Never Coming Back(14)

In the second, I was sitting on her lap. A birthday cake with two candles was on the table in front of us. A third candle stuck out of the side of the cake: the to-grow-on candle. Tamar’s tradition. In this photo, her face was in shadow, but you could still see how soft it was, how long her hair was, curving around the curves of her cheek. She had always been a thin woman, my mother. Some might call her scrawny. But in this photo, her face was the soft face of a girl.

Which she was. Twenty years old. Much younger than I was now.

In the last photo my face—maybe I was four? Five?—poked through a giant wooden cutout of a strawberry. Strawberry Fields Forever, which was a pick-your-own place north of Boonville. This photo was one I remember being taken. Tamar and I had gone up early in the morning to pick strawberries. We and another family—a mother, a father, five or six children—were first on the field. It was a foggy day, the kind of day when noise came randomly, a voice suddenly clear in your ear and then fading. The kind of day that steadied you with the blurring of outlines and the narrowing of surroundings. I remembered crouching, holding the green pasteboard berry box in one hand, reaching under the green leaves of the plants to find and pluck the strawberries with the other. My fingers stained red. I remembered looking around to see where my mother was. She was not next to me, but out of the fog her voice came floating, a few rows or many rows away, impossible to tell. She was singing “Hallelujah.” She sang it over and over, first a little higher, then a little lower, then a little slower.

The sound of my mother singing was not unusual. She sang when she was working, when she didn’t know, or forgot, that I was around to hear. Maybe she thought she was alone now, there in the fog, so it was okay to sing, to raise her voice to the clouds come down to earth. To the berries, hiding beneath the green leaves. To the dirt, rich and dark beneath her sneakers. Maybe she didn’t even know she was singing.

I crouched between rows of strawberry plants, that fog so thick that wisps of it curled around my hands and the berry box. I was alone and she was alone, and the voices of the other family, the one with all the children, came to my ears intermittently from wherever they were in that big field.

The berry box was full of strawberries and I put one in my mouth. So sweet. So red. The color red fused with the sensation of sweetness in that moment. Berry after berry, sweet-red sweet-red, listening to my mother sing the song that I didn’t know yet was her favorite song from her favorite singer, and when her song came to an end I began picking again and rapidly filled another box and then another and then another, so that when we met again at the end of the rows, there in the fog, she would look at the berry boxes and know that I had not wasted my time, and she would be proud of me.

We sat together on the porch, Jack and Dog and I, thinking about that day and her song and looking out at the woods beyond the cabin. The fairy lights glimmered in their silent way.





* * *





The photo of me in the snowbank was more substantial than the others, heavier somehow.

“Because, hello, there’s another photo stuck to the back of it, Clara,” I said out loud. “Well, well, what do you know?”

This is what happens to people who live alone and who live in their heads. They carry on running conversations with themselves, or with the ashes of their departed dogs, or with the fireflies that blink among the pines at dusk, or with their bottles of whiskey. They say things like “Well, well, what do you know?” out loud to themselves. They use the royal we, like this:

“What do we have here, Clara?”

What we had here, Clara, was a small photo printed out on regular copy paper from a color printer. It was not me as a baby or a little girl. A curl of tape on the back of orange-snowsuit me had stuck to it and turned it into a twofer photo. It was not my high school graduation photo, as the minute I saw it I realized I had expected it to be. It was a photo of Tamar. My mother. Ma.

Except not really.

“Ma?” I said to the photo. I brought it up closer to my face and studied it, then tipped it this way and that underneath the lamp. I recognized the shirt she was wearing; it was one she had worn for a year or so when I was in high school, a shirt unusual for her because it was pretty. A white gauzy shirt shot through with blue embroidery, a non-Tamar kind of shirt. “Ma?”

The woman in the photo—my mother, at least partly—said nothing. Her eyes were bright.

“Who are you looking at, Ma?”

No answer.

“More to the point, what’s that look on your face?”

It was not a look of I have something on my mind or Hurry up, I’m going to be late to work or What is my strange child up to now or Can you just take the picture already because You know I hate having my picture taken. It had not been me who took the photo, because I would have remembered that look on her face. And the look on her face was one I could not place, because I had never seen it before, this soft, young look.

Strange.

My mother’s legacy to me: three photos of her daughter, ones she must have found in that whirlwind week she spent clearing out the house, giving everything away, packing up the rest and moving herself out. It was the habit of the Amish to pay cash for everything, and I imagined her walking into the place where she lived now and placing a shoebox filled with hundred-dollar bills on the reception desk. Here. Take care of me and whoever I will become. The image made my heart hurt. Yes, it was an image I had imagined up right then and there, but imaginings make unreal things real. See the look on my mother’s face as she walked into the nursing home alone, her shoebox of money clutched to her narrow chest. Shouldn’t she have had someone with her on a day like that, a day when she had just left behind her entire life? Shouldn’t a family member, like a daughter, have been with her? Ma.