“You could have told me,” I say.
“Maybe,” she says. “But it feels like there was no right answer.”
All this helps me connect the dots between my parents’ ongoing mourning and my own reservations about speaking up or speaking out. I was a quiet, careful child who learned to step gently in the world. I hadn’t thought of it for years, but now I remember going to bed at night in grade school, for months straight, feeling like the planet itself would unravel if either of my parents were to die.
“I guess we felt like we didn’t want your life tied to that night,” Mom says. “After the accident, the doctors said you were in perfect health. But it was hard to believe in anything when Joshua was on life support. You came a month early, and six days after that, Joshua slipped away. I remember holding you that night. Our sweet little pea who’d come early, in a hurry to save us.”
My mother puts her hand on my knee and holds it there. Warmth spreads all through my leg. I feel ashamed for all the times she was made to suffer while I denied her, over and over, by not coming home these past years. And upset that I didn’t know about Joshua decades ago.
“I nearly missed all this,” I say.
“But you didn’t,” she says, and gently squeezes my leg. With her free hand, she turns backward through the plastic pages, some that need to be pried apart. “And we cannot allow ourselves to live a life of what-ifs.”
But don’t I? Every day. Wondering what-if, with Sarah.
“Oh, here,” she says at the sight of two pictures of a man, on Christmas morning. In one, he’s sitting with his back to an ornamented tree. In another, he’s stuffing a fistful of wrapping paper in his mouth.
“Is that him?” I ask.
“That’s Carl,” she says.
“He looks nice.”
“He was every single kindness,” she says. “I remember taking these pictures. I remember that morning. I was six weeks pregnant with Helen.”
“Helen?” I ask. My first thought is: please, please, don’t let my mother have suffered the death of another of her children.
She nods, and puts her thumb on the picture, over her stomach.
“Six weeks after this was taken—I don’t know if it was fatigue, or just bad luck—there was a crippling sting, then a shriek of blood. I miscarried, and Helen was gone.”
Mom looks at me, her lips pressed tight together. She nods and says, “I cried and cried, and Carl never wavered. ‘I’m here,’ he said. ‘I’m here. I’m right here.’ I was so young then. I still believed the world was limitless. That God had gifted the three of us forever.”
My mother’s weak arms struggle to lift the heavy album to her face. She kisses the picture of Carl with wrapping paper in his mouth, then gives another kiss to her belly. She flips forward and finds Joshua standing in the snow, and kisses that one, too. Then closes the album.
“I don’t want to leave you, or your father, who has been perfect in the face of all storms,” my mother says to me, her voice swelling so she has to swallow. “But it gives me so much relief that I’ll see them all very soon.” Mom stares down at the closed album, then leans forward for her half-filled mug of chamomile. She can’t reach, so I hand her the cup. She takes the smallest sip. “And if it doesn’t work that way, then I guess I’ll just die,” she says. “But at least I get to take them with me.”
Twenty-Nine
In the grocery store near my parents’ house, my father and I shop for Mom’s Last Supper. We’re standing mid-aisle for minutes, my father staring at all of the macaroni and cheese options, until I ask, “Dad? You okay?”
“Is this the good one?” he asks, and grabs a no-flash box labeled with the word “organic,” instead of holding up the noisier option that promises to pack a Bigger! Cheeeeesier! Wallop Than Ever Before!
“I’m sure it’s fine,” I say.
“You used to love spirals,” he says, like everything is far away. “You eat those anymore?”
“Dad, you sure you’re okay?”
He holds the organic box of mac and cheese in both hands and tells me, “I just want to get this right.”
My father drops the box in the cart, then walks away. The cart between us, I watch him move, a slight sway to his steps, the look of a lost child.
I grip the shopping cart handle like I’m revving it, and feel a gentle sting at the back of my left wrist. I see the burn from yesterday, when I pulled the frozen pizza from the oven without care. I study the oven’s mark. This brown-purple V. This oversize sear freckle. This commemorative stamp of my mother’s passing. I hope it stays. I hope it scars.
I push the cart an aisle over, where my father studies the shelves for All-New Flavor Crystals! and Twice the Taste, HALF the Price!
“This is all made by the same people,” he says, waving at the filled shelves. “And it’s all crap. But we buy it all the same. Let’s grab some fresh fish, then double back for the rest.”
My father walks away, toward the back of the store, and I follow.
“Your mother and I agree that Sarah is a very good egg,” he says to me. “And I know it does your mother a world of good to know that once she’s gone, you won’t be alone.”
And there’s something in his tone that’s a tell: Dad’s figured out that Sarah isn’t really Sarah. That Elsa’s a fill-in, playing make-believe.
We arrive at the seafood counter, where we gaze through arched, clear windows at an assortment of headless fish positioned on half-inch-wide nuggets of white ice.
A stout woman trudges over, white smock, white hat, hands covered in cheap, ill-fitting, translucent gloves. Her lips look more purple than pink. “What can I help you with?” she says.
“Tilapia was a symbol of rebirth in Egyptian art,” my father tells her. “So let’s go with that. Enough for four.”
The woman nods, then reaches down and opens the door to the fish without dipping her head below counter level. I watch her hand feel around before it locks on to two filets. She backs up and slaps them onto a wide rectangle of yellow paper before she goes back in for two more.
“Your mother’s been wanting to die for a long time,” he tells me.
“Excuse me?” the woman behind the counter says.
“His mother,” my father says, and gestures to me. I hold my breath, afraid he’ll repeat what he’s just told me. Afraid someone else will know. “We’re making her dinner.”
I exhale, trying to make zero noise.
“Growing up, I showed you too good of an example of how to be removed,” Dad says. “Or at least distant. Which is a useless shame. But you lucked out. There’s way more of your mother in you than me. Which is why I knew you’d come home.”
I look down. I took so long. I took too long.
“Don’t beat yourself up, though I know you will,” he says. “But understand that every day you stayed away was another day with her.”
The woman behind the counter has wrapped, taped, and price-tagged the fish. She watches, intently. “Sir,” she says, when she decides my father is finished.
Dad faces her, and she slides the package toward him. He takes it and looks at the price tag, like there’s some secret hidden in the numbers. She turns her attention onto me, so I force a smile in her direction. Satisfied, she looks at my father, who turns and heads down the nearest aisle, the package of fish in his hands. I don’t immediately go. I turn my back and look the length of the counter at the bright fluorescent lights maxing out every color: the orange-pink salmon, the tuna’s gel-like deep red, the snowy silver whitefish. I breathe in the congesting sea scent and consider the impact of my twofold past. Raised as an only child, but really I’m the second of two children. Wait, no. There’s Helen. By Mom’s count, I’m the last of three.
I push the cart toward Dad. He’s eyeballing spaghetti sauce injected with More Flavor Than EVER! that has The Freshest In
gredients You’ll Find Anywhere!
“Dad?” I say when I get close. “Dad?”
He turns with a tired, “Huh?”
“Why the name Helen?”
“Helen?” His brow creases. The rows of red sauce are so ruby and rich and savory and fantastic-tasting that lined up like this, they look absolutely bland.
“Helen,” I say, enforcing her name’s first syllable, making it obvious that this is his wife’s miscarried daughter. “Is it a family name?”
“I don’t know how you mean,” he says. But what he means is he doesn’t know whom I mean.
“Oh, shit,” I say, and take a sudden, distracted interest in the sixty frozen Paul Newman faces smiling at me from spaghetti sauce labels.
“Who’s Helen, Thomas?”
“Let’s get home,” I say, feeling the sudden press of time. Every moment we’re away from my mother, we’ll never get back—the minutes of her life quickly dwindling.
“We should have sent Sarah,” I say, buying into the lie for my mother’s sake. “Why are we even here, really? We need to go.”
I start to wheel the cart toward the store’s front, and my father grabs my shoulder hard.
“Tell me,” he says.
“You need to ask Mom,” I say, and he looks at me with such rich sadness. “It’s fine, Dad. Everything is fine. I just really want to be home with Mom, now.”
I look at my father who gazes into the cart, empty save for this dinner’s necessities and packaging flooded with false, exclamatory promises. Life as he’s lived it, for so long, is hours from vanishing.
I push the cart toward the front of the store, and Dad follows. As we near the end of the aisle, the store opens wide. Beyond the stretch of registers, I see the multiple exits ahead. My mother dies if I go home. But if I leave town now, maybe I save her. If I rush out of one of those doors, maybe she recovers and goes right on living. All I have to do is run. Run and run and never stop running.
Thirty
My mother’s last supper in full swing, Mom talks freely and cheerily about her past, including living in Germany, where her father was stationed. I listen with fascinated interest as she tells Elsa, “I was sixteen and no way would my father let me drive.”
I try to gauge my father’s reaction, but he’s smiling. Even though tomorrow, he’s a widow.
“Back then he’d be gone a month at a time,” my mother says. “And once, my mother went back to America without me to take care of her own mother, who was ill. So I was on my own. When Daddy left, he took the car keys, so I was held hostage in Frankfurt. Which, I have to say, is no great shakes at any age.”
I add up my mother’s children on my fingers. My thumb is Joshua. I name my pinkie Helen. My index finger is me.
My mom says to me, “The Thomas you were named after was my cousin, who was in the Army.” Then to everyone: “Tommy Fox and his wife were stationed in Heidelberg. Only sixty-five miles away, but I had no way to get to them. Until a friend of mine on base, a sympathizer, showed me what I could do with two hairpins.”
I want to know what Elsa’s face is doing, what my father’s expression is, but my mother holds me with her sunken eyes. “So a week after my father had gone, I went out to the car, took those two hairpins and hot-wired the son of a bitch!”
We all laugh along with my mother, a celebration of her boldness, her joyful retelling. But her excitement turns into stalled breath followed by coughing. We all go quiet while she brings her clenched fist to her throat and forces a swallow. After a resigned moan, I’m thinking: there won’t need to be a pill overdose. No point of a lethal injection. Things will end soon enough for her all on their own.
“After that,” Mom continues quietly, “I headed to Heidelberg.”
I look at my mother, her body a failing echo, her skin inked with pain. If this is her Last Supper, then we are the apostles. I look around the table. First, to my father, silent and drawn. Then Elsa, all forced smiles and desperation. When I use the back of a spoon to see my warped reflection, I think: I refused to come home, so that’s one betrayal. Two is I haven’t told my mother the truth about Sarah. Is there a third?
Everyone’s plate but my mother’s is filled with broiled tilapia, buttery mashed potatoes, and string beans drizzled with soy sauce. A half hour before dinner, her arm wrapped into my arm, my mother said to me in confidence, “Don’t give me too much, I don’t want to barf all over the table.” Her small portion of fish, small enough to disappear with one big fork scoop.
“But on the way to Heidelberg I started getting worried I’d be pulled over,” Mom says. “So I pulled off in Darmstadt and found the German equivalent of the DMV, so I could get my driver’s license.”
I look at my father and think: Not dodging a steamrolling semi is one betrayal. Being a quiet ghost is two. For him, is there a three?
“So I’m driving with this instructor in the stolen car, whipping right through the test,” my mother says. “I’m on the right side of the road—in Germany you’re on the right side, same as America. But then I stall the car while parallel parking—the damn thing was a stick shift. I tried to restart it, but of course there’s no key! I nearly shit.”
My mother and her grand theft auto has Elsa enthralled. For Elsa I think: The first betrayal is coming here. Posing as Sarah is two. What’s three?
“So right in front of the driving instructor I reach down, fiddle with the hairpins. The car started right up. And if you can believe it, he passed me!” Elsa spurts a laugh of disbelief. “I couldn’t believe it, either.”
My mother, smiling, scoops up the last of her fish, guides it into her mouth, and chews.
I look around the table and think: What is the third betrayal?
I look at my mother and think: Hiding your past for my entire life is one. Asking your child and husband to kill you is two. But three?
My mother chews with weak teeth, a weak jaw, her entire body a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. The cancer has stretched out its arms and legs. It’s in her bones and stomach. It’s in her liver and what’s left of her uterus. It crowds her lungs.
I try a bite of the fish. It’s gummy and cool.
My mother notices that I’ve taken a bite, and that no one else has in too long. “Good, Thomas,” she says and pats my wrist, then holds on to it. The faltering control of her mouth works into a smile. “Thank you.”
Followed by the brief, fractured song of cutlery on plates as we, nearly in unison, all take a bite.
My mother’s still-flickering eyes look over at Elsa, who she thinks is Sarah. Elsa’s pushing a green bean with the tines of her fork when my father asks, “Rosemary, who’s Helen?”
“Oh, Marty.”
“Don’t ‘Oh, Marty’ me,” my father says.
“Like it matters at this point. But she was my daughter. Or would have been. But I miscarried. It happened a very long time ago.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Dad says, visibly hurt.
“I don’t know,” my mother says. “Maybe she was only mine.”
“You could have told me.”
“I know.”
My father looks down at his plate for only a moment.
“Look at me, Marty. Please.”
Their eyes have already met. His are darkened and teary. Hers are jaundiced and at peace. What she wants him to remember is context. And now we’ve all got it. Look at me. There’s no room or need for fault. Not anymore. Now her body is a framework of broken-down parts eager to expire that should have been given relief long ago.
In this way, near the end of my mother’s final dinner, the third betrayal is revealed to me. I look around the table at my mother, my father, at Elsa. But there is no hope of shifting blame to these three, the unassailable. I am the one that did not let my mother die.
The third and final betrayal: it is all mine.<
br />
Thirty-One
My mother leads us up the stairs to her bedroom—my father, Elsa, then me. Her fragile legs work slowly. She’s in no rush and wants no help.
Three-quarters of the way up, a throat-stripping cough stops her. She pulls a Kleenex from the pocket of her mauve terrycloth robe and spits a gurgle of phlegm into it the way she always has: by licking the Kleenex, moving the mess from her tongue to paper. I watch the transfer closely. There’s no blood. She balls the Kleenex up and tucks it into her pocket.
“Rosie?” my father says and stops.
“Marty?” my mother says back, only a stair above him.
“Can you not do this, please?” he says quietly.
My mother leans into my father’s arms, an embrace. “I know you don’t mean it,” she says, her face over his shoulder. “We both know I have to go.”
Dad looks at me, so I’ll say something.
I look at my mother’s scalp, beneath fragile strands of drained hair. Her withered outline. This time, I don’t argue. This time, I show mercy.
“What am I supposed to do?” Dad says.
Elsa’s uneasy. She looks away from my parents, then turns and takes a step down the stairs toward me, in a clear attempt to avoid this premortem melodrama.
“No,” I say. I don’t let Elsa pass, won’t let her escape unscathed from what’s soon coming.
To her credit, she doesn’t put up a fight. She simply closes her eyes, inhales a deep breath, then turns back in the direction of upstairs, of my embracing parents.
“I made notes for you,” Mom says to my father. Which explains why the coffee pot has instructions on a 3x5 note card taped to it:
MAKING COFFEE
Remove coffee filter.
Pour in 2 ½ cups of water.
Put ¾ of a scoop of coffee in a filter.
Place filter in top of machine.
Hit red button.
Wait.
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