Never Coming Back(2)

“Didn’t think so. Then Old Forge it is. Come on home.”

“Old Forge isn’t home.”

“It’s half an hour north of Sterns. That makes it home-ish.”

Old Forge, where my mother used to take me once a year, in the summer. We went swimming in Fourth Lake, we had pancakes at Keyes Pancake House, we spent hours wandering through the multi-roomed palace of Adirondack Hardware. We went to the water park, where once, another mother, a mother who wasn’t my mother, took a Polaroid picture of me sitting inside Cinderella’s giant pumpkin and gave it to us. Old Forge was our big summer adventure. Now I thought, Why did we go only once a year? Since it was so close to home, we could have gone there every week if we wanted, every day, for God’s sake.

“Old Forget,” I said. “That’s what I used to call it, when I was a kid. I used to think of it as this magical place.”

“It is a magical place,” Sunshine said. “We’re magical, aren’t we? And we’re here. Come home, Clara.”

“Yeah,” Brown said. “Come home-ish.”

So home-ish I came.





* * *





That particular phone call happened roughly a month after I first noticed anything. I had come home for a long weekend, opened the kitchen cupboard to get a coffee mug and beheld a carton of orange juice, tucked between the plates and bowls, both of which had been pushed aside to make room for it.

“Hey there, Mr. Orange Juice,” I said. “Too cold in the fridge for you?”

I picked Mr. Orange Juice up and carried him out to the dining room, where my mother was deadheading her indoor geraniums. One October years ago she had uprooted them, transplanted them into buckets, and moved them inside to keep them safe from the cold, and then in the course of that long upstate New York winter, decided they were happier inside than outside.

“Ma?”

She looked up, her hands full of withered blossoms, and shook her head. “No. You know I don’t like orange juice. Too sweet. I got that for you.”

“I found it in the dishes cupboard.”

“What are you talking about?”

I jiggled the carton. “This. It was between the bowls and plates.”

“Stop,” she said, frowning. Still shaking her head. “Put it back where it belongs. Orange juice is expensive.”

It was then that a weird feeling came over me. When I remembered that moment I could still feel the heaviness of the carton in my hand, how I had spread my fingers out to hold it so it wouldn’t fall, how it was room temperature and not cold the way you expected orange juice to be. I saw the frown on her face, the way she glanced from the faded red and pink flowers in her hands back to me. I felt my other hand shove itself by instinct down into the pocket of my jeans to close around the silver hammer earring, the talisman that was always with me to keep bad things from happening.

“It was in the dishes cupboard,” I said again. This annoyed her.

“Stop it, Clara. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

Had my mother ever, even once in her life, said, If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all? She had not. Plenty of other mothers said that—I had heard it from other mothers all my life, directed at their own children in that singsong mother voice—but not my own. Had you asked me, I would have bet every bit of money I had that my mother had not uttered and would not ever utter that line. What did that sentence have to do with this orange juice situation anyway? The weird feeling spread.

“Ma?”

What was I hoping she’d do? Laugh, because what she’d just said was such a non-her thing to say? Turn it into a joke? My mother was not the joking type and never had been. Was I hoping that she would come up with some kind of an explanation, maybe explain that the orange juice in the cabinet was part of an elaborate ruse, and then explain what exactly that ruse was? Yes. That was what I hoped for. Because knowledge—of wrongness, of something-is-not-rightness—was creeping up from my feet, spreading through my body, on its way to my heart and from there to my mind.

I had come home for the weekend because it was her birthday.

She was about to turn fifty.

I was thirty-one.

Yes, my mother was eighteen and a half when she had me. And she had just turned fifty years old when they told us what she had. Not old enough. Way too young. Young young young young young was how old my mother was, when we heard those words “early” and “onset.”

And if I could tell you one thing, people, with regard to those clichés about the brevity of life and how fast it zips by and how it’ll be over before you know it? It would be that all of them, every damn one of them, was true.





* * *





The cabin on Turnip Hill Road that I bought when I moved back home-ish to the Adirondacks was one room. Two hundred and fifty square feet, which, spelled out like that, looked bigger than 250. The first time Sunshine and Brown came to see the cabin, I sat in the porch chair, angled because the porch was so narrow, and waited while their station wagon picked its way around the curve and up the dirt driveway.

“But there’s no room for anyone but you,” Sunshine said. “You and your computer.”

Her voice was full of wonder. She peered through the door as if she were in a museum looking at a diorama.