AS I EXPECTED, IT was Mom who brought everything up. I suspect Dad may have told her that I had apologized, in tears, about not coming home, because she stopped making a big deal about how glad she was that I was there. But the day after Christmas, when Dad went back to work, Mom stayed home “to clean the house down,” which meant taking down all the Christmas decorations. Once Christmas was over, the ornaments had to be boxed up, the crèche on the sideboard put away, and the tree taken to the curb for recycling—all immediately, as if we were committing an act of hubris by continuing to celebrate a holiday that had already passed. “The office can manage for one day without me looking over their shoulders,” Mom said, shooing Dad out the door. Still, I knew why she was staying home when she told Dad that I would help her clean the house.
We started with the tree, carefully removing every ornament and laying it in its box or compartment. “Remember this?” she said, holding up a plastic ball ornament with a lumpy handprint in glitter paint. “You made this for me.”
“Yeah, when I was four.”
“It was sweet. Things like this are important, you know. Good memories.”
I glanced at her, wondering whether she was using this as an opportunity to open a discussion, but she was looking at the ornament, smiling, and then she laid it carefully in its box. Occasionally she would comment on one or another of the ornaments: a reproduction in gold filigree of Monticello, which we had visited the summer before I started at Blackburne; a wool-knit Santa Claus that my grandmother had made; a cornhusk angel with delicate, dragonfly wings. I unwrapped the strings of lights from the tree, coiled them up, and put them in a Macy’s shopping bag where they had lived for as long as I could remember. Then Mom helped me shove the tree through the front door, and I dragged it down to the street while she vacuumed up the pine needles.
I was beginning to think that I would escape unscathed, when Mom, who was now packing up the crèche, said, “So, what’s it like, teaching at Blackburne?”
“Hard,” I said, and then quickly followed up with, “I mean, teaching is hard. Figuring out what to say to students in class, grading, living on dorm.”
She nodded, wrapping one of the wise men figurines in tissue. “Must be strange, being on the other side of the desk,” she said. “Seeing the school in a whole different light.”
An image of Terence Jarrar, dead and lying on the rock in the river, was so startling that I flinched. I looked quickly at my mother, but she was putting the wise man into a box and hadn’t noticed. “Uh, yeah,” I said, trying not to sound shaken. “I’ve definitely seen the school differently.” I picked up another figurine, a shepherd, and grabbed some tissue paper to keep busy.
“How’s your writing going?” Mom now held the Joseph figurine in her hand. As always, Joseph looked a bit bewildered, trying to figure out where exactly he fit in with Mary, God, and baby Jesus.
I twisted the tissue around the shepherd. “I’m actually taking a break from it. It’s insane how busy it is at school, with grading papers and dorm duty, weekend duty. But I’ll get back to it.”
Mom began wrapping Joseph. “Well, I hope they let you make some time to write next semester. You’ve got a gift, Matthias. You don’t want to lose it.”
I stopped wrapping the shepherd. “I haven’t lost it, Mom.”
Mom looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Honey, I’m not suggesting you have. I just don’t want you to waste it. That’s all.”
“I’m not. I’m just busy.”
“Okay.”
“Fine.” I finished wrapping the shepherd and shoved him into a box.
A brittle silence descended, and we packed up the rest of the crèche without saying anything else. When we next spoke to each other, it was about taking down the wreath on the front door and the electric candles Mom had placed in every window at the front of the house. Mom fussed at me about how to pack up the candles. When I took the wreath down from the front door, I told her she should get an artificial wreath she could use year after year. She retorted that artificial wreaths looked tacky and she and Dad liked the real thing. Later, I stood on the pull-down stairs to the attic and made Mom hand the ornament boxes up to me rather than allow her to climb up herself. In passive-aggressive skirmishes like this, we spent the rest of the morning.
At noon, Mom called for a lunch break. “We could go to the Grill Room at the club,” she said.
The Grill Room would be full of more neighbors who would want to know how I was doing, how teaching was, et cetera. “Not the Grill Room,” I said.
She made a face. “You used to love the Grill Room.”
“I used to love Sesame Street.”
Mom put her hands on her hips. “Matthias Duncan Glass, are you going to be a pain in the ass all day, or are you going to have a nice lunch with your mother?”
I’m not sure which was more effective, her use of my full name or her calling me a pain in the ass. I stared at her, openmouthed. She scowled at me. Then she suddenly chortled and put a hand over her mouth. “You look like a trout that just got pulled out of a pond,” she said, still smiling, and then took me by the arm. “Let’s eat here. Come on.”
Mom made hot tomato soup and tuna fish sandwiches with homemade mayonnaise. When we sat down in the dining room to eat, I started to apologize, and Mom shushed me. “We eat first,” she said. Food for my mother was the basis of all social contracts. If people sat down and had a good meal together, she had always asserted, they could solve almost anything. Dutifully I ate while Mom talked about the various Christmas cards she and Dad had received, the old friends who still kept in touch and the ones who didn’t, who had gotten married and who had given birth. “How’s Michele doing?” she asked in the middle of all this. “You two still together?”
I managed not to choke on my soup. “We broke up.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” she said sincerely, although I could see the relief in her face.
I did not want to talk about Michele or our sordid, dysfunctional relationship, and so I asked the first question that popped into my head. “Did you get a Christmas card from the Davenports?”
My mother was as surprised as I was by my question. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “They haven’t sent us cards since—since you graduated.”
There was an unspoken question in her voice, and I shrugged. “I ran into Abby Davenport. At a mixer at Saint Margaret’s. She’s a teacher there now.”
Mom wiped her mouth with her napkin and pushed her chair back from the table. “I almost forgot,” she said. “Just a minute.” She stood up and walked into the kitchen, the door swinging shut behind her. I could hear her open and close a drawer in her desk. Then she came back through the door, holding something. “I found this in your room when I was cleaning it,” she said. “Last week before you came down.”
It was a jewel case for a compact disc. I took it from her and opened it, even though I already knew what was inside. It was the recording of the Bach cello suite that Abby had made for me ten years ago. I stared at it, hearing the melancholy strains in my head. To Matthias. Christmas 2000. Love, Abby.
“Matthias?” my mother said.
I closed the case. My heart swelled with something like grief. “Thanks,” I said, my voice squeezed in my throat. “Thanks for finding this.” I took a breath, exhaled. “There was a boy, at Blackburne. His name was Terence Jarrar. He died, at school. Right before Thanksgiving.” Mom gasped, her face pained. “There’s more,” I said. “I found drugs in his room. And—and I don’t know what to do about it.”