Never Coming Back(5)
“She gave everything else away?” I said, once the porch was buried with books. “There’s nothing else?”
“There’s this,” William T. said, and he held out the blue ceramic urn that held the ashes of Dog, gone now for nearly a decade. I cradled it against my heart.
“I’m sorry, Clara.”
“That’s okay. It doesn’t matter.”
Except that was a lie, because it did matter. What I wanted was not nothing else but everything else. Everything back in its place, including my mother, the way she used to be. Including me, the way I used to be, before the fear—fifty percent, five-oh, exactly half—entered my mind and my heart. William T. touched my shoulder, and Crystal gave me a hug, then they told me to call them, I had their number, and they got back in their truck and drove away down Turnip Hill Road.
Into the cabin I hauled the boxes of books, where I turned them into furniture. Like the boy in Where the Wild Things Are, whose walls became the world all around, who sailed away in a boat over days and weeks and months and a year, except there was no boat for me. Only books. And Dog? Dog sat in his urn on the kitchen shelf.
* * *
My mother didn’t know that on the long drive north, while she was boxing up her life without telling me, I had made plans. I would support us with Words by Winter.
Looking for the right words? Unable to find them? Not sure how to get your message across? Words by Winter is at your service. In tough times, in good times, in times of thankfulness and times of loss, our wordsmiths, with their uncanny ability to craft the perfect words for any occasion, are by your side. $100 for up to 100 words, payable via PayPal. Our motto: “If it can’t be said in a hundred words, then it can’t be said in a thousand.” www.wordsbywinter.com
I used to run that ad here and there, in the beginning. Online, mostly. Word got around once I had happy clients, though. You’d be surprised how many people and places now recommended Words by Winter: wedding planners, funeral homes, dating sites. So yes, Words by Winter would support us, one hundred dollars at a time, and while there was still time, my mother and I would get into a routine. While there was still time, we would watch the television show Jeopardy! together, which in my head I always spelled with the proper exclamation mark! because that was what copyright laws were all about!, and eat dinner together and go for walks together. While there was still time, we would somehow figure out how to talk about the past, the said and the unsaid, and all that was locked up between us would be unlocked. The common denominator of each of those scenarios was the assumption of enough time before the erasure of time, that with enough time, the key to the kingdom would be yours and mine.
But that was not what happened.
See the daughter in her jam-packed Subaru, hands on the wheel, neck aching from the strain of staring straight north, I-95 unspooling before her for a thousand and more miles. See her as she takes Exit 31 off the New York State Thruway, hands the tollbooth man a wad of ones, then angles the car northward again. Up and down Glass Factory. Right, then right, then left through the town of Sterns and north to the driveway of the house where her mother lived, the house where she herself grew up, the house where her mother should be. Where her mother had always been. Would always be. See how the tenses mixed themselves up from that moment on, because who was the woman walking out the door onto the porch? Why was Tamar dressed up like an Amish woman? Why was there an outhouse in the backyard? Who was the Amish child in the bonnet pulling clothes off the clothesline? Whose horse and buggy were clopping into the driveway? Not Tamar’s. Not mine.
“Ma.”
That was me, standing in the place where my mother lived now, that same night. The Amish woman had given me the address. She had also given me a taped-shut shoebox, Keds, size nine—the only shoe my mother wore besides her winter boots. I had tried to give it back to her but she shook her head and turned away.
“Ma.”
“Clara.”
See the boxers as they enter the ring. The thin middle-aged woman stands straight in her corner, next to the drooping orchids on the plant stand. In her hand is one faded orchid blossom, deadheaded. The thin younger woman with the lavender-streaked dark hair stands not as straight in her corner. No cheering crowds. No attendants to towel them off, rub their shoulders, give them pre-fight pep talks. Theirs is a battle of posture, eyes and words. They have met before, these two, in many a previous ring, and neither has yet emerged victorious.
“Why, Ma?”
That was the younger woman. Inked black wire twining up one arm and down the other, the beginnings of it just visible below the rolled-up sleeve of her blue shirt.
“Because.”
That was the older woman, the one with the dead flower in her hand. No tattoos for her. Hair still dark, mouth set, eyes unblinking. Why? Because. Asked and unanswered.
“You didn’t have to do this, Ma. You didn’t have to move into this place. You could have stayed in the house.”
She shook her head, that quick back-and-forth Tamar shake. Definitive. Case closed. But the case wasn’t closed. Everything that was gone—the house, the furniture, her clothes, her indoor geraniums, her cocktail fork, her cans and jars of food, her bird feeder, the dishes that we had eaten off of all my life, all my life, all my life—came swarming up inside me and turned my vision dark. My hand came up to my throat. My heart hammered, ready to stampede its way out.