What We Have (20 page)

“What do you mean? Can I get you an Advil?”

Usually, my mom didn’t like taking anything for pain, but, yes, she said she’d take some Advil. Two, she added, as I rummaged around in the kitchen cabinet for something other than infant teething drops.

 

IN BOSTON, SPRING IS CAPRICIOUS.
It’s cold, raw, damp, it feels like it’s never going to get warm, and then suddenly heat blows in from nowhere, and you’re still pale and pouchy and wearing your winter coat and your boots and the mercury shoots from fifty-seven to eighty in a single day. The lilacs burst from buds to full color in a matter of hours, and dazed flies loop on dizzy orbits.

Saturday morning was hot and humid. Our house was still in winter lockdown, Ice Melt bags instead of potted pansies at the door.

Jacques and I flew into action, pushing up storm windows, rolling sagging porch furniture out from the garage. Jacques had his shorts on, a butterfly of sunburn flaring across his nose. My mother sat at the kitchen table stirring her coffee, watching us. She wasn’t herself.

I suggested taking Sacha for a walk, but my mother wanted to wait until the most recent dose of Advil kicked in. At lunch I caught her probing her side again with her index finger, like the Caravaggio portrait where Saint Thomas slips his finger into Jesus’ open wound. Only my mother was both the probe and the wound.

Two hands. One hand sees how the other is doing.

“Are you OK, Mom?” I asked her.

Her face was clenched and inward-looking, what my sisters and I called her “reading” face. She didn’t answer.

“Is your side still bothering you?” I asked, but she shook her head, reaching past me for Sacha.

After lunch we took a walk after all, up to the private school at the corner where the girls played lacrosse. Later, we drove around and I showed her some nearby houses we’d looked at and rejected, and she seemed like herself again, making fun of them, propping me up, noticing all the clever things Sacha was doing that nobody else seemed to see.

I’m glad you’re here
, I wanted to tell her.

But I didn’t. We didn’t really say things like that, my mother and I. Instead, I made her tea—iced, today, and she actually drank it—and we sat outside and fanned ourselves and fanned Sacha and looked out over the steamy backyard and talked about Julie and Jon’s baby and the Fourth of July and the plans for Charlevoix.

Before I knew, it was Sunday, Mother’s Day. Typical for our family, we spent half of it at the airport. I think I must have hugged her too hard at the departure gate, though, because when I pulled back, she winced.

Planning was our thing. We talked about what was coming next like we could see it all before us: shimmering, like a bright planet coming into view.

Turn over: to examine or review. To prepare, as in turning over a garden, or a new leaf.

To change position. To start over.

Halfway through the year, time turns, the days get longer. One evening in late May I was outside walking with Sacha in her stroller, Bacchus panting alongside, and I realized it was past seven and it wasn’t dark yet, and I was almost stupefied by the wealth of it—the lengthening light, the smell of barbecue, and the soft whirr of sprinklers, the sense of things opening. In a month it would be the solstice, and there’d be the subtlest of turns,
from now on the days will get shorter, ever so slightly
, a faint shadow under the brightest burden of flower, the realization that it couldn’t last, light and warmth would gather to a zenith, reaching that point only to begin, second by second, to drop away.

 

FOR WEEKS, SACHA HAD BEEN
trying to turn over. This task dominated her world now. She’d forget about it for a while, playing with a toy or laughing at Bacchus, but the minute I laid her down she’d remember, her face tightening with concentration, arms sticking out on either side, rocking back and forth on her belly.

Just a month ago it had been enough for her to lie on her back and swat at the dangling toys we hung above her, or on her stomach—either was fine! Now, whatever position we put her in was wrong, because it wasn’t the other one. She flailed like a terrapin, hostage to gravity.

“It’s like she’s possessed,” I told Julie. “She wants to do this so badly!”

“I can relate,” Julie said. “I feel pretty much the same way these days. I can barely turn over anymore in bed.” Julie was due in just over two months, and you could tell it was getting harder for her to move around. She had that short out-of-breath sound women get when they’re very pregnant, and she moved awkwardly, as if in slow motion.

 

MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND WE HEADED
up to Maine on Friday afternoon. I’d persuaded Jacques to take half the day off so we could leave early and beat the traffic, get a first taste of summer. It was great to be up here—we could smell the sea. I loved the feel of Julie and Jon’s house on Laurel Street. You could see a sliver of Casco Bay from some of the rooms, and the house was airy and sweet-smelling. I was upstairs in their second-floor family room, helping Julie sort through the stacks of infant clothes we’d brought up for them. While Julie and I sorted, Sacha lay on her blue blanket, struggling to propel herself from one side to the other.

I held up one of my favorite baby outfits. Blue-and-white terrycloth, printed with airplanes. “The Pilots,” my mother called it—a hand-me-down from Jenny to Rachel to us, and now to Julie. Sacha had worn this one over and over again her first few weeks. I wanted to conjure it all back up: those early, baffling days. Clara. The baby swing from Annie.

But Julie had something else on her mind.

“Listen,” she said. “Has Mom said anything to you about her back?”

“Her back? I know her side has been bothering her,” I said slowly. A jolt of fear ran through me, like a current. “She didn’t mention anything about her
back.
”

“I guess it started hurting a while ago. She saw an orthopedist last week,” Julie said. “They think it might be osteoporosis—Dad said she may be getting little compression fractures in her vertebrae.”

“Huh,” I said, thinking this through. She hadn’t said a word to me about her back being sore—only her side. But then, with a rush of guilt, I remembered I hadn’t let her get much airtime. I’d been the one doing most of the talking.

My mother’s favorite aunt had osteoporosis. She’d ended up with a hump on her back and stooped so badly she needed a cane. We knew that condition could be compounded by having a hysterectomy. No more estrogen meant my mother’s bones could weaken as she got older. “Is it serious?” I asked. And then—“Dad’s not worried, is he?”

“No,” Julie said. “I don’t think he is.”

That settled it. My father was the canary in the coal mine of worry. If he wasn’t concerned, everything must be OK.

“It’s just—” Julie hesitated. “She just hasn’t been sounding like herself, that’s all. And she didn’t call me yesterday, even though she knew I was seeing my doctor.”

We met each other’s eyes. That didn’t make sense. My mother might miss a day—even a few days—of phone calls, especially around this time of year, with all those final papers to grade. But she wouldn’t miss checking in after one of Julie’s appointments. She tracked Julie like a bloodhound every time she knew one was scheduled.

“Anyway, I tried her this morning, but there wasn’t any answer.” Julie was struggling to get up. “You try next, OK? You can use the phone in here. I’m going to go get dinner started.”

I tried twice, once just after Julie went downstairs, and again about half an hour later. Both times I just got my parents’ answering machine. Was it possible they’d gone away for the long weekend? But they would have told us! Anyway, my parents weren’t the types for spur-of-the-moment trips. I was getting worried. Sacha was napping and I was still up in the family room. I could hear Julie downstairs, putting silverware on the table out on the screened porch. I left a message for my parents. Then, on a whim, I called Sara.

“You know, it’s funny,” Sara said, when I got hold of her. “I talked to Mom the day before yesterday, and she didn’t sound great.”

“Why? What did she say?” I asked, twisting the phone cord around one finger.

“Oh, just the same stuff she’s been saying. How her back’s been hurting, but she’s sure it’s osteoporosis. And she said she was having some kind of scan done, but she didn’t want to talk about it.”

I looked out the window. Bright blue bay, white curtains. A smell in the air of summer coming, of the sea.

We promised we’d call each other once we tracked her down. In the meantime, Sacha napped, and Julie and I talked about plans, the way we always did. Getting ready for the baby. Where the crib should go.

One thing that amazes me about babies is how transparent they are. Whatever they’re feeling, you see it right away: Frustration. Fear. Mirth. Always on the sensitive side, Sacha’s face registered every one of her emotions. A loud noise, an unknown dog, a crash of thunder all prompted in her expression a depth of terror that made me ache for her. On the other hand, the simplest things could elicit joy. Jon playing spider games on her bare feet with his fingers. Julie making puppets for her by slipping socks over each hand. How do we learn to hide what we feel as we grow older? Watching Julie and Jon playing with Sacha after she woke from her nap, you’d never read in either of their faces what this past year had held for them. Emily. The move to Maine. Excitement and nerves about becoming parents.

 

WE WERE UPSTAIRS IN THEIR
family room. Jacques, Jon, Julie, Sacha, and I. I stretched out Sacha’s blanket on the floor and laid her down on it.

Right away, Sacha got to work, shutting us all out as she concentrated furiously on trying to get her muscles to do her bidding. Julie eased herself down on the floor and stretched out on her side, ungainly, egging her on. “Roll, Sacha-la, roll,” she crooned. Jon cheered each time she almost made it.

Then Julie had an idea. She picked up one of Sacha’s toys—a small, stuffed clown with rattles for feet—and brought it close to her face.

“Look, Sachabelle, look!” she said, flicking the clown a little for Sacha as if she were a matador and Sacha, the bull. Sacha, stuck on her stomach on the blanket, stared wonderingly up at her. You could tell she wanted desperately to turn over, but couldn’t. Sacha gazed up at the clown, and Julie snapped it suddenly to the other side so Sacha had to turn her head the other way to see it. Back and forth, back and forth, and suddenly, without warning, delighting in the game, Sacha turned sharply to the left and kept turning until she’d rolled completely over.

There was silence, then a whoof of surprised, exhaled breath. Sacha stared up at all of us with a look on her face of astonishment, like,
what just happened?
Then she cracked a huge smile. Julie applauded. “Good job, Sacha! Look what
you
can do!”

Sacha made her happiest sound: half chortle, half snort.

She wanted to do it again and again. Jon bent over her to capture it on video camera. “She looks like one of those kids practicing ‘Stop, Drop and Roll’ during a fire drill,” Julie said, laughing. I could’ve watched them forever.

Instead, Jacques and Jon stayed upstairs with her, and I went downstairs to help get dinner ready. Julie tried calling my mother again, but there was still no answer. Later we ate out on the screened porch, and after a while Sacha got fussy and Jacques took her upstairs and got her settled, and Julie and Jon and I stayed out on the porch, watching the sky darken and the fireflies come out.

In a few more weeks it would be the solstice—longest day, shortest night.

Everything felt still, as if the world were holding its breath. Out in the bay the waves lapped the shore. It felt like we were almost perfectly balanced under the huge dome of sky, the scattered pebble-white stars just becoming visible.

It was almost nine, late for the phone to ring. Four long rings, before Jon got it. I had a funny feeling, watching him cross the kitchen, picking up the receiver. It was like in a movie when the background music changes key, major to minor.

He covered the receiver with one hand.

It was my mother, he told us. She wanted to know if Julie and I were both there.

“She wants to talk to both of you,” he said, looking puzzled. “She says she has something she needs to tell you.”

 

JACQUES HAS ALWAYS SAID THAT
bad news travels fast, and this seemed true, because by the end of that night we’d all talked: my mother and I, my father and I, Julie and each of them; Sara and all of us; Jacques and my mother, Jacques and my father; Jon and both my parents. My mother was trying to be matter-of-fact, but I could hear her voice cracking. She sounded so scared.