Out of nowhere, he remembered being eleven years old, his lip split by a bully in a playground fight. He had lain on the ground until the other kids left, but he would not let them see him cry. Later, when he’d told his parents about it, his mother had held her hand against his cheek and abyá€He smiled at him.
He would not let Paige see him cry, or complain, or be in any way inconvenienced. Two could play the same game. And he’d do what he did to that bully-he’d ignored him so completely in the days following the fight that other children began to follow Nicholas’s lead, and in the end the boy had come to Nicholas and apologized, hoping he’d win back his friends.
Of course, that was a kids’ competition. This was his life. What Paige had done was somewhere beyond forgiveness.
Nicholas expected to toss and turn, racked by black thoughts of his wife. But he was asleep before he reached the pillow. He did not remember, the next morning, how quickly sleep had come. He did not remember the dream he had of his first Christmas with Paige, when she’d given him the children’s game Operation! and they’d played for hours. He did not remember the coldest part of the night, when out of pure instinct Nicholas had pulled his son closer and given him his heat.
chapter 21
My mother’s clothes didn’t fit. They were too long in the waist and tight at the chest. They were made for someone taller and thinner. When my father brought up the old trunk filled with my mother’s things, I had held each musty scrap of silk and cotton as if I were touching her own hand. I pulled on a yellow halter top and seersucker walking shorts, and then I peeked into the mirror. Reflected back was the same face I’d always seen. This surprised me. By now my mother and I had grown so similar in my mind, I believed in some ways I had become her.
When I came back down to the kitchen, my father was sitting at the table. “This is all I have, Paige,” he said, holding up the wedding photo I knew so well. It had sat on the night table beside my father’s bed my whole life. In it, my father was looking at my mother, holding her hand tightly. My mother was smiling, but her eyes betrayed her. I had spent years looking at that photo, trying to figure out what my mother’s eyes reminded me of. When I was fifteen, it had come to me. A raccoon trapped by headlights, the minute before the car strikes.
“Dad,” I said, running my finger over his younger image, “what about her other stuff? Her birth certificate and her wedding ring, old photos, things like that?”
“She took them. It isn’t as if she died, you know. She planned leavin’, right on down to the last detail.”
I poured myself a cup of coffee and offered some to him. He shook his head. My father moved uncomfortably in his chair; he did not like the topic of my mother. He hadn’t wanted me to look for her-that much was clear-but when he saw how stubborn I was about it, he said he’d do what he could for me. Still, when I asked him questions, he wouldn’t look up at me. It was almost as if after all these years he blamed himself.
“Were you happy?” I said quietly. Twenty years was a long time, and I had been only five. Maybe there had been arguments I hadn’t heard behind sealed bedroom doors, or a physical blow that had been regretted eve fa d‡n as it found its mark.
“I was very happy,” my father said. “I never would have guessed May was goin’ to leave us.”
The coffee I’d been drinking seemed suddenly too bitter to finish. I poured it down the sink. “Dad,” I said, “how come you never tried to find her?”
My father stood up and walked to the window. “When I was very little and we were livin’ in Ireland, my own father used to cut the fields three times each summer for haying. He had an old tractor, and he’d start on the edge of one field, circlin’ tighter and tighter in a spiral until he got almost dead center. Then my sisters and I would run into the grass that still stood and we’d chase out the cottontails that had been pushed to the middle by the tractor. They’d come out in a flurry, the lot of them, jumpin’ faster than we could run. Once -I think it was the summer before we came over here-I caught one by the tail. I told my da I was going to keep it like a pet, and he got very serious and told me that wouldn’t be fair to the rabbit, since God hadn’t made it for that purpose. But I built a hutch and gave it hay and water and carrots. The next day it was dead, lyin’ on its side. My father came up beside me and said that some things were just meant to stay free.” He turned around and faced me, his eyes brilliant and dark. “That,” he said, “is why I never went lookin’ for your mother.”
I swallowed. I imagined what it would be like to hold a butterfly in your hands, something bejeweled and treasured, and to know that despite your devotion it was dying by degrees. “Twenty years,” I whispered. “You must hate her so much.”
“Aye.” My father stood and grasped my hands. “At least as much as I love her.”
My father told me that my mother was born Maisie Marie Renault, in Biloxi, Mississippi. Her father had tried to be a farmer, but most of his land was swamp, so he never made much money. He died in a combine accident that was heavily questioned by the insurance company, and when she was widowed, Maisie’s mother sold the farm and put the money in the bank. She went to Wisconsin and worked for a dairy. Maisie began calling herself May when she was fifteen. She finished high school and got a job in a department store called Hersey’s, right on Main Street in Sheboygan. She had stolen her mother’s emergency money from the crock pot, bought herself a linen dress and alligator pumps, then told the personnel director at Hersey’s that she was twenty-one and had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin. Impressed by her cool demeanor and her smart outfit, they put her in charge of the makeup department. She learned how to apply blusher and foundation, how to make eyebrows where there were none, how to make moles disappear. She became an expert in the art of deception.
May wanted her mother to move to California. Years of leading the cows to the milking machines had chapped her mother’s hands and permanently bent her back. May brought home pictures of Los Angeles, where lemons could grow in your backyard and where there wasn’t any snow. Her mother refused to go. And so at least three times a year, May would start to run away.
She would take all her money out of the bank and pack her bag with only the most importbe ñ€.Chicago. Now, that’s farther than you went the last time.
It was on one of these excursions to Chicago that she met my father in a diner. Maybe she’d never finished her journey because she just needed an extra push. Well, that’s what my father gave her. She used to tell the neighbors that the day she laid eyes on Patrick O’Toole, she knew she was looking at her destiny. Of course she never mentioned if that was good or bad.
She married my father three months after she met him at the diner, and they moved into the little row house I would grow up in. That was 1966. She took up smoking and became addicted to the color TV they had bought with the money they got at their wedding. She watched The Beverly Hillbillies and That Girl and told my father repeatedly that her calling was to be a script writer. She practiced, writing comic routines on the backs of the brown paper grocery bags when she’d unpacked the week’s food. She told my father that one day she was going to hit it big.
Because she thought she had to start somewhere, she took a job at the Tribune, writing the obituaries. When she found out that year that she was pregnant, she insisted on keeping the job, saying she’d go back after she had her maternity leave, because they needed the money.