“She keeps trying to get out the French doors,” she added. “She won’t step onto the black paint, though. Which is good. I pulled the curtains so she can’t see out, but still.”
She waited. I knew what that wait meant.
“Okay. I’m on my way.”
It was late afternoon and it had been only one day since I had seen my mother, one day since I had not asked her about the photograph that lived now in the back compartment of my wallet. But Sylvia wouldn’t call unless she had tried everything she knew. I locked up the cabin and stepped onto the porch. Winter in the Adirondacks and chilly, the sun already falling.
As my mother tended the orchids in the Green Room, so did Sylvia and I tend my mother. Tamar, past and present, the fragments thereof. It was an hour from Turnip Hill to the place where she lived now.
Sylvia looked up at me from behind the desk and smiled. The sympathetic smile, was how I thought of that particular kind of smile, a smile I would hate from anyone but her.
“You made it.”
She pointed to the Green Room. Much went unspoken, with Sylvia. She was a few-words woman.
“Ma?”
She didn’t hear me. Maybe she didn’t want to. She was pacing back and forth in front of the big picture window, leaning on her walker. An aide at her side, watchful for falls, looked up and nodded at the sight of me, then slipped past out the doorway. My mother’s walker made its aluminum sound on the tiled floor as tears ran down her cheeks. She was crying. My mother was crying.
How many times, as a child, had I seen her cry? Only twice. That night with the Neil Diamond album, and that other time, when she sat at the table reading my paper about Hong Kong.
Maybe there had been times I didn’t know about. Maybe there were times, say Wednesday nights, after she finished being justice of the peace, at our scrubbed kitchen table, after she was done meting out justice to the DWIs, the petty thieves, the property-line trespassers, the tax-valuation arguers, when the circumstances of life overwhelmed her and she put her head down on the tabletop and cried. Maybe there were other times too, after the love, whoever he was, left her, and she was alone. But what did I know?
“Clara,” she said, and again: “Clara.”
“Are you thinking about Clara, Ma?”
She nodded. I stepped toward her and took her hand. She let me.
“Clara,” she whispered.
“Do you miss her?”
“I lost her,” she said.
Then, in a single swift movement, she lifted the walker in both hands and flung it against the wall and began to wail. My heart was off and running then, speeding yet again, a high-speed chase of one beat after another. Too thin, too dehydrated, too stressed. Two out of three at any given time would bring on an episode, and now the episodes just kept coming.
Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump, my insistent heart jackhammered away. I tugged my mother toward me. Sylvia and the aide were there swiftly and silently, but I shook my head at them. No. Let me.
“Shhh, Ma,” I said. “Shhh. Sit down, Ma,” and eventually she did. The green couch in the Green Room, orchids, heavy on their stems, bowed down on the opposite wall. Sitting was better. My heart could hammer away but there would be no fainting.
“My daughter,” Tamar said. Her eyes were bewildered. “I can’t find her.”
Do not question. Follow.
“I’ll help you find her.”
I breathed in deeply and let it out slowly.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” I said. “We’ll check this room, and then we’ll check the hallway, and then we’ll check the dining room, and then we’ll check your bedroom, and then??—” She was nodding. I let my voice turn into a chant. A hum. A prayer. This is what we are going to do, Ma. We are going to find that lost girl. I turned my head and Sylvia was in the doorway, still watching. She gave me a good-job-Clara look and then retreated to the desk with the aide.
“I just have to lie down on this couch for a minute, Ma. Is that okay?”
“Your heart?”
Her voice, until that minute a voice unlike hers, was back. Her hand touched the side of my throat, a practiced, instinctive movement. She was checking my pulse. I closed my eyes and focused on breathing in deeply and letting it out slowly until the beat was a normal person’s again.
“Fix,” she said.
“I know. I know, Ma. Pretty soon.”
“She flew away.”
Follow her, Clara. Wherever she goes, follow her. I pictured a winter day, a lost daughter, wind spiraling her up above furious snow into brightness beyond.
“Maybe she did, Ma.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. We can look for her, though. We’ll just keep looking for her.”
Around the Green Room, one lap, two laps, three. A pause by the orchids each time. Then out into the hall, pause by the desk, down one hallway and then the next, past the silent dining room and the lemonade and juice stand. Pause for a Dixie cup of apple juice each. Into Tamar’s room, where her bed was made and the table lamp was turned on and the curtains were drawn and all the books I had brought her were stacked crisscross beneath the window the way I had stacked them yesterday, as if they were logs for the woodstove and we were back in Sterns, readying our firewood for the winter. Tamar tossed the logs and I made orderly stacks. Logs and books—the ritual was the same.
Reckon your losses. Forgive us our trespasses, that we may forgive those who trespass against us. As she hurt you, so you must have hurt her. Apologize. Remember, Clara, that you don’t know the whole story. No one ever knows the whole story.
“I’m sorry, Ma. You must have felt that you couldn’t tell me things.”
“Like what?”
“Important things.”
“Like what?”
She was parroting.
“You loved someone, didn’t you? But you never told me about him.”
“You loved someone?” she said.
Another kind of parroting, another kind of non-answer. Yes, I did love someone, Ma. I loved Asa, and I love Sunshine and Brown, and I am on the verge—no, the verge has been verged—of loving Chris. And you. I love you, Ma.
“I’m sorry I was so hard on you, Ma.”
“Hard on you?”
“Yes, hard on you. Always badgering you about Daphne back when I was a kid, for one thing.”
She was leaning on her walker. We had made it to the doorway of the Green Room, where the television was on, sound muted. She looked up at me and frowned.
“Who’s Daphne?”