All We Know of Love (15 page)

I
told Adam about my mother just before I left.

I used it. I played it for what I thought it was worth, like a face card in game of rummy, like the string section in an orchestra. It wasn’t that I was so desperate. I just wanted him to know me. I thought I deserved that. Especially as he was knowing me in that biblical way.

I used to think that a person would not know who I was, not really know me, until they heard about my mother. Until they knew that I was a girl whose mother had chosen to leave her, who had not wanted her. Whose mother had walked out the door one night and never came back.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl . . .

It was more like a test.

It was late. My dad was sleeping. He didn’t even know Adam was over, that we were in my room.

In my bed. Trying hard to be silent.

I told Adam because I wanted to create something that would hold him to me even after he went home. Even when I wasn’t in his presence and he wasn’t in mine. We could connect in this way, with a shared truth, a story told. A story heard.

“My mom and dad aren’t divorced,” I told him. “That’s not why I live with my dad.”

“Hmm?” He rolled toward me.

“My mom. I never see her.”

“Why not?”

He was so sweet that night. I guess he had what people call puppy-dog eyes, battened down with long, dark lashes. He liked to look right at me, through me. He’d watch me blush with the attention.

“Why not, Natty?” he went on — listening, I’m sure, more to his own voice than my words.

So at first, I just shrugged. Lingering.

“You are so beautiful,” he said, slipping a piece of my hair behind my ear, as if it were his own. “You are. Do you know that?”

If I ever wanted to believe him, it was that night.

“She walked out four years ago,” I went on. “I haven’t heard from her since.”

“She did?”

He was interested. I could tell. It made me interesting. Different. Not every girl has a story like this.

“It hurts me,” I told him. “Still. I think about it. I feel like it was my fault. I feel different from other people. Sometimes . . . it takes me. I don’t know. It makes things harder. I get mad. Or jealous. Or scared. I miss her.”

I was talking but not really hearing myself. I knew what I was saying but I didn’t feel anything. It was all true, but it wasn’t real.

“So I think that’s why I need to know you’re . . .” I started. “Here for me, you know? That you’re . . .”

It was a mistake. Different is one thing; needy is another. But I couldn’t help it. Once I had started, I needed more. I needed something from him that he could never give.

“It’s in the past, Natty. You’ve got to get over it. You’ve got to be strong,” Adam said. He leaned over and kissed me.

“I like a strong woman,” he said with his breath against my lips.

Was that what happened to his last girlfriend? She wasn’t
strong
enough? Had I stumbled on the secret and it was too late?

I called Adam on his cell phone just minutes after he left my house that night, imagining his car halfway down the road.

And he couldn’t tell me when I’d see him again. He wanted to get off the phone.

“Talk to you soon,” he said.

“When?” I asked.

When?

“Lighten up, Natty,” he said.

That’s when I decided to leave again, for real, for the first time, for the last time, for me. In defiance of, in search of, in need of, something I didn’t yet understand.

Now I am standing here on her street.

Tevin ran back home.

I am thinking of that lovesick character in
My Fair Lady
singing that stupid song. Our high school did the play the year before Sarah and I got there. We were still in middle school then, eighth-graders, the oldest in our school, top of the shit-pile, and we went to see the last performance.

In the song, the guy is content simply to stand on the street where the woman he loves is living. Even though she won’t give him the time of day, his heart is soaring, his feet lifting off the pavement, seven stories high, just knowing he’s on the street where she lives.

“I’ll never be like that,” Sarah told to me at intermission.

“He’s pathetic,” I agreed.

“He’s hot, though.”

“Who? The character? Or the kid playing him?” We had bought two bottles of water and one packet of Skittles at the concession. I passed the bag to Sarah.

She hit me in the arm. “The kid. He’s in eleventh grade. It’s Nicky Laico. You know, Caroline’s older brother.”

“Oh, yeah.” I took the bag of candy back. “You think he’s cute?”

“Yeah.”

We would be in high school in a mere three months. I hadn’t really thought of it. Nicky Laico would be there, I supposed. Suddenly, I thought of all the kids, and all the boys, that we would be thrown in with next year. Tons of them. Older than us. Sixteen-year-olds. Seventeen-year-olds. Eighteen.

I didn’t think Nicky Laico was all that good-looking. How was it that Sarah did?

For the first time in a really, really long time, I thought about “the list,” our list. What had happened to it? In retrospect, I was thinking, there may have been some important things on that list.

“Let’s make a deal,” I said to Sarah just as the lights were dimming for act 2.

“What are you, a game-show host?”

“No, seriously. Let’s agree that we will always come first. To each other. That whoever gets a boyfriend, or if either one of us gets a boyfriend, we’ll still be best friends first.”

Sarah looked at me, the water bottle tipped up to her mouth. “Of course, Natty. Why would you say that? You’ll always be my best friend. That comes before anything.”

I felt better, but still I had to wonder. This lovesickness seemed to overtake people without warning. Make them do crazy things against their will. Stand on street corners.

I mean, look at that idiot up there singing.

And somebody writes this crap, don’t they?

1711.

The number is painted in green across the two glass doors of the apartment.

The apartment buildings here in St. Augustine are different from the ones back home, up north. It’s the colors, I guess. Some here are actually baby blue or the color of sand. There are even pink buildings and coral-colored doors. Turquoise balconies, seashell and sand-dollar motifs on the walls and awnings.

Everything reminds me I am not home. None of the buildings are very tall here. They are like the younger siblings, so the sun breaks out over the tops and brightens everything, even the trash that is scattered in the corners and by the curb. I can see why people want to live in Florida. The sunshine is blinding.

But nothing prepares me for seeing her name on the wall beside the doorbell. Even in the deep heat of the sun, I feel cold. I shiver. The only thing propelling me forward at this point is that I am here.

I am here, almost a thousand miles from where I started. Where we both started.

How many miles did she need to travel to forget me?

Did she go a hundred miles but could still see my face?

I watched my mother’s focus return to the mirror.

Did she go five hundred and still hear my voice?

Mom, I want the chocolate cookies.

Did she get here, to this town, and stop when all traces were finally behind her? But I was still there. I still existed, even if she couldn’t see me. Even if she couldn’t remember me. Even if she didn’t want to.

I didn’t disappear.

It was a pair of earrings.

In the package from my mother. It was a pair of crystal chandelier earrings, real crystals. Not glass. Beautiful colors, gold and mauve. And just the right size. Not too big and gaudy. Just right. I put them away and never looked at them again.

It was the wrapper. Her tiny handwriting in the upper left corner. Did she put it there on purpose, to tell me something? Or did they insist on it at the post office?

“Uh, ma’am. We need a return address. Don’t you want to write your address here?” He hands her a pen.

My mother would have shaken her head, no. No need.

“I’m not saying it will, but your package could get lost.”

Lost? Wasted?
That did it. She never could tolerate waste.

She takes the pen and hastily writes in her address. 1171 Fernando Street, St. Augustine, Florida 32084.

S
he doesn’t know me, but she figures it out in a matter of seconds, infinitesimal, lingering, endless nanoseconds.

“Natalie?” she says.

I always thought, when I saw my mother, I would look into her face and somehow become healed, sort of in the way those evangelical ministers do on television. Pressing their hands onto the forehead of some blind girl or crippled boy, thrusting them forward almost violently until they collapse, relinquish their will. And suddenly, they can see or walk or hear or speak; all blemishes vanish. All wounds healed.

But it isn’t like that at all.

This is real life.

The cars are still driving by, at a slow but steady rate, in the street directly behind me. The earth is still revolving around the sun, at a speed so great, almost sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, that it cannot even be felt. Seven blackbirds sitting on a wire that stretches from the corner of one building to the corner of another suddenly fly away, all at the same time, as if they’ve spoken together. And just then, from the apartment next door, from one of the upstairs windows, a man in a white wife-beater leans on the sill and blows the smoke of his cigarette out into the world.

All this is real.

When I don’t answer my mother, because I can’t, her face crumbles into a thousand pieces. I watch it happen, but there isn’t anything I can do about it. I should have known.

“Natalie,” she says again. This time softer. It isn’t a question anymore. It is a dirge.

She is smaller than I remember, and her hair cut short and blunt. For a moment I remember her wearing an elastic headband to keep her long hair off her face while she cooked dinner or did the dishes or gave me a bath. But I don’t remember the streaks of gray.

Her eyes are taking me in, and they seem to redden with an immense pressure behind them. But she doesn’t cry this time. Instead, she takes a deep breath. “Do you want to come inside?”

This is an interesting question. I am no longer narrating my own story and imagining Adam listening to me tell it. Now I have to take responsibility for the fact that I am here. I have set an event into motion, and I have to follow it through.

“OK,” I say.

She hesitates, as if she is unsure whether to turn her back and have me follow or step aside and usher me in. I don’t move one way or another. One way or another, and yet I can still let life move me along. I take my first step toward her.

I can still sail as the wind directs, even if it is I who has built the boat and set it out at sea.

Her apartment is on the ground floor. When I rang her bell, I could see her door open inside the foyer of her building. It opened just as far as the chain lock would allow. I presumed that whoever was inside that apartment could see their visitor through the glass and decide whether to ring them in or not. I watched the door close and then immediately open all the way.

It was my mother who came to the door to let me in.

Now I am following her inside. She is wearing a sweat suit, the kind where the top and bottom match. Gray satin with two black stripes down the legs, like rappers wear. Or old Florida ladies walking the mall. And apparently, my mom.

I wonder for a moment, Did she used to be fashionable? Didn’t she once pay attention to what she wore, her hair? Her toenails? I don’t remember.

“Are you alone?” she asks me. She looks back toward the glass doors. Is she expecting someone else? My father?

“Yeah,” I say.

I am oddly blank. Oddly absent from inhabiting the inside of my own body. I am standing in my mother’s apartment, four years since the last time I saw her, and I feel absolutely nothing. All I can do is look around, take it in.

The floor is covered with a large durrie rug, frayed at the edges. There is a beige-colored corduroy couch against the wall, with one of those daisy-yellow and green crocheted blankets crumpled on one end. There is a low coffee table in front of the couch. Maybe she had been just sitting there. A book is lying facedown on the table, beside it a mug and a balled-up tissue.

Suddenly I have this weird memory. Of tissues. My mother always had a tissue in her pocket. Often they’d make their way out and be lying around our house, on the kitchen counter, in the key dish, next to the bathroom sink.

“Dana, do you have to?” my dad would say. “It’s really disgusting. Can’t you just throw it away after you use it?”

But she never would. Not if she could get three or four or five more nose blows out of it. I never minded, though. She always had one stuffed into the sleeve of her sweater, just in case she needed it. Sometimes they’d fall out and land on the floor. I knew my mother was around when I saw them, a Hansel and Gretel trail I couldn’t follow.

Here I am.

I am on a mission, aren’t I? I have a job to do. I wonder if my heart is beating so loud she can hear it. Is it beating at all?