What I Had Before I Had You (25 page)

Kandy found me at the funeral. Her transformation was still fresh. She wore a gray turtleneck, and her hair was bobbed and natural brown. We sat outside the funeral home and smoked cigarettes and talked about movies we'd seen lately, and it was the only thing that got me through. Pam never came after me. I don't blame her. I didn't look for her, either. I hear that she's a math teacher in West Orange. There are those people in your life who matter instantly, on another plane, and you have to marry them or kill them or run the hell away, you can't do it halfway. I hope her house is full of paintings. I hope somebody loves her.

WHEN JAMES FINDS
my mother, it's the police who call me. I am twenty-one. I am studying for a final in Renaissance culture. I have never gone back to Ocean Vista, not even for a visit. My roommate watches me take the call. Outside our window, petals blow by, a boy throws a Frisbee for a dog. “I'm so sorry to have to tell you this,” says the voice on the phone. The voice asks me if I would like to arrange for a funeral, if I would like to speak to the funeral director, he's right here, and so on, in such a way that by repeating “yes” over and over, I commit to a time and date, to a flight home and an announcement in the paper. In New York the police would not do this. The voice calls James “her companion, Mr. Feldman.” In the paper I will find him listed beside myself as her survivor. I am told the facts: a toxic level of lithium in the blood, a painless death at the kitchen table. I wonder who prescribed lithium for her again, or if she asked for it, if she thought it the most fitting poison. I sometimes imagine that it was an accident and that she was trying earnestly to be well. The rest I feel I know.

James unlocks the door with his key, one of so many on his brass key ring. He has a pizza in one hand, or a bag of fish fry. He calls out to my mother,
Hey-o, anybody home?
It is dusk in my imagination, and light pools in the low places of the living room. The air stinks of incense. He moves slowly through our house with his slumping gait, and as he turns in to the kitchen, he drops what he is carrying—the pizza smacks, the fish fry bag spills loose breading across the carpet.

There she is in her black sundress, her head slung back. That arched throat. Her skull heavy in her skin. She has arranged objects of importance on the table: my sisters' sterilized bottles, a little pile of sand, a bird's wing, a rusty trowel. A half-drunk bottle of wine, a glass bearing the pink imprint of her lips. Always there are things I can't make sense of. Worry dolls. Ketchup bottle tops. A strip of condoms. Spanish coins. Sometimes I imagine there is a picture of me on the table, sometimes I don't.

James presses a finger to her neck. He hovers over her, making the phone call, describing what he sees. While he is waiting for them to come, he lifts her bloated hands into her lap and massages them gently. He has never felt so alone. Always before, she has called him. Always before, he has come in time.

Here is what I would say to those people who would judge her, what I say to myself on some days: What if all the transcendent moments of your life, the sound-track moments, the radiant detail, the gleaming thing at the center of life that loves you, that loves beauty—God or whatever you call it—what if all this were part of your illness? Would you seek treatment? I have, and sometimes I wonder if the greatest passions are just out of my reach. And sometimes I am so grateful.

I imagine what she was thinking, where she thought she was going. I imagine she has gone to her twins. She is rocking them, one in each arm, in a new place. Maybe I am the ghost there, my camera to my eye, peering through the windows of their house, a box by a new parkway, the air thick with salt from a new ocean. She tells them, Your sister is a star in the sky and a shadow on the grass, she will follow you through your life, and you will never be alone.

 

19

I
SWIM UP OUT
of sleep. It feels like there is a crust to break through, a pudding-skin membrane between dreaming and not dreaming. The images from my dream hold fast with uncommon vividness: the lunging lions, the chickens in the toilet, the Monopoly money spilling from my mother's pockets. This is not me, I think. This is not how I dream. This is Daniel talking to me.

I swing myself out of bed and grope for my shoes in the dark. I will not stop to think or I will stop altogether. I sling my purse over my shoulder and go. The carpeted stairs absorb my footsteps. I pass the living room doorway and backtrack to look in on Carrie over the back of the sofa. She is sleeping hard, breathing audibly, like a pug. Her left arm is tucked tightly under her head and her eyelids flutter. Ricky is asleep on another chair, his arms crossed over his chest. Outside, I pull the front door gingerly until I hear the click. I cross the dewy grass to where my car slumbers in Kandy's driveway. The dashboard lights cast a pale glow over my striped pajama pants.

I drive north. Stoplights blink red. I wend my way to old familiar routes. A yellow convertible tears around a corner, and someone throws something out the window—a plastic cup, a sparkling spray of soda under a street lamp. I can still feel the heat from my dream. I put my hand to my flushed cheek and trace the web of pillow marks.

I make the turn that should take me home, but the street is different. It used to be straight through, but now it curves out to the highway. They gave us an exit finally. In the crook of that curve, in the place where our house stood, is the Wendy's. They have paved over the grass in some prescribed corporate shape, but there is no curb where the asphalt ends, nothing to shore up against. It is a weird black island in a field. Wendy grins down at me from her neon sign. The windows are aggressively lit but only a few cars are parked in the lot, at the far edge of the asphalt.

I pull in, and it's the angle of the turn that gets me, maybe, or some subconscious neural response to this spot, the precision of longitude and latitude. I feel it with my whole body: to turn up the drive, to swing my feet out of the car, to walk up our crooked path, to watch my mother's ankles in front of me and the hem of her long skirt swishing, revealing flagstone after flagstone. I'm home.

I park across two spots. I run toward the doors, and at first I think I am still dreaming, and this is the kind of dream where clothing is heavy and you can't get where you want to go, but I am proved wrong by my hand on the cool door pull and the waft of hamburger as I pass through. A boy with a shaved head regards me blearily from the registers. I turn and there is Daniel.

He is sitting in a booth facing me. Before him, a mess of silver foil and grease-spotted fry cartons. He says, “Hi, Mom,” and scrambles off his seat, and I surge toward him and he is in my arms and crying a deep hiccupping cry into my shirt. I clutch him to my chest. He is safe. He is here. It is over.

When I can bear to, I ease off so we can look at each other. His pale teary face, his wild hair. “Are you okay?” I ask him. He nods. He slides back into the booth and I sit down opposite him. “What happened? Did something happen?” He shakes his head and balls a piece of foil in his palm, smooths it out, balls it again. “How did you get here?”

“I walked.” He exhales. He is in his quiet room.

“How did you know where it was?”

“Where what was?”

“This.” I wave my arm around the restaurant. I can see it, by the craggy tree line outside the windows and by my gut: We are in my mother's bedroom. We are sitting in the middle of the bed.

“Sorry I got so mad. I got really mad.”

“Were you hiding?”

“At the beginning.”

I don't want to lecture him on danger. I know he knows. I know he's sorry. “Why didn't you come out when you saw us leaving?”

“I was going to, but it was, like, suddenly you were gone.”

“What do you mean? Did you get distracted?”

“No.”

“And then what did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Daniel, it's been—” I check my watch. “Seven hours.”

He furrows his brow. “I hid and then I walked around for a while and then I came here.” I scan him again for damage. He seems whole, or maybe slightly more than whole; he is giving off an energy such as you feel in dancers who have just finished dancing and stand facing the audience, breathing.

“Why did you come
here
?”

“I met this lady.” He looks at me steadily. “She had red hair. She knew me.”

“You mean on the sign? Wendy?”

“No!” He squawks with laughter and then quiets. “That's silly.”

I see it more clearly now, my mother's house enclosing us. The acne-cheeked register boy slumps on our cream chenille sofa, chin in his hand. Blanche shoves her muzzle into the cooling fries. There are my sisters' cribs, on either side of the condiment bar. “Do you know,” I ask my son, “where we are?”

He nods.

“Did she say anything to you?”

“Yeah,” he says, “she talks a lot.” He smiles at the empty table beside our booth and says to it, “You do!”

Where has my son spent this night, in what dimension? I feel myself crumble to pieces, and I trust him. I turn to face the empty table. If I try, I can imagine that the air looks denser there. Daniel rests his head sideways on his small shoulder, studying me. I wish I could see what he sees. I want to put my ear to her singing chest, to wrap her hair around my fingers. I have things I need to ask her. If Daniel is going to see ghosts, I need to know the rules. He goes back to crinkling his foil, but I know he is watching me. Watching us both. Maybe she is looking at me. Maybe she is leaning forward, one arm on the tabletop, her silver bracelet tinkling against the linoleum, her lips parted, almost smiling. Or maybe she is looking at Daniel.

My son looks tired and brilliant, his elbows planted on the greasy table, his skin so thin and fine, the blood beneath pumping boldly and without my help. He seems double to me, both the most and least familiar person in the world. It occurs to me that I will never know what he saw tonight or where he went. I will lose him this way again and again, and find him, just as I have lost and found Carrie tonight, as well. He will open doors that are closed to me; he will hear the talk underneath talk. Though I stand beside him, we will always be in different rooms, and I think this is how it always has been, though I have never seen it so clearly.

Now I imagine my mother reaching to smooth the hair from my forehead. And now, under Daniel's encouraging look, I can imagine her speaking. I can imagine her doing anything. I can make her do handstands or dance with a hat and cane. I can make her happy, I can make her mad. She says,
Olivia, my tiny bunny rabbit, I am home!
She says,
Shall we go swimming, you and I?
She says,
I forgive you.
Only, it doesn't mean anything
.
In me, there is no conduit to her. In me there is only me. So what I must do, I can do alone, and I do it silently and completely: I forgive us both.

Daniel shudders, and I think he is going into a trance or about to be possessed or something, but then he only vomits a little into a fry carton. I swing around to his side of the booth to hold him. I run my fingernails through his hair. “Poor sickie.”

“I ate five bacon cheeseburgers,” he says, and smiles sheepishly.

I look for the register boy, thinking only now to be angry, but he is gone; he must be in the back, in what was once my bedroom. I hoist Daniel onto my hip like a toddler and he clings, his forehead to my shoulder, his legs around my waist. I carry him out into the parking lot, into the cool night. The stars above us burn through the smog. The grass around the asphalt island ripples with wind and with the shadows of the swaying trees. Daniel will get heavier, and soon I will not be able to carry him like this. He will turn into a teenager and then into a man. He will struggle with his illness and his gifts. Carrie will keep moving away from me and then, I hope, come back. They will change constantly, and I will let them.

Daniel is asleep before I lower him into the passenger seat of the car. I drive back to Kandy's house flush with calm, and when we get there, the lights are all on. Everyone is inside drinking coffee, waiting for us, hoping that we are safe, that we are together, that we are ready for what comes next.

 

Acknowledgments

With thanks to:

Wendy Weil, in memoriam, for taking me on, for finding this book a home, and for all her kindness and wisdom along the way;

Maya Ziv, my champion at Harper, for her vision, her diligence, and her boundless enthusiasm;

Emma Patterson and Emily Forland, for their faith, hard work, and expertise—and Emma, for that first email, which put so many fears to rest;

Everyone who read early sections and drafts of this book, for invaluable criticism, encouragement, and expertise: Jim Magnuson, Stephen Harrigan, Antonya Nelson, Elizabeth McCracken, Paula Smith, Jim Hynes, and Ashley Angert;

The Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin for the support, the fellowship, the barbecue, and the gift of three incredible years, and to my impossibly talented cohort there, who taught me so much, and especially Jen Graham, a brilliant reader and friend;

The Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Norton Island, Interlochen Arts Academy, and Vermont Studio Center for providing me with time, space, and community at several crucial moments that allowed me to finish this book;

My parents, for all their love and encouragement, for never suggesting a more stable career direction, and for filling my childhood with stories;

And most of all Russ, my first reader and my best friend, for every day.