Left Neglected

Chapter 33





It’s early Saturday morning, before the black-backed woodpeckers have started playing percussion on the maples and pines and before the lifts open at the mountain. Linus has just hopped down off my lap and is now lying on the floor with a truck in one hand, Bunny in the other, sucking on his nukie, still in pajamas, watching a Sesame Street video with the volume barely on. Charlie and Lucy are, for the moment, playing quietly in their rooms. My mother and I are sitting on the couch in front of a gently crackling fire, enjoying this peaceful entry into the day. Bob stayed in Welmont, said he had too much work to do this weekend, but I suspect he’s still mad at me and doesn’t want to contribute one feel-good moment to my “cockamamie idea” of living here. I breathe in the smell of my latte before taking another hot sip. Mmm. I’d say he’s missing one right now.

I’m ostensibly doing a word search puzzle, but I’m mostly savoring my coffee, relaxing in front of the fire, and observing my mother. She’s knitting a bright red shawl, completely focused on her needles, every so often naming the order of the stitches under her breath. She stops to massage her shoulder.

“You okay?” I ask.

“I think my arm’s sore from holding Linus so much.”

She’s squeezing her upper left arm. I’m pretty sure she usually holds Linus with her right.

“Maybe you’re tensing your shoulders while you’re knitting,” I suggest, even though her posture doesn’t look tensed.

“I think it’s Linus.”

She rubs her arm, shoulder to elbow, a few more times and then resumes knitting. The shawl cascades down from her needles across her lap and onto the couch like a blanket. It appears to be almost done, and I imagine that it’ll look pretty on her, complementing her silver hair, her black-rimmed glasses, and the red lipstick she loves to wear.

“You must miss your Red Hat friends,” I say.

“I do,” she says without looking up or interrupting her clicking needles. “But I talk to them all the time.”

“You do?”

I never see her on the phone.

“We Skype.”

“You Skype ?”

“Uh-huh.”

This is the woman who missed the advent of the microwave, the VCR, and the television remote control, all of which still befuddle her. She doesn’t own her own cell phone or a laptop, and she doesn’t have a GPS navigation system for her car. But she skypes?

“How do you even know what Skype is?” I ask.

“I saw it on Oprah.”

I should’ve known. My mother’s three sources of all information come from Oprah, Ellen, and People magazine. The academic snob in me wants to belittle her, but I have to give her credit. She’s come a long way in four months. She uses Bob’s GPS like a pro and drove into Boston during rush hour every day while I was at Baldwin. She eventually manages to find the correct remote control (we have five) and press the right combination of buttons to switch inputs from cable to VCR to Wii (even Abby found this to be confusing). She answers the cell phone Bob gave her to use while she’s with us whenever we call her. And apparently, she Skypes on our home computer.

“What about your home? You must miss being in your own house,” I say.

“I miss parts of it. I sometimes miss the quiet and my privacy. But if I were there, I’d miss the kids’ voices and their laughter and all the activity here.”

“But what about all your things? And your routine.”

“I have a routine here and plenty of things. Home is where you live. For now, I live with you, so this is home to me.”

Home is where you live. I think of that sign at the end of Storrow Drive in Boston: if you lived here, you’d be home now. I look out the windows at the natural beauty of our open land, the gray morning filling with color as the sun rises over the hills. I would love living here. And I think the kids would love it. But Bob’s right. We can’t simply move here and uproot everyone without a concrete plan for our livelihood. I envision a sign at the Vermont border: if you’re going to live here, you’re going to have to find jobs. Real jobs, I hear Bob’s voice add in my head.

“I would like to be back for summer, though. I’d miss my garden and the beaches. I love summer on the Cape,” says my mother.

“Do you think I’ll be better by summer?”

“Oh, I think you’ll be a lot better by then.”

“No, I mean, do you think I’ll be back to the way I was before this happened?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

“All the doctors seem to think that if I haven’t fully recovered by the summer, I probably won’t.”

“They don’t know everything.”

“They know more than I do.”

She checks her row.

“I bet they don’t know how to snowboard,” she says.

I smile, picturing a scared and unsteady Martha strapped to a board on Fox Run, falling hard onto her bottom every few inches.

“Nothing’s impossible,” she says.

The doctors and therapists would’ve probably also told me that I couldn’t snowboard yet, that it wouldn’t be possible. And yet, I’m doing it. Nothing’s impossible. I sit still and absorb my mother’s words until I feel like they’ve penetrated the deepest part of me where they can’t be shaken loose. My mother clicks her needles, keeping focused on the construction of her shawl, so she doesn’t notice me watching her, loving her simple yet beautiful words of wisdom, proud of her for doing whatever has been asked of her to be here, grateful that she came at all and then stayed to help me even when I told her not so nicely to go home. Thank God she ignored me.

I reach over and squeeze her socked foot.

“What?” she asks, looking up from her stitch.

“Nothing,” I say.

She returns to her shawl. I sip my coffee and watch the fire, enjoying another feel-good moment. I’m home with my mother.