“You have? Like what?”
“Like, um, like what baseball team you like.”
Sunshine and Brown tensed. The air in the room changed. That was what tension did—it made the air still and solid, something you had to slice through to make progress. Baseball? was what their tension said. Really? That’s what you want to know about? You don’t even care about baseball.
“Baseball?” Tamar said. “The Egyptian Whalebacks.”
“What? Who?”
That was Brown, swiveling on the couch to stare at her. She looked at him calmly.
“Did you say the Egyptian Whalebacks?”
She nodded.
“I’ve never heard of them,” Brown said.
“You have now,” Sunshine said, warning in her voice. Stay with her, Brown, was what the warning said. Don’t correct. Follow her.
“Huh,” Brown said. “Where do the Whalebacks play?”
“Egypt.”
She frowned and gave him a poke in the ribs with her elbow, a where-else-would-they-play sort of poke, and I fought the urge to laugh. Brown was about to ask another question, but she poked him again.
“Shut up now,” she said. “It’s time for the heinous adventures.”
“Ma! Interviews. The heinous interviews.”
Don’t correct. Don’t criticize. Sunshine next to me tensed again, because I had told her, hadn’t I, and hadn’t she written it down in her notebook, that “Don’t correct” was one of the cardinal rules? Tamar flapped her hand in my face: Go away! Shoo!
But she was laughing. My mother, Tamar, a woman so serious all her life that her own daughter barely remembered her laughing, was laughing like a little girl. She flapped her free hand at the television and Brown started laughing too. Meet her where she is, Clara.
“Here we go,” I said. “God help us all.”
Trebek, wearing a navy suit, strode across the stage toward his victims. Philip, who according to Sunshine looked like he could be a marine, appeared to be visibly shrinking from the camera. Sunshine reached for my mother’s hand, a gesture she accepted, and from the corner of my eye I saw Brown, on her other side, pick up her other hand. Let the heinous adventures begin.
Philip turned out to be a martial arts expert and teacher. An image of him in a white suit tied with a belt, brandishing traditional Asian weapons in front of a mirrored wall while little kids bowed and called him Sensei, appeared in my mind.
“Did I call that one or what?” Sunshine said. “It’s all in the posture. You can always tell.”
“You did not call that one at all,” Brown said. “You said he was a marine.”
“Close enough. I still win.”
“Shhh,” Tamar said, and they instantly obeyed.
Philip had just received his Braiding Dad certificate from a three-hour hair-braiding workshop he had attended with his seven-year-old daughter. Philip had found the Braiding Dad class a more difficult endeavor than earning his second-degree belt.
“Really?” Trebek said, which made the entire moment fall flat.
“What a dipshit,” Tamar said.
“Who, Ma?”
“The dipshit.”
She jabbed My Side of the Mountain in the direction of Trebek, the all-powerful Trebek, who would not try to make contestants look good. He would correct their pronunciation and their spelling, and when it came to the heinous interviews, they would all end up looking like fools.
“You’re right,” I said, and she rolled her eyes. Of course she was right.
Martina from Brooklyn often found herself eating fast-food cheeseburgers and high-fructose-corn-syrup snacks in front of her neighbors because “I’ve had it with organic, locally sourced food, Alex. Had it.” She fell into a certain category of contestant who tried to get chummy with Trebek. He cut her off midsentence and moved on to the lovely Julie from Delaware, who was the current high scorer and who, according to rumor, had once escaped a flood by using a child’s sledding saucer as a flotation device.
“Is this true, Julie?”
“It’s true. I pushed the saucer out a second-story window and then I, uh, I kept holding on to it until they rescued me.”
“Isn’t that interesting!”
“Dipshit,” Tamar said.
* * *
“She doesn’t actually seem that far gone to me,” Brown said.
“‘Far gone,’ Brown?” Sunshine said. “Rude. But I kind of agree.”
We were sitting in the Subaru in their driveway. Martina the Brooklyn cheeseburger-eater had come from behind in the final round and crushed pretty Julie the flood survivor, who had bet every penny on a wrong answer wrongly spelled. The three of us had walked Tamar back to her room and then poured ourselves Dixie cups of lemonade from the 24/7 juice station, drank them down and headed north.
“It was a good night,” I said. “She was right there with us. Mostly, anyway.”
“Does that change?” Sunshine said. “Visit to visit?”
If they kept coming, even once in a while, they would see for themselves. The fog still came and went, but the day would come when it would be there permanently. If they kept coming, they would see that. The words if they kept coming scrolled across the bottom of my brain like subtitles and I wouldn’t let them out of my mouth, because then Sunshine and Brown might hear how much I wanted them to keep coming.
But Brown leaned forward from the backseat and rested his chin on the headrest of my seat, the driver’s seat. “Can we come with you next time?” he said, and I nodded. Then the doors opened and they got out of the car, Sunshine pressing her hand against the windshield like a benediction, and into their house they disappeared.
When I left them I passed the turnoff to the cabin and kept on going, hoping to calm my mind. Miles and miles in the dark, heading north, deeper into the Adirondacks. Two-lane road, high beams lighting the night, shiny animal eyes waiting in the ditch. A deer. A fox. A coyote.
The only station was the oldies one, drifting in and out. All the songs of Tamar’s era, the songs I had grown up with. Every song that came on the radio, I knew, along with almost all the words, because Tamar used to put her albums on and sing along to them every weekend. Those songs burned themselves into my brain. What Asa had said about songs being everywhere, and everyone knowing them, was true.
Clara, open the window. It’s late. You’re tired. Don’t get drowsy.
My own voice inside my own head, telling me to be careful. I opened the driver’s side window and cold air rushed in. Trees rose up on either side of the road and the road stretched before me like a parted sea. “Peace Train” came drifting in on the airwaves and I was fifteen and Tamar was singing in the kitchen as she put her new electric can opener to work. Cat Stevens, long gone into his world of religion, something Tamar would never forgive him for.