But then my mother’s escape, her half-measure return to the outside world, had been smashed when I was ten and Lindsey nine. She’d missed her period and had taken the fateful car trip to the doctor. Underneath her smile and exclamations to my sister and me were fissures that led somewhere deep inside her. But because I didn’t want to, because I was a child, I chose not to follow them. I grabbed the smile like a prize and entered the land of wonder of whether I would be the sister to a little boy or to a little girl.
If I had paid attention, I would have noticed signs. Now I see the shifting, how the stack of books on my parents’ bedside table changed from catalogs for local colleges, encyclopedias of mythology, novels by James, Eliot, and Dickens, to the works of Dr. Spock. Then came gardening books and cookbooks until for her birthday two months before I died, I thought the perfect gift was Better Homes and Gardens Guide to Entertaining. When she realized she was pregnant the third time, she sealed the more mysterious mother off. Bottled up for years behind that wall, that needy part of her had grown, not shrunk, and in Len, the greed to get out, to smash, destroy, rescind, overtook her. Her body led, and in its wake would be the pieces left to her.
It was not easy for me to witness, but I did.
Their first embrace was hurried, fumbled, passionate.
“Abigail,” Len said, his two hands now on either side of her waist underneath the coat, the gauzy gown barely a veil between them. “Think of what you’re doing.”
“I’m tired of thinking,” she said. Her hair was floating above her head because of the fan beside them – in an aureole. Len blinked as he looked at her. Marvelous, dangerous, wild.
“Your husband,” he said.
“Kiss me,” she said. “Please.”
I was watching a beg for leniency on my mother’s part. My mother was moving physically through time to flee from me. I could not hold her back.
Len kissed her forehead hard and closed his eyes. She took his hand and placed it on her breast. She whispered in his ear. I knew what was happening. Her rage, her loss, her despair. The whole life lost tumbling out in an arc on that roof, clogging up her being. She needed Len to drive the dead daughter out.
He pushed her back into the stucco surface of the wall as they kissed, and my mother held on to him as if on the other side of his kiss there could be a new life.
On my way home from the junior high, I would sometimes stop at the edge of our property and watch my mother ride the ride-on mower, looping in and out among the pine trees, and I could remember then how she used to whistle in the mornings as she made her tea and how my father, rushing home on Thursdays, would bring her marigolds and her face would light up yellowy in delight. They had been deeply, separately, wholly in love – apart from her children my mother could reclaim this love, but with them she began to drift. It was my father who grew toward us as the years went by; it was my mother who grew away.
Beside his hospital bed, Lindsey had fallen asleep while holding our father’s hand. My mother, still mussed, passed by Hal Heckler in the visitors’ area, and a moment later so did Len. Hal didn’t need more than this. He grabbed his helmet and went off down the hall.
After a brief visit to the ladies’ room, my mother was heading in the direction of my father’s room when Hal stopped her.
“Your daughter’s in there,” Hal called out. She turned.
“Hal Heckler,” he said, “Samuel’s brother. I was at the memorial service.”
“Oh, yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you.”
“Not your job,” he said.
There was an awkward pause.
“So, Lindsey called me and I brought her here an hour ago.”
“Oh.”
“Buckley’s with a neighbor,” he said.
“Oh.” She was staring at him. In her eyes she was climbing back to the surface. She used his face to climb back to.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m a little upset – that’s understandable, right?”
“Perfectly,” he said, speaking slowly. “I just wanted to let you know that your daughter is in there with your husband. I’ll be in the visitors’ area if you need me.”
