“I’ll talk to her. I’ll explain that he’s different. Maybe I can convince her to leave him, because he won’t do it. Out of guilt or shame or some kind of feeling of responsibility.” I was grasping for control, looking for something I could do, some action I could take to bring his body and soul back to me. “Maybe she’ll tell him to fuck off if she knows he loves me. If I tell her.”
“Mom wants to talk to you.”
“Can I not?”
But she never answered.
“Theresa?” That voice. So flat and patrician. Jonathan called it haute voix.
“Mom.”
She didn’t say anything, but she sounded wet. I heard a half a breath and a ladylike sniff. Mom didn’t cry, so she tried to hide her hitched breaths and clear the mucous out of her throat with a rattle instead of a snuffle. I’d never heard much emotion from her, but what I was barely hearing was a soft sob from most people. For my mother, it was blubbering.
I could have been mistaken, confusing tears with allergies, until she spoke through lungs that wouldn’t stay still and a nose full of snot.
“I thought I was losing two in one day.”
“I’m sorry, I… we had to disappear,” I said.
“You didn’t see us on the way out today, and I was scared you were leaving again. Theresa, my baby. Don’t… please don’t do this.”
“Do what, Mom? I’m back. I’m here.”
“I wanted you. Did you know? You and your brother surprised me, but you were my special gifts.” She broke down into sniffles and hics.
I was frozen. I didn’t know how to react. I’d never heard this sappy story of her feelings about her last two children. “Mom…”
“And I’m losing the two of you.”
I touched my St. Christopher medal to protect against hating myself for what I’d done. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
Why did I say that? Would I have to stick to it? Was I cursing any chance I had of working things out with Antonio? I wasn’t ready to make that bargain. Not yet. Other deals with the universe were still pending, but this was no time to take it back.
“Where are you?” said a voice that wasn’t Mom’s. The new voice was bent with rage at the same time it was lilting like a singsong meant for a child’s ears. Only my sister Sheila could do that.
I opened my mouth to tell her then realized I didn’t really know.
“Where are you?” Sheila growled and sang.
On a closet floor, feeling like an ass for getting upset over a man when my whole family is falling apart. “I’m fine,” was the only lie I could articulate.
“Oh, bully for you. Really? Did you do this on purpose?”
“Do what?”
“Fall off the face of the earth? Let us all think you were dead?” Her phrases made hairpin turns around razorblades.
I wanted to tell the truth, spill everything. I was sure I’d get lacerated on a lie. “Sheila, I can’t answer that.”
“Oh, for the love of fuck, how could you? How could you do that to people who love you?”
She said everything I’d feared hearing when I came back, but I thought it would come from Margie or Mom. Instead it was Sheila, who had always had too many children to focus on me.
“I’m sorry to inconvenience you,” I said. “I’ve been a piece of furniture in this family my whole life. I haven’t asked any of you for a thing, and I promise you, I never will.”
It was the perfect time to hang up, but I couldn’t. I’d done enough walking away.
“Don’t pull that,” she growled. No one got away with anything as far as Sheila was concerned. “Any one of us would have jumped in front of a bullet for you.”
I was a pathetic woman crouched in a dark closet, but when she said that, and I heard the love behind her anger, I felt worthy in a way I hadn’t ever before.
“Maybe I didn’t want you to,” I said. “And I promise you the whole situation is more complicated than I can explain over the phone.”
“I’m so pissed off, I can’t even swallow.” But she wasn’t. She’d said her piece, and she was on her way down from her rage high.
“Well, get used to it. I’m not a piece of furniture anymore.”
“You were always the one we could count on to not change.”
“I’m sorry.”