“Hel-lo?” she said after a moment, pretending to knock the air between us with her free hand. “Is the Teenager sleeping?”
I set my head against the window.
“I’m just saying it was an impractical thing to wear. It was impractical, wasn’t it?” She was kneading the steering wheel with her hands. She was looking at me long enough for the truck to swerve, slightly, into the oncoming lane. “Just say yes, okay?” She got the truck back on course. She slowed down, or maybe the engine missed. “Just say, yes, that sweater was a strange thing to wear. You can add fucking. You’re a teenager, so I don’t care. Say it was a fucking ridiculous thing to wear, and then you can say that her explanation, her defense or whatever that was, was pretty much a load of bull, too.”
I could hear the gumming of her palms against the plastic of the wheel.
Then she added, getting worried, “You know it’s a load of bull, right?”
When I was eleven or twelve, I found this unexpected thing in the back of the shed. It was a wooden cradle wrapped in a clear plastic tarp, which I pulled open when I was looking for something else. The thing was hand painted with white daisies and blue lilacs, long-finned fish swimming through it all like golden grinning devils. It was filled to the brim with rotting firewood, mouse droppings, unfurling weevils. I remember covering it back up with the tarp, finding a stack of asphalt shingles to lay over it. I shooed the dogs outside and went back to my day, but later, when I was guiding the canoe through shallows or pulling some teeny thorns from Abe’s paw—or working out a tedious math problem—the image of that cradle would occasionally come back to me. I’d see the grimy rim painted fresh with lilacs and fish, the maple runners creaking back and forth, some bald little thing wedged inside, wiggling.
I’d see a face hovering over it. Going, you know, shh, shhh.
The thing is I have no memory at all of my mother before the commune broke up. In my mind it was always just Tameka and a constantly shifting amalgamate of teenagers and adults—legs in jeans, legs in skirts—and I admit I wanted to bring her into focus, see her rocking a little baby I could imagine was me. But my mom never said much about my baby self. She didn’t have any pictures of course, and she once said with a snort that my first word was “wah.” She wouldn’t even tell me what she’d chosen when the commune did the vote for my name. “Madeline’s all your dad,” she insisted, but I knew from stories that everybody wrote down the names they wanted and put them in a hat. For a while I thought about that a lot, the names she might have liked, such as Winter or Juniper or Ark. I thought about those baby days and maybe names (Canidae, I thought with longing, when I was doing my wolf project in eighth grade), until it dawned on me at some point that maybe my mother wouldn’t say, not because she’d wanted something else, but because she’d suggested nothing at all. And then I began to wonder, who besides my dad had wanted Madeline? Who else had voted for that?
I’m not saying I ever consciously wished there’d been someone else. And I’m not saying this thinking happened all at once, because it didn’t. It came over me gradually, almost unremarkably, in a way that seemed to move on a separate plane from all the other events in my life. I can’t attach it to anything that happened, to a year in school or a particular thing my mother did or didn’t do, but once the thought was there it didn’t go away. “The CEO’s doing her accounts!” she’d say, for instance, and my scalp would tighten like a cap above my ears. Or she’d dangle some decorative lure she was making in front of my nose while I was connecting dots in my workbook, and I’d have to lay my pencil down. I’d have to release that pencil like it was a match in a newly lit fire. Look up at her. “Hush!” she’d say to herself then, seeing the dark expression on my face, but not the plea, never the bald desire to be treated more gently. She’d whisper, “The Professor’s at work! Shhh! Everyone be quiet.”
Or she’d knock the air between us with the hand she wasn’t using for driving. She knocked the air and kept her eye on the highway.
“Earth to Mad-e-line. Did you hear what I said—” And before I knew what I was doing that day in the truck, before I could stop myself, I was croaking out, “Did I do okay?”
“You mean—?”
I waited, felt the truck’s engine churning us down the road. Missing, churning again.
She thought about it for a while before saying, “What happened probably would have happened whatever you’d done. If that’s what you mean.”
I returned my head to the lip of the door, watched clouds swell over other clouds that might have been smoke.