What I Had Before I Had You (21 page)

“How do you know this stuff?”

“God, Olivia, how do you not?” she says, and Courtney elbows her.

“So what if she doesn't want to be stabilized?”

Laura screws up her face distastefully. “That would be unfortunate, right? That would be masochistic.”

I don't know what “masochistic” means, but I can see that they don't understand about divine energies. If a pill would make her better, it would also make her someone else. That idea rankles: She could have been steady all through my childhood—no disappearances, no spinouts, no weeks passed out on the sofa—and she chose to be otherwise. She was selfish, though she would never see it that way. But how much do we really choose these things? I think. How can I blame her for her gift of sight?

“She can tell the future. Sometimes she can tell what you're thinking. She knew all about Jim Jones.”

They look at me dubiously.

“She has a chart with tides and constellations, and her psychic energy follows these patterns, like, she gets really, really psychic for a while, and then she has to wait to get psychic again and get her energy back.”

“So,” says Laura slowly, “is she psychic right now?”

“No, now she's just tired.” I get up. “I gotta pee.”

I slip into the hallway, closing the door soundlessly behind me. The floorboards creak gently beneath my socked feet. I can hear clanking in the kitchen, and as I take the three steps down to the landing at the top of the stairs, I see my mother and Tom in the foyer below. I insinuate myself into the low shadows. I watch them through the banister posts.

My mother is standing in the middle of the foyer, facing away from me in an unusual attitude of rigidity, her hands clutched together in front of her. A foot away from her, Tom leans against the long wooden mail table with his ankles crossed, looking anywhere but at her. My mother is speaking too quietly to hear. She turns her head to the side to push her hair behind her ear, and her face is full of misery. Then she steps forward, closing the gap between them, and takes hold of Tom's arm at the elbow, her thumb in the crook and her fingers wrapped around, her freckled, slender forearm laid on top of his muscular one, his tawny arm hair, his gold watch. Her body follows her arm forward, and she arches her back to look up at him in a gesture of pleading, of submission. Her voice quavers. I am horrified.

This is when I know, although maybe I knew when I first met Tom, or even earlier, in Christie's oblique attentions. I have seen this gesture before, this reaching plea. I can't piece together the specifics, but I understand: my mother and Tom. A big red circle around his brown hair, my brown hair. His attached earlobes, mine.

Tom shakes her off and, rattled, blusters through the door to his office and closes it. This office was once my grandfather's, and I imagine my mother as a little girl, doing puzzles on the floor while he typed on an old clacking typewriter. Now it is my father's, and she is not welcome.

As I creep back along the hallway, I probe my interior for some filial emotion and come up dry. Shouldn't I feel something? Nobody knows that I know, so I don't have to fake my way through some kind of tearful reunion, and that is a relief. What I do feel, more strongly than anything I will ever feel for Tom, is vindication. Laura and Courtney are my sisters. I was never mistaken at all.

WHEN WE ARE
allowed to come downstairs, Christie and my mother are sitting in the living room. All the furniture here is complementary-colored: soft blues and oranges. A bowl of wasabi peas on the table. Tom is gone.

The afternoon passes in stilted efforts at conversation. I see my mother retreat inward as the minutes tick by: She hunches her shoulders, sinks into Christie's expensive sofa, and unfocuses her eyes. We go out for pizza at a place Christie thinks my mother will remember. “Stand up straight,” my mother snaps at me on the walk over. She doesn't know that my leg pains me, and she can't sense it, or maybe she just isn't trying.

I stand with Laura in line, choosing toppings. As Christie pays, I see Courtney and my mother talking at a table. My mother is holding Courtney's right hand cupped in her left, tracing lines across it with a bitten fingernail. I've always found palm reading too intimate for public places. Your hand spread and splayed, all its secret rumples stretched raw, and a stranger touching those secret places, learning things about your heart that you don't know, yourself.

I smack my tray down hard on the table next to Courtney. Courtney, who is once again my sister.

“I'm going to have four kids,” she says.

“I thought you were at half strength or something,” says Laura to my mother.

“That's true. But palm reading doesn't require any ability. It's just like reading a book.”

My mother tells Courtney that her lifeline splits in the middle, which means she will reinvent herself. She will travel a great deal, but her travels will bring her sorrow. I can see the effort of speaking and moving and eating in the lines of my mother's forehead, the heavy pauses between her words. Every now and again she fixes me with a pleading look, a
get me out of here
look. Christie eats primly, wiping orange grease from the corners of her thin lips.

UNDER THE TALL
Manhattan streetlights, I stand with my mother by her car. Empty iced-tea bottles litter the backseat, and a paper bag from Wendy's is balled up in the drink holder.

“Do you need to gather your things from the house?” she asks me.

“No,” I mumble.

My mother's face collapses as she registers my unwillingness. She buckles against the car and strains there as if against a wind. She cries. Her gulping breaths ring excruciatingly loud and wet in the quiet street. She reaches out to me, and I let her put her arms around me and lay her cheek on my shoulder.

“Why did you leave here?” I ask her. She breathes on my shoulder. “Why did you say my sisters were dead?”

“They
are
dead.”

“Did you
love
Tom?”

“Yes.”

“If I came home, would it be any different?”

I wait for a long time, and then she says, “No.”

She doesn't loosen her arms when I pull away, and that makes it worse, so I shove backward. As I turn away, I catch a glimpse of my mother that I will never shake: the lines of the car lit yellow by the streetlight, all those horizontals interrupted by the dark bedraggled mass of my mother, her wilted posture, the dandelion earrings oxidizing in the jungle of her hair, greasy to the color of rum. Her look heavy and blank like a sky full of rain, and her hands trembling half-raised, caught somewhere between reaching out for me and dropping slack to her sides.

 

15

W
HEN WE GET
back to Kandy's, Carrie goes right to the hall bathroom. I hear the water running and know she is sticking her face under the tap, washing away the mascara tear smear. It's two o'clock. We find the electrician asleep on the sunroom couch, a long-haired dachshund curled behind his knees. How did I completely fail to notice earlier that Kandy has a dog?

A television audience stops clapping, and Ricky emerges into the kitchen, up the steps from the sunken den. “No calls,” he says.

“Thanks for being our man on the ground,” says Kandy.

Ricky pours a mug of coffee from a half-drunk pot and slugs it black. He gestures at me with the pot.

“No, thank you,” I say. He is trying so hard to be responsible. Maybe that's all it takes. Trying.

Carrie brushes by me. “I'll have some.” Ricky pours coffee into a tall blue hand-thrown mug for her, and she holds it without drinking just long enough that he understands and starts rooting through the cabinets for sugar.

Kandy flats her palms on my back and leans forward, tucking her chin over my shoulder. “Are you going to sleep? The kids can stand watch.”

Carrie follows Ricky back down the three carpeted steps into the den, slow, so as not to spill her coffee. Through the doorway, I can see them sitting side by side on the leather sofa, their backs to me, watching a late-night talk show. Their slender necks and the hoods of their sweatshirts. The dark wispy hair at the nape: baby hair.

My daughter looks at me over her shoulder. She must expect me to snap out of it any second now, to dump out her coffee and send her to bed. Her lips are bright from wind chap, and her cheeks are flushed, and now that she has washed away her eye makeup, she looks more than ever like my family, like Courtney especially, and like my mother.

“She'll be fine,” Kandy says. I don't know which one of us she is talking to. I think of Jake and of all the boys who came after. I remember them angrily, as if they hurt me, though it was almost always the other way around. I wonder which way it will be for Carrie. I think of my grandmother, who took a bottle of painkillers ten days after my grandfather died. Christie is angry with her—with her ghost—that she didn't want to go on living for her children and her grandchildren. That she was so singly devoted. I picture my grandparents as I know them from the family photos, always together, always collaborators. I picture them at a table in a restaurant, alone together, though there are other people in the shot. Then I picture him disappearing and her still there, unsure of where to put her hands, unsure of the reason she's come to dinner or what the point of dinner is anymore, without him, unsure of how to get home and what will be the point of going home, since he will not be there.

Imagine what that love must have been like. Fifty years of that love. In the end, I am jealous of my heartsick grandmother, because the joining of herself with her lover gave her a joy so large that its absence felt to her like the absence of the world.

THE LAST PERFECT
day I can remember was the day the chicks came in the mail. Carrie was eleven and Daniel seven. She was still my muddy girl, barefoot and earnest, stealing berries from the colander, standing behind the sofa to braid and unbraid my hair. And Daniel was still Daniel. His rages had started, but it would be a year of escalation before his diagnosis. We waited in the cool morning for the P.O. to open its doors, all four of us, and Sam opened the chirping box right there on the counter to make sure I hadn't been swindled. Our four chicks wobbled together in a squalling fuzzy mass. Carrie reached in and stroked them with the tips of her fingers.

In the car we listened to
Abbey Road.
We stopped to pick up breakfast tacos, and I remember Daniel on Sam's shoulders, jiggling up and down, asking for extra bacon, and the gloss of Sam's black hair in the sun. We put the chicks in the cat-proof brooder box in the spare bedroom and dipped each of their beaks into the waterer, as we'd seen in online tutorials, and then we all sat Indian-style on the floor and watched them dart and huddle and collide. We spent the whole day together in that room, watching, talking, paging through chicken-keeping books. We had rarely been so quiet together, so unprogrammed. We were stewards of new life. I lay on the floor, resting my head on Sam's slim thigh, and Carrie read out a list of parasites to watch for. Daniel positioned the chicks face-to-face, each pair in succession, and introduced them to each other.
Chicken, this is chicken.
We went for a bike ride around Town Lake in the twilight, and then my kids fell asleep together in the hammock. This was back when Daniel could fall asleep anywhere, without fear or fuss.

It wasn't that Daniel's disorder came on suddenly, but that there was an end to the possibility of perfect days. Where before there had been good and bad days, after the chicks arrived, it became good and bad hours. I don't see how this could have been causal, but the hens suffered for the implication. The pre-chicken years, a golden time. When we woke up on Sunday morning, the black Australorp chick was dead. It might have been that the heat lamp was set too low, or it might have been failure to thrive, which is as inclusive a term as I know. Daniel came into the kitchen with the bird in his sweaty palm.

“Oh my God,” screeched Carrie, flying toward him. “What did you do?”

“It's okay, it's okay,” said Daniel, and I was about to tell him gently that the chick might not prove to be okay, when he said, “It's just dead, it's okay.”

See how like my mother.

TONIGHT, PUTTING ON
pajamas seems like giving up. I pull the drawstring too tight around my hips and leave it that way. I lie on the bed in Kandy's guest room. I have struggled to be good for my kids. I have been secretive, it's true, and selfish. Sometimes I am Christie, remote and functional, and sometimes I am my mother, a shower of sparks. I want to live in the space between them. I want to be everything my mother was that was good and none of the bad. I know this is impossible, the yin without the yang.

If Daniel is delivered to me this night, I swear I will try harder. I will be better. I close my eyes, and there is Daniel in a boat, Daniel with a suitcase at his father's door, police officers laughing, gullible written on the ceiling. I keep thinking I hear my cell phone ringing, but I surface to silence again and again. At last fatigue takes me over, lets me sink and drift. Daniel broken, Daniel dying, Daniel dead. My mother as James found her, sitting at the kitchen table in her black sundress with the gold buttons and her black high heels, her hair curled with an iron, her head fallen back, her throat arched impossibly. Her mouth wide open, her hands dangling and swollen purple. My thoughts unspool, and I am stolen down into the dark.