Ma.
I pictured her in the place where she lived now. I pictured her in the passenger seat of the car after our meeting with the doctor. I pictured her alone in the house she raised me in, packing up everything but the books and giving it all away.
“Kids? Can I tell you a secret?”
They all nodded. They all needed a secret, something to bring them out of the woods and into the sunlight. My heart hammered away in my chest and I knew that I would have to lie flat on the table once they were gone and wait until it reverted to a normal beat.
“I used to be afraid of losing my mom too,” I said. “And guess what? I still am!”
I looked from one side of the room to the other in a we’re-all-in-this-together, we’re-all-scared-of-losing-our-mothers kind of way. Then a cell phone alarm went off, meaning that the writer lady half hour was over and it was on to the arts and crafts room. The adults began to shepherd the children out, but not before nodding to me, each of them, in a sober kind of way. They had seen through me. They could tell that something was happening in my life, something I had vowed not to talk about but couldn’t help talking about, in a sideways kind of way.
* * *
The duct-taped-shut Keds size-nine shoebox was hidden in the middle of the middle stack of the books-as-coffee-table. When I pictured it, I saw the expression on the Amish woman’s face when she handed it to me. I saw the way she shook her bonneted head when I tried to give it back to her. The knowledge that the box was here with me, buried by books but right here in the middle of the one room of my one-room cabin, was unsettling. An unasked, unanswered question. Be brave, Clara.
It took a little unearthing to get to it. Once the shoebox was out, the stacks were lopsided, which was also unsettling. Shifting Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy and The Long Winter from their original stacks to the middle one evened things out again. Symmetry was crucial to the structural integrity of the books-as-coffee-table.
I picked up the shoebox and carried it out to the porch and set it down on the little table next to my chair. I looked at it and it looked back at me. What could be so light that it weighed almost nothing? Then I went back into the cabin and brought Jack and Dog out to the porch with me. Calling in the reinforcements.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here, men, shall we?”
When I didn’t feel brave, I sometimes spoke out loud in a hearty, World War II movie commander sort of way and kept speaking this way until 1) I felt braver or 2) I couldn’t stand the sound of my hearty commander voice anymore so 3) I had to take action.
The tape came off in a satisfying duct-tape way. Three photos were what the box held, photos of me. Me as a baby, me as a toddler, me as a little girl.
In the first, I was zipped into an orange snowsuit and someone—Tamar?—had propped me against a snowbank. The sun glinted off snow and my eyes were squinted shut. You couldn’t see my legs or my arms or anything besides my face. I was an orange blob against a glaring pile of white.
In the second, I was sitting on her lap. A birthday cake with two candles was on the table in front of us. A third candle stuck out of the side of the cake: the to-grow-on candle. Tamar’s tradition. In this photo, her face was in shadow, but you could still see how soft it was, how long her hair was, curving around the curves of her cheek. She had always been a thin woman, my mother. Some might call her scrawny. But in this photo, her face was the soft face of a girl.
Which she was. Twenty years old. Much younger than I was now.
In the last photo my face—maybe I was four? Five?—poked through a giant wooden cutout of a strawberry. Strawberry Fields Forever, which was a pick-your-own place north of Boonville. This photo was one I remember being taken. Tamar and I had gone up early in the morning to pick strawberries. We and another family—a mother, a father, five or six children—were first on the field. It was a foggy day, the kind of day when noise came randomly, a voice suddenly clear in your ear and then fading. The kind of day that steadied you with the blurring of outlines and the narrowing of surroundings. I remembered crouching, holding the green pasteboard berry box in one hand, reaching under the green leaves of the plants to find and pluck the strawberries with the other. My fingers stained red. I remembered looking around to see where my mother was. She was not next to me, but out of the fog her voice came floating, a few rows or many rows away, impossible to tell. She was singing “Hallelujah.” She sang it over and over, first a little higher, then a little lower, then a little slower.
The sound of my mother singing was not unusual. She sang when she was working, when she didn’t know, or forgot, that I was around to hear. Maybe she thought she was alone now, there in the fog, so it was okay to sing, to raise her voice to the clouds come down to earth. To the berries, hiding beneath the green leaves. To the dirt, rich and dark beneath her sneakers. Maybe she didn’t even know she was singing.
I crouched between rows of strawberry plants, that fog so thick that wisps of it curled around my hands and the berry box. I was alone and she was alone, and the voices of the other family, the one with all the children, came to my ears intermittently from wherever they were in that big field.
The berry box was full of strawberries and I put one in my mouth. So sweet. So red. The color red fused with the sensation of sweetness in that moment. Berry after berry, sweet-red sweet-red, listening to my mother sing the song that I didn’t know yet was her favorite song from her favorite singer, and when her song came to an end I began picking again and rapidly filled another box and then another and then another, so that when we met again at the end of the rows, there in the fog, she would look at the berry boxes and know that I had not wasted my time, and she would be proud of me.
We sat together on the porch, Jack and Dog and I, thinking about that day and her song and looking out at the woods beyond the cabin. The fairy lights glimmered in their silent way.
* * *
The photo of me in the snowbank was more substantial than the others, heavier somehow.
“Because, hello, there’s another photo stuck to the back of it, Clara,” I said out loud. “Well, well, what do you know?”
This is what happens to people who live alone and who live in their heads. They carry on running conversations with themselves, or with the ashes of their departed dogs, or with the fireflies that blink among the pines at dusk, or with their bottles of whiskey. They say things like “Well, well, what do you know?” out loud to themselves. They use the royal we, like this: