Transcendent Kingdom(69)

“I don’t know what to think. Why don’t you tell me what to think? Better yet, tell me what you’re thinking because I sure as shit can’t read your mind. All of this, all of this…it’s like I don’t know anything real about you.”

    What was I thinking? I was thinking that I had done it again, ruined everything. I was thinking that I could never shake my ghosts, never, never. There they were in every word I wrote, in every lab, in every relationship.

“You’re fucked up, you know that?” Raymond said, and I didn’t answer. “You’re fucking crazy.” He threw my journal across the room, and I watched it fly open. I watched Raymond grab his keys and his wallet, his jacket, a heavy, unnecessary thing in that Peninsula sun. He collected every trace of himself and then he left.



* * *



—

“I really appreciate what you’re doing, Katherine, but everything’s fine. I’m fine and my mom is too.”

Katherine was a fast eater. She had cleaned her plate long before I reached the last segments of my roll, and we had spent the last few minutes in silence as I chewed slowly, deliberately.

“Gifty, there’s no game here. There’s no trick. I’m not trying to treat you or psychoanalyze you or get you to talk about God or your family or whatever. I’m just here strictly as a friend. One friend taking another friend to lunch. That’s it.”

I nodded. Under the table, I pinched the skin between my thumb and forefinger. What would it look like, to believe her? What would it take?





54





I left lunch and decided to give myself the rest of the day off. My mother hadn’t left the house or the bed since the day she came to visit me in the lab, but still, it made me hopeful that she was making progress. Maybe I could convince her to take a trip to Half Moon Bay with me.

I drove back to my apartment with the radio off and the windows down. My date with Han was coming up that weekend and I was nervous about it, playing over and over again in my head the possible ways it could go. If things went poorly, it might be just the thing I needed to convince me to graduate, leave the lab, if only to avoid seeing him every day. If things went well, well, who knew?

I turned into my complex. Someone had parked in my designated spot, and so I parked in someone else’s, becoming a part of the problem.

“Ma,” I called as I entered my apartment. “How would you like to see the Pacific Ocean?” I set my bag down in the entryway. I took my shoes off. I didn’t expect a response, so I wasn’t surprised to be greeted by silence. I poked my head into the bedroom, and she wasn’t there.

When I was a child, I had this sense of confidence, this assuredness that the things that I felt were real and important, that the world made sense according to divine logic. I loved God, my brother, and my mother, in that order. When I lost my brother, poof went the other two. God was gone in an instant, but my mother became a mirage, an image formed by refracted light. I moved toward her and toward her, but she never moved toward me. She was never there. The day I came home from school and couldn’t find her felt like the thirty-ninth day in the desert, the thirty-ninth day without water. I didn’t think I’d be able to survive another.

    “Never again,” my mother said, but I didn’t believe her. Without meaning to or planning to, I’d spent seventeen years waiting for the fortieth day. Here it was.

“Ma?” I yelled. It was a small apartment. From the middle of the living room you could see almost everything there was to see. You could see she wasn’t there. I raced to the bathroom, the only room with a closed door, but she wasn’t there either.

“Ma?” I ran outside, down the stairwell, across the pristine lawns, the parking lot with all its mis-parked cars, the sidewalks sparkling with silicon carbide. “Ma!”

I stopped short of a fire hydrant and scanned the complex. I didn’t even know where to begin looking. I pulled out my phone and called Katherine.

She must have known something was up, because she didn’t even say hello, just “Gifty, are you okay?”

“No, I’m not okay,” I said, and I wondered when the last time I’d said that was. Had I ever said it, even to God? “I came home and my mom is missing. Can you help me?”

“Hold tight,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”

When she pulled up, I was sitting on the hydrant with my head between my knees, staring at the striking red, the color somehow a reflection of what I was feeling.

Katherine rested her hand on my shoulder, squeezing it a little, and I got up. “She couldn’t have gotten very far on foot,” she said.

    As Katherine drove us around, first in my little apartment complex, and then out, off onto the main road that led to Safeway, to campus, I pictured every bridge, every body of water.

“Does she know anybody here?” Katherine asked. “Anyone she may have called?”

I shook my head. She didn’t have a church here; she didn’t have a congregation to hold her up. It was just me. “Maybe we should call the police,” I said. “She wouldn’t want that, but I don’t know what else to do. Do you?”

And then, under a tree, off the side of the road, there she was. She was swimming in her pajamas, no bra, her hair a nest. She used to scold me if I left the house without earrings on, now this.