But he did not know this:
In Connecticut on September 10, 1976, a hunter on his way back to his car saw something shiny on the ground. My Pennsylvania keystone charm. Then he saw that the ground nearby had been partially dug up by a bear. Exposed by the bear were the unmistakable bones of a child’s foot.
My mother made it through only one winter in New Hampshire before she got the idea of driving all the way to California. It was something she had always thought she would do but had never done. A man she met in New Hampshire had told her about the work to be had in wineries in the valleys above San Francisco. It was easy to get, it was physical, and it could be, if you wanted it to be, very anonymous. All three sounded good to her.
This man had also wanted to sleep with her, but she said no. By then, she knew this wasn’t the road out anymore. From the first night with Len in the innards of the mall she had known the two of them weren’t building anything. She could not even really feel him.
She packed her bags for California and sent cards to my brother and sister from every town she stopped in. “Hello, I’m in Dayton. Ohio’s state bird is the cardinal.” “Reached the Mississippi last night at sunset. It certainly is a big river.”
In Arizona, when she was eight states beyond the farthest she had ever been, she paid for her room and brought a bucket of ice with her from the machine outside. The next day she would reach California, and to celebrate she had bought herself a bottle of champagne. She thought of what the man in New Hampshire had said, how he had spent one whole year scraping the mold out of the giant casks that held wine. He had lain flat on his back and had to use a knife to peel back the layers of mold. The mold had the color and consistency of liver, and no matter how hard he bathed he would still attract fruit flies for hours afterward.
She sipped champagne from a plastic cup and looked at herself in the mirror. She forced herself to look.
She remembered sitting in our living room then, with me and my sister, my brother and father, on the first New Year’s Eve that all five of us had stayed up. She had shaped the day around making sure Buckley got enough sleep.
When he woke up after dark he was sure that someone better than Santa would come that night. In his mind he held a big bang image of the ultimate holiday, when he would be transported to toyland.
Hours later, as he yawned and leaned into my mother’s lap and she finger-combed his hair, my father ducked into the kitchen to make cocoa and my sister and I served German chocolate cake. When the clock struck twelve and there was only distant screaming and a few guns shot into the air in our neighborhood, my brother was unbelieving. Disappointment so swiftly and thoroughly overtook him that my mother was at a loss for what to do. She thought of it as sort of an infant Peggy Lee’s “Is that all there is?” and then bawling.
She remembered my father had lifted Buckley up into his arms and started singing. The rest of us joined in. “Let ole acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind, should ole acquaintance be forgot and days of auld lang syne!”
And Buckley had stared at us. He captured the foreign words like bubbles floating above him in the air. “Lang syne?” he said with a look of wonder.
“What does that mean?” I asked my parents.
“The old days,” my father said.
“Days long past,” my mother said. But then, suddenly, she had started pinching the crumbs of her cake together on her plate.
“Hey, Ocean Eyes,” my father said. “Where’d you go on us?”
And she remembered that she had met his question with a closing off, as though her spirit had a tap – twist to the right and she was up on her feet asking me to help her clean up.
In the fall of 1976, when she reached California, she drove directly to the beach and stopped her car. She felt like she had driven through nothing but families for four days – squabbling families, bawling families, screaming families, families under the miraculous strain of the day by day – and she was relieved to see the waves from the windshield of her car. She couldn’t help thinking of the books she had read in college.
