I'll Be You(28)

I stood on the back porch, watching. “I can feel you breathing, you know,” she said, eyes still closed. “It makes it hard to focus.” She sighed and rose stiffly, wiping dust from her rear.

“If your hips are so bad, maybe you should be sitting in a chair instead,” I observed.

“I like to be closer to the earth,” she said, waggling her fingertips toward the dirt, and gave me a significant look. “I can feel it on a deeper level there. The osmosis, the exchange with the elements, everything linked together through our interconnected root systems.” She came up the stairs, wobbling with each step, and grabbed my wrist to steady herself. “I think I was a tree in one of my past lives.”

I tried to imagine my mother as a tree. I saw something big and colorful and messy: a jacaranda maybe, or a pepper tree, scattering sticky seeds underfoot. “Is reincarnation your new thing?”

The beatific smile faded from her face. “What do you mean, new thing?”

I laughed. “C’mon, Mom. You’ve always got something new you’re into. Last time I was here it was kundalini yoga. The time before that you were trying to convince Dad to give all your retirement savings to Sai Maa.”

“Stop being so dramatic. It wasn’t all of our savings.” She snatched her hand away from my wrist and smoothed her curls into place, clearly miffed. I’d gone too far. “Laugh if you like, but I believe in the power of continually seeking knowledge.”

Or, you’re a spiritual dilettante, believing everything and nothing, never pausing long enough to let an informed opinion take shape, I thought. But who was I to judge? I had found my spiritual meaning in the bottom of a bottle and now, with that gone, I was too worried about my continued sober existence to spend time thinking about enlightenment at all. “I’m not laughing, promise. Tell me about your past lives. I’m interested, honest.”

She shot me a look, trying to figure out if I was teasing her. “Our cells are never destroyed. They just get recycled into new living things. So who’s to say our souls aren’t, too? I mean, it makes more sense than heaven, doesn’t it? There’s actual science in it!”

“I’m not sure that a scientist would agree with you, Mom.”

She shook her head, disappointed in my pragmatism. “Well, it’s nicer than believing that you die and nothing happens at all. It’s much more pleasant to know that making the right decisions in this life will set you up for an even better life next time around.”

“And you made the right decisions, I take it?” I couldn’t prevent a wry note of skepticism from creeping into my voice.

She didn’t answer that. She reached for a bottle of rosé that was sitting on the table and poured herself a glass. The bottle sweated, prisms of sun caught in the condensation, whispering a lewd invitation to me. How good it would feel right now, I thought, to let myself sink into that comfortable obliteration. After a year of honing my mind—letting sobriety sharpen it slowly back into consciousness—I missed the soft blanket of a buzz.

A drop of moisture collected near the neck, slipped down the bottle toward the label. I reached out and collected it with a finger, put it on my tongue. It tasted like nothing at all. I thought about telling my mother about what I’d found in Ojai, about the shaved heads and the belligerent twins and the gatekeeper who pretended not to know my sister, but when I opened my mouth something else entirely came out. The question I knew I shouldn’t be asking at all.

“Mom? What happened between Elli and Chuck?”

The wineglass stopped halfway to my mother’s mouth.

“Elli said it was the infertility,” she said thoughtfully. “Which is why I assumed that adopting Charlotte would help patch them up, but it didn’t. Maybe it was all too broken by then.”

“Huh,” I said, a flush of discomfort warming my cheeks. “Where is Chuck now?”

“Tokyo. Believe it or not.” She took another sip, fuming to herself. “You know I called him? Just to try to leave a bridge open. And he never called me back. We really misjudged him.” She sniffed, hiccuped. “The whole thing broke Elli’s heart. Thank God for Charlotte showing up so soon afterward. Charlotte really saved her.”

And yet Charlotte hadn’t really saved her, I thought to myself. Because apparently Elli still felt compelled to join some kind of cult. Something about the timeline of Chuck’s departure and Charlotte’s arrival nagged at me, something I couldn’t quite put into words. “Mom, where did Charlotte come from?”

She put the glass of wine down on the table. “An adoption agency.”

“Which one?”

“How would I know?”

“Did you know Elli and Chuck were trying to adopt?”

She shrugged. “She’d said they were looking into it as an option. They were doing everything. Looked into IVF, surrogates, everything. You know that, right?” She said this casually, not knowing that her words felt like needles under my skin. I reached instinctively for the wine bottle, then pulled my hand back. “She said the call came out of the blue, not long after Chuck left. Like an answer to her prayers.”

I thought about this. “How old was Charlotte when Elli adopted her?”

“Twenty months, I think?”

“And she didn’t come from a foreign country?” My mother shook her head. “So she must have come from foster care, right? Otherwise, who puts up a child that age for adoption?” Something else occurred to me. “And if a couple breaks up, wouldn’t the adoption agency put a hold on the adoption? Why would they give the baby to just one parent? Or was Elli pretending she and Chuck were still married?”