(Pause)
I have a new idea, Jenna—about next year. Or, rather, next summer. When the children are finished with school. I looked up the date—June eighteenth.
(Pause)
OK. Sorry to miss you.
Love you.
(Pause)
Love all of you.
(Pause)
Good-bye . . .
(Pause)
H’lo? Did I hear someone? Is someone—there?
(Pause)
OK, guys. Love you. I’ll call back soon.
G’bye.
“NO MORE”
Early she’d wakened. Very quietly—stealthily—she was leaving us for Seattle.
A car had come for her, sleek-dark hired car like a torpedo in the twilit air before dawn waiting, motor running, headlights in the driveway below. And Naomi panicked and ran after her barefoot on the stairs for she was leaving without saying good-bye as she had arrived without (it seemed to us) saying hello. “Mom, wait! When will we see you again . . .”
But already she was at the door, with her suitcase. Already, about to step outside.
“Mom! Mom!”
Her thinning shale-colored hair had been brushed back severely from her face. Her thin taut body that had reverted to the neuter body of a young girl and was no longer a mother’s body was hidden inside a shapeless dark coat that fell nearly to her ankles. Her face—that had once been a beautiful face, or nearly—was now worn, wan, alabaster-pale—bloodless. (Darren had said Jesus! She looks exsanguinated liking the sound of words extravagant and reckless and angry in Zap Comix style.) Her eyebrows seemed to have disappeared. Her eyelashes were brittle and broken. The eyes were naked, raw.
“Aren’t you going to say good-bye to anyone? Not even Melissa?”
Excitedly Naomi spoke. Not accusingly but with a sound of child-fear, that entered the marrow of the (fleeing) mother’s bones like radium.
She was shaking her head now. She was fully awake.
“Mom? Wait . . .”
In the doorway Jenna hesitated. She had not seemed to hear Naomi’s question yet she turned to Naomi her wide damp blind-seeming eyes. And she was smiling, a faint, terrible smile.
Shocking to Naomi, the face was a mirror-face. Almost, her own face reflected at her. But a tired face, an extinguished face, a baffled face. And in the eyes, for an instant, something like the dull blank of non-recognition.
“Naomi! I didn’t want to wake you, to say good-bye. Or—the others . . .”
Vaguely she spoke. Apologetically.
Then Jenna said, as if she’d only just now thought of it, as if this chance meeting with her elder daughter at the very moment of her departure had provoked the disclosure that would have otherwise remained unarticulated, “D’you know, it’s funny, after we listened to Gus’s voice last night, I was thinking—not for the first time actually, but this time more clearly— how I’d always taken for granted that we are meant to help one another here on earth—(forgive me: ‘here on earth’ is such a cliché! Gus would laugh at me)—to be good, to be generous, to be kind and loving and forgiving to one another. Whenever I meet another person, instinctively I smile at him—or her; I am obliged to be generous, to be kind, to be thoughtful, to think of the other, to think conscientiously of the other, and not of myself. Of course. Your father was like this, too—in his own way, a more aggressive way. Where I am fearful, Gus was fearless. He believed passionately in this response to life . . . But in the past year it has become clear to me that really, none of this matters.”
Naomi wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. None of this matters?
None of—what?
She was the bad girl, the skeptic. Naomi, and her brother Darren. Both skeptics. Sharp-tongued kids, bratty kids, kids who roll their eyes during Pledge of Allegiance. Smart-ass kids with high I.Q.s and low tolerance for others. Kids with wizened little crab apples for hearts.
Abortionist’s kids. Well, they all got what they deserved didn’t they.
Naomi stood blinking at her mother wondering—was she supposed to laugh? Was this remark a joke? (Though Jenna did not appear to be joking.) (Had Jenna said anything remotely funny, amusing, ironically funny, even witty since November 1999?) Was her mother actually expecting Naomi to agree with these astonishing words?
With the air of someone who had worked out for herself a mathematical theorem that is commonly known yet no less remarkable for being commonly known Jenna continued: