My Last Continent: A Novel(44)
He was also the one who’d fostered my curiosity. When he was home, he’d take me “fossil hunting,” which in St. Louis meant amateur geological digs at the sides of highways. My father would pull off the road, and, along an I-170 road cut, we’d find the shells of crinoids and corals, unearthed by construction crews that had dug into the limestone hills. “All this was underwater once,” my father would say, waving his arm around the flat, suburban landscape. “Right where we’re standing—this used to be the bottom of the ocean.”
I was vaguely aware of my mother’s dislike of these outings, the fact that my father would arrive home after a week or two away and set right out again, with me, on what she called “silly scavenger hunts.” Yet we didn’t talk about any of this—denial was, for us, as natural as breathing—and her unhappiness remained veiled in offhand comments rather than actual conversations.
I, too, learned to keep quiet, having discovered early the perils of being curious, of speaking one’s mind, of asking the wrong questions. Early one summer, when I was about eight years old and poking around in the briefcase my father had left on the bed while he packed for yet another business trip, I’d caught a glimpse of something colorful—a flash of red and pink—and automatically reached for it. I pulled out a greeting card with a watercolor heart on the front, and as I opened it my father snatched it from my hand. I’d caught only the word love.
“Deborah,” he snapped. “You know better than to mess with my things.”
He never spoke sharply to me. And he never called me Deborah.
“Is this for Mom?” I asked.
A pause. “Yes. Of course.”
“But her birthday isn’t until November.”
“It’s a surprise,” he said. “So don’t say anything to her, okay? It’s going to be a very special birthday.”
By late November, I’d forgotten all about it. My father was home for Thanksgiving that year, and he was still in town for my mother’s birthday a week later. We had a snowstorm that week, and I went outside to help him shovel the driveway. When it was too cold and icy for fossil hunting, this was one of the few chances we had to be together. As he shoveled the snow to the side of our long driveway, I packed it together to make a short, thick snow wall. When he was finished, he helped me decorate it with turrets and a few guard snowmen. I remember the way he smiled at me—his eyes, usually set somewhere in the distance, looking this time directly into mine.
Later, we took my mother out to dinner at Pasta House—which had my favorite food, toasted ravioli—and later, back home, we seated my mother at the dining room table, where my dad presented her with a birthday cake. It was from Schnucks, but even a supermarket cake was more of an effort than he’d made in years. While Mark and I stood next to her, Mom looked like a child herself as she blew out the single candle on top, then moved on to open the card and the long, slender, gift-wrapped box on the table.
After my father helped my mother try on the delicate gold bracelet he’d given her, she opened the card—and that’s when I remembered. “That’s not the card with the heart on it,” I said.
My dad pursed his lips together and didn’t answer. The knife Mark was using to cut the cake stopped deep inside and stayed there, and my mother’s face seemed to shrink into itself, like a deflated balloon. I don’t even remember how our little party ended; I only remember the silence that followed and eventually became the norm.
I didn’t know my mother had once been different until I found an old photograph of her and my father, tucked away in a drawer of the dining room sideboard. It looked like summer, and they were sitting together on a balcony, leaning against the railing, my father behind my mother, his arms around her waist. They were both laughing, looking at something happening to the left of the photographer. My dad held a cigarette and my mom a glass of wine; they wore their hair and clothes long and loose. I hardly recognized them when I saw it—they were so rarely together now, and so rarely smiling—and for a long time afterwards I studied them closely, trying to see my dad’s once-thin frame, to imagine my mother’s face round and happy.
As we grew up, Mark did his best to take my father’s place during his long absences. He covered all my dad’s chores; he was the last one to bed, after walking around the house turning off the lights, making sure the front and back doors were locked. On summer nights, he’d stand over the grill, my mother handing him a plate of pork chops and foil-wrapped corn, while she and I made deviled eggs and salad and opened cans of fruit.
Why my mother didn’t leave my father, I don’t know—maybe she wanted to, and maybe she’d even tried. She spent a lot of time praying. When I was twelve and got my first period—she’d never sat me down for “the talk,” so even armed with sex ed and biology, it took me half the day to realize what was happening—she waved me out of the room, as usual, without opening her eyes or lifting her head. I rummaged in the cupboard under her bathroom sink and helped myself to her supply of tampons. Another two months went by before she noticed.
Back then, my favorite companion was nonhuman. That year, when my father was home for my birthday, he took me to the shelter to adopt a cat—an orange tabby I named Ginger. He’d done this without my mother’s knowledge, and when we got home, she refused to let Ginger inside. “I don’t want dirt and fleas in my house,” she told us. I was allowed to set up a bed in the garage for Ginger, who spent her days outside, and my father installed a cat door. But I left my bedroom window open at night, and when I called her, she would walk along the roof’s gutter and climb in; eventually I’d find her waiting there as soon as I opened the window. Sometimes she would bring me a dead mouse, which I tossed out into the yard. Ginger snuggled with me all night—I liked having her furry body next to me, her light heartbeat—and she woke me every morning around dawn, before my parents got up, as if she knew we’d both be punished if we got caught, and I’d open the window for her to slip out again.