Meet Me at the River (22 page)

Mom sits on the sofa, drumming her fingers on the armrest. When she sees me, she jumps to her feet. She looks agitated, wide-eyed, but strangely exhilarated. I notice that her stomach has shrunk back to approximately its original dimensions except for a little pouch, like she’s back at the beginning of her pregnancy. She looks younger than I’ve seen her in a long time.

“Tressa,” she says. “We got a phone call from your English teacher.”

I run my hands over my face, which feels puffy with sleep. Mom and Grandma both stare at my clothes—Luke’s black sweater, and jeans stiff with dried snow and dirt from Carlo’s and my farewell.

“Tressa,” Grandma says, practically shouting over the wailing baby. “Did you sleep in your clothes?”

“After doing some midnight gardening?” Mom adds. She doesn’t sound admonishing but energized. I know this look. It indicates a change, an idea. It indicates flight. I’ve seen it a dozen times. The last time, she had just phoned Paul collect from a rickety phone booth on Nuku Hiva. “I’m coming home,” she’d told him. “I’m ready.”

“Of course,” Paul had said. “I’m here. I’m waiting.” We said good-bye to Hugo and Isabelle and came back to Colorado. Paul and Mom were married within months. He wouldn’t take any chances—not that a marriage license had helped him hold on to her the first time.

“What did Mr. Tynan say?” I ask, trying to divert attention from the state of my clothes. Apparently he didn’t say anything very good, because Mom looks over at Grandma, and they both frown.

“He says he thinks you need to talk to someone,” Mom says, “so I’ve made an appointment with Dr. Reisner. You and I can go to Durango tomorrow and stay in a hotel. We can have dinner at East by Southwest. When’s the last time we ate sushi?” She claps her hands as if it’s all settled. I cast a glance over at Grandma and Matthew. He finally seems to be calming down. Wails have given way to occasional little blipping sounds, and his funny old-man eyelids have started to droop. Grandma doesn’t dare halt her bizarre, rhythmic movement, but she returns my gaze with a measure of alarm.

“I don’t see why we have to spend the night,” I say. “It’s only an hour and a half away. And what about Matthew?”

“Hey,” my mom says, her voice strained. “You’re still my baby too, you know. I have to take care of you, too, right? Paul can deal with Matthew just fine.”

“But, Mom,” I say. “He’s three weeks old. Do you really think you should leave him overnight?”

“Let me worry about that,” Mom says. I feel an old, familiar sinking. In the past I was the only one of three children she ever worried about, and I don’t want to become the only one of four. Matthew, over there wailing in Grandma’s arms, is supposed to be keeping me company in the mothering section of her brain.

*   *   *

When Mom tells Paul her plan—to leave Matthew with him and go on an overnight to Durango—his face drops. It goes so pale that even I feel sorry for him. Clearly the idea of her loading me into a car and taking off without him, to say nothing of his child, is flatly traumatizing. Which is why the next day finds me, my mother, and Matthew driving together to Durango with plans to return that evening after we attempt sushi. The hotel idea struck me as strange anyway, since it only takes about ninety minutes to get from Rabbitbrush to Durango. However, I start to see the appeal of Mom’s original plan when Matthew spends the first sixty minutes or so screaming. If Paul thought that insisting she bring the baby along would ensure her return, he may have been shortsighted. By the time Matthew finally falls asleep, Mom looks like she’s been through a war—and she kind of has been, leaning over his backward car seat to nurse him, singing, waving a little cloth face with legs and cloth flaps sprouting out all around it.

Mom crawls back over the seats to sit next to me, her agility impressive for a forty-five-year old woman who has just given birth to her fourth child. She leans her head back and closes her eyes for a minute. Then she says, “All I wanted was one day to myself. Do you think that was too much to ask?”

I keep my eyes on the road. Even though I found the crying ordeal admittedly horrifying, most people would
not consider a daughter’s suicidal leanings an opportunity for vacation. “Well,” she says when it’s clear I don’t plan to answer. I hear an edge of irritation in her voice. “Do you think it’s too much to ask?”

“Sorry,” I say, glancing sideways. Her eyes are open now, and she sits with her long legs tucked beneath her. “I thought it was a rhetorical question.”

Blowing out a long stream of air, she says, “I guess it was.” She glances into the rearview mirror, which is aimed at another mirror on the backseat so that she can see Matthew even though he’s pointed away from her. This communication between the glass strikes me as a metaphor for constant vigilance, and suddenly I feel sorry for my mother, who does so famously ill in captivity. It was one thing to be pregnant, playing at perfect motherhood, another to put that perfection into action.

“It’s funny,” she says. “He doesn’t look anything like me.”

“Well, Mom,” I point out. “Why would he?”

“I know, I know,” she says. “It’s just got me thinking about babies, about all my babies. I know this is the kind of thing a person’s not supposed to talk about, but my whole life everyone’s told me I was so pretty. I can’t remember a time when people didn’t tell me that. And I heard the words, but I never saw it in myself. I used to stare into the mirror, and all I ever saw was this kind of pale, crooked face. I’d walk down the street feeling okay, and then I’d glance in a store window and think,
Yikes
.
I never felt pretty. I never liked my face even a little bit until I had the twins.
Their
faces were so beautiful, they were so perfect, and they looked just like me. When I looked in the mirror, suddenly I would see pieces of them, and finally I liked my own face.”

This is enormously interesting. Before this minute I have never heard Mom speak of Jill and Katie as babies, her own children.

“It kills me that they call me Hannah,” she says. “Do you know they called Francine Mom? For years they called her Mom, even after Paul left her.”

“I thought she left Paul.”

Mom waves her hand and says, “Whatever.” I grant her the ambiguity, as we all know Paul left Francine emotionally long before she left him—if he was ever present emotionally in the first place.

“But, Mom,” I say, now that she has opened this long-closed door, “how could you do it? How could you leave them?”

From the backseat Matthew gives a little hiccup, as if seconding the question. Mom looks into the rearview mirror with intense, wide-eyed dread. Clearly, nothing in the world—swerving off the road, a heart attack, a sudden forest fire—would be worse than the sleeping baby waking.

Luckily, it turns out to be a false alarm. Mom turns her gaze back to the road, staring intently. She doesn’t seem to have any intention of answering, so I prod. “Seriously,” I say.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I can’t explain it. It was a kind of antsyness, like I didn’t have any choice. I was so young, and they just wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted all the time, every second around the clock. I didn’t sleep for nearly two years. Maybe if it had been just one baby, it would have been different. But suddenly I could see my whole life, with no movement whatsoever. Every second of it in that little town, the same people, the same experiences.”

“So why did you keep coming back?” I ask. “Why did you come back and marry Paul?” She shrugs as if she doesn’t know herself. Then she says, “I was forty-two. I felt seasick. I couldn’t stay with Hugo anymore. I was done with that. And I thought, where do I go from here? Where’s my security? Do I really want to be a forty-year-old vagabond? A fifty-year-old vagabond? How many more men can there be, after this?”

“And you knew Paul would take you back.”

“He always said he would. And he did, immediately. No questions asked. He’s very forgiving.”

I remember how devastated Hugo was when Mom told him we were leaving. He and Isabelle both cried, and he refused to take us to the airport. I tried to hug him good-bye, but he couldn’t bear it. Seasoned sailor though he was, he’d never come across a storm as unpredictable as my mother.

“Don’t think I haven’t asked myself the same question,” Mom says, finally returning to my original prompt.
“How could I have left my own children? I think it’s part of the reason I held on to you so ferociously. Mom and Dad would have taken you, and sometimes I could see how that would have been a better life. Jesus Christ, I could barely even feed you. But then what would that make me, if I did it twice? And if life in Rabbitbrush was so terrible, what was I doing leaving all my children there?”

This story veers so dramatically from the one she’s always told me, about how her deep, fierce love prevented her from ever parting with me, that I almost want to pull over to the shoulder and catch my breath. Instead I press a little harder on the gas, pushing the car well over the speed limit toward eighty. I wonder if Mom will comment, worried for Matthew’s safety, but she just keeps staring at the road in a steady, sleep-deprived fog.

Assia Wevill turned on the gas oven. She placed a blanket on the floor beside it and laid her sleeping daughter down. Then she lay down too. She not only left; she brought her daughter with her.

“I never looked anything like you,” I say to my mom. This truth has always been part disappointment—missing out on her beauty—and part relief, a point of separation, the possibility of escape.

She turns toward me, surprised and maybe even a little wounded. “You don’t think?” she says. “I do. We have the same chin. The same forehead. The same jaw.
And you have my hair—a different color, but the texture’s the same. I always think of you looking like me.”

“I look like my father,” I say.

“Yes,” she says quietly. “You look like him, too. He was lovely, Tressa. He was really beautiful.”

I try to picture my father’s face but can’t conjure adjectives to attach any more accurately than I could to my own. What I see instead is the scenery changing, the landscape a colorful blur through the car window. Mom touches the top of my head. I can see Durango now as we come up on the city limits. In a few minutes I’ll be out of this car, out of this conversation. It can’t happen soon enough.

*   *   *

Dr. Reisner has an office in town, and this is where he wants to meet me. I feel thankful for this bit of normality, not making me return to the halls of the hospital but letting me wait in a room built for normal neurotics, with
People
magazine and
Good Housekeeping
spread out across the glass table.

“I’m worried about the baby,” I say as soon as I sit down across from him. “My mom seems like she’s getting ready to take off again.”

He tilts his head, then drums his fingers on his knees. Dr. Reisner is a telemark skier and always looks like he’d rather be on the slopes. I like this about him. For one thing, it makes him seem less like a psychologist. He has long, gray-blond hair that he wears in a ponytail,
and a permanent wind tan, pale around the eyes where his goggles block the sun. Even in early summer, when I stayed at the hospital, that tan persisted. Now, in the midst of ski season, his skin is red, freckled, and peeling—making those pale rings all the more dramatic. I’m touched that he would forfeit today’s sunny blanket of fresh powder to meet with me.

From the waiting room the baby wails. Matthew woke up when we got out of the car, and now Mom must have just stopped nursing him. “That baby’s kind of a handful,” I tell Dr. Reisner.

“Newborns tend to be,” Dr. Reisner says. “But that’s something your mom can discuss with her own therapist. I’m interested in you, Tressa.”

I lean forward and roll up my sleeves. I show him my scars—still red, raised and violent.

“I’m okay,” I say. “Look. Same old wounds. No fresh ones.”

“A teacher was alarmed?”

“A teacher overreacted. I’m not subject to thought control, right?”

“Of course not. I just want to check in on those thoughts, not control them. Make sure you’re all right.”

I pull my sleeves down and sit back in my chair. Dr. Reisner crosses his arms. I think about everything I can’t tell him—Luke’s visits, and saying good-bye to Carlo. Dr. Reisner imagines that his own power and knowledge surpass mine. And yet he will never know what I
do, about loving so deeply that it brings back the dead. I like Dr. Reisner, I do. But unlike during the old days at the hospital, before Luke came back, I don’t feel as if there’s anything he can do for me except maybe give my English project the green light.

Dr. Reisner asks his gentle, prodding questions, some of them implying it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go back on Prozac, or some other SSRI. Of course I don’t say the first phrase that leaps to mind,
Over my dead body.
Outside in the waiting room the baby continues to cry. Outside the window the San Juans rise—covered in snow, the blue sky behind them, with thin wisps of clouds that might be spirits, angels.

Matthew gives Mom a break and sleeps through dinner. With his car seat perched on one of the chairs, she drapes a blanket over him like he’s a parakeet she can trick into silence. We eat spicy tuna rolls and unagi. She orders hot sake and pours a glass for me. I leave it sitting there beside me, untouched, until finally she reaches across the table and drinks it herself.

“I think Dad’s going to let Paul build his theater,” she says.

“No.” I dip my eel into the dish of soy sauce and wasabi. “He said he never would.”

Mom shrugs. “It’s really not up to him. He gave the land to me. Anyway, I guess they had a good talk at the diner.”

I remember Grandpa’s face at the diner. It didn’t look
like a particularly good talk to me, and I start to tell her so. But she interrupts me.

“Did I ever tell you about that guy in Ireland?” she says. The waiter appears, to clear away our empty plates. “The one who fell off a cliff?”

I sip my water and stare at her over the rim of my glass, wishing she’d fill me in on Paul and Grandpa, and wondering how she could possibly think I want to hear a story about a guy who fell over a cliff, when just a couple months ago she didn’t consider me strong enough to hear the word “mortified.”