I measure the years of my childhood by my mother’s boyfriends: Joe, a murky blond fellow in my baby memories of Alabama. Then Eddie. Tick. Anthony. Hervé. Dwayne. Rhonda. Marvin. Each knows a different Kai with a different last name and a different history, but she always keeps her story straight.
I pick up who I am on the fly, eavesdropping. Eddie the yoga teacher believes my father was a Tibetan monk who lifted up his saffron robes and broke all his vows for Kai, just once. My copper-colored skin is a shade too dark for Tick the skinhead, and though I have Kai’s light green eyes, they are set disturbingly aslant. My mother is long and pale—very beautiful, if you’re into the Irish thing. Tick is. Enough to pretend that he believes my dad was an Italian count she met while hitchhiking through Europe. Kai tells Anthony my dad was a blackanese yoga teacher, and shows him a picture of Eddie. Kai had me so young that Hervé asks if I’m her little sister. We go with it, and I get used to saying Kai instead of Mama.
Man after man rests his head in her lap and listens, rapt, as she spins us a new history. We are never from Alabama. Her parents are never their sour and earnest selves, one managing a hardware store, one hounding the bereaved with an endless stream of church-lady casseroles. We are better than the truth. Kai makes us better, changing us to orphans fleeing tragedy or runaways escaping a dark past.
Even my bedtime stories are spectacular: Old South folklore dipped in Hindu poetry and god tales. It is an odder alliance than a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup—Oh no! You got your slutty blue god in my Bre’r rabbit! No, you got your racist rabbit in my sex god—but she makes it true. On campfire nights, she blends in chunks of the Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe books that she’s read to tatters.
As I get older, I try to parse my history, to separate what she says from what I see. Impossible. My story is a Frankenstein’s monster made of stolen parts, many too small to be sourced, the original morals melded or cut away entirely. Every year or so, she reincarnates, whole, and makes me a fresh self, too. The only constant in my childhood is us. We cling together through our every incarnation.
Now, somewhere out in Texas, she is dead. Weeks, if I am lucky, her note said. Kai has always been quite lucky—but five months have passed. By now there is no new Kai to be invented, no voice to tell me all the lives she lived while we were estranged. There is only silence and absence.
Small wonder, then, that yet another panic attack hit me when I saw my mother’s eyes. They were looking right at me, just outside my office building.
At first, all I saw was a white guy, tall and very young, politely opening the door for me. I looked up to say thank you, and our eyes met. His were spring green, crescent shaped, thickly lashed. My mother’s eyes, set deep in the face of a stranger.
They were so like hers. Identical. I had a hideous vision of this boy burrowing his way into the ground like a long, pale worm. I saw his eyeless face pushing itself down deep under the loam to find her missing body. I heard the Lego click as he pressed her stolen eyes into his gaping sockets.
My heartbeat jacked. I breathed in sharply and smelled campfire popcorn, patchouli, and hashish. I swayed and put one hand on the frame, dizzy, and then, dammit, dammit, it was happening again. It was as if Kai’s ghost had been waiting to ambush me in my office building’s sleek and modern lobby, and I’d sucked a wisp of her right up my nose.
The kid’s upsetting eyes widened, concerned, and he grasped my arm as if I were his papery frail auntie. He marched me to one of the ice-white benches near the elevator bay and plopped me down onto the upholstery. I leaned my elbows on my knees and lowered my head, trying to get air into my screwed-shut lungs.
This kid was nothing to do with me. He was a stranger in my office building’s lobby who happened to have a pair of spring-green eyes, but my stupid heart kept thundering around my chest cavity. I could feel it throbbing in my lips and ears and fingers.
It pissed me off. Granted, a person is allowed an episode or two when her mother dies, even if her mother had the parenting skills of your average feral cat. The firemen who responded to my silent 911 call had been very understanding. I didn’t begrudge myself the three more panic attacks I had in February and March—but they should have tapered off in April. They should have stopped altogether before the summer came. Instead, they’d escalated, becoming more frequent and more easily triggered. Now here I was, panicking in July, when I should have already finished up whatever stage four was and hit acceptance.
“Are you okay?” the boy asked. He was a long, narrow object with a prominent Adam’s apple and a mop of honey-brown curls.