“Call me when you grow up,” she said. “Call me when you want to talk.”
She opened the passenger door and slid back across the seat to the driver’s side and coaxed the engine to life again. Then she rolled down the window. Her white face loomed in the darkness, a pale moon. “It’s a two-way street, Clara.”
* * *
“Ma, I saw Annabelle Lee last night.”
Across the polished floor beyond the Plant Room doorway, Sylvia raised her head and smiled at me. She loved Annabelle Lee, who visited once a week, before choir practice. Everyone at the place where my mother lived now loved Annabelle Lee. They thought she was great. So funny, so in-your-face, so stalwart and strong. My mother tilted her head at me.
“Where?” She looked around, as if Annabelle Lee might be hiding somewhere in the Plant Room.
“In Old Forge. At the cabin.”
My mother looked confused. Old Forge? The cabin? I plowed on anyway.
“Ma, can I ask you something? Why did you never sing in the choir?”
Sylvia was looking at me again, wary now. No, I will not meet your eyes, Sylvia. I’m talking with my mother. Yes, there’s a weird tone in my voice. The force of Sylvia’s gaze was strong. She was impelling me to look at her, doing everything in her power to drag my eyes to hers, but I would not. My mother shook her head. She held both hands up in front of her, as if to stop me.
“I never asked you that question and I figured I should,” I said. “There are a bunch of things I never asked you.”
Sylvia’s powers were too strong. I had to look at her. There was a warning in her eyes, a Don’t upset the patient kind of warning, not that she would have put it that way. You were the one who told me to say what I had to say now. I beamed that sentence to her telepathically, but the warning in her eyes stayed. How should I do this, then, Sylvia? How should I ask my mother the questions I never asked her? My mother held aloft the book I had brought her that week—Heidi—as if it were a remote, and aimed it at the Plant Room television.
“I’m sorry, Ma,” I said. “You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to answer.” From the corner of my eye I saw Sylvia relax and turn back to the desk. “Let’s watch our show.”
She nodded and I pressed the orange on button on the remote. It was time for the Jeopardy! contestant interview, an excruciating segment in which Trebek pried a little background information out of each one. The contestants must have been coached to act peppy and interesting, which made them the opposite: dull and stiff. An optometrist began with a story about his daughter’s birthday and how, instead of whacking a pi?ata with a baseball bat, she whacked him on the butt.
“Oh, my,” Trebek said. “Well!”
That was the Trebek method. He ever so slightly cut off each contestant with that abrupt Well! and moved on to the next. The second contestant, a former-teacher-now-stay-at-home-mother-of-seven, told the tale of how she once accidentally locked herself into a bathroom stall overnight. The third contestant, a man who wrote a “Single Dad Cooks” column in his local newspaper, told how he once rode a horse blindfolded and facing backward in order to impress a date.
“Oh, my!” Trebek said, and “Oh, my!” Tamar said, in exact imitation.
“This is the painful part of the show,” I said.
“This is the insufferable part of the show,” she said, and she aimed Heidi at the television again. She sounded exactly like the old Tamar, back when she lived full-time in the same world as I did, the Tamar who would correct me, who would speak her mind. I turned to her—what could I say, quick quick quick, to keep her here with me?—but just like that, she was gone again.
Jeopardy! was not a game of chance. It was a game of knowledge and skill and quickness, of how fast could you press the buzzer, and how fast could your mind whisk through possibilities to settle on the right answer, and how fast could you calculate a bet? When it came to the Daily Double, and again in Final Jeopardy!, contestants had a choice. Bet small and safe or bet it all. Most didn’t bet it all. Betting it all was risky. Bet it all and there was a chance you would lose it all.
But there was a chance you would win it all too.
If we were the Daily Double, my mother and I, what might we lose, and what might we win, either of us, both of us, if we talked, if we really talked? If we un-ambered ourselves, un-armored ourselves, and hashed it all out, with it being our life together? It was late in the day for that, but was it too late? Behold the baffled kings, side by side on the green couch, remote control pointed at the television, composing nothing.
* * *
Brown’s legal name was Court Brown—Court Jefferson Brown, to be precise. We were up late, drinking gin with apple cider and talking, when I learned that fact. We were in the college-freshmen-trade-secrets-late-at-night phase of our lives.
“Samantha Lacey Rourke,” Sunshine said. “Irish on my father’s side, German on my mother’s.”
“Clara Winter,” I said. “No middle name. British and French Basque on my mother’s side. Not sure of the other side.”
Saying “the other side” meant I could avoid saying the word “father” or “dad.”
“Court Jefferson Brown,” Brown said. “No clue on either side.”
Sunshine looked from him to me and back again. “Ask your parents,” she said. “It’s a simple question.”
“No it’s not,” Brown and I said, exactly at the same time. Something passed between us, a flash of understanding. There is more to the story, was what the look he gave me said, even though neither of us knew what the more to the other’s story was.
Sunshine saw the look and tried to catch up. “Why not?”
Brown shrugged. So did I. Her eyes went from him to me. She knew she was missing out, but on what? Many people in that situation would withdraw. They would feel shunned and turn bristly, peeved at the silence. I sensed her wavering. Should she press on? Should she drop the matter and know that already an invisible wall was up that wasn’t going to come down from here on in? We were three days into our first year of college. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. Something flickered across Sunshine’s face. She had made her decision.
“You guys are telepathically saying something important to each other right now. I can feel it. So fill me in. Both of you.”