MA. STOP CRYING.
Who wouldn’t want to go to Hong Kong? Sampans and red lanterns and the Star Ferry and that famous harbor. Chinese food. Why not go to Hong Kong? But I had chosen it at random, because it was far away and easy to write about and sounded like a place that a person who wasn’t me would dream about. A dream that sounded like a dream but wasn’t my real dream, which was to one day, some far-off day, live inside a world of words. Words to bring back the old man, words to wall off the memory of Asa, words to build barriers, words to take them down, words to soothe the savage breast. Stop crying, Ma.
“Me, I always wanted to go to San Francisco,” she said.
“San Francisco?”
I laughed. San Francisco was the most doable dream in the world. Get in the car and head west. Eventually you’d hit the Pacific Ocean. Hong Kong, now Hong Kong, even though I was only pretending I wanted to go there, was a different matter entirely. I stood there in the yellow light from the lamp she’d dragged over to the table—Tamar hated overhead light—and laughed. At her. Instantly, she stopped crying. She looked away. She got up from the table and turned herself sideways to slip past me in her Tamar way. Her two-dimensional way, which was how thin my mother was. She didn’t say another word about San Francisco, then or ever.
Back then, if you had asked me why I was laughing, I would’ve told you that compared to Hong Kong, San Francisco was such a tiny dream. Tiny, small, a laughable nothing kind of dream.
If you asked me now why I was laughing, I would tell you that I was an angry, sad girl who hated to see her mother cry. Whose world went black when her mother cried. Who would’ve done anything, who did do anything, like laugh at her right in her face, to make her stop.
Now, fifteen years later, I pictured Hong Kong in my mind. Did the lanterns still hang from sampans in that famous harbor? Or were sampans a thing of the past? I wouldn’t know, because I hadn’t been to Hong Kong. The dream I dashed out on notebook paper when I was seventeen and a senior at Sterns High School was a false dream, one I made up to finish a paper as fast as I could, a paper I got an A on.
Tamar’s dream, though? That was a true dream. A real dream.
“She wanted to go to San Francisco,” I said again. “But I think it’s too late.”
* * *
“Maybe we could bust her out,” Brown said. “Not to San Francisco but for the weekend. Or a day, even?”
It was the next morning and we had just finished breakfast at Walt’s. No wait, no lines, because the foliage—the ridgelines on fire, folding one over the other on their curving march to the far horizon—was done for the year.
“I mean, it’s too late for San Francisco,” Brown said. “I get that. But what about Old Forge? Is it too late for Old Forge?”
“Music, maybe?” Sunshine said. “She always liked music.”
“Yes! A concert!”
“Or a drive,” I said. “She likes drives. Or she used to.”
“Yes!” Brown said again. His exclamation-mark voice. “A drive up to Lake Placid, maybe, and then some food, and some music.”
Outings for $200. An afternoon with Tamar. Okay. Next day we piled into the Subaru, hours earlier than usual so as to have her back in the early evening. But it was a day of confusion and brain fog. The walls were coming up, or going down, and she was wary.
“Ma?”
She sat on the couch in the Green Room and shook her head at me. Here I was again, the strange woman who kept calling her Ma.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Tamar?”
“Yes?”
“We were wondering if you’d like to go for a drive.”
Her eyes went from me to Brown and back again. Suspicious. Maybe it was Brown’s excitement, radiating out from him into the air of the room. She looked him up and down, carefully, then back to me. Wary. It was only when she noticed Sunshine, still standing in the doorway, that she relaxed.
“It’s you,” she said, and Sunshine smiled.
“It’s me,” she agreed. Tamar patted the spot next to her on the couch and Sunshine sat down.
“Pretty girl,” Tamar said. Sunshine’s sitting down seemed to settle her, and she gestured at Brown and me to sit in the rocking chairs. Which we did.
“Do you want to go on a drive with us, Tamar?” Brown said. Still hoping. His whole plan for the afternoon was almost visible there in the air: the drive, the food, the music. But she shook her head.
“I miss my daughter,” she said. “I can’t find her.”
Brown and Sunshine looked at me and opened their mouths, their hands already lifting off their laps to point to me, the daughter, the daughter! Right there! Right here in the room with you, Tamar! But I frowned at them. Don’t argue. Don’t correct. Remain calm. Remain detached.
“It must be hard, missing your daughter,” I said.
“Oh, yes. It’s very hard.” She pinched her thumb and fingers together and scribbled them in the air as if she were holding a pen. “Those things, you know—pinpricks. Clouds.”
“Pinpricks and clouds.”
“She was good at them. Clouds.”
“She was good at making things up, maybe.”
“Yes. That’s what clouds are.”
She frowned at me. Her daughter the word girl wouldn’t have said something dumb like that.
“You miss your daughter,” I said. “And I miss my mother.”
She looked out the window then, past Brown and Sunshine, past me, focused on something out there or maybe nothing out there. I wanted to say something, something that would pull her back with us, but she started to hum. She motioned us to sing—her fingers waving as if she were a choir director—but I couldn’t. That was all right, though, because Brown took over and began singing with her. That same baffled king, still composing his hallelujah, the king my mother never tired of singing about. Her alto, Brown’s tenor, Sunshine’s arm around my shoulders. And the inked wire holding me together.
* * *
Next night I went back to the bar. It was not a busy night and I sat on a barstool and helped the bartender polish wineglasses. Around and around each rim with a clean cotton dish towel, hold it up to the light and examine it for any remaining marks, then stand up and slide it into its slot on the overhead hanging rack.
“So you were a piano major?” the bartender said. Not a college man, he was curious about college, about majors and minors, semesters and schedules.
“I was.”
“But you never tried to get a job using your piano?”
I shook my head and waited for him to tilt his head in that typical quizzical way and ask, Why not? But he didn’t do that. What he did instead was wait. The bartender was good enough at waiting to beat me at my own waiting game.
“I studied piano because I loved it.”
“And the loving it was enough?”