“She does that now,” he says, and takes notice when I sit in Mom’s armchair, instead of on the couch next to Elsa-as-Sarah. “Does she bite?” Dad asks me.
“Once in a while,” Elsa says, and glances at me, then looks down.
“And your parents,” Dad starts. “What do they do?”
“My father’s an industrial engineer,” Elsa says, as she creates an all-new Sarah. A Sarah I’ve never met. “And Mom helps organize democratic political campaigns.”
“And now you work caring for children?”
“Adults, actually. I teach art therapy to people who have experienced trauma.”
•••
Soon enough, Elsa rises and asks my father if he’d like more tea. He shakes his head and says no thanks.
“I would,” I say. “I’ll help you make it.”
Elsa picks up my father’s empty mug and her own, then I follow her into the kitchen. Once we’re out of my father’s sightline, her head goes down and she beelines to the sink. She rinses the mugs, and once the faucet’s off she turns and I say quietly, so my dad can’t hear, “You being here is insane.”
“Look, I really am very sorry. But your father asked me to come.”
“Great!” I say, all sarcastic.
“He kept calling me Sarah.”
“And why not fly two thousand miles under false pretenses to continue a batshit lie?”
Elsa’s brow clouds. She crosses her arms tight across her chest. “We didn’t know how much longer she had left.”
“We!” I say. “Holy shit.”
“Your mother’s so happy you’re here,” she says.
“Well, yeah, of course she’s happy, because now she gets to die.”
Elsa squeezes herself even tighter with her arms.
“I’ll leave,” she says. “I’ll pack up now and go.”
I laugh. “And how’s that going to look?” I say. Then I get mean. “Now you’re here until the bitter end.”
The oven timer beep-beep-beeps. Elsa makes a move, but I take a long stride toward the oven so she stops.
“I put a pizza in,” she says. I’m about to chastise her for making herself at home, but I soften when she says, “So none of us forget to eat.”
I press the timer off, and without opening the oven door all the way I slide a cookie sheet between the crust and the rack. The back of my left wrist touches the inside of the oven door and sizzles. Quick like a gasp, I say, “Fuck!” and let go of the cookie sheet with a clang.
“You okay?” Elsa asks.
“Yeah,” I say, looking at my wrist, waiting for the pain.
“Everything all right?” Dad asks, and makes his way in from the living room.
“Yes,” I say. “Everything is A-plus-plus.”
“I told her we could order Imo’s,” Dad says. “But as long as you still have your hand, I guess this’ll do.”
•••
It’s around dusk when Mom slowly descends the stairs. I meet her at the bottom, and she gives me two kisses on my right cheek. Then she shuffles into the living room, takes Elsa by the wrists, and looks her in the eye. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she says.
“Me, too,” Elsa says followed by a smile that collapses as soon as she sees me.
Mom eases onto the couch and, when she’s settled, she pats the cushion next to her, an invitation. I sit as close to her as I can without cramping.
Dad comes in with a mug of chamomile and sets it on the coffee table in front of Mom.
“Now?” Mom asks him, as Dad sits.
“Now, what?” I ask her.
“Now, sure,” Dad says.
Mom does a little wriggle next to me to straighten up, and Dad uncrosses his legs, breathes in deep, then lets out a smooth, concentrated exhale. Both clear signals that we’re about to embark on something major.
Which I am not ready for, and it fills me with panic.
“Mom?” I say, and I sit up, too.
She hears the alarm in my voice and says, “It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” I say.
“What’s up?” Elsa says, with an expression of clear unease.
“Your mother just wants to talk,” Dad says.
I push my hands into the couch cushions, press my heels into the carpet, an attempt to slow time, to stop it.
“I told you about a year ago that I couldn’t do this without seeing you again,” Mom says.
“Mom, please,” I say, and now I can’t catch my breath.
“Sweetheart,” Mom says, and puts her hand on my leg, which calms me. Then she turns to me and takes my face in her hands and kisses me on the cheek. “My sweet,
sweet Thomas.”
I nod, and she takes her hands away.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she says. “Not tonight. I just want to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“Everything.”
I look at Dad for a clue, but he’s just nodding at me with a pleasant expression. Then I turn to Mom. “I don’t know what that means.”
“You’re about to,” Dad says.
I look down to check in. My breathing’s mellowed, and my hands have stopped shaking.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
Then I look up and see Elsa fidgeting.
“Wait,” I say. “Sarah doesn’t need to hear all this.”
Elsa takes the cue, and stands abruptly. “Yeah, I’ll just go upstairs.”
“Sit,” Mom says to her. “Please.”
“I can’t,” Elsa says and turns like she’s going to go, but then stops. Her eyes flash my way, but all I can offer is a blank expression. But it’s my mother’s face, my mother’s nod, that withers any inkling of an exit, and Elsa collapses back into her chair.
“I imagine you two share everything, anyway,” Mom says. “This saves you from having to repeat it all later.”
Then she takes a cleansing breath, and begins.
Twenty-Six
Thirty-nine years ago, your mother falls in love with her first love. A man who’s twenty-three, older than she is by two years. It’s storybook. This man, Carl Mixen, is everything to your mother and she is everything to him. Three months later, they’re married.
Carl is so happy, and so is your mother.
This is your mother, and you aren’t born yet.
Three weeks later, a call from the hospital: Carl’s been in a car accident. No one’s hurt. No one’s dead. But something in his brain has balloon burst and half of him is stripped down to body without movement. Your mother goes to the hospital where the doctor tells her, “He should have never married, his brain the way it is. Aneurysms.” The word, frightening alien speak.
At night, in the dark, your mother holds Carl in her arms and tells him how much she loves him. “I’m here,” she says. “I’m right here.”
Carl’s mouth is never a full smile; still he glows because of his good luck. This is how the man your mother loves thinks of himself: Lucky. His beatific life, ending in three, two, one aneurysms.
Fast forward three years to Carl’s next-to-final aneurysm. Your mother saying: “Don’t go, please. Stay with me. You’re all I have.” Carl is crippled movement. He is slurred speech. I’m here, he mouths. I’m right here.
Fast-forward four months to your sleeping mother snapping awake. It’s 6:00 a.m. She whispers Carl’s name into the empty room. She moves through their house silent and finds Carl, motionless in the hallway. This is your mother’s life. Her first love, an empty body. Her first love, now gone.
Two years pass. Your mother is slow-moving with a wounded heart. She works as a secretary and a receptionist. She makes ends meet.
Then, with no fireworks or sense of fate, she meets a man named Martin Arnold who is kind enough, who is loving enough, who is enough en
ough.
Martin and your mother marry. With Martin, your mother is soon pregnant. She misses Carl. But here, a new life brewing. Nine months and this new child—Joshua—is born.
Time passes, and there is another child on the way. We’ll call this child Thomas. We’ll call this child you.
It is January. You are still in the womb. Your family inside a sedan. The roads are slick and the tires find a patch of black ice. The car glides and sways and the back end collides with a truck with one, two, three, eighteen wheels.
A miracle, then: everyone survives. Your mother, your father, Joshua, and in-the-womb you. But. Joshua’s head is smashed so badly he can only breathe while on a machine. The doctors say lots of things, but they can be summed up by: It’s only a matter of time.
Your mother, this poor woman. Your mother’s lone living son is counting down. His arms twisted sticks. Legs purple and knotted. Tick tock.
This is your mother’s life, what’s left of it.
Then comes you. A post-traumatic stress birth. A premature breach birth. Followed by so much blood. Concerns that neither you nor she will make it. Emergency surgery, then her tubes tied. The last child your mother will ever have. Thomas.
Six days after you’re born, Joshua, your brother, passes.
This is how your mother lived another life that didn’t include you. This is what she tells you, your mother, while your father and Elsa look on silent.
This is your mother telling you secrets she’s never told you before. This is why she stayed alive while you were too afraid to let her die.
You put your arms around your mother so tight it feels like she’s crumbling. Tomorrow, after an early dinner, now that you’re home and she has told you what there is to tell, you will help her die.
So here you are, repeating the same two words—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—as you’re hugging her, and she is holding you. To counter your two words, she says two words of her own. Over and over. “I know,” she says. “I know. I know. I know.”
Twenty-Seven
After Mom’s turned in and Elsa’s upstairs in the queen bed I slept in until I was eighteen, Dad and I sit in the living room’s low light.
“You okay?” Dad asks.
“Heartbroken,” I say. “Shell-shocked.” He nods and scratches his nose with a knuckle.
“What your mother told you,” he says. “I want you to know we weren’t trying to hide anything from you.”
“I think I get it,” I say quietly, because I think I do.
Plus, so much is clear, now. The quiet in the house when I was young. January’s month-long candlelight vigils. A reluctance to drive in inclement weather. Full hugs from my mother that would go on so long. And my father’s trancelike silences that I’d feel guilty to interrupt, though every time I did his warmth was immediate.
“We wanted to protect you,” Dad says. “Losing your brother…” He pauses, and his eyes momentarily close while his hands fold together over his belly, as if in prayer. He forces an exhale through his nose. “I don’t talk about it. For years we talked through it, but now it’s something between us that’s not spoken. I haven’t said his name in twenty years.”
“I wish I’d met him,” I say.
“Oh, me, too.”
Joshua, my brother who I’ll never know. I imagine him full-grown, someone I could meet, now that I know he exists. But he never saw his fifth birthday; he’s been dead thirty-three years.
“It’s late,” Dad says, without a glance at his watch, or turning to see the clock on the wall behind him. “Or it’s getting there.” He stands and looks at Mom’s tea mug, alone on the table.
“I’ll clean up,” I say.
“Don’t,” he says, eyes still on the mug. “And I mean that. Leave it, please.”
I tell him I will, then I tell him goodnight.
“Tomorrow is a big day,” he says. “A very, very big day.”
•••
When I enter my bedroom, Elsa’s in the en suite, so I scratch around the burn on my wrist that stings like an itch. I turn it toward the light to see the blotch of shiny skin and the curl of a few toasted hairs.
A fire ignites in me when Elsa comes out of the bathroom, quiet, and says, “Let me see.”
“No,” I say, spiteful. Then I sit on the bed I’m forced to share with a total stranger so my mother can continue to make believe she’s Sarah.
“I’m sorry, okay? I’m really, really sorry,” Elsa says and stops at the foot of the bed. “I know my being here is crazy, and that I’m in the way, but I swear I came here because I was trying to help.” She pushes her fingertips into her hair. “I mean I am at your freakin’ parents’ house, in the suburbs of St. Louis,” she says. Her arms flop to her sides. “What the fuck am I doing?”
“I don’t know,” I fire back, unforgiving. “I seriously have no idea.”
Elsa walks to her side of the bed, and turns her back to me. “This is just way too much, and I am in way too deep.”
“Why did you come?”
“I guess because your mother sounded lost on the phone,” Elsa says, and crosses her arms. “She was dying, and I wanted to give her comfort.”
I don’t move. I just stare at her.
“And…and probably because this whole thing gained momentum out of nowhere.” She turns away from me, then back. “Before I knew it, it was a runaway thing I couldn’t get off.”
“But you. Why did you come?”
“Because I’m a little Goody Two-shoes who’s always believed if the moment presented itself, I could save the day.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not,” she says, and turns to me.
“But you are getting warmer,” I say, because there’s more, something she doesn’t want to say. “But who pretends to be someone else and fly two thousand miles? That’s specific to you, and it’s not sane.”
“Sane? Who sits by while their dying mother fades to nothing?” Elsa says and her eyes go wet. “She’s in so much pain—she’s been in so much pain. She begged you to come home, and you waited and waited, for what?”
She wipes under both her eyes with a swipe of her index finger.
“The real reason, the really real reason, is I’m here because you didn’t have the guts to come. And someone had to.”
“I’m here,” I say, the thinnest defense. But I know she’s right.
Then the sound of her cell phone ringing, a low series of beeps, from downstairs.
“Somebody’s phone,” my father says from down the hall.
Elsa exhales, clumsily opens the door, and leaves it open after she exits. I hear her hurried steps down the carpeted stairs, and as she’s coming back up, I hear her voice downshift into inaudible whisper.
When she’s back in my room, she closes the door and hands me her phone.
“Who is it?” I ask.
Drained, she jabs the phone at me like, Just take it.
I answer with an unsure hello.
“Why is your phone going straight to voicemail?” Ryan asks.
“I guess it died?”
“Well, charge it.”
“How did you know Elsa was here?” I ask him.
“What do you mean?” he says. “I said on your voicemail she was on her way.” The voicemail I never got around to checking.
“And how did you know she was coming here?” I ask as I look up at Elsa, who’s pacing back and forth with her arms crossed, chewing at the tip of her right thumb.
“Because we talk every day?”
“What?”
“What ‘what’?” Ryan says.
I suddenly feel like I’m part of a murder mystery, and this is the moment I realize that every person I see on stage, everyone involved, is somehow—until now, unbeknownst to me—connected.
“Is eve
rything okay?” Ryan asks me.
“Everything’s fucking brilliant,” I tell him. “My mom’s been decimated by my inaction, and a total stranger, pretending to be the love of my life, just tore into me.”
“You’re home,” he says, trying to soothe me.
“Great,” I breathe out, feeling defeated.
“You can’t see it now, but it is great.”
“Is it?” I ask. “Because tomorrow I get to see my mom again. Then after dinner, I never get to see her again.”
Twenty-Eight
After a fresh-fruit breakfast, Mom and I sit alone on the couch, a blanket over her legs. A photo album on her lap.
“Here he is when he was two,” she says, and points to a picture of Joshua. He’s standing in snow up to his ankles, a branch in his right hand and a wool cap over his ears. I search for signs that he looks like me. But he looks like any child, really. Unformed and sweet.
My mother runs her thumb over the picture. I can feel her remembering.
When the spell breaks, I ask her, “Where were these pictures when I was young?”
“We didn’t want to confuse you,” she says. “So once you started walking, we kept the pictures deep in drawers and put his clothing in boxes in the attic.”
“You hid them away?” I ask. “And not just from me, but from yourselves.”
“That’s not how it was,” Mom says. “Memories of him were everywhere. He was never hidden from us. Year after year, your father and I would talk about going up to the attic and paring his things down to those essential, heart-aching items we couldn’t let go. But we never did throw anything away. Why put ourselves through having to choose? Your father can show you, if you want. But it always takes him a day to recover. As for the pictures, we looked at them when we could stand it. When you were in bed, or at school.”
“I remember the candles,” I say.
“We still do it. All of January,” she says. “We keep a town full of candlemakers in business.”
When I was young I’d asked why they lit candles, and my parents told me the same thing every year: “To remember those we’ve lost.” I never asked for specifics, and since all of my grandparents had passed before I was born, I assumed the candles were for them.
Collision Theory Page 8