The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(116)

We sit together at the same little table where I’d watched the mom sit and share her hot dog with her little girl. We try to ask each other questions about the last five months. It’s hard to know where to begin, or even the right kinds of questions to ask.

I tell them about walking tacos.

They tell me about fettuccini.

I show them the lump on my hand from where the tent stake barreled down on me.

My mom shows me the earrings and necklace she’s wearing, modeled after a pair Queen Mary once had, that she’d bought on the ship because of extra onboard credit. Then they show me some of her bruises.

“But even that bad stuff was still good,” Davy says. My mom nods her head. She seems to understand everything he is saying, everything I am saying, which is not something I was ever sure of before she left. Does this mean that she’d understood when I’d told her I loved her as she was going into one of her brain surgeries, when I hugged her goodbye for this trip?

“We found a closeness we never knew possible,” Davy says.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

I look over to my mom and she is looking at him. She pulls her hand up from the coffee she’d been holding and runs it through the back of his hair. She breathes out softly, a kind of breath I’m not sure I’ve noticed before, a calm release of air. Not a sigh exactly, there is more sweetness to it, and a sound in it, subtle, a faint tone with the breath. She is saying something.

“I think your mom and I are pretty positive people,” Davy says. “We knew we would be able to work through whatever happened. At least we weren’t shrinking into a little dark hole someplace. So many people just stay in their home and start smelling like urine. Being old wasn’t something I wanted for us.”

I laugh. My mom does, too. It sounds so simple like that—choosing not to accept the kind of life that’s expected of you.

She understood. She understands. And she is still here.

“We became so incredibly close along the way. I don’t know, it wasn’t something I was expecting, being able to communicate nonverbally. But we have no artifice between us now. No secrets. Everything that happened, happened to both of us. You kind of merge a little. In the hospital, everything is built around pain and progress. When you’re out and you’re trying to decide what to eat, do you like that painting, how about that statue of the David, that’s much more broad and unstructured, and it builds you together in a different way. It led to a kind of enrichment that the show me where your pain is on this scale just doesn’t have.”

It is almost time for me to go, to get into costume and perform a few last days on the stage before it is all over. It is almost time for them to go catch their train.

My mom reaches out her hand to my hand and pulls me close. She exhales slowly, letting out that same soft note. She runs her fingertips over the calluses on my hands, over my hangnails. I run mine over her necklace, through her hair. There is no hesitation in her movement. What is there left for her to fear?

I give them both big hugs, and, just as I’m running back toward my tent, Davy yells for me to wait.

“They got any fried ravioli here?” he asks. I point them in the right direction.

And then they’re gone.

*

The last few days of performing are a blur as everyone makes their final travel plans and we start packing and fixing what needs to be packed and fixed backstage between acts. There is no time on the final day for tears or reflection, because, like every closing day, the work starts early and hard and never ceases, the day of performing sliding into the night of teardown, folding and unpinning and stacking and rolling and hauling and heaving, working on and on into the night and only occasionally remembering, as we load Queen Kong into the back of the truck, that this is the last time I’ll ever do that particular thing.

Roelof runs to our truck after teardown, 9:00 a.m., morning light streaming in. His crew is leaving in fifteen minutes. Driving the trucks to Orlando, spending the night in a motel there and getting on a plane the next morning for South Africa. But he runs to our truck before he leaves, grabs my face in both his hands. He is panting, sweating. We’d spent eight days of this fair, when my parents weren’t here, together. He brings his face close to mine and looks at it up close, keeps his bright blue eyes on mine, and then kisses me.

“Goodbye,” he says. He turns around and runs, quickly, away from the truck.

There are some romances that last until death. Some that start in childhood. David and Teresa. For Roelof and me, it was just for the time the carnival was in town. It was finding a kindred spirit who was trying to find his way through the arc of grief while still living, and it was bright, and sweet, and sexy, and funny, and I was smacked in the face with the simple, obvious idea that the world isn’t all about what has been lost. There is so much still here, to be found.

I imagined my mom out in that field again, the one where the author of that book on strokes, and all the other people who’d recovered, had left her. And she was still there, partially, and there were little blue and yellow and white flowers everywhere, but she wasn’t alone. There were animals out there, talking to each other. There were all the other people from all over the world who had to figure out new ways of communicating with each other. And Davy was out there, too, somehow he’d found a way to her. He was whittling a stick and sitting beside my mom as she arranged the bright petals into some complicated, beautiful pattern on the dirt. I didn’t need to shoot everyone who tried to enter in case they might hurt her. I didn’t need to be skulking on the edges or gnashing my teeth for violence. I needed to go into the goddamned field myself. To sit beside her.