At that point, I would have survived the contestant interview portion of the show, having given away nothing of value, nothing of importance. The viewing public would have no clue that all those years of practicing the piano had ingrained it into me, so that there was a permanent piano in my heart and in my brain, and that sometimes when I woke up at night I closed my eyes and placed my fingers on the invisible keys and played and played and played, until the dark went away and I played myself back into sleep.
My mind and my heart would still be my own. No one watching me during the contestant interview would know how it hurt to drive by the house I grew up in, way out there in the foothills, the house my mother and I didn’t live in anymore, but that I kept doing it anyway. They wouldn’t know that sometimes I drove by Annabelle Lee’s trailer too and sent my thoughts to her through the invisible air, thoughts of how sorry I was that this was happening to her too, how hard I knew it was for her as well as for me.
No one would know how my mother’s brain—that sharp, sharp brain of hers—clicked on and off now. Like a half-broken light switch that you kept flipping even though most of the time it didn’t work anymore.
I had come across my mother talking to a wall. Not a metaphorical wall either. A real wall, made of plasterboard, painted light green, a key strung on twine hanging from it on a hook. The key might be metaphorical—a key to a locked room? A song? Someone’s heart?—but it was also real. It hung in my mother’s room. Sometimes when I came to visit her now, I knocked, then turned the knob so softly that she didn’t hear it. And there she was, talking to a lockless key as if it were her oldest friend. Once I found her singing to that key, a single line from her man Len, three words repeated over and over. So long, Marianne, so long, Marianne, so long, Marianne.
No one would know that on nights like that, playing my way back to sleep on the invisible piano sometimes took hours, from Hanon scales to Chopin to Shostakovich to Bach to the Beatles to Christmas carols. I played as loud as I wanted because who was there to hear what was happening inside my brain? The last song I played now was not the Chopin prelude. It was the one about the baffled king composing hallelujah, my mother’s favorite song.
* * *
“Ma?”
She looked up from the walker. We were doing the circuit, the circuit of hallway and juice and Green Room and hallway and juice and Green Room, and around and around and around she went, where she stopped, nobody knew, except that she didn’t stop. She only went.
“I’m sorry about Eli,” I said. The expression on her face didn’t change. I said his name again: “Eli.” She pushed forward, heading toward the Green Room.
“Ma?”
On she went. Talk to her, Clara. Tell her how you feel. Things that you want to say to her, say now.
“Not sorry that it happened, Ma. That’s not what I mean. I’m sorry that it ended.”
And I was. They could have been together, I thought now. Time would have softened the edges, wouldn’t it? Eased the strangeness of it, the new configuration of family and love and friendship. To me, at least, if not Asa.
I looked back on my childhood now and thought, She had to shield herself from you, Clara. Tamar was a woman of stillness, and her child was a blunt instrument who would throw and throw questions at her while she gathered silence around her like a cloak. And now?
The days were going by, each of them a ticking clock, and my mother’s condition was worsening “significantly faster than we had anticipated.” It was the “what we hoped wouldn’t happen, Clara” scenario. She was “probably quite a bit farther along than we thought when she first came in, apparently,” losing physical strength and balance, losing comprehension, gaining agitation and confusion. Was she with me yesterday, when I last saw her? Did she recognize me? Did she remember that I was her daughter, did she remember my name?
Yes, yes and no.
* * *
“She’s going down fast,” I said to Sunshine and Brown. It was like a mantra. A chant. Sometimes now I just showed up at their house. The demon child descendeth.
“It’s a one-way street,” I told them. “She’s at the far end of the spectrum. They alarmed her chair and her walker and her bed. She’s a human alarm now.”
They let me babble. They didn’t argue. They didn’t point out the clichés and repetition, the unlike-Clara way the words came out. They offered food. Whiskey. Board games. They offered themselves, the constancy of their presence and their friendship, and it wasn’t enough but it almost was.
“The coffee table is gone,” I told them. “All the books are with her now.”
They nodded. They had been to the cabin and they had been to the alarmed room where Tamar lived. They had seen the disappearance of the coffee table, the appearance of the books-as-firewood. Books to keep her warm. Books to burn. Books never to be read again.
“The only one she ever opens is Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” I tell them. “So which is the book I read to her? Jonathan Livingston Seafuckingull. From Jonathan’s mouth to God’s ear. Those are the only words she wants, apparently.”
Words had power. Bossy little Kandace saw Blue Mountain begin to shrink when she made fun of his name, and she kept making fun, so that he would keep shrinking. Sticks and stones might break your bones but words, words would break something inside the marrow of those bones, something that might not ever put itself back together.
The only way to fight the shrinking and the breaking was to fight. Fight with everything you had. However you could, fight. Fight with words, if you had them. Fight with poems. I did.
I have spread my dreams under your feet, I told Blue Mountain when he came back into the quilt room that day. Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams. You might be thinking he laughed. You might be thinking, He’s a dinky little kid, he doesn’t know anything, he has no idea who Yeats is, he has no understanding of what those words mean. You would be wrong. He stood and listened, those dark eyes on me, until his teacher came back to retrieve him. You can change the air of a room with your words. Even if you say them out loud only inside your head, the air around you will turn deeper, softer, stronger. Maybe Blue Mountain would remember, in some part of himself at some later point in his life, at a time when he most needed it, that someone in his childhood spread her dreams underneath his feet and blessed him with words he could no longer remember.
* * *