But I tried. My aunts told me I needed my strength, and I agreed. The meal that night was something I loved, one of my favorites, a leftover from the days of sitting happily with Grammy, a stuffed animal in my lap. Fish sticks and mashed potatoes, maybe. A meal that would have brought joy even a week before. Now I could only eat a bite of it before I had to stop.
Little things can, for moments, carry the full force of tragedy. I looked at this meal and it was all the childhood happiness I’d ever enjoyed and would never feel again, and I started to cry. And as I cried, I thought about how some person—not a tornado or a hurricane or a car crash or a fire, but a person—had taken her away from me, had robbed me of everything, and a great, furious wave suddenly swept over me. “I can’t eat! I can’t fucking eat!” I screamed. “Why would someone do this? Why! Why the fuck did this happen?! FUCK HIM! FUCK HIM!”
I kept on like this, banging the table with my fist. I could see that my aunts and my grandmother were terrified, and I ran with it. I wanted someone else to be afraid, I wanted someone else to feel everything spin entirely out of control. The fact that I had no face upon which to focus my hatred only intensified it. I raged at my helplessness, and at the fact that no one around me knew what they were talking about. My aunts’ attempts to soothe me only made me angrier. “You don’t fucking understand!” I told them, although they would have admitted that themselves. But I was beyond being fair. I was nearly blacked out.
Somewhere within me, though, I could see myself breaking down. As I burned off some of my trapped energy, that calmer, older self came out and shone a light in my head: I couldn’t let him do this to me. I could not let the shadow take over.
Just then, Grammy approached me with some pills. I was sobbing but no longer banging the table, and I saw her hand shake as she laid them in front of me. I picked up my glass of water and took them, didn’t ask what they were, didn’t pay attention to how many. I had always had a childish difficulty swallowing pills, but now I opened up and threw them down my throat. I became quiet immediately, all the fight leaving me as quickly as it had entered. The pills could not have worked that fast; I was just too tired to go on. Defeated. I didn’t look at anyone’s face. I got up from the table and headed for the living room couch, and as I did, I saw on the kitchen counter the box from which the pills had come. Cold medicine. They truly did not know what to do.
9
* * *
before
I never asked Mom about the early days of her marriage; any mention of my father, Tom, upset her, made her irritable and withdrawn. I think she felt that my rare questions about him implied that she wasn’t enough on her own. I had a couple of thin photo albums, plastic pages brittle with age, some hazy early-childhood memories, and that was all. They’d divorced when I was five, and Tom and I had only sporadic contact after that, and none after Mom died. And so, after eighteen years of silence, I decided to contact him, to ask him about Mom’s youth, about their seven-year marriage. I tried to put her descriptions of him out of my mind. Other people have often told me that my father is a surprisingly likable man, with a disarmingly friendly voice. “Tom’s a decent guy,” they’ll say, “when he isn’t drinking.”
We arranged for me to pick him up in a pharmacy parking lot. He was the sheepish man with the worn red cheeks. We went to his brother’s girlfriend’s apartment, a clean, cozy space. He told me he’d borrowed a nice shirt for the day. As he spoke, I found myself smiling at him, trying to put my finger on the familiar quality of his voice. It made me think of stock characters from old movies. A gentle farmer in a drought year. A noble con taking the fall for his buddy. But it didn’t quite fit any trope I could call up. I finally had to admit that his voice must have gotten into me when I was new to the world, trusting and fresh. That the exact timbre of it took me back to something simpler, despite everything that had happened.
We both knew I had to be the one to call first, just as we both knew I was searching for her, not for him. But now he calls on holidays, on my birthday. He has my address. We chat about the weather, and job prospects. I try to ignore the sense that I’m betraying her by speaking to him. It is the first thing I have done that I am sure would contradict her wishes. He and I dance carefully around each other, both wondering when I might suddenly feel like throwing a punch.
* * *
According to Tom, my parents met at a party.
It was at a camp down on the shores of Long Lake, a boxy place covered in cedar shingles darkened by moisture and time, the unheated rooms full of teenagers smoking weed and drinking Bud and Coors, Led Zeppelin on the crackly radio, shirtless boys jumping off the dock out in the dark.
Or maybe it was at somebody’s house downtown, parents gone for the weekend, records on a turntable, liquor cabinet busted open, cigarette ash ground into beige shag. High schoolers, dropouts, early-twenties road crew members, little siblings too young to be there.
Or it was in an apartment on Lower Main Street, in the broad middle of a Sunday, afternoon light filtering through clouds of smoke, music cranked up loud, people leaning and calling over rickety porch railings. Calls around to friends for more beer, stocked up: no liquor sales on the holy day. Wild teens, kids scurrying underfoot, adults home, but not from any job. Harder drugs available in the kitchen.
Mom wore high-waisted, faded bell-bottoms, or a ruched sundress in dark blue calico, or brown peg-leg pants and a halter. Tom wore jeans and a dark T-shirt with a pocket. Or a flannel. And boots.
He can’t quite remember the details; all of these are equally probable Bridgton stories. But he knows Mom was with another girl, probably Linda. The two of them would have been a beautiful sight, Linda’s soft brown curls complementing Mom’s bright red perfectly. It was very early summer—Mom’s freckles were starting to multiply, and Linda was taking on the brown of what would become a lifelong tan.