“Probably as many as we’ve made her drink beer.”
Tamar stayed quiet. Where was she now, I wondered, and what was she thinking about? Was she thinking at all? The day would come when she stopped talking entirely. They had told me that at the Life Care meeting. Please say something, Ma.
“There,” she said, and I felt her move above and behind me. A small movement, a disturbance of the air. Maybe she was pointing at the porthole? Knothole had turned into porthole and we were following her lead.
“There what, Tamar?” Brown said.
“There.”
There on the porthole, the sound on mute, Trebek was standing next to the three contestants at their podiums. Time for the contestant interviews. The heinous interviews. Come, first contestant, lean forward and do your best.
Then there was movement above and in back of me again. A hand descended on my head, a light touch, like the touch of a baby trying to understand hair. Sunshine and Brown and Chris stopped talking, all of them, at once. It was as if they had received a signal from the universe: Be quiet. Then I understood that the hand on my hair, whispering through it strand by strand, was my mother’s.
There might have been nights, when I was a baby, that my mother placed her hand on my head. Maybe there were dark nights, nights when I couldn’t stop crying, nights when maybe she couldn’t stop crying either, and she sat with me in the darkness and held me and put her hand on my head and cradled me and rocked me. Maybe she sang to me. She must have sung to me, because my whole life was filled with memories of my mother singing. When she was gone from this earth, her voice would still be with me. Nothing went entirely away. Some part always stayed. Like the silent, unseen electricity running its way up and down the walls of the cabin. The shadow world: indivisible from this outer one in which we moved, and drove, and talked and laughed and held hands.
Was my mother scared, when I was little? Did she feel alone? Did she feel as if she were on a path leading somewhere she could not predict, somewhere she would have to go whether she wanted to or not? Was the child in her arms a comfort? Or was I a burden, a responsibility that she had no choice but to take on?
Both. That was the word that came to me, there in the porthole room. You were both a comfort and a burden.
On the muted porthole, Trebek was chatting with the three contestants. Their faces smiled and nodded, and so did his. Had I ever really looked at Trebek? Was this what he really looked like, an ordinary person having ordinary conversations with other ordinary people who happened to be good at trivia? Maybe this was who Trebek was, an ordinary, friendly man, and I just hadn’t noticed. It was impossible to know the whole story.
Was I still a comfort to my mother? Was I still a burden? Her fingers whispered through my hair, following strand after strand, beginning at the root and moving down and down and down through the length of it, until the length of it ended and her fingers journeyed back up to the top of my head and began again.
“What do you think they’re talking about up there?” Brown said.
“Game theory,” Sunshine said. “Betting strategy.”
Tamar was quiet, but her fingers kept moving. My head felt alive with her touch. Chris was quiet too, his knees solid behind my shoulder blades. Maybe the contestants were talking game theory and betting strategy. Maybe they were talking about the luck of certain shirts, the right tie. Maybe they were talking about their families. Did I know anything about Trebek’s family? No. All these years, I had taken him and his show for granted.
Tamar’s fingers danced the slowest dance in the world, arranging the strands of my hair in a way that must have made sense to her, because she kept on. She persevered. Then Chris’s hands were on my shoulders, and my mother’s fingers were light and soft in my hair, and my best friends were talking about what exactly was game theory, anyway.
If time could be frozen, that was where I would freeze it. That moment, in that room, with these people, this couch, this floor, that television. Chris’s hands on my shoulders, my mother’s fingers in my hair. Portal to another world.
The orchids in the corner hung heavily on their long stems, and the porthole kept up its soundless flickering. The third contestant tipped his head back and laughed a silent laugh while Trebek smiled.
* * *
When the call came I knew what it was about before Sylvia had a chance to say hello.
“She fell, didn’t she,” I said, and “Yes,” Sylvia said, and then I told her I was on my way and I clicked off and then called Chris and Sunshine and Brown. I called Eli too, and left him a message. It was late in the evening and I waited on the porch with the quilt wrapped around me over my coat until headlights came flickering through the darkness and wound their way up the hill. Chris got out and opened the door for me, and Brown drove and Sunshine sat next to him.
She had fallen while trying to cross the black abyss. She was trying to get outside, through the glass door into the bare, pre-snow stalks of the back garden, invisible at night. She was trying to get to her daughter, lost out there somewhere.
I pictured the swatch of black paint in front of the locked sliding doors. The aide might have been asleep on the couch, or taking a bathroom break, or watering the orchids, or adjusting the volume on the porthole. The alarm had sounded and Sylvia had gotten there within seconds but not soon enough. My mother had left behind her walker, jumped the black hole and fallen into the abyss.
I undid my seat belt and slid across the big back seat to Chris, who wrapped his arms around me the way Eli Chamberlain had done the day I went to tell him how sorry I was. The headlights pierced the darkness of Route 28. Soon we would be at the junction of 12. It was a bad fall, Sylvia had said, and the tone of her voice filled in the meaning of bad. Soon we would be on the outskirts of Utica, at St. Luke’s, where they had taken my mother. She was going down a road and I could not follow her.
I thought about the bartender, how he had pushed those chairs together and lain down next to me the night my heart wouldn’t stop hammering in my chest. How, when it finally calmed, he had taken my hand in both of his and held it all the way to the car. I thought about my mother’s fingers, how in these last months they had described curves and shapes in the air. Her fingers had traveled ahead of her to the land of words and phrases, the place where all her lost words and phrases lived now. They waited there for her.