Never Coming Back(54)

Once I returned to college after that winter break, Dog took himself out in the woods to die. He had taken to standing by the door, nosing at it, and Tamar would let him out, but when she went to let him back in a few minutes later he wouldn’t be there. He wouldn’t come when she called either. She went searching for him, in the old storage barn, down the dirt road, in the woods. Each time she found him he would be nearly invisible, a shadow by a dark tree. Each time, she led him back to the house with one hand on his head to encourage him along.

That was the way I imagined it. My mother didn’t use any of those words. Her words were more like He kept wandering away down the dirt road and He wouldn’t come when I called.

“Remember when Tamar called to tell me that Dog had died?” I said to Sunshine and Brown in the car. We were on our way back from DiOrio’s. “He’d died the night before, but she didn’t tell me. You were with me when she finally called the next morning. The next morning!”

Neither of them said anything. I could feel them talking, though, without words, in that way they had. Brown cleared his throat. He was riding shotgun. “Maybe she wasn’t sure how to tell you,” he said.

“Give me a break. ‘Dog died.’ That’s all she had to say. She should have told me right away.”

Sunshine leaned forward from the backseat and put her hand on my shoulder. “Listen, Clara,” she said. “Remember we told you she used to call us sometimes? That was one of those times.”

“What? Why?”

“She was worried. She didn’t want you to be alone when you found out. She wanted to make sure we were with you when she called. She knew what Dog meant to you.”

But Tamar was my mother. Dog was my dog. Italics scrolled along the bottom of my brain.

“How often did she used to call you guys, anyway?”

“Once in a while. When she was worried about you.”

My mind, with the influx of new information, was adding and subtracting, shaking everything up and redistributing it. Shuffling a deck of memory cards. A Jacob’s ladder, each tile clapping down upon the next. Dominoes. Games of chance and skill barreled their way through my mind, each of them built around the image of my mother on the phone, the heavy old phone in the kitchen at our old house, talking to Sunshine and Brown over the years that I had known them. I pictured the Jeopardy! grid that Brown had printed out for me, back in the cabin, pinned under a shot glass on the kitchen table.



Cans and Jars

Baseball

Breakup with Asa

Choir but No Church

Out-of-State College

Self-Eviction



$2000

$2000

$2000

$2000

$2000

$2000





“But I’m her daughter,” I said, as if somehow this would bring insight that had thus far escaped me.





* * *





“Do you know anything about her dreams?” Sunshine said.

“She sleeps okay,” I said. “As far as I know, anyway. Sylvia or whoever’s on duty that night calls me if she gets too agitated.”

“No, the other kind of dreams. Things she wanted to do, places she wanted to go. Is it too late or could we take her somewhere?”

“She told me once she wanted to go to San Francisco.”

My mother had told me this late one night. She always went to bed early, before me, but on this night I went to the kitchen to make some popcorn, and she was sitting at the kitchen table reading something. Number one, she was not a reader, and number two, when she looked up at me her eyes were wet. She was wearing the same pretty white shirt as in the mysterious photo. The shirt I didn’t remember her wearing in later years. The sight of her crying twisted something up in me.

“Ma? What are you reading?”

I pretended I didn’t notice she was crying. Stop crying, Ma. Stop it. She slid the paper, stapled sheets of notebook paper, across the table to me. It was an essay I had written for Great Books. Compare and contrast Virginia Woolf’s dream of a room of her own to a personal dream of your own. Stupid topic. Why was she crying? Stop crying, Ma.

“I didn’t know you wanted to go to Hong Kong,” she said.

MA. STOP CRYING.

Who wouldn’t want to go to Hong Kong? Sampans and red lanterns and the Star Ferry and that famous harbor. Chinese food. Why not go to Hong Kong? But I had chosen it at random, because it was far away and easy to write about and sounded like a place that a person who wasn’t me would dream about. A dream that sounded like a dream but wasn’t my real dream, which was to one day, some far-off day, live inside a world of words. Words to bring back the old man, words to wall off the memory of Asa, words to build barriers, words to take them down, words to soothe the savage breast. Stop crying, Ma.

“Me, I always wanted to go to San Francisco,” she said.

“San Francisco?”

I laughed. San Francisco was the most doable dream in the world. Get in the car and head west. Eventually you’d hit the Pacific Ocean. Hong Kong, now Hong Kong, even though I was only pretending I wanted to go there, was a different matter entirely. I stood there in the yellow light from the lamp she’d dragged over to the table—Tamar hated overhead light—and laughed. At her. Instantly, she stopped crying. She looked away. She got up from the table and turned herself sideways to slip past me in her Tamar way. Her two-dimensional way, which was how thin my mother was. She didn’t say another word about San Francisco, then or ever.