Never Coming Back(72)

“I’ll help you find her.”

I breathed in deeply and let it out slowly.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” I said. “We’ll check this room, and then we’ll check the hallway, and then we’ll check the dining room, and then we’ll check your bedroom, and then??—” She was nodding. I let my voice turn into a chant. A hum. A prayer. This is what we are going to do, Ma. We are going to find that lost girl. I turned my head and Sylvia was in the doorway, still watching. She gave me a good-job-Clara look and then retreated to the desk with the aide.

“I just have to lie down on this couch for a minute, Ma. Is that okay?”

“Your heart?”

Her voice, until that minute a voice unlike hers, was back. Her hand touched the side of my throat, a practiced, instinctive movement. She was checking my pulse. I closed my eyes and focused on breathing in deeply and letting it out slowly until the beat was a normal person’s again.

“Fix,” she said.

“I know. I know, Ma. Pretty soon.”

“She flew away.”

Follow her, Clara. Wherever she goes, follow her. I pictured a winter day, a lost daughter, wind spiraling her up above furious snow into brightness beyond.

“Maybe she did, Ma.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. We can look for her, though. We’ll just keep looking for her.”

Around the Green Room, one lap, two laps, three. A pause by the orchids each time. Then out into the hall, pause by the desk, down one hallway and then the next, past the silent dining room and the lemonade and juice stand. Pause for a Dixie cup of apple juice each. Into Tamar’s room, where her bed was made and the table lamp was turned on and the curtains were drawn and all the books I had brought her were stacked crisscross beneath the window the way I had stacked them yesterday, as if they were logs for the woodstove and we were back in Sterns, readying our firewood for the winter. Tamar tossed the logs and I made orderly stacks. Logs and books—the ritual was the same.

Reckon your losses. Forgive us our trespasses, that we may forgive those who trespass against us. As she hurt you, so you must have hurt her. Apologize. Remember, Clara, that you don’t know the whole story. No one ever knows the whole story.

“I’m sorry, Ma. You must have felt that you couldn’t tell me things.”

“Like what?”

“Important things.”

“Like what?”

She was parroting.

“You loved someone, didn’t you? But you never told me about him.”

“You loved someone?” she said.

Another kind of parroting, another kind of non-answer. Yes, I did love someone, Ma. I loved Asa, and I love Sunshine and Brown, and I am on the verge—no, the verge has been verged—of loving Chris. And you. I love you, Ma.

“I’m sorry I was so hard on you, Ma.”

“Hard on you?”

“Yes, hard on you. Always badgering you about Daphne back when I was a kid, for one thing.”

She was leaning on her walker. We had made it to the doorway of the Green Room, where the television was on, sound muted. She looked up at me and frowned.

“Who’s Daphne?”

Some things, you couldn’t imagine they would ever disappear, like the memory of your own baby. But they did disappear, apparently, to use the Life Care Committee’s favorite word. And the fact that they disappeared made other things that you wanted to do, like show your mother the photograph and ask her about it, impossible. My heart leaped off the tracks again, began again its jolt and shudder in my chest. Twice in the space of one hour? That had never happened before. Tamar was still looking at me with that frown, waiting for me to tell her who Daphne was, but I put my hand to my chest and her eyes followed.

She pushed herself up. That unsteady gait, no aluminum walker for balance, hands stretching toward me. She put her hand over mine, over the beatbeatbeatbeatbeat that made our fingers and palms quiver. Her hand stayed on mine and I lay down on the couch and looked at the ceiling, at the ugly acoustic tile, until my heart caught mid-sprint and again returned to a steady beat.

“There,” she said, as if my heart had gone missing and was now returned. She was right. I sat up.

We stayed there on the couch for a while, my mother and me, her hand resting on my hand. Twenty years ago would have seen me asking her about my father, about my dead twin sister, about my grandparents, and her silent in the face of those questions. Now I was asking again, and again, and again, about all manner of things that I knew now must have felt to her back then the way rain felt when it was near freezing and driving horizontally into your skin. Cold needles pricking all the exposed places. Did my questions still hurt her? Or was she beyond them?





* * *





“It’s an outpatient procedure,” the electrocardiologist said. “What we do is thread catheters up your femoral veins into the heart, then we provoke an episode so as to get the lay of the land and see where exactly the misfire is happening.”

“Episode?” I said. “Provoke?”

His office was in Utica, down the block from the doctor that Tamar and I had met with. It was just the two of us in the examining room, dusk falling over the Mohawk Valley outside the single window.

“Yep,” he said. “In at seven, home by five. It’s the slam dunk of the cardiology world.”