Never Coming Back(53)

“No I’m not.”

“You are, though.” Her palm was on my cheek. “Your cheek is like ice.”

“I’m not cold at all,” I lied.

I took her and Dog around to all the classroom buildings, to the dorm where Sunshine and I had hung India batik prints on the walls to “warm them up.” A phrase that belonged to Sunshine, along with the batiks, a phrase and a thing I’d never seen before that fall. I told Tamar that my classes were lots of work but great, that I studied lots but it was nothing I couldn’t handle, that I had made lots of friends—the word lots kept coming out of my mouth—that the sleeping bag was coming in handy, that on Friday nights we all walked into town with our fake IDs for pitchers of happy-hour beer and 2/$5 Cape Codders and screwdrivers, followed by dancing at The Excuse, that the cafeteria food was really not bad at all, even poached eggs, once you got used to them.

What was really happening was that I was pushing it all at her, all this information, all this breeziness and chatter, because what was done was done. She had forced me out of Sterns and out of upstate New York and out of everything I had known until now. She had banished me from my own life, and even though I had raged and fought against her grim decision, I had gone along with it, hadn’t I? I could have run away, couldn’t I? I could have flat-out said no. But I hadn’t.

I had always assumed I would live in Sterns, where my childhood friends grew up and would continue to live, solid black arrows of parents and children and grandchildren within a few miles of one another. In leaving, I had thought my mother was forcing me out, but the truth was this: she had seen a bigger life for me than I had imagined. And she had been right.

But right didn’t mean easy. I couldn’t take the presence of her, the literal Tamar presence of her, her in her re-whitened sneakers and her jeans and her lumber jacket held together with duct tape patches on the inside, her hand still gripping Dog’s leash.

I wanted her so much.

I wanted to be in her kitchen, my kitchen, our kitchen, sitting next to her by the woodstove. I wanted Dog, Dog with the old stuffed monkey that Asa had given him dangling from his jaws, turning three times in a circle before thumping down onto the rug beside us and tucking himself into a fur comma. I missed her so terribly, now that she was there, right beside me, and I had to shut down that terrible missing so that it wouldn’t crush me with its power.

My mother walked beside me, Dog on his leash. She listened to all my surface chatter. She followed my arm with her eyes as I flung it right and flung it left, describing the wonder of the days I was living now. She went to the dinner and the brunch and the tea and the campus walkabout with me, she and Dog, and both nights of the weekend they left me on campus after dinner and drove out to the pets-allowed cheap motel half an hour away.

Sunday morning they left. She put her arms around me and squeezed my shoulders. She said nothing and neither did I. Then she and Dog got back into the truck and drove down from the White Mountains and over the Green Mountains, crossed Lake Champlain and made their way into the Adirondacks, to the house where I used to live but didn’t anymore and never would again.





* * *





I got a ride to the Utica thruway exit for winter break my senior year in college. Tamar was there to pick me up, but Dog wasn’t in the backseat waiting the way he usually was.

“Where’s Dog?”

“He didn’t want to come.”

“Since when? Did you tell him you were coming to pick me up?”

She said nothing. Gave me a look. Tamar was not a believer in explaining to animals what was going on, the way I was. If Dog didn’t feel like a ride, then she wouldn’t press the issue. By the woodstove he would remain, his head resting on that old stuffed monkey.

But when I walked in the door, he struggled up from the rug and the monkey and wobbled toward me. Those were the words: struggled and wobbled. Tamar was turned away from me, shaking the snow off her jacket and scarf.

“Ma,” I said, tried to say, but nothing came out.

Dog had made his way to me but his head was tilted and stayed that way, as if he couldn’t lift it all the way up.

“MA.” That time it came out.

She turned then, and saw me crouched down next to him. Confusion and surprise and then something else flitted over her face and I knew she was suddenly seeing him the way I was, with eyes new to the scene, eyes that hadn’t beheld my dog in four months. She crouched down then too, and we both put our arms around him. The memory of a night the spring of my senior year in high school flooded into my head. I had been out at a party, one of the constant parties that seniors seem to have, the same franticness to all of them, as if time were running out. I came up the dirt driveway late, in my flip-flops. The house was dark. The door was unlocked. No sound from upstairs, where Tamar was either asleep or lying awake silently.

Dog, though. Dog was waiting for me at the door. He wasn’t a barker, just a low rrff once in a while, if an unfamiliar car pulled into the driveway. He pushed his head into my leg, there in the dark kitchen, and I fell onto the floor next to him. I lay down and clutched him as if I were drowning and he was my life preserver. I had missed Asa all night long, missed his presence next to me at the party, and in that moment I missed him with my whole body, aching for him, for the life we had shared, the one he had abandoned for the army, the life I too was about to leave behind.