“Okay and thank you for the information.”
I looked at him, he looked at me, and between us passed the understanding that I had thought long and hard about being tested and that I had come to no conclusion and that if and when I did come to a conclusion—to test or not to test—I would let him know. He nodded. We stood up. I left and walked down the hallway and pushed through the double doors out to the parking lot and double-clicked the key to open the door of the Subaru and got inside and laid my head against the cool, cool vinyl of the steering wheel.
Because what part of any of it applied to me?
Spouse, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, boss, colleagues: no and no and no and no and no and no and no. There was no “our” or “we.” There was only me.
* * *
It was early afternoon at the View Arts Center in Old Forge, an overcast September day. A poster sign was set up out front: me holding a copy of The Old Man in both hands with the caption SEE OUR QUILT EXHIBIT! MEET AN AUTHOR!
“There’s a school field trip due any minute!” the woman at the reception desk said. Her voice was exclamation-mark-y, like Brown’s when he was excited. Maybe she was the one who had made the poster. “They’re coming down from Saranac just because of you. Big fans of your book, apparently!”
“How old are they, do you know?”
“Third grade. Still little and cute!”
A table was set up underneath a huge hand-stitched white quilt hung against the far white gallery wall. White on white, almost but not entirely disappeared. I sat on the table and watched as the children filed in, teacher in front and room parents behind. Sit on the floor. Fold your hands. Shhh. Third grade. Still little and cute, which made it worse if it was a day when it was hard to look at little, cute kids. Like the boy whose shirt was buttoned all the way up to his neck. Or the girl fingering the butterfly clip in her hair. They took you in, absorbed you through their eyes, trying to figure you out. You and your place in the world.
“Do you think that’s her? The writer lady?”
“No. Her hair’s different from the poster.”
“It’s still her, though. I’m pretty sure. Yeah. It’s her.”
The children talking about me were sitting three feet from me. They stared directly at me as they talked, in that way that small children did, as if I couldn’t hear them.
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s me.”
At the sound of my voice they were instantly stunned into silence, eyes big and round with shock.
“What are your names?” I said. Writer Lady had spoken. I waited for them to emerge from speechlessness.
“Jamie,” one finally whispered.
“Candace,” a girl said, and then she said it again. “Candace with a K.”
Candace transformed itself in my mind into Kandace. A small boy with a mullet looked up at me sadly and said nothing. Mullet Boy. His eyes were dark and unblinking.
“Tell her your name,” Kandace snapped. “It’ll freak her out.” She poked him with her pinky. Why a pinky instead of her pointer finger? Poke.
“It’s a really weird name!” Kandace said.
Mullet Boy drooped. The space around him widened a fraction of an inch. Think fast, Clara.
“Did you guys know that weird means unconventional? Which is a great thing to be.”
Kandace twitched. She didn’t want weird to be a good thing. Mullet Boy took a deep breath, a strength-gathering breath. He was going to do it. He was going to tell the writer lady his unconventional name.
“My name is Blue Mountain,” he said, then squinched himself into a tight ball and hauled his shoulders up to his ears.
“See what I mean? I told you it was weird! His parents are hippies!” shouted Kandace. “Want to know why the hippies named him Blue Mountain? Because he was conceived there! Right on top of Blue Mountain!”
“What does ‘conceived’ mean?” Jamie said.
“It means that his parents did it on top of Blue Mountain!” Kandace was louder and louder and louder. One of her internal engines had spun out of control.
“Did what?”
“IT!”
Jamie looked confused. So did the boy next to him. So did Kandace, come to think of it. I stood up and raised both hands in the air, flat, and then floated them down, hoping it might work in a Shhh, children kind of way. And it did. The entire room went silent.
It could make me cry, if I let it. All those children, those little, cute kids—they didn’t and couldn’t know what was ahead of them, what life would bring their way. Did you? Did I? Did my mother?
My messed-up heart kicked into gear and began to race. From beat, beat, beat to beatbeat-beat to beatbeatbeat to beatbeatbeatbeatbeatbeat in a fraction of a second. A familiar faintness crept through me from the head down. My fingers stole up and pressed themselves against the side of my throat. This was a bad one. Two-hundred-plus beats a minute. Maybe more. A cardiologist had told me years ago that at the point that “the abnormality” began to “interfere with the normal course of living,” then I should get it “taken care of.” Quotation marks kept grouping themselves around the words as they floated by the bottom of my brain, because what exactly was an abnormality, and what exactly was a normal course of living, and how exactly did wires threaded up your veins into the middle of your heart and then killing off part of it mean getting it taken care of?
The racing and fluttering in my chest and in my throat filled my eyes with stars, but I was standing there in front of them and I had to get through this.
Fake it, Clara.
I sat back down on the table. That way I wouldn’t pass out. Breathe. Focus. My thudding heart, the ocean sound in my ears.
“I have a question for you,” I said. “Do you want to know what it is?”
“Yessssss!” they called together, in the way of small children.
“Think way back, will you? To when you were little.”
When you were little made the adults look up and smile at me. We were the ones who knew that the children were still little. The kids didn’t know they were still little.
Unless they weren’t. Maybe little doesn’t exist. Maybe we don’t want to believe there wasn’t a time when we weren’t thinking about our place in life and what we wanted our lives to be. When we weren’t wondering about the meaning of it all. Maybe we want desperately to think that we once had a few years when things were easy, when others were taking care of us, when we had no worries.
Clara, shhh.
“Can anyone remember something you were afraid of, way back when you were little?”
Hands shot up. Thunderstorms. Dogs with giant teeth. Bad guys with guns.
A small boy with a pierced ear sitting in the back raised his hand. “Can it be something I’m still afraid of?”
“Sure.”
“I’m afraid of going into a store with my mom, and then I get separated from her, and I never find her again.”
Jackpot. Lost Mothers for $1600. The Daily Double. The children moaned and held hands and shook their heads. The adults grimaced. The room itself began to shrink, all of us arrowing into our insides, alone with no mother beside us.