We sat in silence.
“Whoa!” Greg said finally.
“I couldn’t tell the mountain rescue people,” I said, “because I didn’t want anyone to start hunting them. You understand? We must keep this secret.”
“That’s not going to be so easy,” Robin remarked, “because of how you look.”
“I still don’t know what my face looks like,” I said. “I tried to see my reflection in the pool, but the wind ruffled the surface.” I couldn’t speak of seeing Kiria’s eyes. Of all the strange experiences I’d been through, that moment seemed the strangest.
“Why don’t you go look in the mirror?” Robin suggested.
I laughed as I got up from the table. “The obvious solution.” But my heart pounded as I walked to the bathroom. I stopped outside the door, not sure I wanted to see my face. Do it, I prodded myself. So I went in, turned on the light, and faced the mirror.
The reflection that looked back at me was so different from the last one I had seen that I barely recognized myself. My white, wispy hair, so thin you could see pink scalp through in places, was now thick gold-brown curls. The flesh of my throat and face was smooth and firm, the line of my jaw clean, my skin lightly tanned, my cheeks and lips rosy with health. No moles, sags, turkey neck, dark shadows, no wrinkles except for a few laugh lines around my eyes. My eyes! The color was not so different. My eyes had always been a changeable blue-green-gray—sea-colored eyes, my father had called them—but now the color was deeper, more luminous. Their shape was only subtly shifted. They were bigger in my face, set a little wider, slightly tilted up at the outer corners. But the whole effect caused me to shiver. They had given me Elirian eyes.
Now I understood the image in the pool. It was not Kiria’s eyes I had seen, but my own.
I was beautiful as I had never been. As a young woman I had been considered pretty, but any grace in my features had been marred by an expression of apologetic self-consciousness. The face that looked back at me now, despite the shock of my changed appearance, had the clear, quiet gaze of an old woman who had spent decades in daily meditation.
“Who am I?” I asked the mirror. My Elirian eyes looked back at me and my inner old woman answered, You know as well as you ever did.
But I can’t go out into the world looking like this, I thought in sudden panic. No one will know me. How will I relate? I backed slowly away from my reflection until I bumped into the towel rack on the wall behind me.
“Mama?” It was Robin outside the door. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I opened the door and buried my face in Robin’s shoulder. “It’s just kind of overwhelming.”
Robin held me tight. “I can understand that, but you’ll get used to it. Come on back now and finish your supper.”
By the time we were done eating, it had grown dark outside the dining room window and was raining softly. The smell of rain on warm pavement drifted into the room, a city smell.
“What about Lisa?” I asked. “Did you tell Lisa I was missing?”
“I called her yesterday morning,” Greg said, “before we left Rob’s. She was frantic that you were lost. I would have contacted her by now, but I can’t get South America on my cell.”
“Oh! Call her right away,” I said. “Use my phone. But, Greg, don’t tell her everything, just that you found me and I’m okay. I’ll tell her the rest, I’ll have to, when she comes for Christmas.”
Greg got up and went to my office. Robin and I sat together at the table. “I called Alice on the way down,” he said. “She was real relieved to hear you’re okay.” He reached out and cupped my cheek. “You look incredibly beautiful, Mama, but you always did, even before.” I laid my hand over his. There was love to be found on Earth, as well as in the sky.
We could hear Greg in the next room. “Hey, Lisa. Just wanted to let you know. We found her. She was coming down the trail behind us this afternoon. She’s okay. Actually she looks pretty good. Give us a call when you get this.” He came back into the dining room. “I left a message. She never answers her phone.”
I got up and began clearing the table. As we washed up, Greg asked, “They healed everything inside you?”
“Everything. I feel incredible. Look.” I squatted in the middle of the kitchen. “Remember my knees?” I jumped up out of the squat as I had on the smooth rock at the head of the valley. “And how about this?” I dropped back into a high arched backbend, my fingertips only inches from my heels, then pushed off with my hands and came back to standing again.
Greg whistled. He knew what it took.
“My heart is stable. And I haven’t had one hundred over sixty blood pressure for years.”
“That’s pretty cool,” Greg commented.
“I’m glad, Mama,” Robin said. “I hated to see you struggling.” He let the dishwater out and began wiping the sink and counter.
Greg piled the last pot on the drainer. “I guess I don’t need to worry about hurrying up here for your funeral in the near future.”
I shivered as I put the tea kettle on. “That’s kind of spooky. It may end up being the other way around. I might outlive you.”
“Don’t rush me,” Greg said. “I’ve got a while yet.”
When we were settled in the living room with our tea, I said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. My friends won’t know me. How am I going to explain this?”
“I know,” Greg suggested. “You lie low for a week or so, then say you’ve been to a spa, gotten a makeover, you know, the works. Face lift, hair color.”
“Hair transplant,” Robin put in. “Her hair’s a lot thicker now.”
They grinned at each other and started tossing it back and forth.
“Boob job.”
“Mole removal.”
“Cosmetic dentistry.” I began to giggle.
“Liposuction.”
“Wheatgrass diet.”
“High coffee enemas.” My giggles became laughter.
“Tummy tuck. You probably don’t need one of those,” Greg said. “You’ve kept your figure pretty well and your body doesn’t look so different in clothes. But, judging by your face, without them… ” He raised an eyebrow.
I blushed.
“You know, Mama,” Robin said. “You have what everyone’s always wanted—the wisdom of age and the strength and beauty of youth. You could set the world on its ear.”
“But I don’t want to set the world on its ear,” I said. “I’m still an old woman inside. I’ve lived a full life. I just want to be quiet, do a little massage, work in my garden, dance sometimes.”
“That could be a conflict,” Greg said. “An identity crisis.”
“It’s already an identity crisis!” I exclaimed. “What am I going to do about basic stuff like ID? Look what happened at the hospital. You were right. It wouldn’t have helped if Robin had gotten my driver’s license. Oh—I must have left it in the car.”
“Do you want me to get it?” Greg asked.
“I will.” I rose easily. “You won’t have to fetch things for me now.” That felt good. I went out to the garage, soft rain on my head, and brought back the little purse that held my driver’s license, a twenty-dollar bill, and my Golden Age card.
We gathered around to look at my license.
“There’s a faint resemblance,” Greg noted. “But I don’t think it’s going to work as a photo ID.”
I sighed. “What am I going to do? I need a photo ID everywhere, to cash a check, to get on an airplane.”
“Don’t try to figure it out tonight,” Greg said. “We’ve done enough for one day. You’re found and home and well. And I’m pooped.”
“You must be.” I felt penitent, asking them to solve my problems after all they’d done. “You guys have been great, searching for me, helping me, everything. I’ll make a bed up for you downstairs, Greg.”
We all stood. Robin embraced me. “I should get on home. Alice will be wondering where I am, and tomorrow I need to get back to school.”
Later, as he hugged me good night, Greg said, “What I was saying about identity crisis goes a little deeper, I think, than your driver’s license.”
I shivered with premonition. “I think it does.”
Chapter 5
I took Greg’s advice and laid low for a week. The first day, I puttered around putting away my hiking gear, marveling with every move how easy it was to bend, to pick up, to reach. My ambivalence at being young faded into the background, and joy flooded through me. I can dance again, I thought, without getting tired and having my knees ache. I bet I could dance all night the way those crazy young tangueros do. And I’ll be able to hike higher than I have for a long time. I can go to the pass again, and the glacier, and all the other places I love that I haven’t been to for years.
For the next few days, I tore into the garden and began clearing up years of neglect. I had kept it going, planting a few things in the spring, watering it, but mostly it had gone wild. Annuals had reseeded themselves—pink and purple cosmos, gold and orange calendulas, snapdragons of many colors, heavenly blue morning glories climbing the side of the garage, spilling down over the tomatoes. Perennials had spread—roses grown taller than I, clematis tumbling off its trellis, ice plant, violets, and sweet woodruff everywhere underfoot. I weeded, pruned, fertilized, transplanted, put in bulbs for the next spring, turned the compost pile, and reveled in the beauty of flowers and the dark, rich smell of earth. Best of all, I could squat while I worked and stand up easily to move to the next place.
I walked every day, sometimes around the lake, sometimes over the hills. Occasionally on my walks, I met acquaintances and stopped to chat with them. I could see on their faces a look I knew I had often worn when I met former clients in the grocery store. That look says as loud as words, I think I know you, but I just can’t place you. I watched it with amusement and a pang of guilt, but didn’t feel ready to reveal myself. So we’d exchange greetings, remark on the weather, and move on.
Within the week I was back in the high country. I hiked all the way to the pass, climbing the switchbacks on the rock face I had looked at with such longing on my birthday, and stood on the continental divide, my heart soaring in the wind. No storms came that day. On the way down, I stopped again in my special place and lingered until twilight.
Wherever I walked, I thought about the gift of my renewed life, especially about the gift of beauty. Beauty had been a huge issue for me all my life. Early on, I had formed the belief that I would be loved only if I were beautiful. This was reinforced by my devotion to fairytales as a young girl, identifying with the beautiful princess awaiting her prince. I longed for a quality of love I had missed as an infant with an impatient mother who did not pick me up when I cried or understand how to nurture me. All my life I sought that mother love, futilely, through a man, a prince, who would cherish me and not abandon me. And I believed beauty was the key to win him.
As I aged, I mourned the appearance of each new blemish, the sagging of flesh, the deepening of wrinkles, and believed myself less and less lovable as my youthfulness faded. I had the sense to stay away from plastic surgery and soon discovered that too much makeup made me look like an old tart, but I spent a lot of money on wrinkle creams and was obsessive about keeping my figure. Friends told me age had made me more lovely, that my white hair was a like a halo around my face, that my eyes were radiant, but I never believed them.
Only in the last ten years had I broken the myth and accepted my aging face and body, my unmanageable wispy white hair—all of it.
Now I had the beauty I would have died for, and I didn’t need it anymore. I’d made peace with my singleness and didn’t want to attract a man. I was an old woman, done with all that.
Now the beauty I had been given felt somewhat dangerous. I wanted to hide it, diminish it. Beauty attracts, and I’d always fallen in love too easily with anyone who desired me. Off I’d go on the romance roller coaster. Only that roller coaster was not like the ones in amusement parks where you step off safely at the end of the ride. My roller coasters always crashed and broke my heart.
Would I be any wiser now?
There was the problem of the driver’s license.
I was nervous about that and entertained various disaster scenarios. The officials at the driver’s license bureau would never believe the makeover story. I could tell them I needed a new license because my old one had expired. But it hadn’t, as they would discover as soon as they found me on their computer. They would arrest me for attempted identity theft.
Finally, in my second week home, I came up with a plan. I called the driver’s license office and asked what to do if I lost my license. I would need my social security card, the man told me, and proof of my address. I’d have to take an eye test and pay twenty-five dollars. I might have to wait; the line was long.
Okay, I thought, that doesn’t sound too hard. I gathered my courage, put a book in my purse, and went. When I arrived, I took a number and sat down to wait in one of the rows of chairs. The book distracted me, which was fortunate, because I had plenty of time to be nervous. It was three hours before my number came up.
Heart pounding, I stepped up to the counter, my social security card and proof of address clutched in my hand. The clerk was pale, her lank dark hair pushed back behind her ear, her skin pocked. She didn’t look at me. I explained my plight, and handed her my Social Security card and a bank statement with my address on it. She still didn’t look at me. She looked at her computer.
“Clara Norwood?”
“Yes.”
“Address: 7 Moss Rock Road, Boulder, 80304?” Her voice sounded like a recording.
“Yes.”
“Birthdate August 30, 1931?”
I sucked in my breath. “Yes.”
She still didn’t look at me. “Place of birth Boston, Massachusetts, USA?”
“That’s right.”
She tapped away on her computer. I realized I was tense, biting my lower lip. I let my breath out quietly. It seemed I had lucked into a zombie clerk.
She ran me through the eye test, still without giving me a glance. “Sit over there.” She gestured toward a row of chairs against the far wall. “They’ll call you for your picture.”
I sat as directed, pulled out my book, and held it in front of my face, repressing a rush of unruly giggles. The zombie clerk. She never even looked at me.
The stout, mustached man taking the pictures, however, did look at me. He looked me over from head to foot. I was glad I had dressed modestly.
“Stand right here,” he directed, sweeping me with his glance again. He stroked his mustache. “Now smile.”
My usual tactic for ID pictures was to keep a sober face, but he would have none of that. “No, no. Not such a serious look. I bet you have a fabulous smile. Come on.”
I gave in and smiled.
“Beautiful. When you have a smile like that you shouldn’t hold back. Pretty eyes.” He was definitely hitting on me. He looked into his camera. “Perfect. Great picture.” He left his camera and went behind his desk. “Here’s your ID and your temporary license.”
I walked up to his desk. His hand lingered on mine as he handed me the papers. “You’re all set now. Your permanent license should arrive in the mail within two weeks. If it doesn’t, come on back here and let me know, hear?”
“Thank you,” I said coolly, turned, and left. Outside in my car I let the giggles loose and all my nervousness with them. I laughed until tears ran down my cheeks. One not looking and the other looking at the wrong thing, neither had seen the incongruity between my face and my birth date.
My voice mail and email were loaded with calls and letters. Apparently there had been a report in the local paper that I was missing, then
another one saying I’d been found, that I’d been hit by lightning and had amnesia. I simply didn’t deal with all those messages for a while. One thing I’d learned as I grew old was that not everything was an emergency. But the calls kept coming, so I began to answer them, refused to speak with a reporter, and reassured my small circle of friends I was okay, just needing to be quiet for a while.
Then on Tuesday evening of the second week I was home, I got a call from Martha, a client I’d been massaging for many years, every other Wednesday at four. She was younger than I, still in her sixties, one of the few clients I kept working with because I loved her and she needed my help to ease her chronic pain.
“I read in the paper you’d been lost in the mountains,” she said. “The second article said you’d been struck by lightning. How are you? We have an appointment tomorrow? Are you okay to work?”
“I’m fine. I’ll see you at four as usual.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be there then. I’m looking forward to it.”
Now I’m in for it, I told myself after I hung up. She’s not going to have trouble placing me, not walking into my studio.
The next afternoon at four, I heard the doorbell, and went downstairs to my studio. I had put on a shirt Martha would recognize because she’d often said she liked it. She was already there when I entered the waiting room, her back turned as she took off her shoes.
“Hi, Martha.” My voice at least was the same.
She turned, smiling. “Hi.” She stepped back. “Oh. I’m looking for Clara. We have a session scheduled for four.”
Never Again Page 7