Never Coming Back(87)

“Sylvia?”

Panic in my voice, soft, controlled panic because it behooved no one to panic at full volume in the place where my mother lived now. She didn’t turn her head, but her other hand reached toward me, fingers spread in a warning that meant Shhh, that meant No need to panic. So I slowed and approached the way a pioneer girl might have done if she were trying to walk like an Indian guide in the woods, if she were trying to leave no trace of her presence, nothing to give herself away. I stood opposite Sylvia and pressed myself against the wall, angling my head to see what she was looking at, which was my mother, my small, thin mother, with Eli Chamberlain’s arms around her. He was rocking her back and forth, there on the green couch in the Green Room, with his face pressed against her dark hair and his eyes closed.

There are times in life when you come across something—a piece of music or a passage from a book or words spoken by a person you love—and something in you responds in an instant, physical way. Your throat swells almost shut, tears spring out of your eyes, your heart draws in on itself in a way that somehow makes it feel bigger. Or broken. Maybe they’re the same thing.

The both of us stood, Sylvia and I, one on either side of the doorway to the Green Room, watching someone who was not me and who loved my mother in a way that was nothing like the way I loved her now or ever, gather her in and hold her close.

And she let him.





* * *





The ship was in Trebek’s capable hands and we let him guide it through the calm harbor of the first round. Brown and Sunshine were on one side of Tamar, Chris on the other, and me? On the floor, propped against Chris’s legs. Their voices floated in looping, lazy curves in the air just above my head. Winter this and Winter that, Sunshine and Brown telling Chris more stories of back in college, how they used to come drag me out of the piano practice room and haul me downtown for beer and pool.

“How many times you think we’ve taught Winter to play pool, Brown?”

“Probably as many as we’ve made her drink beer.”

Tamar stayed quiet. Where was she now, I wondered, and what was she thinking about? Was she thinking at all? The day would come when she stopped talking entirely. They had told me that at the Life Care meeting. Please say something, Ma.

“There,” she said, and I felt her move above and behind me. A small movement, a disturbance of the air. Maybe she was pointing at the porthole? Knothole had turned into porthole and we were following her lead.

“There what, Tamar?” Brown said.

“There.”

There on the porthole, the sound on mute, Trebek was standing next to the three contestants at their podiums. Time for the contestant interviews. The heinous interviews. Come, first contestant, lean forward and do your best.

Then there was movement above and in back of me again. A hand descended on my head, a light touch, like the touch of a baby trying to understand hair. Sunshine and Brown and Chris stopped talking, all of them, at once. It was as if they had received a signal from the universe: Be quiet. Then I understood that the hand on my hair, whispering through it strand by strand, was my mother’s.

There might have been nights, when I was a baby, that my mother placed her hand on my head. Maybe there were dark nights, nights when I couldn’t stop crying, nights when maybe she couldn’t stop crying either, and she sat with me in the darkness and held me and put her hand on my head and cradled me and rocked me. Maybe she sang to me. She must have sung to me, because my whole life was filled with memories of my mother singing. When she was gone from this earth, her voice would still be with me. Nothing went entirely away. Some part always stayed. Like the silent, unseen electricity running its way up and down the walls of the cabin. The shadow world: indivisible from this outer one in which we moved, and drove, and talked and laughed and held hands.

Was my mother scared, when I was little? Did she feel alone? Did she feel as if she were on a path leading somewhere she could not predict, somewhere she would have to go whether she wanted to or not? Was the child in her arms a comfort? Or was I a burden, a responsibility that she had no choice but to take on?

Both. That was the word that came to me, there in the porthole room. You were both a comfort and a burden.

On the muted porthole, Trebek was chatting with the three contestants. Their faces smiled and nodded, and so did his. Had I ever really looked at Trebek? Was this what he really looked like, an ordinary person having ordinary conversations with other ordinary people who happened to be good at trivia? Maybe this was who Trebek was, an ordinary, friendly man, and I just hadn’t noticed. It was impossible to know the whole story.

Was I still a comfort to my mother? Was I still a burden? Her fingers whispered through my hair, following strand after strand, beginning at the root and moving down and down and down through the length of it, until the length of it ended and her fingers journeyed back up to the top of my head and began again.

“What do you think they’re talking about up there?” Brown said.

“Game theory,” Sunshine said. “Betting strategy.”

Tamar was quiet, but her fingers kept moving. My head felt alive with her touch. Chris was quiet too, his knees solid behind my shoulder blades. Maybe the contestants were talking game theory and betting strategy. Maybe they were talking about the luck of certain shirts, the right tie. Maybe they were talking about their families. Did I know anything about Trebek’s family? No. All these years, I had taken him and his show for granted.