I wonder whether she remembers that.
She’s sleeping when I see her. She’s on her back under a pink waffle blanket, her arms, wrapped in gauze up to her elbows, perfectly straight along either side of her. Her face is pale and sunken. Her eyelids are mauve. Silvery roots have grown in at her scalp. Even under the blanket, she looks thinner than when I left.
The room itself is dreary, with light gray walls and rubber baseboards. My mother shares it with an elderly woman, who lies in her bed, holding a plastic cup as big as a pitcher and sipping water through a straw, her blue eyes wide open. The two of them are separated by a gray cotton curtain that hangs from a track on the ceiling. My mother is on the side of the room with the window, the aluminum blinds closed, some of them bent and drooping at the ends. A piece of framed needlepoint—a kitten pawing a ball of yarn—hangs on the wall next to her bed. It’s terribly depressing.
Lucy stands when she sees me walk in. She has on a yellow gown, just like the one I and everyone else are required to wear as long as we’re in the burn center. When she hugs me, we crinkle against each other. “She’s okay,” Lucy says. She smiles sheepishly. “No, I’m lying. She’s not okay. She’ll recover from the burns. But she’s not okay.” Her look is stern. She wants to make sure I understand. Then she says, “Why do you smell like mothballs? They have a lot of mothballs where you were?”
I could tell her, and I probably should, too, but I want to tell my mother first.
“The person I was rooming with had mothballs in her suitcase. The smell got over everything.”
“Where’s your suitcase?” she asks.
“I dropped it off at home first.”
“I cleaned everything up the best I could. I went back there after she was settled. I think you’ll have to get an inspection, though. Have someone over to take a look at the oven. I don’t know if it’s still usable. You might need to buy a new one.”
“Okay.” I’m hardly listening. My eyes are locked on my mother. Looking at her, I feel a constriction, a tightening around my heart, as well as a drowning guilt—the strongest sense of it I’ve ever had—over leaving her like I did.
“It would have happened even if you’d been home,” Lucy murmurs. “I’m a trained professional and I wasn’t able to stop it. It’s like having a child. No matter how much and how closely you mind them, every mother I know has a story about how their child fell off the bed at least once. You can’t be there all the time.” Lucy puts her hand on my arm in a way that makes it feel like absolution. “You can talk to her. She probably won’t wake up for a while still because of the medication they’ve got her on, but I’ve been talking to her anyway.”
I stay still.
“Go on,” she says, nudging me a little. “I’m going to take a little walk in the halls. Been sitting down for too long now.”
I sit on the side of my mother’s bed, balancing awkwardly so as not to disturb her. I don’t know what to do next. A minute later the door to the room opens, and though I can’t see beyond the curtain, someone shuffles inside. I wait, thinking maybe it’s a nurse coming to check on my mother. But then there’s a murmuring from the other side of the curtain.
“Elizabeth,” a man says. “Elizabeth, how long have we been married?” His voice is thin. “Is it forty-eight years? Forty-eight years, is that right? I have to fill it out on this form. They’re asking how long we’ve been married. I think it’s forty-eight years, but I can’t remember.” The man makes a sound like scribbling. “Does anyone in your family have trouble clotting blood?” he asks. There’s no sound. “I’ll put down no. Is there any mental illness in your family? Did anyone have a stroke?” He goes on and on in his fragile way. Every so often, the woman in the bed, his wife, Elizabeth, makes a noise of consent, but mostly the room holds only the man’s voice, searching, trying with desperation to take care of his wife, groping for answers.
When he leaves, I look over my shoulder at my mother, still sleeping.
“I didn’t go to Washington,” I whisper. “I went to Panama.” Her face is still. “I found his letters to you. In your room. I knew you wouldn’t want me to go there, but—”
She stirs.
“Mom?”
“Mira?”
“I’m here.”
As soon as my mother is back at home, I call Dr. Herschel’s office and tell him that I need more time. I explain that my mother had an accident. We make a plan that I’ll return to school the following fall quarter. Dr. Herschel assures me my scholarship will carry over.
The day we return from the hospital, there’s a potted bouquet of yellow flowers wrapped in cellophane on the front step.
“What is that?” my mother wants to know. “Did I already die and I don’t know it?”
“They’re flowers. Daffodils, I think.”
She sighs. “Well, bring them in the house. We’ll put them on the ledge next to George’s plant, I guess.”
The flowers are from my friends. A plastic spear stuck in the soil holds a note that says, “Let us know if you need anything.”
I call Beth as soon as I get my mother settled inside, watching television.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say.
“We had to do something. I mean, we wanted to do something. We were going to come there sometime this weekend, too, if you want. We don’t want to be in your way, but if we can help, you know we’ll come.”
“I know.”
“Are you okay?” Beth asks.
I draw a deep breath in and hold it for a second, feeling the pulse against my ribs. “Tell me something else. What’s going on over there? All we do is talk about me these days.”
“Well, the big news is that Asha got a terrible haircut yesterday. It’s longer in the back than in the front.”
“It’s a mullet?”
“That’s the thing. It’s not exactly a mullet. But it’s definitely not good.”
“What was she doing?”
“She got into a huge fight with her parents the other day, and she decided that they were too obsessed with her being a perfect Indian girl and that she was tired of being a perfect Indian girl, so she went to Art and Science and told them to chop it all off. I don’t know. It’s bad, though. She skipped all her classes today because she doesn’t want anyone to see her. I’m supposed to take her my red knit hat this afternoon.”
“It’s going to take forever for her to grow it out again.”
“I know.”
It feels good to be talking about something meaningless.
“Oh, wait. This is even bigger news. I forgot because it happened a few days ago and the Asha hair debacle was just yesterday, but Ben Linwood called Juliette.”
“No, he didn’t!”
“Well, I wasn’t actually on the call, so I can’t say for sure, but she said he did. They’re meeting up after his shift tomorrow night.”
And then, as if I stepped in quicksand, I am sucked back into a lonely desolation.
“That’s great,” I say. “It’s great for her.”
Before we hang up, Beth says, “I don’t know if I should ask. I mean, I think I know the answer since you haven’t said anything about it, but did you find him?”
“I found his sister.”
“But not him?”
“He died. Ten years ago.”
“Oh, Mira. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“I kept worrying that you would see him and he would reject you. Maybe this is better than that. No, that’s stupid. Forget I said that. It’s obviously not better. I’m so sorry, Mira.”
I ask Lucy to stay on with us for a while, and fortunately it’s not difficult to convince her. We establish a tag-team routine of sorts where at least one of us is no more than a few feet away from my mother at all times. We entertain her, start the shower water for her and sit in the bathroom while she washes herself, pour milk in her cereal, knot her freshly laundered socks, find the radio station she likes in the car, escort her on sh
ort walks through the neighborhood, blow-dry her hair, read her the mail, tell her again and again that her black beaded necklace is on the dresser. My mother seems fine at times, and at other times gets excessively frustrated, and at still others simply collapses—not physically, but within, as if the bulk of what’s inside of her is made out of delicately heaped leaves that, out of nowhere, get blown away by a bit of wind, becoming scattered and displaced.
One week in February, after a few days straight of staying indoors because the weather was so cold and wet that none of us wanted to even open the front door, Chicago heats to unseasonable temperatures, and Lucy thinks it would be a good idea to get my mother out of the house.
“Just drive around with her a little. Roll the windows down so she can get some fresh air.”
My mother dresses herself in black shorts, a black polo shirt, purple socks pulled up to her knees, and running sneakers. She still has bandages on both arms, which Lucy or I change every morning. A week earlier, the doctor assured us that she no longer needed them. Her skin, which was once raw and bubbled at the wrists, has healed enough that it should no longer be painful. It’s not particularly attractive, though, since there are areas of her forearms where the natural texture of her skin has been erased, a patchwork of swaths that are flatter and shinier and more pink than the areas of skin surrounding them. So my mother insists she be wrapped up, one long ribbon of gauze pulled around and around until she is satisfied. I tried to substitute gloves once—long black silk gloves—but she refused them on the grounds that they did not look “official” enough.
That day, I steer my mother’s eleven-year-old Toyota Corolla south along Sheridan Avenue to Lake Shore Drive. We pass buildings lined up along the side of the road like spectators at a parade. The icy blue body of Lake Michigan cracks under the sun. I put the windows down and my mother leans her elbow in the opening, resting her chin in her hand, as the crisp air whips in.
We make it all the way to Buckingham Fountain—we’re stopped at a light—before either of us speaks.
“Did you find him?” she asks, so softly at first that I’m not sure I heard her.
“What?”
“Did you find him?”
“No.”
She has her face turned from me, but I can see her reflection in the side mirror. She closes her eyes briefly.
“I haven’t seen him in so long,” she says when she opens them. “I wonder what he’s doing now.”
“Mom—” I say, then stop myself. I don’t think there’s any point in telling her he’s gone.
She doesn’t speak again until we’re moving. “I tried to call him once, but a woman answered.”
“And what happened?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No. A woman answered.”
“Did you say anything to her?”
“I think I hung up. I don’t know. We were disconnected.”
“You hung up or you were disconnected?”
She doesn’t respond.
We pass the museum campus—the glass-faced aquarium, the sparkling dome of the planetarium. As we hurtle around a curve, the coins in the tray in the console slide. “You could have called back,” I say.
“I don’t know why I called in the first place. It was probably better that he didn’t answer. I imagine he had gotten over everything by then. There was no need to open it all up again.”
I shift my hands around the steering wheel. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so what?”
“I don’t think he had gotten over it by then. I don’t think he ever got over it.”
“Oh, he must have eventually.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Stop saying that! You’re just trying to make me feel bad.”
“No, I’m not. I mean, you should feel bad, but that’s not why I’m saying it. I just really don’t think he got over it like you think he did.” I nose around cars, switching lanes, suddenly anxious to go faster.
My mother takes a deep breath. “With all due respect, Mira. I don’t think you have any basis for saying that. You don’t know him like I do.”
It feels like being punched, or what I imagine being punched—hard, square in the middle of my breastbone—would feel like. Slowly, I grind my teeth back and forth against each other and blink to keep my eyes from watering up so much that I can’t see the road. I lean my foot a little harder against the accelerator.
Then, as if the discussion is over, my mother turns on the radio. Pointedly, I turn it off again. I swing around a black convertible with its top down into an open stretch of lane.
“You don’t want to listen to the radio?” my mother asks.
“Didn’t you think I wanted a father?” I ask. “I mean, there is no way, is there, no way that you couldn’t have thought, wow, maybe Mira would actually like to know her father? Maybe, since he’s not a bad guy like I let her believe he was, she might want to meet him one day or, I don’t know, here’s a thought, call him on the phone or, like, at least know that he’s not a bad guy and that he cares about her and wanted to be part of her life. Is there seriously any way you didn’t think that?” A back tire catches the edge of the shoulder and sends us skidding a bit. I feel shaky. My mother, in her own world, doesn’t even flinch. She just looks out the window again.
“Because I honestly can’t imagine a scenario where that wouldn’t have occurred to you at least once.”
“I thought that all the time.”
“Oh my God! Then why didn’t you do anything about it?”
Silence.
“Are you going to answer me?”
Silence.
“Because you could have changed everything. At any time. All you needed to do was tell him once that you still wanted him. He wouldn’t have even needed to come here. It wouldn’t have had to be a big production. But one phone call or one letter and you could have changed everything. I can’t believe you don’t know that. Or . . . never mind. I’m sure you did know it. You had to have. I can’t believe you didn’t do anything about it. I just think . . . it’s so shitty! You have no idea the kinds of things I thought about him my whole life, and if it were up to you, you would’ve let me go on thinking them, and I can’t even tell whether you feel bad about any of it. Mom?”
Silence.
“It’s like you rolled this ball down a hill and you chose to ignore the fact that, if you wanted to, you could stand up and run after it and pick it up off the ground and save it. Instead, you set it in motion and let it keep going until it landed in this ridiculous, stupid ditch, and it’s just so—” I stop. Then I shriek as loud as I can. The long, withering sound echoes within the confines of the car, filling it like a flood, and draining out again just as quickly.
“What do you want me to say, Mira?” my mother asks softly.
I can barely even feel myself driving. I’m just zooming through a blurry city, over potholes and through yellow lights, a skate park on the left, condos on the right, skyscrapers farther afield, streetlights hanging on bowed cables, the wash of gray pavement below and blue sky above. I’m just racing and thinking about it, what do I want her to say? That she’s sorry? That she regrets it? That she would take it all back if she could? That if this stupid fucking disease eats me up, too, the way it’s devouring her, she hopes it’s the first thing I’ll forget? What? What is it, exactly, that I want from her? Is there anything she can offer me now? Or is what I want from her the thing that she already chose not to give me, the thing that there is no way to go back and get now? My father. Isn’t that what I want from her? Somehow, to learn that she could produce him out of thin air. But of course that’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen. And I take a breath. And another. It’s over now. It’s over.
A long wailing sound slices through my thoughts. My mother bolts straight up in her seat.
“Mira, pull over.”
“What? Why?”
“The police.”
The officer writes me a ticket for speeding. He says if I hadn’t been going quite so fast, he could have let me go with a warning on account of my spotless driving record, but twenty-five miles over the limit is excessive. He has no choice. I don’t argue. Even after he pulls back onto Lake Shore Drive and motions for us to get off the shoulder and onto the road, I keep the engine off. I need a second to let my head clear. I’m amazed that I’m as composed as I am. My mother is staring out the window again, silent as a rock. Vehicles speed by on the road beside us, shaking our car in their wake. After another minute, my mother flips the vent on the dashboard open and closed a few times, then flattens her hand over it. “Damn it,” she says. She rounds her shoulders and drops her cheek against her outstretched arm. Then she starts crying.
My suitcase stays, still packed and zippered shut, in the basement for more than a month. I shoved it in the crawl space when I got home with every intention not to look at it again for as long as I could stand it. I wouldn’t need any of the clothes inside it for months anyway. But in late February, just after midterms, Asha calls me in a panic because she needs a copy of Principles of Geology.
“I have to write a paper comparing the impact of Lyell’s views with either Darwin, Marx, or Freud for my earth science class, and every single copy of it is checked out of the library, and you know interlibrary loans take too long, and I don’t have any money to go buy a copy because my parents have totally cut me off financially because of the hair thing.”
“They did?”
“Can you believe that?”
“Because you cut your hair off, they cut you off?”
“Mira, please! It’s really not funny.”
I tell her I’ll put my copy of the book in the mail for her. She says no, she’s going to drive to Evanston to pick it up herself.
“The mail will take two days!” she wails. “You think I have the luxury of two days? I’m behind enough as it is. I haven’t even read it yet, even though it’s been on the syllabus since the beginning of time. I can’t believe I let you talk me into taking this class. I was so happy just sailing through my chem major.”
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