Never Coming Back(13)

My messed-up heart kicked into gear and began to race. From beat, beat, beat to beatbeat-beat to beatbeatbeat to beatbeatbeatbeatbeatbeat in a fraction of a second. A familiar faintness crept through me from the head down. My fingers stole up and pressed themselves against the side of my throat. This was a bad one. Two-hundred-plus beats a minute. Maybe more. A cardiologist had told me years ago that at the point that “the abnormality” began to “interfere with the normal course of living,” then I should get it “taken care of.” Quotation marks kept grouping themselves around the words as they floated by the bottom of my brain, because what exactly was an abnormality, and what exactly was a normal course of living, and how exactly did wires threaded up your veins into the middle of your heart and then killing off part of it mean getting it taken care of?

The racing and fluttering in my chest and in my throat filled my eyes with stars, but I was standing there in front of them and I had to get through this.

Fake it, Clara.

I sat back down on the table. That way I wouldn’t pass out. Breathe. Focus. My thudding heart, the ocean sound in my ears.

“I have a question for you,” I said. “Do you want to know what it is?”

“Yessssss!” they called together, in the way of small children.

“Think way back, will you? To when you were little.”

When you were little made the adults look up and smile at me. We were the ones who knew that the children were still little. The kids didn’t know they were still little.

Unless they weren’t. Maybe little doesn’t exist. Maybe we don’t want to believe there wasn’t a time when we weren’t thinking about our place in life and what we wanted our lives to be. When we weren’t wondering about the meaning of it all. Maybe we want desperately to think that we once had a few years when things were easy, when others were taking care of us, when we had no worries.

Clara, shhh.

“Can anyone remember something you were afraid of, way back when you were little?”

Hands shot up. Thunderstorms. Dogs with giant teeth. Bad guys with guns.

A small boy with a pierced ear sitting in the back raised his hand. “Can it be something I’m still afraid of?”

“Sure.”

“I’m afraid of going into a store with my mom, and then I get separated from her, and I never find her again.”

Jackpot. Lost Mothers for $1600. The Daily Double. The children moaned and held hands and shook their heads. The adults grimaced. The room itself began to shrink, all of us arrowing into our insides, alone with no mother beside us.

Ma.

I pictured her in the place where she lived now. I pictured her in the passenger seat of the car after our meeting with the doctor. I pictured her alone in the house she raised me in, packing up everything but the books and giving it all away.

“Kids? Can I tell you a secret?”

They all nodded. They all needed a secret, something to bring them out of the woods and into the sunlight. My heart hammered away in my chest and I knew that I would have to lie flat on the table once they were gone and wait until it reverted to a normal beat.

“I used to be afraid of losing my mom too,” I said. “And guess what? I still am!”

I looked from one side of the room to the other in a we’re-all-in-this-together, we’re-all-scared-of-losing-our-mothers kind of way. Then a cell phone alarm went off, meaning that the writer lady half hour was over and it was on to the arts and crafts room. The adults began to shepherd the children out, but not before nodding to me, each of them, in a sober kind of way. They had seen through me. They could tell that something was happening in my life, something I had vowed not to talk about but couldn’t help talking about, in a sideways kind of way.





* * *





The duct-taped-shut Keds size-nine shoebox was hidden in the middle of the middle stack of the books-as-coffee-table. When I pictured it, I saw the expression on the Amish woman’s face when she handed it to me. I saw the way she shook her bonneted head when I tried to give it back to her. The knowledge that the box was here with me, buried by books but right here in the middle of the one room of my one-room cabin, was unsettling. An unasked, unanswered question. Be brave, Clara.

It took a little unearthing to get to it. Once the shoebox was out, the stacks were lopsided, which was also unsettling. Shifting Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy and The Long Winter from their original stacks to the middle one evened things out again. Symmetry was crucial to the structural integrity of the books-as-coffee-table.

I picked up the shoebox and carried it out to the porch and set it down on the little table next to my chair. I looked at it and it looked back at me. What could be so light that it weighed almost nothing? Then I went back into the cabin and brought Jack and Dog out to the porch with me. Calling in the reinforcements.

“Let’s see what we’ve got here, men, shall we?”

When I didn’t feel brave, I sometimes spoke out loud in a hearty, World War II movie commander sort of way and kept speaking this way until 1) I felt braver or 2) I couldn’t stand the sound of my hearty commander voice anymore so 3) I had to take action.

The tape came off in a satisfying duct-tape way. Three photos were what the box held, photos of me. Me as a baby, me as a toddler, me as a little girl.

In the first, I was zipped into an orange snowsuit and someone—Tamar?—had propped me against a snowbank. The sun glinted off snow and my eyes were squinted shut. You couldn’t see my legs or my arms or anything besides my face. I was an orange blob against a glaring pile of white.