What You Want to Hold
From the first bend in our long gravel driveway you could see the lake. On a bright day it reflected back the light of the sun in silver wavelets, blinding you with its dance as you approached it. On a cloudy day it could sit slow and gray as granite, as uninviting as the sunny day made it friendly. That day it was not quite either. That day the clouds blew across the sky in fits, so that the lake was shaded in patches.
The sunlight was fragmented against the lake, and where the clouds reigned above it, the water seemed the deep, dark gray-green of it’s furthest depths. Where the sun struck it, especially around the edges, it was calm enough that I could see the fir trees reflected. The wind blew in starts and stops. No force of nature, it seemed, could decide quite how to behave. I got off the school bus when it was quite calm, and walked down the road feeling and hearing the gravel crunch beneath my sneakers. I would have turned away from the lake and up to the house without ever seeing her if the wind had not begun to blow, a warning of the storm that had cancelled my soccer practice.
When I rounded the bend it struck with a force so strong I closed my eyes and stood suddenly still to keep my footing. When it quieted I readjusted my backpack straps and looked up to see my mother’s long tie-dye dress whipping around her ankles by the lakeside. It was a thin thing, something she usually wore in mid-summer. Too cold for that day. I was in my practice shorts, and my legs were pimpling with the cold. She probably couldn’t even feel it. I would go up to the house and grab her a sweatshirt. Then I could drop my backpack and have an excuse not to start my homework till I got her inside, at least.
I took a couple more steps as the clouds shifted and the sun shone down on her and her edge of the lake. She was so beautiful standing there. The distance between us made her slim figure seem more round. From where I stood I couldn’t see the bony protrusions of her shoulders, her hips, her knees. She looked like she had the summer before, before we got the news, when she would run in her flowery dresses with the dog by her side, into and out of the waves, laughing. She had been forgetting to eat even before the chemo began to make her nauseous, and her curves had sidled away for good.
The wind calmed for a moment, a patch of sunlight drifting over her and the edge of the lake, making her ash-flecked golden waves shine as they ceased whipping about her, and drifted softly to rest against her shoulders, as if they knew how fragile she was. My own thick hair, dark and tightly curled like dad’s, was pulled back, a headband keeping most of the strays out of my eyes.
She called for our dog, but her voice was so small and so far away that I couldn’t even make out his name. I knew she called for him though by the way she pat her thigh, tossing her head absently in the direction she thought he had gone while she did so. He came running from the other direction, a wiry mutt, all sinew and snout, loyal to her above anyone else. She knelt and hugged him a long moment before standing again. He ran around her and looked towards me, I think he whined by the way he stuck out his muzzle, his throat elongating and his lower jaw quavering. But I couldn’t hear him.
I turned up the path toward the house, suddenly angry at her for going outside dressed like it was summer. Angry that she could not feel the cold. I would get her sweatshirt, and bring her inside. I didn’t even realize her car wasn’t in the driveway. Sometimes she parked it down the side road, toward dad’s studio, and walked home from there. I suppose I might have thought it was there, but I don’t think I thought of it at all. I learned soon enough that she had sold it that afternoon, after she’d stopped by my school for lunch hour.
She brought sandwiches from the deli by her work, and we sat in the jeep, parked by the edge of the sports field, watching a gym class run round and round the track. She wasn’t working anymore, but she liked to go in and see how the office was doing, when she felt up for it. So she’d gone into the office in the morning, her friends and colleagues at their desks like the day she’d left them there. She told me Marjorie had a new plant on her desk, and there was a young temp doing her old job. “Quite capable,” she’d called him, smiling. Her jeep’s old seats were worn just how we liked them, and we sat in it and ate and talked like nothing was the matter. We had been pretending that was the case for some time, but that I day I thought, with her appetite, she must be doing better. She ate the whole sandwich, and kissed me goodbye, and I went back to class.
As I walked into the house I wondered if it was a side effect, not feeling the cold. I had thought, when she first experienced it, that it was from the tumor. I thought the chemo had been helping that, at least, even if it made her nauseous. She had worn her spring coat at lunch. It was a faded, thin woolen green, and it was hung on the back of one of our kitchen stools as I went inside.
I dropped my backpack beside the stool and picked up her coat.
She drove away from my school in her old tan jeep, having kissed me goodbye as if nothing was wrong. She’d waved from her car and the arm of her jacket flapped weakly against her thin wrist. I picked up the jacket. It smelled like her rose shampoo, her bergamot and lemon moisturizer, her distinct scent of summer. Later, I imagined her wearing it as she sold the jeep for a fistful of cash that I found beneath a note on the kitchen counter, sitting just in front of her discarded jacket. I put her jacket in the crook of one arm and picked up the note.
It only had three lines. I read it four times before I understood.
I’m sorry.
I love you.
This should help.
It seemed strange at the time, but I realized later the brevity of the note was all she could manage. The writing was tremulous, but not from emotion. She’d avoided writing anything for months, because the treatments made her shaky, and her handwriting suffered the worst from it. But when I saw her standing by the lake she stood straight and tall, even in the battering wind. She was not emotional when she made her decisions about that day. She had gone through conventional ideas of emotion and come out the other side, laden with feelings so strong that she became strong too, powerful and heavy as the rocks in the depths of her lake.
She had done everything she could to hide her symptoms, her emotions, in the past year. Earlier that day she had hugged me fiercely enough that I rolled my eyes as I hid a smile, but did not suspect anything was anymore wrong than was our usual.
I think I ran then, but I had gone numb and I can’t be sure. When I got to the porch I yelled, directing my voice at the trees blocking my view, the anger and fear in it battering against the wind that pushed back at me.
I scrabbled up at the bottom of the stairs, but don’t recall falling. I remember the feel of gravel in my palms and knees, trying to gather her coat from where it had flown with freezing, bleeding hands. I must have run from the path back onto the driveway, but when I got there all I could see was our old wiry dog running in frenzied circles above the shoreline. He ran into the waves as if he could attack them, and ran out again, barking, in fear of their ferocity. We had lived on a lake almost my whole life, with a dog who adored the waves. He was practically part fish, until that day.
He grew so afraid of the water, so quickly, that we had to move away. I ran to the shore, watching him dash in and out, barking and biting at the waves as if it was their fault. I folded my mother’s jacket hastily and placed it on a rock. I ran into the waves, dove underneath unheeding of the freezing spring waters, until it stung my eyes and my lungs and the only thing I knew was that I could be no help.
I must have brought my phone outside, since I found it some time later, close to her coat, the screen cracked. I dropped it the moment I was done with the call, I forgot how fingers worked until they pulled her coat to me, and I sunk to our pebbly beach with it pressed against my chest. I do not remember the police arriving. I do not remember the cold of the wind on my soaked skin. I do remember the sensation of shivering. I do remember clutching her coat to my chest. Most of all I remember my mother’s old wiry dog, curling up around me, fussing and pushing at me, trying, I think, to keep me warm. Trying to hold me as fiercely as I clutched my mother’s coat. As fiercely as she had hugged him just moments before, when she had been warm and bright as summer.
Tightrope Walkers
We have fought since we were tiny. Over barbies, over boys, over the bodies of grandparents. Once I even threw a remote at my sisters head. I like to think I missed on purpose. We used to share a room and she would shush me when I woke, crying, from my nightmares. Mom came in to comfort me, an angel in the dark.
Since I've moved away, we've been better. On the occasions we see each other, we listen to each other more, we watch for each others scars and avoid them with careful precision.
Both approaching our thirties, we are three states away and starting to tolerate each other. Still, I want to tell her, and I cannot tell her, about the nightmares that wake me now. Because she plays a starring role.
In my dreams we face each other like banshees over a problem we cannot fix. We throw hate around like baseballs, until we cannot see each other for the bruises we've inflicted, until the ugly words we hurl are thick like tar and hold us down, and I watch as the last thing holding us together slips away. I wake feeling like the tightrope I have been walking has snapped beneath me. And I cannot even call her to tell her I am sorry.
Sustenance
I want breakfast, so I scrounge up an unsatisfying coffee, and swipe through my dating apps: five new messages. The plant on the sill with leaves spotted yellow strains toward its own bright love. I respond yes to a date tonight, and push at the pot until it rests in the sun -- but where it sits will be shaded come afternoon.