“I mean, even when that annoying client called her that afternoon, your mom was so together. That was among my very first impressions of your mom: dialing down a madman. She was so firm. So totally in the captain’s chair.”
“The Friday of Parents Weekend,” I murmured.
“She was so chill. Ice queen cool. And whoever it was, was so…desperate. Remember?”
I did. I had forgotten, but it came back to me now. It was the sort of moment that might bewitch a young person meeting my stunning, statuesque mother for the first time. We had been walking across the quad toward Johnson Chapel, Erica’s family and mine, and my mother had taken a call on a cell phone that was still a clam shell. She slowed her gait to give herself privacy, and we had gotten a little ahead of her. But soon we were at the entrance to the nineteenth-century brick chapel, where the president was going to address the parents, and my mother was now two dozen yards behind us on the grass. My father seemed at ease, but I wanted us to get inside and choose our seats. Erica’s family did, too. And so I had gone to retrieve my mother, and Erica had, for whatever the reason, accompanied me.
“I would tell you to relax and get some sleep—get over it—but obviously that’s not the answer,” my mother was saying, the autumn sun on her hair. Her back was to us. “And, frankly, this is neither the time nor the place to discuss this. I’m sorry, but that’s just how it is. I can’t help you. I never could help you. Don’t you see? I can’t even help myself.” When she turned and saw the two of us motioning for her to hurry up, she looked at us and said firmly into the phone, “I’m sorry, but I think you need to find another architect.” Then she snapped the phone shut. “Well, I just fired a client,” she told us. She sounded neither bitter nor sad. She sounded as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
As Erica and I walked along that Boston street a little more than three years later, I recalled the e-mail I had found on Gavin’s computer—the very last one from my mother. The one where she had canceled on him because it was my first Parents Weekend, and she had written that she and my father and Paige were driving to Massachusetts that Friday.
My mother hadn’t been speaking to a client as she had stood on the college quadrangle before Johnson Chapel. She had been talking to Gavin. If she had been firing anyone, she had been—and I knew these weren’t the right words, but they were the ones I heard in my head that Thanksgiving weekend—firing him.
All young parents watch their children sleep. We stand over the crib, the bed with rails, and then the bed without rails, and we smile at the utter miracle and welcoming innocence that is a child asleep. We watch them dream, wondering what they are seeing as they stretch out their small fingers or pedal their knees once or twice. We savor the aroma of baby shampoo or strawberry shampoo. We adjust a blanket. We kiss a forehead or cheek. Before we leave, we check the thermostat.
I do all that now, decades removed from the summer my mother disappeared.
But you can bet that I also watch my own children for any signs of parasomnia. I watch for arousal disorders and night terrors and sleepwalking. I think more than any parents I am likely to meet at my children’s elementary school about—and here is a technical term that many husbands (though not mine) would find baffling—sleep-stage transition impositions.
So far there have been none. There have been no parasomnias at all. Both of my children seem fine. I pray—and I pray with a self-taught and childlike innocence, the way I learned when I was twenty-one and would roam alone through the red Victorian—that they have been spared that part of their family history. The odds still are against them.
They have their grandmother’s eyes and their grandmother’s lush yellow mane. A boy and a girl. Someday, they will be knockouts.