That made them smile. It made me smile too. The kind of smile that you tried to hold back because it seemed wrong to find it funny, to find a woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s funny, but somehow it was.
“Sometimes I talk to Dog about it,” I said. “I look at his ashes and I talk it over with him. Is that weird?”
“Yes,” Brown said, “but you’re weird. As you just pointed out.”
“I talk to Dog because he knew her,” I said. “He was the only other living creature who was there with me and Tamar, living in our house, listening to us talk. He was the thing we both loved.”
“Besides each other,” Sunshine said. “You both loved each other.”
“Love. You both love each other,” Brown said. “Present tense.”
* * *
“So what’s the goal now?” Sunshine said. “What is within your power to do, for your mother or for yourself?”
“Good question, wife,” Brown said. “Given that it’s apparently a one-way street.”
We were sitting on the porch now, all three of us, lined up on the edge with our legs hanging off, me in the middle. I was a human book and they were human bookends. The fairy lights glimmered on in their silent way, and the air was cold and crisp and tinged with smoke from the embers glowing in the fire pit. Brown and Sunshine were no strangers to good questions. Long ago they had asked themselves what was within their power to do about Sunshine’s cancer and their lives in the face of it, and they had decided to think of it as a chronic illness. Like diabetes. Something to be neither encouraged nor denied, but managed.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Not good enough,” Sunshine said. “The phrase ‘I don’t know’ is a filler phrase, used as an excuse when someone wants to avoid answering.”
“A ‘filler phrase’? What are you, the urban dictionary? I mean the rural dictionary?”
She would not be distracted. She butted up against me, and so did Brown on the other side. The human book was being mushed between its human bookends.
“Come on,” she said. “Talk to us.”
“What I want is not within my power,” I said. “What I want is her, the way she was.”
Her, the simple fact of her. Her in her lumber jacket chopping up firewood and tossing it onto the porch in that haphazard way. Her leaning up against the counter eating her goddamn artichoke hearts. Her walking me down the aisle at my wedding. Her as a grandmother. Jesus! Did I want a wedding? Did I want a baby? Neither of those things did I think about—my one and only boyfriend had been dead for seven years now—but there they were, images as fully formed as photos, hanging right there inside my head. Everything I didn’t know, everything I now wanted, came crushing down inside me and squeezed my heart.
“But I can’t go back in time, even though I wish I could,” I said. “Get some answers, maybe. Figure things out.”
“Dissolve the wedge between you?” Sunshine said, she who had been there for all the impatient phone calls, all the rolling eyes, all the brushing-off of my mother.
“We messed up,” I said. “And now I’m losing her and she’s losing me. I feel as if I don’t know anything that went on inside her, back then.”
“All the more reason to try,” Sunshine said.
“You used to be a reporter,” Brown said. “Put those reportorial skills back in action. Talk to her. Ask her questions. Interview her friends.”
“Annabelle Lee is her only real friend.”
“We are too,” Sunshine said. “Brown and me.”
“That doesn’t mean you know her,” I said. “Any more than I know her.”
“Then get going,” Sunshine said. “If Tamar is a locked trunk, your job is to pick the lock. Tick-tock. Hop to.”
* * *
We ringed ourselves on the floor around the books-as-coffee-table. Where to begin? A list of people to talk to, which boiled down to “Annabelle.” Brown got up to get Jack and in the getting stopped to peer at the photo propped on the shelf.
“Whoa. Is this The Fearsome? When was this taken?”
“No clue.”
“She looks so”—he shook his head.
“Unfearsome?” I said.
“Exactly. She also looks, I hate to say it, but kind of hot. Is that weird?”
“For you to say or for Tamar to be?” Sunshine said. “In either case, the answer is no.”
She got up to study the photo too. The two of them hovered before it, murmuring in their obnoxious merged-self way. Look at that cute shirt, Sunshine said, and She looks so—what’s the word—soft? Brown said, and Yes, that’s the word, Sunshine said, so unlike the way I always think of her, which when you think about it is kind of unfair, isn’t it?
“Who took this photo?” Brown said to me. “And what’s she looking at?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It was stuck to the back of a photo of me as a baby.”
“It’s well-worn,” he said, which was his kind of phrase. The alliteration. “Clearly been carried about, maybe in a wallet? Maybe in a back pocket?”
Brown put the photo back on the shelf, smoothing it into place with the tips of his fingers as if it were precious. As if it were valuable. An heirloom. Which maybe it was, the mystery photo, Tamar with the soft eyes and soft smile. He lowered himself back to the floor and thunked the bottle of Jack down on the books-as-coffee-table.
“Think of it like this,” he said. He picked up his phone, ready to take notes. “If she’s at Stage Six-b, we’re halfway through the game. We’re already starting the Daily Double. All the bets are twice what they started out as, and you are the losing contestant. Every category, every clue, you’ve got to slam the buzzer fast and hard. Even if you don’t know the answer.”
Sunshine began crocheting a scallion hat. Crocheting, even the pretend crocheting she sometimes did when she’d forgotten her bag of wool, helped her focus.
“Let’s think categories,” she said. “What do you most want or need to know about your mother?”
“Why she only ate out of cans and jars,” I said. “Why she moved herself into that place without telling me. What she and Asa were talking about the night before he broke up with me. Why she practiced with the church choir for thirty years but never went to church. Why she got a long-term-care policy. Why she made me go to college two states away. Shit, I don’t know. Everything. Anything.”
“Whoa,” Brown said. “My thumbs can’t type that fast.”
“You must know the answers to some of these questions already,” Sunshine said. “Right?”
“No! I told you! She wouldn’t tell me anything! And now we’ve run out of time!”