy; I’d complained about Iris needing me too much. I’d bitched—there was no other word—about Amanda, calling her spoiled, calling her mean, letting them agree. Hearing myself recite the story of our relationship made me realize all the mistakes I’d made. I’d judged her at her most vulnerable, I’d couched my criticism in charity, and worst, I’d suspected her of something only someone who was unbalanced might do. I wasn’t the only one letting off the collected steam of years, though I felt guiltiest for ratting out Caius, his not seeing me anymore, asking me if I might be happier doing things, all the while making a silent comment that I was doing some harm through my dissatisfaction. Maybe that’s all it was, a temporary dissatisfaction, a storm.

  Something rustled behind me on the rock, and a furry form bustled out toward the grassy plain beyond the outcrop. I held my breath for a minute, trying to remember what we were supposed to do if we saw a bear. Was it run? Or stay still? Was it different in daytime or night? But of course, breathing now, it wasn’t a bear, it was much too small—a groundhog, just like the burrowers at home who cut their tunnels under our yard and Amanda’s, ignoring the fence. Perhaps all I needed was to spend more time beyond my property lines, looking in instead of out, opening my frame instead of holding everything inside.

  I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. But I also knew I didn’t want to be my mother, holding so tightly to everything, to everyone, that letting go meant excising a piece of herself. It wasn’t her fault she’d lost a son; it was her fault she never let the living go, either, never let us love her from a distance. And this was a gift I had, for that moment, anyway: distance. I promised myself I’d leave when I needed to, drive to Ramapo State Park, up to Turkey Hill in Harriman, that I’d scoot out on the log that straddled the brook in the woods behind our house, anything to give myself more proper perspective from now on. I had to learn how to let go and how to fill myself up.

  We’d taken my mother for granted—we ate her perfect meals and basked in her perfect attention and never expected her to resent it, even when we pushed her away. Somehow, despite my best intentions, I’d taught my family to do the same. I had learned from my mother’s grief; perhaps I studied her grief too closely. I prepared myself for a loss that might never come, and if it did, I wasn’t actually prepared. I was just practiced, which wasn’t the same thing. You couldn’t prepare. My children growing up wasn’t something to begrudge, and neither was their needing me. What I needed to do was to stop making myself look for sorrow.

  I’d always thought my father’s obsession with finding something important in math—making his mark—was a vanity. His published papers were kept laminated in notebooks. That my mother’s quiet work of raising children, making dinners, the garden, were mark enough. But perhaps it was as elemental a drive as that to procreate. The need to be something, make something—the preschooler’s pride in a beauteous lump of feathers and clay—all on your own. Children were always separate, even as they needed you, they were their own people from the very beginning. It was only the work of leaving that required assistance. My mother’s modesty had its own beauty, perhaps, but it was a mistake to think modesty could sustain me. It wasn’t enough; it probably hadn’t been for her, either. I wanted to make something, too. I wasn’t sure what that meant, except that when I went home, I was going to find out. Community college courses, maybe architecture, graphic design, writing. Something else just for me. What Caius was trying to tell me all along, only I’d had to find it myself, my own way.

  I put away my book and just looked, just let myself face the quiet world. No sound except wind, except a tree leaning against another, groaning, nothing except my own breath. It was new and it was familiar, the view a gash of blue sky and green, the silver stripes of the birches, the sky opening up to me like an offering. And I was small in all of it, and I had fourteen more hours to myself, then twelve, and then I was setting up my bivvy sack for the opera of the sunset. I picked a spot under a few birches, just in case it rained, but I scrambled up to a viewpoint a hundred feet higher to watch the sky open into orange fruit, then pink and blues.

  I hadn’t expected to cry. I hadn’t expected anything but the relief of my aloneness after all that intense company. But I missed my new friends now, missed the celebration of our collective escape. And I was tiny in the world, slightly afraid of a night alone. It wasn’t bears I expected, it wasn’t ax-wielding madmen in this pristine space of woods and sky, it was the danger of my own return. I cried for the unimportance of dead groundhogs, for the time I’d willed past instead of appreciating, for Carra’s growing older, for all the frustration Iris would inspire, would conduct from her own perspective, for the closeness I’d wanted with my own children, for what was there and what was missing.

  Inside my sack, my clothes still damp, I watched the sky, the slow movement of the stars. I ate two cold pancakes and drank water, still warm from the da
y. I thought of the glow-in-the-dark planets Oliver had helped me putty up on his ceiling in their order: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizza Pies. “If it’s pizza pies,” Oliver had said, “how come there isn’t another P planet after Pluto?”

  I saw how much space there was between now and the light of the stars. I saw how much I’d forgotten to look at everything—and that my shortsightedness had the celestial bodies of my children as an excuse.

  Just before dawn I started to pack up my things for the walk back toward our base camp. I had four hours before we were going to meet, so I was surprised to see someone walking toward me through the dappled morning light of the skinny birches, thin silver men. It was Susan.

  “They want us to come right back now,” she said, with a strange urgency. “Something’s happened—we have to leave early.”

  “Something’s happened?” What could happen if you left the ordinary world for a few days? “Is everyone okay?” I meant the other women; I meant my family, too.

  “I hate to say it,” said Susan, “but my first thought when Beth found me was nuclear meltdown. Isn’t it weird, all this distance between us and the world, and yet there’s a nuclear power plant close enough to kill us, I’m sure.”

  We swished our way through the woods, and I wondered whether there was anything to worry about but my own small world, whether I really wanted to cut my private revelations short by a single day for something I could do nothing about. But then, of course, I worried about that very private world, which had endured enough over the summer. My stomach hurt, but it was kind of exciting at the same time. I hated to think I was as thrilled about an unknown event as I might be watching a thriller.

  “Do you think it’s something regional? Or should we worry about our kids?” I asked.

  “We should always worry about our kids.” Susan forced a chuckle.

  We were back in half an hour, no meandering contemplation. It was a sharply sunny day, and I could smell the sweat of five days’ effort rising from my own underarms. Everyone sat in a circle around the long-finished campfire at base camp in the sunshine, and Dora, our group leader, told us about the airplanes and that the World Trade Center in New York had been destroyed.

  It wasn’t how I’d intended to come home. My flight out was canceled, so I took a bus and two trains. There was an ongoing public conversation—everyone had something to say, except for the occasional Arab-looking person, who was left sitting in his or her own section of seats like a plague-bearer. And I was afraid all the way home, though I’d talked with Caius on the phone after more than a dozen attempts to get through. Most everyone we knew was okay, except for two men he’d gone to law school with who had worked in the tower that fell first—the web of phone calls still hadn’t revealed their fates. The man who coached Oliver’s soccer team was gone, and a girl from Carra’s swim team had lost her mother. It was a gap, like torn fabric, a hole between when I’d left and now, the long return. It wasn’t until I switched buses in Trenton to head back north that I thought about Amanda and Aaron, thought about how neither worked downtown but both went into the city every day.

  Emergency, I said to myself. Emergency. I still didn’t believe it, despite the descriptions that fell around me like snow. Buses and trains changed routes or were canceled or delayed. It wasn’t until the bus got on Route 17 and headed north that we could see the smoke still rising from the city. It was like something in a video game, an action movie. It wasn’t something that was supposed to happen here.

  Home. It had taken more than thirty-five hours to get here. The white clapboards looked so clean, the shutters so shiny in their jackets of paint.

  For the first minute Iris was incensed, as if my leaving was a personal affront, as if my being gone was all that had happened in the world. Then she held tight to my leg and conceded a sticky kiss directly on my lips. I was sure she’d grown an inch in my days away, my long complicated journey home. I didn’t tell Caius about the National Guard inspection we’d endured in Trenton, that because of my backpack I’d been searched. I’d had to take off my bra. I’d had to give up the food in my pack and my Swiss Army knife.

  Without changing, I took Iris in the backyard, where the last of the summer heat was leeching from the grass. The sky was over-cast, the flowers long finished, the heavy paper heads of the day lilies listless in the last of the day. I could almost see winter in the green, new ice splitting the sap-sucked twigs, fat final buds of the trees pinched tight by the icy fingertips of autumn evenings. Chasing Iris through the yellow forest of the first-turning maple, I imagined the cold that could happen, the quick change in the sky, the cold collapsing the leaves into yellow fists.

  Safety in this strange storm: I looked at my home with a little less weariness. I had all this. Still, I wanted to go again. I was not cured of wanting to escape, but the world had grown smaller, more fragile, in the last few days.

  “Chase me!” Iris loved this game, and I let her go a little before I followed her. She had no idea what had happened; Caius had turned off the radio, the television, when she came in the room, he told me. I wasn’t sure how long we could protect her from the awful truths of the world. She led me back by the historic site of the bottle-cap mosaic. A single purple fall-blooming iris tilted its head in search of sunlight. I crouched in the home of my histories, beside a spontaneous outburst of forget-me-nots among the dead leaves, just opening their tiny buds. I felt as if I’d been forced to look outside the frame I’d hammered around my days, around my past.

  “Chase me!” Iris’s voice grew smaller. I wondered what we’d ever be able to tell her about this time, what wars would consume us now, what changes in our liberties.

  “Have you heard from all the neighbors?” I called out to Caius, but the screen door closed; he hadn’t heard me. Every house in the neighborhood had people home, televisions on. I felt fond of everyone, afraid for everyone. I followed Iris.

  “Chase me, Mommy!” Her voice was vanishing. I pushed through the maples at the back of the yard.

  Then the afternoon was finished, and I’d showered and held my children to me and let them squeeze away. Iris was in bed; Caius and I sat on the porch swing holding hands and wondering about each of our friends. He’d been calling people everywhere; he’d been reminding himself of everyone for whom he cared. He’d left three messages with Aaron and Amanda, but neither of them had called back. The house stood empty, no baby, no nanny, as if it were unoccupied and up for sale. I shivered.

  “Can I play basketball at Nicky’s?” asked Oliver as he dropped his bike on the driveway.

  “I think you should start getting ready for bed,” said Caius, the father in charge of the children.

  We sat, listening to the screen door wheeze as it closed after Oliver. Carra talked on the phone, her voice rising with romantic intent. I knew that sound. Our daughter was an adolescent. I creaked the swing, pulling us back, letting us go.

  A car drove into the driveway across the fence. Amanda’s car. The front door opened and Malena’s cry fell out into the early evening. Aaron got out of the passenger’s side, his face strange, wearing a suit smeared with soot. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath.

  Caius called out to them, “I left a message—is everyone okay?” And we already knew the answer. And I breathed and breathed.

  “I was on the ground floor,” said Aaron, walking up and leaning against the pickets, as if we spoke every day. “I was supposed to be upstairs, at Windows on the World, but I missed my train,” he said.

  “You would’ve been up there?” Caius looked at him, then stood and walked over to our neighbor. He reached across the fence and pulled him in, a real embrace, kissed his cheek. A smudge of soot transferred to my husband’s sleeve.

  “It took me until now to get out of the city. The hospital—”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, his mouth moving but his face oddly still.

  “Thank God,” I said, looking
at Amanda, who was now standing behind Aaron.

  “We’re going inside,” said Amanda, reaching for her husband’s hand. Malena had grown, too; she almost looked like a toddler, with enough hair to relinquish babyhood and a certain, curious face emerging from the plushness of baby fat.

  “She’s so beautiful—,” I said, and Amanda looked at me, and a gentle smile graced her bow lips. I meant it for both of them, all of them. Their beauty was something I’d forgotten.

  “Thank you,” said Amanda. It was like the smallest absolution. They turned and trooped into their house.

  “See you later,” said Caius, as if he hadn’t just kissed her husband.

  As we settled back on the porch, Caius turned and brushed a hair from my mouth. The touch thrilled me, a little, just enough. I tried to brush the soot from his sleeve but it was already working its way into the fibers. We sat, not talking, listening to the final calls of the cicadas, temporarily safe, temporarily satisfied with the contents of our own changeable hearts.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Giant thanks to my extremely talented agent, Jennifer Carlson; to Sally Kim, an extraordinary editor and person; to the lovely folks at Shaye Areheart Books; to friends and super-strength supporters Cynthia Starr, Linda Buckbinder, Harlan Coben, Sandy Desmond, Kim Perrone, Kris Linton, Madeleine Beresford, and Susan McBrayer; and to early readers Moira Bucciarelli and Marcia Worth-Baker. Thanks also to Alison O’Connor, Sandra Marshall, Emily Remensperger, and Melanie Segal, without whom my time to write would’ve fit inside an acorn. Thanks Claudia, Rebecca, Alex, and Samantha, Dad and Peg, Herb and Ethel Herman, Mom and Tom, Rosenbergs, and Filners. To Josh (reader, Web-page designer, best friend), Jacob, and Carina—you are my home.