—You think so?
—Son. Do you think I’m a very daring person?
—Why are you asking that all of a sudden?
—You know I’ve lived like a man for so long. I thought I feared nothing and didn’t know anything about regret. But then I had you and realized that wasn’t true. When you were a baby, holding you felt like clutching a fat purse, I felt so rich and satisfied. And it made me fearful. That you might get hurt, or break, or disappear.
—Jesus.
—One time when you were in kindergarten, I thought I’d lost you. Kindergarten hours were long over, but you didn’t come home. The bus driver said you didn’t get on the bus. You’d told him you were going to a friend’s house instead. There was a panic. I ran out of the house and searched for you, all along the way from the kindergarten to our home until from a distance I saw your back. I decided to follow you and find out what you were doing. You kept taking a couple of steps and stopping. Looking into all the shops, every single one of them, observing and touching things. Your face full of curiosity. I wasn’t angry. I was afraid. I realized that you weren’t the child that I knew anymore. You were going to see what you wanted to see, walk where you wanted to walk and when you wanted to—you were a child with a world of your own. That filled me with such regret. Such fear.
—I guess I’ve always been easily distracted.
—I think that’s why I was so terrible to you. I was scared. I wanted to keep you in my tiny soy-sauce dish of a world forever.
Umma grinned as she rubbed the part of her stomach where half of her liver, the source of courage according to folklore, had been removed. I hadn’t seen her smile in a long time.
After her cancer came back, I kept dreaming that she would die.
In my dream, her car was no longer small and red but a big Volvo manufactured in the United States. The safest car in the world, they say. That wasn’t the only thing different from reality. Umma didn’t look like she was about to die; she was in her forties again, energetic and vivacious. In the dream, she drives the American-model Volvo straight off a cliff. It falls and shatters into a thousand pieces. Her hand sticks out from a window. The engine catches fire, beasts surround the burning wreckage like they’re at a barbecue. Black smoke rises from inside the car, and something appears over her body. Decorative kale. It looks like blue fungus. It blooms and covers her in a flash, the scene of the accident suddenly obscured. And what are my thoughts as I stare down at all of this from the cliff? Do I cry? Laugh? Or feel nothing?
It would always be 5:00 a.m. when I woke up from this dream in a cold sweat. I would sit down at Umma’s desk and begin to write, my back bent over the desktop that was pathetically small for someone my size. My sentences formed like lines coming out of my fingertips. They kept on coming without my thinking about them, as if they had a mind of their own. Then I would get a whiff of something burning, and the sentences that had driven on and on like a mad little red car would come to a halt.
Whenever I thought about what my writing meant to her, I felt as lost as if I was staring down the edge of a cliff. I was already thirty, a legal adult for ten years, and was old enough to know that my mother did not exist solely to hinder my existence but was a person in her own right who had fought hard making her way through life. She just happened to be unlucky. In other words, the fact that our relationship had been so terrible was as natural as cancer or fungus or the rotation of our planet or sunspots. I knew this, but the feeling that she was the source of all my problems kept nagging at me. I kicked myself for thinking this about a dying person, someone who was only skin and bones at this point, but the thought refused to leave my mind.
Me at ten years old terrified over bleeding to death from holes all over my body, me at nineteen writing about my mother to earn some extra cash, and me at thirty whipping myself up into a frenzy of vengeful hate to write stories about people who’d been kind to me, for strangers who didn’t know me—all of these versions of me were sitting behind my mother that day.
Umma looked as hard and beautiful as ever as she gazed into the sunset. As I watched her, it suddenly occurred to me that she may indeed have read every one of my published stories and writings. Not that this would’ve changed anything, really.
She spoke in a sentimental voice.
—I used to feel that I’d been given the whole world when I held you.
Disease can turn anyone into a completely different person. Once upon a time, she’d been someone who was stronger than anyone else, who never looked back, who would rather die than say anything so sentimental, much less say such a thing as she looked into a sunset. It kept making me feel like I wanted to confess something, too.
—Umma . . . you know . . . there’s something . . .
The words came before I could stop them, but I couldn’t bear to say the words. There were so many things to say to her, and I wanted to say something, anything at all, but I hadn’t a clue as to how to begin. You know, Umma, there’s something I wanted to say . . .
I wish you would apologize to me for once in my life. About trampling on my heart that time. About giving birth to me this way, raising me this way, then deciding to push me away into a place I can’t come back from, into a world of ignorance and being ignored, I wish you would apologize for that. I know that what happened to me wasn’t really what you had wanted to happen, and I know it’s not anyone’s fault, I know that, but I—
—. . . I’ll never understand it.
—Understand what?
—I’m really sorry, but I don’t think I can ever forgive you for that. Ever.
—What is this child going on about?
I felt like I was about to cry. Quickly, I turned my head. I got up.
—Toilet.
I slung my bag over my shoulder and ran for the toilets. By the time my sanity returned, I found myself inside the wheelchair-accessible stall. I sat down on the toilet and took off my bag. I got out the stack of paper and held it in my hand. The twisted letters of my handwriting on the pages, his handwriting in red imposed over mine in black. I tore them in half, and in half again. I tore each separate piece into still smaller pieces and tossed them into the toilet bowl. The letters touched the water and dyed it red. When I flushed, the layer of paper on the water formed a swirl of confetti and disappeared down the hole.
I used to feel like I’d been given the whole world when I held him.
Like I was holding the whole universe.