Long Bright River(18)

I say this because, of the two of us, I am the only one with memories of our mother, and very fond ones at that. Therefore, the loss of our mother was difficult for me in a way that it would not have been for Kacey, who was too little, while our mother was alive, to recall her.



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She was young, our mother. Eighteen years old at the time of her pregnancy with me. She was a senior in high school—a good student, Gee always said, a good girl—and she had only been dating our father for a few months when it happened. As the story goes, it took everyone by surprise, and no one more than Gee, who to this day narrates the shock of the news with urgency and grief. No one believed it, she says. When I told them. They all said, not Lisa.

Gee was just religious enough to make an abortion out of the question. But she was also religious enough to be enraged by the pregnancy, ashamed of it, to see it as something to hide. The year was 1984. Gee herself had been married at nineteen and had had Lisa at twenty, but times were different then, Gee liked to say. Gee’s husband died very young in a car accident—I wonder, today, if he had been drunk, since Gee often mentions his drinking—and she never remarried.

I used to imagine that things would have gone differently for Gee if her husband, our grandfather, hadn’t died. So much of her life has been governed by the need to simply keep her head above water: to put food on the table, to pay bills, to pay down the debt that she constantly incurs. If she had had a partner in these endeavors—someone to add a paycheck, someone to mourn alongside when her only daughter died—perhaps her life, and ours, might have been better. But this sort of idle speculation might be pure sentimentality, for to this day Gee claims she has no use for men: thinks of them only as obstacles in her path, nuisances who are only occasionally necessary for the propagation of human life. She mistrusts them implicitly. Avoids them when possible.

The only thing she really got out of her union, it seems, was the ability to say that she had been married when her daughter was conceived—married, she explained, often, thrusting a finger into an invisible chest. She had done things correctly.

When Lisa delivered the news of her pregnancy, therefore, Gee had insisted on a wedding. Gee had met this Daniel Fitzpatrick (this Daniel Fitzpatrick was how Gee permanently referred to our father) only once before, but now she sat both of them on her sofa and insisted they see the priest at her parish and formalize their vows. Our father himself was the offspring of a single mother who was notoriously irresponsible: a floozy, Gee often said, who had not been married when her son was conceived, thus sealing forever in Gee’s mind the firm line between the two of them, where respectability was concerned. Worse, in Gee’s estimation: the son was a charity case at the school. Someone who raised tuition, Gee lamented, for other working people. What our father’s mother thought about all of this—the baby, the marriage, Gee herself—is lost to time. I cannot, in fact, ever recall meeting her. She did not attend our mother’s funeral: an offense that Gee will take to her own grave.

In Gee’s telling of things—the only version of events that I have ever heard—Lisa and Daniel, our parents, got married in private at Holy Redeemer, on a Wednesday afternoon, with Gee and the deacon as witnesses. Then Gee took Dan in, giving her daughter and her new son-in-law the middle bedroom in the house, taking rent whenever the young couple could give it, and telling the rest of the family the news as slowly as she possibly could. Head held high. Defiant.

Five months later, I was born. Kacey a year and a half after that.

Four years later, our mother was dead.



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—

Of the years in between my birth and my mother’s death, there are memories, still, if I quiet my mind sufficiently. It is rarer and rarer, these days, that I can. On a shift, sometimes, inside my patrol car, I remember being in the backseat of a car that my mother was driving. No car seat, in those days. No seat belt either. In the front seat, my mother was singing.

From time to time it happens, too, when I’m at the refrigerator, any refrigerator, at home or at work: a quick vision of my young mother complaining to Gee, in Gee’s kitchen, that there’s nothing inside. Oh really, says Gee, in another room. Then why don’t you put something in it.

And a pool. Someone’s pool. Rare to be at a pool. And the lobby of a movie theater, though I’m not sure where it was, and every movie theater is in Center City, now, and the others are closed or converted to concert venues.

I remember my mother’s youth, the way she seemed like a child herself, or a peer, her skin clear and smooth, her hair still the shining hair of a child. I remember, too, the way Gee softened around her, became stiller, stopped moving, for once in her life. She laughed in spite of herself, put a hand over her mouth at her daughter’s antics, shook her head in disbelief. You’re nuts. She’s nuts. This must be the nuthouse, Gee said, looking at me, grinning, proud. Gee, in those days, was kinder, bewitched by her funny, irreverent daughter, unaware of the fate that would befall her, and all of us.

Harder still to recall are the memories that come to me in the still dark of my bedroom. Whenever Thomas is in close proximity to me, little-boy head right next to me, whenever I am close enough to his skin to breathe its scent—there—just there—is a flash of my own mother beside me in my childhood bed. My mother’s face, young face, my mother’s body, young body, covered in a black T-shirt with writing on it that I cannot read. The arms of my mother around me. My mother’s eyes closed. My mother’s mouth open. Her breath the sweet breath of a grass-eating animal. I am four and I put one hand on her cheek. Hello, says my mother, and she puts her mouth on my cheek, talks into my face, and there are the teeth and the lips of my mother. My baby, said my mother, over and over, the phrase she used most in the world. If I try very hard, I can still hear her saying it in her high, happy voice, which sometimes carried inside it a note of surprise: that she, Lisa O’Brien, had a baby at all.