That night my mother came to me in my dreams. It was the first time since she had died. She gave me no clues as to what had happened to her, no insights in which I could take comfort. We were grocery shopping. The only twists my subconscious offered? We were shopping at a supermarket that sold swim fins beside the fresh peas and carrots, and magic tricks in the same aisle with the Juicy Juice. She was wearing an ink-blue pencil skirt that was among her favorites when we were visiting Manhattan, a white blouse, and black stiletto heels. She was overdressed for a Hannaford’s supermarket in rural Vermont, but in the mystifying world of a dream her attire made all the sense in the world and no one seemed to notice. Certainly I thought nothing of it. Mostly I was just happy. I was happy with the normalcy and I was happy to see her. Neither of us commented on the fact she was dead, because neither of us remembered.
And so when I awoke, I was weeping. I recalled Gavin’s observation in the cruiser the day we had met back in August: at that moment, alone in my bed, I couldn’t imagine anything worse than the sadness we feel when we understand an utterly perfect dream was only a tease. My mother was still dead and I was still a mess.
How many times had my father looked at Paige and thought to himself, Whose eyes are those? Because they looked nothing like his and nothing like his late wife’s. And the child’s athleticism? Wholly foreign to either him or his wife. Did he ask himself about that, too?
I pondered those questions that autumn, and I decided he was too smart not to wonder. I thought about them on Halloween night, as Paige and I gave out candy to children from a front porch strangely and uncharacteristically bereft of jack-o’-lanterns. (Our mother would not have approved.) Paige did not go trick-or-treating; if one of her friends had a party, she never told me. (She said none of the seventh graders had dressed up as Al Gore or George Bush, but one group of girls was decked out in long black tunics and sunglasses à la The Matrix.) The questions were with me as the first snow fell on November 1 and the deadline passed to tell my college I was coming back. I wasn’t. At least not in January. I thought about the mysteries of sleep and conception when my sister’s ski coach called the house, looking for our father, and asked me why my sister was having second thoughts about Chile—why suddenly she wasn’t going. He wanted to see if our father could change her mind and rekindle her interest. And, yes, I thought about them when I listened to the messages from Gavin Rikert on my cell phone, none of which I had returned. I missed him, and the sound of his voice could make me at once wistful and giddy. But I wasn’t sure I could trust him. The fact is, there was a part of me now that feared him.
Erica continued to beg me to please phone the registrar at Amherst, insisting it wasn’t too late. Gavin continued to beg me to please call him back, trying to convince me that I was overreacting. And my father? He asked for nothing. I made my family breakfast and dinner, and I drove my sister to the mountain, where now they were making snow, instead of to the swimming pool at the college. I made sure that my father had his scotch and my sister had batteries for her Game Boy. I cut cards and talked to myself, pretending it was patter. I voted for the first time in my life, using a pencil and a piece of paper in a three-sided wooden booth because this was a small village in Vermont that had no need for voting machines. Occasionally my mother’s friends or the pastor would phone the house to check in, and I would lie and say we were fine. Sometimes my own friends would call and plead with me to join them for a movie or a drink or to get high. They wanted to talk about the election and Florida, and how a presidential contest could become such a disaster. But always I passed. Mostly those weeks I read and I dozed, and I would lie on the floor before the wood stove and beside Joe the Barn Cat. Sometimes he would get up and wander upstairs to the guest room with my mother’s drafting table and computer, where he would sniff at her handbag and a scarf on the credenza, and then curl up on her chair. It broke my heart to see how much he missed her, too.
OTHER DAYS I would say, “Forgive yourself. They would. They will.”
But I couldn’t. I can’t. It’s one of those things, like losing weight or being patient or following through on any New Year’s resolution, that’s just so much easier said than done.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN