Or I imagine her coming back as an old woman, rocking in a rocking chair, knitting socks all day—surrounded by piles of those moist, breathy socks.
Even in my dreams, she bears only the slimmest resemblance to the mother I thought she was.
That January, a year ago, when my father first told the police about the argument they’d had, about the phone call from her the next morning, how she’d vowed never to return—when he went on and on in that trembling voice, told the three cops who sat in a blue row in front of us how her own mother had done the same thing, run off on a husband and daughter in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, and how, for months, she’d been acting strange, how she’d bought a miniskirt and a canary and started slipping away for hours without explanation, or sleeping in the middle of the day like a woman who’d been dredged out of a bog, they’d asked if he thought she might be dead. They’d asked if he thought she could have been suicidal, could have done something permanent and rash.
The mouths of those policemen looked as though they’d been wired too tightly. Even when they smiled reassuringly at us, their lips stayed linear, corners pulled back, making a flat line in the middle of their faces.
My father looked at me. I was sitting next to him on a folding chair in one of these officers’ offices. Both of us had our hands folded in our laps as if we were praying or holding on to butterflies—cupped loosely, secretly between our palms—and I just shook my head.
No, I thought then, and still think now. She isn’t dead. The world’s too full, still, of my mother. I think of a pile of leaves my father left raked last fall in the backyard, but forgot to bag, to have hauled away—
Those leaves sank back into the earth after only a few months of rain and snow. They turned first into a layer of thatch, melting into each other, becoming one thing—a thin black mattress that seemed to exhale a cool but festering breath. Then, they started to shrink, curl up, absorbing light like skin, as if you could dig there and find night itself in the center. And then one day they were simply gone, merged with the earth, swallowed up, a damp shadow, something as thick as gravy spilled where they’d been.
Looking into that, I felt my skin crawl with maggots, with the kind of soft, toothless insects that get into your body when you have no more use for it, and shivered.
It’s impossible to imagine my mother like that. I cannot imagine her softened, thawed, decayed, becoming sweeter as she spoils. I imagine her trapped in a mirror instead. A permanent image of her locked into a rectangle of hard brightness, open-eyed.
When she left, she left her station wagon behind, and my father gave it to me when I got my driver’s license. Now, driving it across town, I feel her beside me, giving directions, criticizing the landscape, the other drivers, the weather, which is a big fist of earth and sky with us struggling in it.
And I can hear her in the morning as I pour cereal into a bowl, telling me what’s wrong with what I’m about to eat.
Now, at dinner, I sit in her chair at the dining room table, to get the view from there. My father looks handsome and boring across the table from where she’d be, and my own place shimmers with my absence instead of hers—dust motes, nothing. I try to imagine what she would have thought of Detective Scieziesciez, and remember the way she used to scoff at my father’s weakness.
“You wimp,” she said to him once when we were at Cedar Point Amusement Park and he wouldn’t ride the Nile.
“I’ll get wet,” my father said.
“That’s not what you’re afraid of,” she said, and he wouldn’t look her in the eyes.
And I remember the way she watched Phil move around our house—his lanky teenage body, all breastbone, and the way his spine curved neatly into his jeans—like a woman with something on her mind. I could imagine the younger woman she once was looking back at the woman she’d become, thinking, This is where it’s ended? All those long, sensual years spent slipping in and out of my body like an erotic pond or a fresh, white bed?
I was following my own flesh here?
I’ve sorted through the clothes in her closet for the skirts and sweaters that fit me, that I like, and I’ve taken over the expensive ones—the cashmere sweaters, the linen skirts. But the night before I wear them to school, I leave them in a pile on the bottom of my closet, to rumple them, so they no longer look like the clothes of someone’s suburban mother. When they’re dirty, I don’t bother to dry-clean them. I just haul them to the basement, toss them from the washer to the dryer. They come out altered. Pilled, softer. I figure when she comes back, she can buy herself new clothes.
And some afternoons, when my father’s gone, I lie on her side of the bed, the way I used to find her sometimes after school in mine, and I look at the ceiling that was hanging over my mother night after night.
“SO HOW DOES THAT FEEL?” DR. PHALER ASKS. “YOUR mother’s been gone one year.”
I shrug.
Dr. Phaler is lovely today in a white wool suit. The little silver spectacles perch happily on her nose. As always, her makeup is tasteful and soft. A rose-beige base. Basic red lips. Right now her eyelids are light blue, but she’s done them well—not at all like Charlie’s Angels, that bad seventies blue.
No. The light blue on Dr. Phaler’s lids makes them shine like startling little pools, the kind you might glimpse from a jet over California. I want to be able to tell her how I feel about my mother being gone for one whole year, but what I say instead is what it seems a reasonable person in this situation would say she felt.
“Confused,” I say. “Maybe mad.”
Dr. Phaler looks disappointed. Perhaps she was hoping I’d cry. The one time I did cry in her office, I thought I noticed a swipe of red across her neck, as if she were excited. She whipped the box of tissues out so quickly I knew she’d been waiting a long time to do it. Those tissues were pink and clammy, and they smelled like a thin layer of lotioned skin when I blew my nose in them.
But I don’t cry today. I don’t feel sad—though I also don’t feel confused, or particularly mad. I’ve only said these things because there are no adjectives for this lightness I feel, this whiteness. It’s as though I’ve been caught in a diaphanous net—bodiless, that net holding my whole essence loosely in a breeze. Or as though I have weights around my wrists and ankles, but the weights are lighter than I am, as though I am wearing a dress made of emotion—a damp, invisible mesh. How could I possibly tell her that?
“After a whole year?” she asks, and I look down at my hands, which tremble a bit in my lap.
It was a beautiful year, I should add.
An early spring started one morning in March with a swarm of sudden, glassy, bird cries, and then the cool jewelry of primrose and violet loosened themselves in the dirt. Then summer burst into the world like a gorgeous car accident, opening eyes all over our bodies in the brilliant light. Fall—the smell of pumpkin guts, sluttish and unsweetened. Until winter fell all over us like pieces of heaven, glazed with oxygen or ether, hitting the ground in small, cold shards.
It was like a year in Eden where no Eve had ever lived.
WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, MY MOTHER TRIED TO CURL MY hair.
“Kat,” she’d say after my bath, standing in the doorway as I toweled myself, steam obscuring us, as if we’d just stepped together into a Hollywood set of heaven, “let’s do something with that hair.”
In that heavenly Hollywood fog, perhaps we had wings.
I remember watching my own face in the mirror of her vanity as she rolled dark hanks of my hair into hotpink cushions. I was maybe seven years old, and in that mirror the whole future was waiting for me like a skyline of cut-glass perfume bottles, silver tubes of lipstick.