He was showing us a trick called the magic pan, a silver skillet perhaps four inches deep with a silver lid. You show the audience it’s empty, cover it, and then whisk off the lid to reveal an overflowing mound of sponge balls, flowers, or silks. I liked it, but I worried that if I couldn’t produce something more solid—something not easily compressed in the hidden panel—the trick would lack dazzle. I was imagining hard candy: a great big, colorful pile of hard candy. Then I would toss it to my classmates or the really little kids who, back then, were my audience. My mother and I were discussing this possibility with the salesman, and my mother was asking him if he could disclose the size of the compartment. It was right about then that Paige awoke and started to fuss. My mother gently lifted her from the carrier, unbuttoned her own blouse, and pulled the lone chair in the small showroom up to that counter. And then she sat down and began to nurse my baby sister. Instantly, Paige settled down.
I never thought twice about my mother nursing in public in Vermont in 1989. I might not have thought about it in Manhattan that day. But the old magician said to my mother, “If you’d like, you can do that in the storeroom.” His eyes were on the corner of the floor behind us. It was as if my mother’s breast, even shielded by a rapacious infant’s mouth, was the sun.
My mother smiled at him, momentarily surprised by his discomfort. Soon, however, she was relishing it. “Oh, we’re fine,” she said. “You were about to show us the panel. The secret panel. I’m guessing it’s in the tray, and when you lift the lid, you release it—and then it becomes hidden in the top. True?”
He glanced down at the trick. He eyed me. He was going to gaze everywhere but at my mother. “Look, you really need to do that elsewhere,” he said finally, speaking straight into the glass display case. “What if another customer comes in here?”
My mother shook her head. “They won’t care,” she told him, losing none of her equanimity. “I think you might. But most men your age have seen breasts, and I know every woman has. Now, one of my daughters is hungry and one is interested in buying some magic tricks. I think between the two of us, we can make them both very happy. Why don’t you pay attention to Lianna here, and I’ll pay attention to this little one. That way, everyone will get what they want.”
The salesman knew he had lost. He saw my mother’s logic; he respected her intensity. And so he said nothing more to her while Paige snacked, and a few minutes later, when Paige was sated, he welcomed my mother back into the conversation.
And when the three of us returned to my aunt and uncle’s later that day, I had with me in a big paper shopping bag the magic pan, as well as a trick deck and a spring bouquet I could stash inside a hollow wand or up my sleeve. The salesman had given me the last two items.
Make no mistake: my mother was a lioness with a ferocious love for her cubs. I recalled how she had gone to battle on my behalf when my high school guidance counselor had insisted that certain colleges were beyond my reach, and how she had gone nuclear when a boy drove me home from a party when I was in tenth grade and she could see (and smell) that he’d been drinking. She’d driven him to his house in her car and presented him drunk to his parents.
Yes, I had lost her earlier than I should have. Paige, of course, had too. But something inside me changed when her body was found, something inside me grew up. I understood once and for all that my courageous mother was never coming back, and I vowed to stop sleepwalking through grief.
My mother was probably as good as dead by the time her body broke the plane of the Gale River. There was water in her lungs, but little indication of active respiration; her injuries suggested she was going to die even on dry land soon enough.
Cause of death? A skull fracture and an acute subdural hematoma. Blood had pooled between her brain and her skull, suggesting a violent head injury prior to her body hitting the water. It seemed that someone or something—and when my father and I were informed of the autopsy results, I envisioned a wooden baseball bat—had caved in the back of her skull. My college roommate Erica, however, told me later that day when we were talking on the phone that my imagination had run wild: Who carries around a baseball bat as a bludgeon? she had asked.
It was also possible that my mother had had consensual but violent sex (which led me to wonder privately if there could have been consensual but violent sleep sex). Still, that was merely conjecture, too. The medical examiner could catalog the contusions near my mother’s genitalia, but how was he to know for sure the bruising was not the result of the rocks and logs and debris against which her body—naked but for the tattered remnants of a navy-blue sleep shirt—had been colliding for weeks? She had a pelvic fracture, but the M.E. said that the injury may have occurred postmortem. In the water. Her corpse (what was left of it) was a ragged, gelatinous, stringless marionette. Entire strips of sinew, muscle, and tissue had washed away. After so many days in the Gale River, her skin was the texture of cottage cheese and the fathomless brown of a swamp.
The pathologist examined her vaginal walls with a speculum; he combed her pelvic girdle for foreign hairs. He found none. He might have aspirated fluid from her vagina, searched for semen and blood, but the Gale had performed its ablutions: any liquid residues from a sexual encounter had long since washed away. Still, he swabbed what he could. He found nothing.