I say, “Tell me why my father left.”
She purses her lips. “Morgan, now’s not the time to get into that.”
“Really?” I ask. “You really came to my door at six in the morning to complain about tea bags.”
She sighs, wringing her powerful hands one at a time, slowly, like old towels. When she speaks, she doesn’t address me but, rather, addresses the middle distance that has always lain between us: between home and Los Angeles, New York, the ashrams in India and martial arts training centers in the Negev; between what we both knew to be the truth, and the things we actually said.
Then she says, “You know I never wanted children? But Archie did. He wanted a huge brood. He wanted eight. Even when he was young. ‘We’ll grow up with them,’ he said. The day I told him I was pregnant was the happiest day of his life.”
She says, “And then you were born.”
I go very still.
“The night we brought you home from the hospital, I woke up and he was gone. I found him sitting on the couch in the dark. I said, ‘Archie, what is it? Come back to bed,’ and he said, ‘Everything I touch breaks.’ I said, ‘Our daughter’s not broken,’ but he was inconsolable.”
Her finger absently circles her lips. “I think maybe he really did try to overcome it. But it wasn’t enough. He never wanted to hold you. I would come home from working long hours and find you in your crib, diaper overflowing, because he couldn’t bring himself to touch you. We never had a nanny in those days, of course. We couldn’t afford it, and Archie was certain that word about your deformity would get out if we let any strangers in. He wanted to hide you from the world.”
“And then you hid me from the world.”
“I hid your Hole from the world,” she says. “To give you a normal life. He would have kept you in isolation. He would—there’s no telling.”
I sit up, barely hearing her. “The mirror at the end of the exhibition was for him. The what am i missing? mirror.” I run my hands through my hair. “No wonder you liked Marcel’s idea so much. You wanted Dad to see himself in it.”
For the first time in my life, my mother looks helpless. Her body still firm but her skin tired.
“I’m a proud woman, Morgan,” she says softly. “I know I haven’t always been the perfect mother, and I’m sorry. But I gave you a life without a man in it who would tell you that you were broken.”
We stare at each other across the space of the living room. There is something fierce and unyielding and exhausted in her gaze.
“I’m not sorry for that,” she says. “I’m not sorry.”
I imagine her, eyes closed, pinching the bridge of her nose off-set in Hong Kong, in Rio, in Seoul, in all the hotels of the world. I think of all the times I wanted her to just be my mother, and I imagine her wishing she could reach across oceans and touch my cheek.
So I cross the room and touch hers.
She reaches up, and I crawl into her lap. She wraps her arms around me, nestling me close. I breathe in the warm skin of her neck, and she smells like nothing but my mother.
41
After Mother leaves, I take forty-five minutes to draft an email to my father. In the end, it is just nine words. I can’t do Thanksgiving. How about this Saturday instead? I agonize over the signature—Sincerely? Yours? Best? Definitely not Love—and eventually send it off with just my name.
I try calling Howie for the eight-hundredth time, but it goes straight to voice mail. I finally drive to the King’s Motel, the weird, rich smell of the Purina dog food plant that looms up behind the motel curdling in my nose. There’s a light on in Room 27, but no one comes to the door when I knock.
I try calling again, look around for something on which to leave a note. A receipt flutters by in the chill wind, and I trap it beneath my shoe, dig in my bag for a Sharpie. I consider. You don’t want to be alone, and I don’t either, and, Just because we don’t fit doesn’t mean—but I’m not sure what it doesn’t. Finally, I write, I miss you.–M
I wedge it in the crack beneath his door and head back to the car under the collective watchful eye of the homeless men clumped in front of the shelter across the street. A chill is creeping into the air, and a wind is already beginning to pick up. As I drive home, I imagine that every piece of trash whipping by is my letter to Howie, the shoulders and drainage ditches of Raleigh repeating I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.
There’s an email from my father when I get home: Sure, that sounds great! What about Gypsy’s at noon?
So at least there’s that.
I rehearse our conversation in my mind as dusk falls, and the photographers outside thin, huddling closer to the competition for body heat.
I walk into the diner. He is sitting in a corner booth, impossibly large for just the two of us. But when I scoot in beside him, it somehow feels intimate.
He says, “Morgan, thank you for meeting me.”
No, I think, paging through Caro’s well-worn copy of Tiny Beautiful Things. Too formal. Too much out of a mobster movie. The language of a father with a Glock under the table, a father who, in the heat of the moment, would shout, “Leave the gun. Take the bottomless coffee refills!”
“Morgan, it’s great to see you at last.” He studies the tablecloth. “It’s been too long.”
“Has it?” I ask, casually. “What took you so long to get in touch?”
But the fantasy breaks down there. I can’t figure out what perfect thing I want him to say. I try on hurt, screaming rage, reconciliation, idle threats and understated composure. But the imagined conversation always spins itself out, dissipating sometime between the departure of the waitress and the arrival of the food. Again and again I catch my mind wandering the nooks and crannies of Howie’s face, the gentle bones of his hands. I try to reel it back in, but I can’t seem to set myself straight. I stare out the window at the November clouds scudding by, lumpy and cold and promising nothing.
Friday arrives: our weekly overnight at the clinic. The thought of seeing Howie makes me jittery. I wake up too early, agonize over what to wear. “It doesn’t matter,” I rage to Caro, trying on and discarding blouses and earrings. “They’re just going to put us in hospital gowns.” She agrees, but brushes my hair anyway, dabs rouge onto my cheeks until I glow, a feverish Pollyanna in a pixie cut. She grips my wrists.
“You’ll be great,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “It doesn’t matter. It’s just a doctor’s appointment.”
“That you look totally hot for.”
I hold her tightly. “Caro, how do you have room in your broken heart to take care of me?”
She examines me critically, pushes my bangs out of my eyes. “I guess I’m just a goddamned superhero.”
On the way to the clinic, Yum Yum Situation’s “Hole Girl” comes on the radio, and I switch it off.
Howie’s nowhere to be seen when I arrive. Dr. Morse has a literal stack of papers for me to sign, consenting to a ream of new tests on my growing tissue and shrinking Hole. “The reagents won’t come in until next week,” she says, eyes bright, already seeing beyond, as though the small details of time and physical reality are a minor stumbling block in her plans. I sign my name on dotted lines, glancing up at the door and wondering when I’ll see Howie.
I don’t get a chance until after I’ve changed and been led into the examination room. He’s waiting, arms crossed, perched on the bed farthest from the door. I say, “Hi, Howie,” and he says, tightly:
“Hey.”
Dr. Morse wants us to begin the appointment with a Merge, to see if we still fit. It seems a hateful and impossible request—but then, somehow, we do. It is tighter this time, harder. There is a terrible squeezing sensation in my ribs as the Lump, lubricated with cold, clear jelly, slides inexorably into place, Howie’s hand tight on my shoulder, my palm at the flat of his back, pressing. But then my breath s
eizes, and it’s there.
A shaking sigh escapes Howie and reverberates in my gut. The nurses break into restrained applause. Dr. Morse’s head is down, eyes two fringed slits as she scribbles on her clipboard.
I peer up toward Howie’s face, trying to read his reaction. But I’m standing so close, I can only see him in pieces: elfin chin, knob of shoulder, arching tendon of neck. I want to say, See? It’s okay! We’re okay! We can still fit! But I’m standing too close to see the whole of him, and the pieces don’t add up to the person I want to comfort.
After we separate, Howie turns and leaves the room. I look to Dr. Morse questioningly.
“Howie requested to stay in a separate room tonight,” she says, ducking her head as she follows him. “Sorry.”
I sway in my cloth gown and rouged cheeks as the nurses step in, dab away the lubricant with warm, damp cloths. I can feel Howie, clear as a blip on a radar screen, moving away down the hall, somewhere in the bowels of the building. I trace his arc away from me as a nurse guides me to the lonely second bed and begins the business of hooking up my breath and blood to project brightly across a screen.
The sunset that night is beautiful, and I can’t help myself. Even from the depths of my loneliness, I mix and name the colors: Ultraviolet. Rescue flare. Lemon dream. I name orange-peel-all-in-one-piece-and-flung-over-the-shoulder, and orange-peel-broken. I name still-beating-heart.
At some point, against all odds, I sleep.
They unhook me in the morning, take notes. Dr. Morse comes in with her thousand too-personal questions, and I answer them as honestly as I can, feeling weak and shaky but still fiercely rushing, hoping to catch Howie in the parking lot. I only have a few minutes before I have to go meet my dad, but all I need is a look from him, a hug. Even a simple word: Later.
I get to the parking lot just in time to see him pull away. The cameras eat up my disappointment in precise, happy clicks. I wave them off half-heartedly and sit a long minute in the car, watching the clock. It ticks from 11:47 to 11:48, and the air drains from my body. I crank the engine to life and head toward the diner where my father waits, and to some uncertain future.
Then I pop an illegal U-turn on Tryon Road and speed toward Howie’s hotel.
42
I pound on the door of Room 27. There is a flutter of floral drapes. Then Howie opens the door, face steeped in weariness.
“Come with me,” I say.
“Back to the hospital?” he asks.
“Screw that,” I say. “No more doctors. Only magic. Get in the car.”
He rubs his forehead. The skin bunches beneath his hand like laundry.
“You should go,” he says.
I step directly into his space. We are toe to toe, chest to chest. We are breathing each other’s breath.
I say, too quickly, the words crunching together. “I’m in love with you.”
“Stop,” he says.
I reach up and pull his hand from his face and say, again, each word clear and right and true, “I’m in love with you.”
He catches my wrist. “Stop it,” he says. “Okay? It’s not magic. We’re not puzzle pieces. We’re not mystically, genetically meant to be together or whatever.”
“So?”
“So please leave me alone.”
I am inches from him, feeling the warmth that rolls off his skin. It seems impossible to be so close to a person and to still have them say, No, you can’t; you’ve gotten this close, but I will not let you go further. To have everything stop at the skin.
I stoop and put my shoulder to his stomach. Then I lift.
Howie yelps in surprise as I stagger with his weight. My spine crunches together. He pounds on my back, but the blows are light, useless. Fists like summer rain.
“Morgan, what the actual hell,” he shouts.
A deep ache of dizziness wells up in my middle, and I push it down. I say, “I am going to get you into this car if it kills me.”
And he must believe me, because when I stagger and nearly drop him on the sidewalk several steps later, he gets up and walks the rest of the way to the car by himself.
Howie doesn’t speak as I steer west onto the Beltline and out of the city. He stares out the window at the weak-tea sun. But as the exit numbers decrease, I can feel his mood lighten from sullenness to irritation to curiosity. We stop at a service station so I can vomit and put gas in the car. When I emerge from the bathroom, wiping my mouth, he looks at me with a mixture of sympathy and jealousy.
“Where are we going?” he asks at last.
I try to click the nozzle off right on thirty dollars but miss, spilling a few pennies over. Across the street, the sky stretches out over a bone-colored tobacco field.
“Where do you think?” I ask.
“The Angel. Morgan,” he says, “I get it. But you have to let this go.” He squints at me across the roof of my car. I hadn’t given him time to grab sunglasses, or a jacket, for that matter. He was lucky he was wearing shoes when he answered the door.
“Why?” I say. “Because we might not be perfectly physically matched?”
“Morgan—”
“Don’t you understand that that’s the physical reality for literally every other couple everywhere?”
“We aren’t every other couple.”
“Fine,” I say. “So the rules are different for us. We can’t be together because my genetic deformity is slightly smaller than your genetic deformity. That sounds totally realistic and fair.”
“That’s not the point,” he says.
“What is it, then?” I ask. “I’m a Taurus and you’re a Pisces?”
He turns away from me, staring out at the ragged pine fringe on the horizon.
“Just take me home,” he says.
“Where is home?” I ask.
The fight goes out of him. He slumps against the door of the car.
I want to be close to him, but I don’t know how to execute the steps. I say across the car, “Howie, ever since I could talk, I’ve been making excuses for not having what I want. But then, when I met you, I thought maybe I was done with that. Not because of anything you said, or did, but because you made me feel like maybe I could be a different person. A better person. If everything changed tomorrow—if the Hole healed and you never spoke to me again—at least we would have done this thing you’ve wanted to do your whole life.”
Howie says nothing, still staring out at the horizon. I rub my cold nose with my palm, fasten my seat belt. He stares a long time at the stand of loblolly pine cupping the field across the street, and I wonder what it whispers to him, what he’s reading in those tea-leaf shadows. I’m about to start the car, to turn on the heat, when he finally opens the door and climbs inside. I turn on the radio to drown out the silence between us as we head toward Appalachia and our Angel.
43
The directions take us through increasingly small towns. Eventually, the map prompts us to leave the highway, nudging our headlights onto smaller roads and then smaller ones, knotted mountain byways that go by numbers instead of names and change demarcation from town to town.
Dusk falls early in the mountains. Though the sky directly overhead is still bright, darkness has stretched across our feet when we finally turn off the road and begin a steep climb on a narrow, wooded drive. The body of my car squeals through a quarter-mile of scraping limbs, and then the cabin is there, on a flat patch of scrub carved into the side of the mountain. It is small and weathered with a mossy roof, the white wearing from its clapboards. A ladder of wood smoke pitches its way into the sky.
Howie hasn’t spoken in hours. When he asks, “Is this trespassing?” I jump.
“Maybe.” I turn off the car and cinch the emergency brake, climb cautiously from the door. The driveway is just rutted dirt, studded with stones too large to be called rocks and too small to be called boulders.
The air outside is sharp and cold, with a damp smell that is simultaneously strange and familiar. I can hear water running around us, an early snowmelt snaking through leaves.
Howie follows me across the dirt yard. We both hesitate at the front porch, and then I knock twice, loudly. A light within sets a curtain aglow, a faint pink.
I’m lifting my fist to knock again when the cabin door cracks open. We’re assaulted by yapping and the smell of old paper, and an old woman peers out, withered and minute in a worn cotton nightdress.
She is impossibly tiny, blue-eyed and hollow-cheeked, with deep pockets on either side of her mouth. Her forehead, beneath the thin cirrus cloud of her white hair, is furrowed with so many lines that I am tempted to count them. The number would be prime, I feel, or a piece of the golden ratio.
“Helen?” I ask. “Are you Helen Rhees Boyle?”
The woman says, “Yes?”
I say, “We’re looking for the Fallen Angel of Appalachia.”
She starts to close the door, but I jam my foot inside the frame, bones squeezing painfully. “Wait,” I blurt.
“Excuse me,” she says, with the sharp politeness of old Southern women. “Do I know you?”
“No,” I say. Then, “Yes.” I lift my shirt.
The woman stares at me a long time, stares at the mountains beyond and through my body. Her jaw works in her face.
Finally she says, “If I’d a known I was getting company, I’d have put my teeth in.” She steps aside, leaving the door open behind her.
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