The Long Goodbye (23 page)

No, I'd say.

Yes, he'd insist.

There's no magic in there. How did you get magic in there?

That is what tinfoil is for. We wrap leftovers in it, but it's really for capturing magic. Be careful, though: you can't open it, because the magic will be gone. And you might need it later. Magic is hard to catch, so we should save this one.

No . . . I said.

But I was convinced. I kept that ball of tinfoil carefully against my side all night.

So tonight, remembering the magic tinfoil, I decided the base of my wand would be tinfoil. The hot pepper on top.

My mother woke up.

Let me show you my wand, I said.

OK, she said drowsily.

It's really cool. Look.

She looked and started laughing. That's clever, Meg. Very original.

And that was my magic.

 

 

It was a warm fall and there were more leaves on the trees than usual. As a friend and I walked home from a birthday party she nudged me and said, “Oh, look! They're already putting up the winter holiday decorations.” I looked up, and there was a large electric snowflake strung across the street. “It's a little early, no?” she continued, unaware of the effect it was having on me. “Yes,” I said. “It's a little early.”

 

 

A
FEW WEEKS EARLIER, on a late-summer day when even the grass had been burning in the sun, I'd received a condolence note—an e-mail—from a man who'd known my mother in grade school. I had never heard of this man. His shock that she was dead emanated from the note. My curiosity piqued, I wrote back to ask if he had any stories to share of my mother as a girl. Just the week before, I'd read that the newly bereaved often crave more information about the dead—stories that show sides of the person you didn't know. Anytime I heard a new story about my mother, it was like she was alive again. She was still capable of generating novelty! So perhaps she was not quite dead.

It is said, too, that daughters are particularly keen to learn more about their dead mothers. Whatever the case, D. had stories but wanted to share them in person. We met a few months after e-mailing, on a rainy Friday morning, by a building that had been destroyed on 9/11 and then rebuilt. The week before, he'd called our meeting off because he had to think it over, but today he showed up—a tall man with sandy gray hair; you could see the boy still in his loping walk. He worked at Ground Zero, overseeing some reconstruction, and he'd planned a tour to break the ice, then coffee.

As we walked around he described the progress of foundation laying in the east and west “bathtubs,” or the footprints of the old buildings. The scope of the work was extraordinary. Pointing out the crane at work on one of the towers, he noted, “That's the biggest crane anyone has ever used. And see those baskets hanging off the girders? That's a new technique, one developed just to work with these girders. They're designed to withstand the kind of fireball that took down the Twin Towers. Buildings this secure have never been made.”

We stood, taking in the scene.

“You look like your father's side of the family,” D. observed suddenly. “You don't have that Kelly black hair.” We were passing Dey Street, and he paused and waved to a heavyset man bent over a drill in the midst of a construction crew.

“Hey, Tommy,” D. called out to him. “Tommy!” The man came over, breaking into a smile. They hugged and kissed.

D. says, “Let me introduce you. This is Meghan O'Rourke. She's Barbara O'Rourke's—Barbara Kelly's—daughter.”

“Barbara Kelly,” Tommy repeats, lighting up. “No kiddin'!” I recognize his accent. “How's Barbara? How's your mother doin'?”

I started to change my facial expression—something I realized I always do—when D. put his hand on my shoulder and said, gently, “She passed away, Tommy. She passed away last year.”

Tommy's face changed. “Ah, I'm so sorry. Your mother, she was a great lady, she was a blast,” he said, squeezing my hand. “She also did well in school. I didn't, as you can tell!”

At a deli down the block, the owner knew D. well. “Sit down, sit down,” he said, as we walked in, and he brought coffee and urged food on D., who waved it off. “I can't eat. I have a story I have to tell.”

As I ate a sandwich, D. started to talk slowly.

 

 

It had been forty years since he last saw my mother. They had gone to Catholic school together in New Jersey, back when their town was different: more Catholic, more insular, more old-fashioned. He was unpopular, she was popular; he was a bad student, she was a good student; he was a football player, she was a cheerleader. She was part of a clique he didn't much like. Once, before he got to know her, he'd gone to Holmdel Park, where all the boys and girls paired up in an elaborate, orchestrated ritual organized by the girls, and walked along various paths, and my mother had somehow ended up with him. Then, at a dance, she approached him while “Hey Jude” was playing and asked him to dance. Later it played again, and my mother went up to him a second time, and, as he put it, “in her direct, Barbara way, she said, ‘So you're going to dance with me again, right?'”

I interrupted to ask what the other girls were like, and he said, slowly, “There was no one like your mother.”

They grew close. They told each other everything, walking home from school carrying books, talking on the phone for hours. On the school trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York, my mother lingered with D. and explained all the exhibits to him. She was sharp, he said, but you wouldn't know it unless you were friends with her; she was not a show-off in class. At another dance they walked out from the party and held hands in the courtyard. He felt it was like she had sensed that he wanted to be alone with her—not to do anything, but just to be away from the pack.

In class, he struggled with reading, so my mother arranged to sit next to him—she could make things happen, as he put it. When it was his turn to read, she would read the words under her breath to guide him. “She always leaned way too close,” he said. “I was sure the nuns would notice.” He wasn't always a good student, and one day he heard a nun say, “Barbara Kelly should not be hanging out with the likes of that boy.”

Her friends also didn't like that they were spending so much time together. One summer day they were at the beach club when a popular boy picked a fight with D., who was sitting next to my mother; the boy told D. to move away and make room. The fight put D. in a terrible mood; he felt this marked the beginning of the end of their friendship. But my mother asked him to take a swim with her. She swam out much farther than he was comfortable with, but she was very athletic. They stayed in the ocean for an hour, talking, sitting on the rope buoys, her dark hair blowing across her face. Her lips got blue. He told her they should go in, but she said, Let's just sit out here a while longer. They sat together under the big sky, listening to the cries of the birds.

As time went on, as he told it, older boys were becoming annoyed that my mother paid D. so much attention. In football practice, one tackled him purposefully hard and broke his wrist. D. was benched. He had to go to the games and watch my mother cheer for all the other players. That was hard; it had always felt like something between them that she was a cheerleader and he was on the team. But during the game, she looked up at him as he sat on the bleachers.

At some point soon after, he began to drift away, having decided there was no way to stay friends. Without football, he was having a bad time, and he started getting kicked out of class for talking back to the nuns. One day my mother stopped at his locker and said, “I don't like what I'm hearing about what's going on with you. Are you OK?” And he said, “Yes,” and walked away. She tried again later. “Why don't we talk anymore?” she asked, stopping at his locker again; he didn't respond. She looked extremely hurt, he told me, but he closed his locker and walked away, thinking he would never forget the look on her face. And he hadn't.

Soon after, my mother left to go to the public school in town. He saw her only one more time. She had already met my father and was at Barnard; home for a visit, she was picking her sisters up from a dance. He was hanging out in the parking lot with some friend. One said, “Barbara Kelly is inside, you should say hi.” And he said, “No, I can't.” Then he thought, What the hell, why not? We can have the last conversation we should have had. I can explain what really happened. He found her and he said hello. And she just looked at him. Then she turned around and left. That was the last time he saw her.

It was funny: He had always wanted to get out of the town as soon as he could. But it was my mom who left, while he stayed, living two blocks from their school. He told me he never speaks of this period of his life, but last year his father had died and a bunch of old friends wrote to him, asking him to get together with them. He stopped to think about why he always pushed these friends away, and, he told me, “Barbara flashed into my mind, and I thought that if I could just make that girl laugh once more, everything would be OK.”

He knew from another friend that she worked at Saint Ann's. He googled her to get her number, to tell her he wanted to give her a tour of Ground Zero. Instead, up came the
New York Times
notice:
The entire Saint Ann's family mourns the loss of Barbara O'Rourke, friend, colleague and teacher, and extends its profound sympathies to Paul, Meghan, Liam and Eamon
.

Memories flooded him, memories he couldn't push away. Every night when he walked the dog—just blocks away from their old haunts—he thought of my mother. So one day he wrote to me, half thinking I would write back to tell him it was all a huge misunderstanding. After all, there was no way the girl he had known, and always meant to apologize to, was simply gone. It had seemed there would be time for one last meeting, one last conversation, one last chance to talk about the bond that had once been between them.

He had a photo he wanted to give me. It showed a barefoot girl with long legs sitting next to a gangly thirteen-year-old boy whose arm is in a cast. “She came to visit me when I was injured,” he told me, “and wouldn't let anyone else sit next to me.” Her hair is black and neat. Her features look etched, as if she is more painted than real.

He said, “I don't know why, but I have been haunted by your mother's death ever since I found out about it. I didn't feel this upset when my father died.” As we left the deli, we paused once more to look down at the footprint of the towers. And he told me one more thing. His sons played soccer in Holmdel Park, where he and my mother walked that first day. In the park, the trees are mostly hardwood. But there is one part where there is a stand of pines, and the path becomes soft. One day during their practice he went back around the paths and there they were, the pines, and Barbara came vividly to his mind. He doesn't know why. Maybe she said something about them. Whatever it was, it's gone. But whenever he sees the pines alone there among the hardwoods, he thinks of the girl he once knew, and their long-ago friendship.

As I walked home over the Brooklyn Bridge, I was wrapped in a languorous, uneasy exhaustion. That vision of her in the pines, I reflected, was the true ghost, the haunting that Halloween's false ghosts only parody. Home, I got in bed and slept for three hours, as if I'd been on a taxing trip and needed rest.

 

 

O
NE OF THE GRUBBY TRUTHS about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you most. Jim kept saying, “I am sorry for all the things your mother is going to miss”—and he would list them. And I would think: I am a sorry excuse for a daughter. I just think about how I miss her. I'm sorry for myself, sorry about losing a life where I always had a mom to go to. Whatever the case, in grief you're not just reconstituting the lost person, recalling her, then letting her go—you're having to grow into the shocking new role you play on a planet without her. One night Liam said to me, as we were driving home from my dad's to Brooklyn, “I am not as sad as I was, but the thing is, it's just less fun and less good without her.” I only now have begun to understand what that means. The main difference is that I'm the only woman in a family of men—a father and two brothers. That this shift came with a certain caretaking aspect, whether I willed it or not, was underscored at my mother's funeral. My father spoke about how my mother had cut his hair since he was twenty-three, when they got married. Afterward, her sister Joanne came up to me and said, “Now
you're
going to have to cut his hair!”

No way. Off he went to the barber the next week.

But that first fall, I found myself making a point of having lunch, talking with him about selling the house. He talked about buying a smaller house, deeper in the countryside. He was sixty-three. I had disastrous visions of his getting sick three years from now and going through the whole goddamn thing again, only now he would be an hour from any hospital and two hours from the city. So I said, Wouldn't you maybe prefer to rent a place closer to the train station, closer to the city, so we can all visit easily? By the end of lunch he'd come around to this idea. I could see that my mother was dead. In the past he'd never have listened to me like that. In a tiny way I was becoming my mother—and that was not just a melancholic identification. We take on parts of the role the person played.

Part of my new role is to worry. I have a twenty-one-year-old brother who no longer has a mother and who hasn't graduated from college. He started teaching part-time at Pierrepont and living with my dad. He wants eventually to transfer to a new college, but sometimes this plan seems vaguely distant. And I find that I think about him, worry about him. I call my father to say, “We need to figure out his college applications.” I come by the house and say, “Kiddo, don't you need to wash your hair?” And, “I think he needs a desk and a dresser in his room.” And, “Don't you want a plate to eat that off?” My father does everything he is capable of, but he's in his own grief.