Never Coming Back(71)

Sunshine put down the baby hat she was crocheting, a serious move for her, a woman whose hands always needed to be in motion. “Ask your mother, Clara.”

“She doesn’t know who I am half the time anymore.”

“Ask anyway.”

But I shook my head. I had already said too much. It felt as if I had betrayed her: Brown’s splutter of a laugh and Sunshine’s quieted hands and the soft look on my mother’s face in that photo combined to make my heart swell with a feeling I couldn’t at first name because in conjunction with my mother it was so unfamiliar. I waited for the word to come to me, and as I waited, with the two of them looking at me, I pictured my mother as she looked back when I was in high school, in her jeans and her Keds and her un-made-up face and her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail or a braid or a knot. Not so different from the way she was still, down there in the place where she lived now, where she deadheaded the orchids and trod the hallways back and forth and up and down. I waited for the word to name the feeling inside me, and then it came floating up out of the darkness: wonder. Wonder was the feeling inside me, that my mother had been loved and loved back. That there were rooms within rooms within her, rooms filled with white and light and space, rooms I’d never known about.





* * *





If the place where my mother lived now called, I picked up instantly.

I had given the number its own special ring tone: Old Phone. Old Phone was the sound of the telephone we had when I was growing up, that heavy receiver attached to the long curly cord, the telephone that we never referred to as “phone.”

“This is Clara.”

“Hi Clara. This is Sylvia. I know you were here just last night but today’s been a rough day. Your mom’s been crying on and off all morning. She’s agitated. She’s been looking for her daughter. And a cookie.”

Sylvia pronounced the words carefully, as if the words “daughter” and “cookie” might be foreign to me.

“She keeps trying to get out the French doors,” she added. “She won’t step onto the black paint, though. Which is good. I pulled the curtains so she can’t see out, but still.”

She waited. I knew what that wait meant.

“Okay. I’m on my way.”

It was late afternoon and it had been only one day since I had seen my mother, one day since I had not asked her about the photograph that lived now in the back compartment of my wallet. But Sylvia wouldn’t call unless she had tried everything she knew. I locked up the cabin and stepped onto the porch. Winter in the Adirondacks and chilly, the sun already falling.

As my mother tended the orchids in the Green Room, so did Sylvia and I tend my mother. Tamar, past and present, the fragments thereof. It was an hour from Turnip Hill to the place where she lived now.

Sylvia looked up at me from behind the desk and smiled. The sympathetic smile, was how I thought of that particular kind of smile, a smile I would hate from anyone but her.

“You made it.”

She pointed to the Green Room. Much went unspoken, with Sylvia. She was a few-words woman.

“Ma?”

She didn’t hear me. Maybe she didn’t want to. She was pacing back and forth in front of the big picture window, leaning on her walker. An aide at her side, watchful for falls, looked up and nodded at the sight of me, then slipped past out the doorway. My mother’s walker made its aluminum sound on the tiled floor as tears ran down her cheeks. She was crying. My mother was crying.

How many times, as a child, had I seen her cry? Only twice. That night with the Neil Diamond album, and that other time, when she sat at the table reading my paper about Hong Kong.

Maybe there had been times I didn’t know about. Maybe there were times, say Wednesday nights, after she finished being justice of the peace, at our scrubbed kitchen table, after she was done meting out justice to the DWIs, the petty thieves, the property-line trespassers, the tax-valuation arguers, when the circumstances of life overwhelmed her and she put her head down on the tabletop and cried. Maybe there were other times too, after the love, whoever he was, left her, and she was alone. But what did I know?

“Clara,” she said, and again: “Clara.”

“Are you thinking about Clara, Ma?”

She nodded. I stepped toward her and took her hand. She let me.

“Clara,” she whispered.

“Do you miss her?”

“I lost her,” she said.

Then, in a single swift movement, she lifted the walker in both hands and flung it against the wall and began to wail. My heart was off and running then, speeding yet again, a high-speed chase of one beat after another. Too thin, too dehydrated, too stressed. Two out of three at any given time would bring on an episode, and now the episodes just kept coming.

Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump, my insistent heart jackhammered away. I tugged my mother toward me. Sylvia and the aide were there swiftly and silently, but I shook my head at them. No. Let me.

“Shhh, Ma,” I said. “Shhh. Sit down, Ma,” and eventually she did. The green couch in the Green Room, orchids, heavy on their stems, bowed down on the opposite wall. Sitting was better. My heart could hammer away but there would be no fainting.

“My daughter,” Tamar said. Her eyes were bewildered. “I can’t find her.”

Do not question. Follow.