I pulled my tiny hammer earring out of my pocket and slid it into my ear, the first time in a long time. Then I picked up my keys from where they sat on the shelf next to Jack, and I got into the Subaru, and I drove north on 28. Old Forge was quiet. Most of the stores were closed, except for Adirondack Hardware, which was lit up like a steamship, and DiOrio’s, where an employee stood on a ladder stringing up Christmas lights even though it wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet.
The place was nearly empty when I got there. Chris-not-Christopher was washing down the bar in those same long, sweeping movements of his arms. You know how some people’s entire bodies, their entire beings, open up when they smile? That was the way the bartender was. He looked up when the door scraped open, and there it was, that smile. Pure Prairie League was playing softly in the background. Pure Prairie League had been one of my mother’s favorite groups. Not as high up as Neil Diamond or The Band, not as high up as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Not even close to Leonard Cohen. But still. Up there. Top ten.
“My mother used to love this band,” I said.
“She has good taste in music then. Tell me something else she loves.”
“Jeopardy! The TV game show.”
“No kidding?” He was still smiling. “My grandmother and I used to watch that every night when I was a kid. It came on at seven-thirty.”
“It still does. And my mother still watches it, when I’m visiting her.”
“Where does she live?”
“Utica.”
An image of my mother was forming itself in his head; I could tell by the way he was nodding. What did she look like to him? Shhh, Clara. I willed myself to stop talking, so that the shadowy, Utica-dwelling, Jeopardy!-watching woman he was picturing, whoever she looked like, would never be replaced by a woman with air-dancing fingers, struggling for words. Shhh, Clara.
“You have any brothers or sisters?”
I shook my head. But that was a lie, and it felt like a betrayal. “I had a twin sister but she died when I was born. Her name was Daphne. My mother was young when she had me. Us. Really young.”
“How young is really young?”
“Eighteen.”
It was happening already. A few words, and the image of my mother was building itself inside his head second by second, gathering power. You have nothing to lose, Clara.
“She raised me by herself. North of Sterns, which is a tiny town. Where I grew up is woods. The foothills, half an hour south of here.”
“I know where Sterns is,” he said. “Did she get tired of country life? Is that why she moved to Utica?”
No. Tamar had not gotten tired of the country life.
“Early-onset Alzheimer’s,” I said. “Stage Six already. She lives in a nursing home with a memory-care wing.”
Shut the hell up, Clara. But I was a robot now and the robot part of me, unlike the real me, had no trouble saying the word Alzheimer’s. The bartender stood on the other side of the bar, the wash rag in his hands, but his hands weren’t moving. The words spilling out of me had made their way into his head, and he was preoccupied with my mother, that shadow woman forming and reforming herself in his brain.
“It’s progressing pretty fast,” I said. “She’s cold all the time. Which is a sign.”
I had told him too much, way too much. And too little, way too little.
It was impossible now for Tamar to materialize in his mind the way she should. From this moment on, when the bartender thought of my mother, what sort of woman would he picture? Not the fierce queen of the north woods. Not the level-eyed tough-as-nails Tamar. I willed his hands to start moving again.
You gave her away, I thought, You just gave your mother away. She was in the hands of the bartender now, and she would be there forever, a partially formed woman who would live in his head as Alzheimer’s first and Tamar, the silent and fearsome woman who had lived so firmly in this world, a distant, distant, distant second. This was why my mother had not wanted anyone to know her situation.
My eyes blurred, and then the bartender came around the curved end of the bar and bent beside me. He was saying something but I didn’t know what. What I knew was that his hands were warm and his fingers smelled like soap and lime and he kept them tight on my shoulders.
* * *
“When’s the dipshit?” Tamar said. Dipshit now stood for the entirety of Jeopardy!: Alex Trebek, the contestants, the game itself. She waved her hands at the knothole, which was her new term for the television.
“Ma? Can I tell you something?”
“Yes.”
I leaned in. She was frowning, but at the television, not me. Her fingers began sketching birds, or flowers, or words, or patterns without meaning, in the air between us.
“Sometimes I wish I had a baby.”
“Yes.”
“Asa’s baby. Then he would still be in the world, somehow. He would still be here with me. With us.”
“Yes.”
Was she with me? Was she understanding me? Tell her. Ask her. Sunshine’s and Brown’s voices, egging me on. I kept going.
“Sometimes I imagine a baby. I make him up, what he would look like, how old he would be. If I had him when I was eighteen he’d be fourteen now. I wonder what he would be like. What he would be doing now if he were alive. If he had ever lived.”
Words spilling out of my mouth. Things I had told no one, not Sunshine or Brown or anyone, about the un-baby I sometimes dreamed up, the baby who had never been and never would be.
“Yes,” she said. “Okay.”
“It’s like he’s living somewhere nearby. A parallel world.”
“Yes. Okay. The parallel world.” She pronounced parallel with slowness and precision. Pa. Ra. Llel. The parallel world, where the lost ones lived.
“Ma?”
She looked at me with her eyebrows up. Translation: “What? Spit it out.”
“Did you ever think about not having me and Daphne?”
She wrinkled up her face. She made a brushing motion with her hand, a you-and-your-endless-questions kind of motion. She was abruptly with me, the fog mostly clear and the entire bay stretched out in front of us, glittering and bright. I had the urge to scoop her up and make a run for it, belt her into the front seat of the Subaru and take her somewhere far away, as if somehow a complete change of place would keep her mind right where it was in that moment. The Grand Canyon, the Tetons, the endless beaches of the Florida Panhandle.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
“But abortion was legal by then. You didn’t even consider doing something?”
“I didn’t know.”
—–—–
—–—–
—–—–
My mind, skipping beats, circling around what she had just said. I hadn’t ever thought of that possibility.
“Wait. You didn’t know you were pregnant? But how could you not know?”
She gave me one of her looks. A Tamar look. My hands bore down on the couch cushion, gripping its edges so hard that my fingers hurt. She was there. She was right there with me in that moment. But for how long? Long enough to answer?
“I was eighteen.”
She lifted her shoulders. A tiny movement, bird bones against invisible air, but it was enough. Because with that movement an image of an eighteen-year-old girl came floating into my head, a feather of an image that landed there and would be there forever. A motherless girl wearing a lumber jacket, standing in the chill of an upstate New York fall, two babies growing inside her.
“You were too far along by the time you realized?”