Never Coming Back(20)

She held out her hands, both hands, in a way she never had before, not now, not back then. Don’t think about back then, Clara. Meet your mother where she is. I took her hands in mine.

“I’m glad to see you, Ma.”

“I was looking for you,” she said. “I keep looking.”

“So they tell me. I had a bunch of work to do first, four one-day Words by Winter turnarounds—you know how it is.”

She nodded. She knew how it was. Did she have any idea how I made my living? Would she have cared if she did?

“And you know how it is up in the north woods”—I waved in a vaguely northern direction, there in the Plant Room with the orchids—“there was some road work on Route Eight.”

“Road work never ends,” she said. “Am I right or am I right?”

That wasn’t a Tamar remark. Never would she have said something like that in the olden days, which was how I was beginning to think of them. Shhh, Clara.

“You’re right,” I said. We sat down on the green couch together, she still holding both my hands in hers. She leaned toward me. Her eyes were bright.

“Is there enough wood?”

Follow her.

“There’s certainly a lot of wood,” I said, because there certainly was. There was a lot of wood in this world. All those trees, at least in upstate New York.

Enough wood was always something on my mother’s mind, back in the olden days. Fire-and ply-and more. She cut and hauled and split and then we both stacked—in the storage barn, in the unused garage, on the porch—all summer long and as far into the fall as the weather and light let us. Enough wood to get through the winter. Survival.

“There’s probably enough,” I said. “I think, anyway.”

We nodded, both of us. Enough wood was important. Enough to feed the stove all the way through the bitter cold of January, the bitter winds of February and the bitter snows of March. There could never be enough wood, in Tamar’s world. She squeezed my hands.

“Boyfriend.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend.”

“Ma.”

There it was, that tone in my voice. Had it always been there? Was it only now that I saw its effect on her? Because look, she was shrinking. The air around her was drawing itself in and her shoulders were narrowing and her head tilted down. Choose your words with care, Clara. Don’t correct. Don’t criticize.

“I’ve been thinking about him lately,” was what I said. That was the right thing to say. She nodded.

“He died,” she said.

—–—–

—–—–

—–—–

That was me breathing. Making myself wait. Making myself be calm. Making myself not use the word remember. Because that was what she was doing, wasn’t it? Remembering Asa.

“He did die,” I said.

“It broke my daughter’s heart,” she said.

She nodded, and I was back in time sitting on a chair in the kitchen of the Treehouse in the Florida Panhandle, waiting for a pot of boiling water to turn the shrimp pink, listening to her voice on the other end of the phone. Clara. Clara, Asa died yesterday morning. He died in an explosion in Afghanistan. Those words had never left me. They came back to me sometimes, the sound of her voice over all those miles, the way I sat there with the phone clutched in my hands, the way the boiling water boiled itself dry, the shrimp turned to scorched rubber at the bottom of the ruined pot.

“Help her,” my mother said. Her hands were still pressed against her heart.

“Maybe nothing could have helped her,” I said. “Maybe she just had to get through it however she could.”

“No!” my mother said. The sound in her voice was the sound of agitation. Of exclamation marks. Of breaking dishes and crashing pans. They had warned me about that too. “No!”

Follow her. Meet her where she is. But she met me instead.

“I couldn’t help her,” she said.

Oh, Ma.

My heart jumpstarted itself. It was happening again. Again and again, it kept happening. Too thin too dehydrated too stressed. Two of the toos, except these days it was all three of the toos. She sat quietly on the couch next to me the whole time, neither of us talking. It took an hour for my heart to go back to its normal rhythm.





* * *





Blue Mountain had come sidling back into the quilt room after the rest of his class had been Pied-Pipered into the arts and crafts room. By then it was just me, lying flat on the floor beneath the ghostly white quilt on the wall, waiting for my heart to stop its hammering. He came trudging back to where I lay staring up at the peaked roof of the exhibition hall. He didn’t seem fazed. He didn’t ask why I was lying there on the floor.

There had been space around him in the room while I was talking. An untouchable few inches that the other children didn’t have. They had kept an instinctive slight distance from him, no jostling or pushing or reaching out to touch his flyaway hair or tickle his feet or hold his hand, the way children of that age do.

“I have a question,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“Is your mother proud of you?”

I could have deflected, said, “That’s an interesting question. Why do you ask?” or “Is your mother proud of you?” or I could have not said anything.