OVER THANKSGIVING, WHILE visiting our grandparents in Concord, Paige and I watched a stack of VHS cassettes of my family. Our mother had brought them to Massachusetts the last time we had had Thanksgiving here so she could share them with her parents. The two of us watched them on Thursday night, long after we had finished dinner and everyone else—including my aunt and uncle and our cousins—had retreated to their bedrooms to read or sleep. My father was in almost none of the short videos, because he was usually the one behind the camcorder. So, it was mostly my mother and Paige and me on the TV screen. There was my mother dipping me in a blue kiddie pool I vaguely recalled in our backyard, and there were all three Ahlberg females at Disney World in front of Peter Pan’s Flight: above and behind us was the crocodile with his Victorian lantern and rows of dagger-like teeth. (Our father zoomed in on him and made the iconic tick-tock sounds with his tongue.) There we were hiking Camel’s Hump one year and Snake Mountain another. There we were skiing. There I was doing a magic trick at a middle school variety show, making the bright-red bowling pins I had given a father and mother from the audience disappear from the tubes they were holding and then reappear in a box at their feet.
In the end, the experience was far more wrenching than looking at the images in the photo albums had been: the sound of Annalee Ahlberg’s voice wrecked my sister and me. When we had started to watch, mostly we had been laughing at the memories and making jokes about our parents or how we were dressed. But the experience grew sad fast. Soon we were watching in almost absolute silence; without saying a word, one of us would eject the cassette when it was over and put another one in. We no longer looked at each other, both of us lost in our private yearnings for our mother—a need for her that was almost like food after days and days without eating. I know I cried myself to sleep that night, and I think it is likely that my sister did, too.
My father and I were cleaning up the kitchen and loading my grandparents’ dishwasher after breakfast on Black Friday. “Are you still nervous about having to spend a night wired in a couple of weeks?” he asked me, referring to the sleep center.
We were alone in the kitchen. I had been leaning over, lining up plates in the bottom rack. I stood up. “Yes. I think I’m going to hate it,” I told him. “I think it’s going to be awful.”
“No. I told you, even your mother fell asleep.” He was drying the skillet in which our aunt had made scrambled eggs. After a long moment he said, “The night your mother died…”
I waited.
“Did I ever tell you about our last phone call?” he asked.
“No.”
“Did she?”
“You mean before she went to sleep?”
He nodded.
“She didn’t,” I answered. “I guess I figured you two talked that night. But Mom never said anything.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“I was busy at the conference. I was presenting an important paper the next day—at least I was supposed to. And I was seeing people that night. When I think about our very last conversation, I’ve always been afraid that I was a little short.”
I was moved that he wanted to get this off his chest and had selected me as his confessor: I hated to think of him living with that regret. But I also felt a small pang of anger that he had been—as he put it—short with my mother. And that might have been that, those two reactions jostling for my attention. But then he asked two more questions in rapid succession that left me as unsettled as ever.
“So she never said a word to you about our conversation that night?” he asked once more.
“No.”
“And you never said a word to the police?”
“No,” I repeated. “There was nothing to say. Why?”
He sighed. “No reason, really. I just don’t want them to think any worse of me than they already must.” Then he added, “I hate platitudes. I really do. But sometimes I believe we would all be better off if we always treated people like this was the last time we were ever going to see them.”
“God, what would your mother have done if she’d had boys?” my grandfather said to me that afternoon. We were standing outside a gallery near the corner of Newbury and Fairfield in Boston. He was smiling as he peered into the gallery window and pointing at an oil painting of a woman in her early thirties from the 1920s surrounded by her three children—all boys, which was what had triggered his observation in the first place.