All Our Wrong Todays(7)
They met at the University of Toronto. My father’s parents had emigrated from Vienna to Toronto when he was nine years old, and he never lost an Austrian clip to his vowels. My mother came from Leeds on an international exchange program to continue her undergraduate degree in literature and never lost her British ability to reflexively vector herself within rigid class dynamics.
My father was a graduate student in physics and my mother noticed him around campus, always wearing mismatched socks. She wanted to know if it was a fashion choice above her station or the mark of someone with more important things on his mind. One day, she walked up and handed him a gift—a box of one hundred identical socks. He had no idea who she was. They were married within a year and slotted themselves into their respective lifelong roles—my father was the lighthouse, my mother the keeper who wound the clockwork, polished the lenses, and swept all those rocky steps.
My father had a wife who was more like a mother. And I had a mother who was more like a sister. My father’s reputation propelled him up through the scientific community, but it cocooned my mother from any honest, vulnerable friendships. She had a role to play—midwife to my father’s genius—and she couldn’t admit to anyone that she felt hollow, lonely, full of dread.
Except me. My mother would tell me everything. I was her confidant, her simpleton therapist, a forever ready ear to her bottomless reservoir of anxious chitter-chatter. My father’s job was to change the world. My mother’s job was to create a warm, soft nest for him to preen in. My job was to listen to my mother talk, endlessly, so she didn’t have a nervous breakdown while suppressing anything consequential about herself in case it spoiled my father’s expansive mood of cosmic contemplation.
My mother’s comfort was books. Not the immersive virtual storytelling modules the rest of us enjoyed—actual books, the paper-and-ink kind that nobody made, let alone wrote, anymore. Her leisure time was spent reading words written in a previous era. Before she met my father, she’d imagined a career surrounded by books, teaching them, editing them, maybe even writing them.
I should clarify that my father never requested any of this. Part of his blissfully unaware state of grandiose self-importance is that he noticed none of it. He somehow found a spouse who would naturally wear herself down into a ball of gray wool. She became the comfortably downy socks that were always clean and ready in his drawer whenever his feet felt cold. As far as he knew, the house just made them to order.
And then, four months ago, while she sipped a coffee and read a novel on a patch of grass outside my parents’ housing unit, a malfunctioning navigation system caused a hover car to break formation, careen out of control, and smear half of my mother across the lawn in a wet streak of blood and bone and skin and the end of everything.
When someone dies they get very cold and very still. That probably sounds obvious, but when it’s your mother it doesn’t feel obvious—it feels shocking. You watch, winded and reeling, as the medical technicians neutralize the stasis field and power down the synthetic organ metabolizer. But the sentimental gesture of kissing her forehead makes you recoil because the moment your lips touch her skin you realize just how cold and just how still she is, just how permanent that coldness and that stillness feel. Your body lurches like it’s been plunged into boiling water and for the first time in your life you understand death as a biological state, an organism ceasing to function. Unless you’ve touched a corpse before, you can’t comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears your mother’s face. You feel sick with guilt and regret and sadness about every time you rolled your eyes in annoyance or brushed off a needy request or let your mind wander when she told some inconsequential anecdote. You can’t remember anything thoughtful or sweet or tender that you ever did even though logically you know you must have. All you can recall is how often you were small and petty and false. She was your mother and she loved you in a way nobody ever has and nobody ever will and now she’s gone.
When I was born, my mother planted a lemon tree on their property and once a year she would make lemon tarts, her grandmother’s recipe, for my birthday. That tree, thirty-two years old, same as me, was just strong enough to stop the hover car from smashing right through the large window of my father’s study, where he was considering matters of lofty import and absentmindedly eating the grilled cheese sandwich that my mother had prepared for him as she made herself a mug of coffee to drink while sitting out in the sunshine to read a chapter of Great Expectations before it was time to do some other incredibly thoughtful routine thing that made my father’s life so pleasant and that he would realize she’d done for him for more than thirty years only once she was gone.
Without that tree, my father would be dead too. I would be an orphan. And everything would be much, much better for everyone.
I remember, as a kid, when I first understood that only half of every tree is visible, that the roots in the soil are equal to the branches in the sky, that a whole other half is underground. It took me a lot longer, well into adulthood, to realize people are like that too.
11
The funeral was on a crisp, sunny morning. A few dozen of my father’s employees, their spouses and bored kids, my mother’s relatives from northern England, my father’s relatives from Austria, several of the families from my parents’ housing subsection, some close friends of mine, and three ex-girlfriends gathered at the spot where my mother died to listen to a bunch of eulogies spoken by people who quickly revealed they knew nothing about her internal life.