Never Coming Back(88)

Tamar’s fingers danced the slowest dance in the world, arranging the strands of my hair in a way that must have made sense to her, because she kept on. She persevered. Then Chris’s hands were on my shoulders, and my mother’s fingers were light and soft in my hair, and my best friends were talking about what exactly was game theory, anyway.

If time could be frozen, that was where I would freeze it. That moment, in that room, with these people, this couch, this floor, that television. Chris’s hands on my shoulders, my mother’s fingers in my hair. Portal to another world.

The orchids in the corner hung heavily on their long stems, and the porthole kept up its soundless flickering. The third contestant tipped his head back and laughed a silent laugh while Trebek smiled.





* * *





When the call came I knew what it was about before Sylvia had a chance to say hello.

“She fell, didn’t she,” I said, and “Yes,” Sylvia said, and then I told her I was on my way and I clicked off and then called Chris and Sunshine and Brown. I called Eli too, and left him a message. It was late in the evening and I waited on the porch with the quilt wrapped around me over my coat until headlights came flickering through the darkness and wound their way up the hill. Chris got out and opened the door for me, and Brown drove and Sunshine sat next to him.

She had fallen while trying to cross the black abyss. She was trying to get outside, through the glass door into the bare, pre-snow stalks of the back garden, invisible at night. She was trying to get to her daughter, lost out there somewhere.

I pictured the swatch of black paint in front of the locked sliding doors. The aide might have been asleep on the couch, or taking a bathroom break, or watering the orchids, or adjusting the volume on the porthole. The alarm had sounded and Sylvia had gotten there within seconds but not soon enough. My mother had left behind her walker, jumped the black hole and fallen into the abyss.

I undid my seat belt and slid across the big back seat to Chris, who wrapped his arms around me the way Eli Chamberlain had done the day I went to tell him how sorry I was. The headlights pierced the darkness of Route 28. Soon we would be at the junction of 12. It was a bad fall, Sylvia had said, and the tone of her voice filled in the meaning of bad. Soon we would be on the outskirts of Utica, at St. Luke’s, where they had taken my mother. She was going down a road and I could not follow her.

I thought about the bartender, how he had pushed those chairs together and lain down next to me the night my heart wouldn’t stop hammering in my chest. How, when it finally calmed, he had taken my hand in both of his and held it all the way to the car. I thought about my mother’s fingers, how in these last months they had described curves and shapes in the air. Her fingers had traveled ahead of her to the land of words and phrases, the place where all her lost words and phrases lived now. They waited there for her.

I thought about Blue Mountain and pictured him asleep somewhere in a house in the high peaks. I pictured him waking in the darkness of that house, maybe from a bad dream. Or maybe from a good dream. I conjured up a nightlight in a corner of his room, a nightlight shaped like a star. I conjured up glow-in-the-dark stars glued to the ceiling of his room. I pictured him counting stars, counting himself back into the land of sleep.

I thought about Asa, the day things broke between us. I thought about Eli, how he had laced his arms around his boy and guided him into the truck and driven him away. I thought of before that day, how Asa used to put his arm around me and hold my far hand and, if he thought I was cold, sneak it into the pocket of his jacket. How he alternated first one arm and one hand and then the other arm and the other hand, so that neither of my hands had a chance to get too cold. I thought about the baby I might have had with him, how he might have waved his hands in the air when he cried, searching for comfort. For someone to help him. Someone to feed him, change him, soothe him, rock him. Someone to take the hurt away.

If ever I made it to the contestant interview, maybe I would tell Trebek about the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains and the White Mountains, how even though they were low and old mountains, they were my favorites. Maybe we would talk about books, and the people who lived inside them. Maybe I would ask him which books he loved as a child.

Whatever questions came my way from now on, and however I chose to answer them, I would hold a night in my heart. I was four years old and my mother was a girl of twenty-two. She woke me in the middle of the night and took my hand and guided me downstairs and out onto the porch.

“Look up, Clara,” she said, and I looked up.

Red and yellow and green and blue, soundless and unearthly.

“It’s the northern lights,” she said. “The aurora borealis.”

The dark night sky had glimmered and pulsed with light. I hung on to my mother’s hand.

Now the four of us, in Chris’s big white car, rounded the final curve of Route 12. The valley spread out before us, shimmering with city lights like a sky fallen to earth. It came to me that my mother had staked her life not on travel, or adventure, or school, or work, or a man to love, but on me. I was the great gamble of my mother’s life, and she had not held back. She had bet it all.