I turn my fear into one pure, intelligent motion and finger one by one the tiny clasps at the back of her neck, lifting the gaudy neckpieces away from her, taking the feathers and charms, the chains, away from her chest where they weigh so heavily. I would like to pluck from her face the moody emeralds that have made her look so strange to me.
“You don’t need all this, Mom.”
She clings to my words like a child. I slip rings from her fingers. I gently lift her arm up and take it out of the sweater. Slowly, carefully, I undress her in the center of the station as if we were the only ones there.
“It’s the Topaz Bird, isn’t it?” I say to her in a whisper as I unknot the scarves at her neck and waist. We are both children now. She nods. The Topaz Bird was the creature of my bedtime stories, invented by my mother so that I might better understand her shifting moods, her inexplicable sadness or rage or joy. It had become, in the years since I was grown, our code word for when she was not feeling well.
I slide the large silver Elsa Peretti bracelet down her smooth arm. I open her purse and place the eyeglasses she wears at these times back into their leather case. She does not need glasses.
“Yes,” she says and tries to smile, “the Topaz Bird.” She tilts her head back and looks up at the starry green ceiling. I can see the line where her makeup ends.
“Silly,” she whispers, still looking up. “Silly,” she says, shaking her head miserably.
“We’ll just have to put some of this away,” I say, putting more and more into her enormous purse. “You don’t need all this, Mom.”
I look up, too, and imagine the Topaz Bird there — its terrible claws, its beak curved and sharp, its feathers brutal, sharpening into points. It grows huge. It devours mice in front of me. It lands on my mother’s head like a spiked crown, drawing blood from her scalp.
“How’s my makeup?” she asks. She hands me a tissue. I wipe away layers of color.
“There. There now. You look good. You look great, Mom. Everything’s fine.” As I speak I look down to the floor and see that hundreds of tiny gold chains encircle her ankles. I cannot control the surge of emotion that grows and breaks in me. It will not be fine.
“Mom,” I say, “let me come back home with you.” I have just come in by bus from a long Christmas break and am on my way back to college for the second semester. “I can take a train to school tomorrow. Really. It doesn’t matter when I go.”
She shakes her head tentatively at first, then decides. “No.”
“Please.”
“Vanessa.”
I look at her hand, clenched in a fist. “No,” she says, “I’m all right.”
“What is it, Mom?” I ask. “What’s in your hand?”
“Silly,” she says, looking up to the cavernous ceiling where the Topaz Bird flies. “Silly. Silly,” she says, biting her lip and trying not to cry, following my example.
She opens her hand and shows me a crumpled paper, something wounded in her palm.
“What is it, Mom? Do you want me to read it?” I ask her.
“Yes, would you?” she says, staring at my mouth, focusing hard.
I uncrumple the piece of paper. My hands are shaking. I see that it is in her handwriting. “Be careful,” she whispers, “please.”
I nod. For a while I simply stare at the piece of paper, looking at her handwriting, the swirls and dips, the flourishes, the looping l’s and p’s, and it gives me the courage to read. It says “New Year’s Resolutions,” and I cry with relief at my mother’s earnest list.
“Don’t cry,” she says. I bite my lip and read them aloud:
1–Enjoy life more.
2–Work fewer hours. Relax more.
3–Take fewer trips/pack fewer clothes.
4–Spend more time with the children.
5–Help the unfortunate.
I laugh and laugh and she laughs with me. “They are good ones, I think,” I say.
“Yes,” she says, “I miss more things now,” and she gazes off, lost in all that means to her.
“I like this one,” she says. “Take fewer trips/pack fewer clothes. What do you think?” We try to pick up the two enormous suitcases at her sides and pretend we cannot.
“Really, Mom, how long was it you were gone for?” I ask.
“Oh, about a week, I think,” she says, and we laugh.
“You’re all grown up,” she says, looking at me like the college student she remembers herself being. “I realize now how much living we’ve missed together. But for now — you’d better go — your train.”
“No, Mom. I don’t want to leave you.”
“Vanessa, yes,” she says.
“You’ll need help with your suitcases,” I say. I am still smiling.
She shakes her head no.
“Please go now,” she says, and I recognize the tone of her voice. It means she is not going to change her mind.
“But—”
“Please go. You’ll miss your train.”
“I’ll call you Sunday,” I say.
“Oh, don’t forget to call.” She is taking the Elsa Peretti bracelet from her bag.
“Mom,” I say, “are you all right?”
“Yes,” she nods. “I’m fine.”
I turn and begin to walk away from her, then turn back. “Mom!” I shout. I can’t bear to say good-bye yet.
I am some distance from her. The snow presses against the high semicircular windows. I feel it hugging us, pressing us, telling us to part, parting us. Her face has changed. Her voice now, as she begins to speak, is not raised but still somehow separates itself from the noise of the station. I can hear it perfectly. She looks up at the snow, then to me. She is focused and clear now, lucid in this last moment.
“I have loved you my whole life,” she says.
She lifts her beautiful braceleted arm into the air. “Go now.”
She waves good-bye.
“You must never forget, Vanessa,” my mother told me over and over through the years I was growing up, “that the Topaz Bird means us no harm.” This is how she would always end her final story of the night just as I was falling into sleep.
“You must never forget,” she would whisper, leaning over my bed as she turned out the light and covered me with night, as she kissed me hard on the forehead, “it means us no harm.”
She would enter my large, odd-shaped room, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes exhausted, sometimes sad and afraid, but the story never changed and it seemed to calm her. She would rest in the telling of it. I helped her, too, I think, in my half-sleep, dreaming the bird with her, inventing it over and over, reaching for it, reaching, my whole body straining to see it.
“Only the luckiest people,” she’d begin, “are born with a bird flying over their lives.”
“Only the very luckiest,” I’d say back to her, she leading, I following her through the story I knew by heart. She would start a sentence, and I would complete it. At times we talked together, our voices weaving in and out of each other’s. We were like lovers drifting off to sleep together, whispering in the dark. I loved her voice at these times, it was so sweet and peaceful. It was the voice of an angel, the voice of a star.
“Only the luckiest people are born with a bird flying over their lives. It’s no ordinary bird, mind you,” she’d smile.
“It’s not a green parrot,” I said.
“Oh, no!” she said. “Not a green parrot.”
“It’s not a cardinal.”
“It’s not a dove either. It’s not…”
“A pink flamingo,” I’d say.
“Or a toucan,” my mother would say.
“No, it’s not a toucan.”
“It’s more beautiful…” My mother closed her eyes. “It’s even more beautiful than a swan.”
Her golden robe shone in the dark room. She was asking me to see the Topaz Bird with her. But I could not imagine a more exotic creature than my mother. I would have been happy to have lived in a world defined solely by the parameters of her arms, to have sunk into her large, soothing voice and stayed there, safe in her dark love, but even before I could get comfortable in her lap she had begun telling the story and pointing my head away from her, asking me to look upward, to grow wings though I had just barely learned to walk.