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 even 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 important things and put on what she called her traveling outfit: a halter top and tight white shorts. She bought bus tickets and railroad tickets and went to Madison, Springfield, even Chicago. At the end of the day she always turned around and went back home. She'd redeposit her money in the bank and unpack her suitcase and wait for her mother to return from work. As if it had all been just a lark, she'd tell her mother where she'd gone. And her mother would say, 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.
She took me to the office with her three times a week, and the other two days I was watched by our next-door neighbor, an old woman who smelled of camphor. My father said May was good as a mother, but she never talked to me like I was a baby or did baby things like play patty-cake or hide-and-seek. When I was only nine months old, my father had come home to find me sitting at the threshold of the front door, wearing a diaper and a string of pearls, my eyes and lips colored with violet eye shadow and rouge. My mother had come running out of the living room, laughing. "Doesn't she look perfect, Patrick?" she'd said, and when my father shook his head, all the life had gone out of her eyes. Things like that happened often when I was a baby. My father said she was trying to make me grow up faster so she'd have a good, close friend.
May left us without saying goodbye on May 24, 1972. My father said that what bothered him most about my mother's disappearance was that he hadn't seen it coming. He'd been married to her for six years, and he'd known so many details: the order in which she removed her makeup at night, the salad dressings she hated, the shifting color of her eyes when she needed to be held. But she had completely surprised him. For a while he bought the Los Angeles papers at an international newsstand, thinking she would certainly show up in Hollywood writing sitcoms and he'd get wind of it. But as the years went on, he began to suspect this: Surely anyone who could vanish without a trace could have been lying all those years. My father believed that the whole time they were married, she'd been getting together a plan. He resolved that if she ever did come back he wouldn't let her in, because he had been wounded beyond repair. Unfortunately, he still found himself wondering from time to time if she was alive, if she was all right. It was not that he expected to find word of her anymore; he had lost his faith in love. After all, it had been twenty years. If she appeared on his doorstep, she'd have been no more than a stranger.
My father came into my bedroom that night when the stars were starting to lose themselves in the yawn of the morning. "You're awake, aren't you,
" he said, his brogue thick from a lack of sleep.
"You knew I would be," I said. He sat down, and I took his hand
in my own and looked up at him. Sometimes I could not believe all he had done for me. He had tried so hard.
"What will you do when you find her?" he said.
I sat up, pulling the covers with me. "I may not ever get that far," I said. "It's been twenty years."
"Oh, you'll find her, all right," he said. "That's the way it should be." My father was a great believer in Fate, which he had twisted to mean Divine Wisdom. As far as he was concerned, if God meant for me to find May Renault, I would find her. "When you do find her, though, you shouldn't be tellin' her things she doesn't need to know." I stared at him, unsure of what he meant. "It's too late, Paige," he said.
Then I realized that maybe for the past two days I had been harboring a rosy image of my father, my mother, and me all living again under this roof in Chicago. My father was letting me know that wouldn't happen, not on his end. And I knew that it couldn't happen on my end, either. Even if my mother packed her bags and followed me home, my home was no longer Chicago. My home was miles away, with a very different man.
"Dad," I said, pushing away the thought, "tell me a story again."
I had not heard my father's stories in years, not since I was fourteen and decided I was too old to thrill to the exploits of muscled Black Irish folk heroes possessing wit and ingenuity.
My father smiled at my request. "I suppose you'll be wantin' a love story," he said, and I laughed.
"There aren't any," I said. "There are only love stories gone wrong." The Irish had a story for every infidelity. Cuchulainn--the Irish equivalent to Hercules--was married but seduced every maiden in Ireland. Angus, the handsome god of love, was the son of Dagda --king of the gods--and a mistress, Boann, while her husband was away. Deirdre, forced to marry the old king Conchobhar to avoid a prophecy of nationwide sorrow, eloped instead with a handsome young warrior named Naoise to Scotland. When messengers tracked and found the lovers, Conchobhar had Naoise killed and commanded Deirdre to marry him. She never smiled again, and eventually she dashed her brains out on a rock.
I knew all these stories and their embellishments well enough to tell them to myself, but all of a sudden I wanted to be tucked under the covers in my childhood bedroom, listening to the tumbling brogue of my father's voice as he sang me the stories of his homeland. I settled under my blankets and closed my eyes. "Tell me the story of Dechtire," I whispered.
My father placed his cool hand on my forehead. '"Twas always your favorite," he said. He lifted his chin and stared out at the sun coming over the edge of the buildings across the street. "Well, Cuchulainn was no ordinary Irishman, and he had no ordinary birth. His mother was a beautiful woman named Dechtire, with hair as bright as king's gold and eyes greener than rich Irish rye. She was married to an Ulster chieftain, but she was too beautiful to escape the notice of the gods. And so one day she was turned into a bird, an even more beautiful creature than she had been before. She had feathers white as snow and wore a wreath braided from the pink clouds of mornin'; only her eyes were that same emerald green. She flew with fifty of her handmaidens to an enchanted palace on a lush isle in the sky, and there she sat, surrounded by her women, rufflin' and settlin' her wings.
"So nervous she was at first that she did not notice that she had been changed back into the beautiful woman she had been; nor did she notice the sun god, Lugh, standing before her and fillin' up her sky. When she turned her head and looked at him, at the rays of light spillin' from him in a bright halo, she immediately fell in love. She lived there with Lugh for many years, and there she bore him a son--Cuchulainn himself--but she eventually took her boy and went back home."
I opened my eyes, because this was the part I liked best, and even before my father said it, I realized for the first time as an adult why this story had always held such power for me.
"Dechtire's chieftain husband, who had spent years starin' into the sky and just waitin', welcomed her back, because after all, you never really stop lovin' someone, now, and he raised Cuchulainn as his own."
In all the years I had been listening, I had pictured my mother as Dechtire and myself as Cuchulainn, victims of Fate living together on a magical glittering isle. And yet I had also seen the wisdom of the waiting Ulster chieftain. I had never stopped thinking that maybe one day my mother was coming back to us too.
My father finished and patted my hand. "I've missed you, Paige," he said. He stood up then and left. I blinked at the pale ceiling. I wondered what it was like to have the best of both worlds. I wondered what it might be like to feel the smooth tiles of the sun god's palace beneath my running feet, to grow up in his afterglow.
Armed with the wedding photo and all of my mother's history, I waved goodbye to my father and got into my car. I waited until he disappeared behind the peach door curtain, and then I sank my head against the wheel. Now what was I going to do?
I wanted to find a detective, someone who wouldn't laugh at me for picking up a missing persons search twenty years after the fact. I wanted to find someone who wouldn't charge me too much. But I didn't have the slightest idea where to look.
As I drove down the street, Saint Christopher's loomed on my left. I had not been into a church in eight years; Max hadn't even been baptized. This had surprised Nicholas at the time. "I thought you were just a lapsed Catholic," he said, and I told him I no longer believed in God. "Well," he had said, raising his eyebrows. "For once we see eye to eye."
I parked the car and pulled myself up the smooth stone steps of the church. Several older women were in the left aisle, waiting for a confessional to become vacant. As the minutes passed, the curtains drew back one at a time, spitting out sinners who had yet to cleanse their souls.
I walked down the central aisle of the church, the one I'd always believed I'd walk down as a bride. I sat in the first pew. The stained glass cast a rippled puddle at my feet, the dappled image of John the Baptist. I frowned at it, wondering how I had seen only the splendor of the blues and greens when I was growing up, how I never noticed that the window really blocked out the sun.
I had given up my religion, just as I told Nicholas, but that didn't mean it had given up on me. It was a two-way street: just because I chose not to pray to Jesus and the Virgin Mary didn't mean they were going to let me go without a fight. So even though I didn't attend Mass, even though I hadn't been to confession in almost a decade, God was still following me. I could feel Him like a whisper at my shoulder, telling me it wasn't as easy as I thought to renounce my faith. I could hear Him smiling gently when, in moments of crisis--like Max's nosebleed--I automatically called out to Him. It only made me angrier to know that no matter how forcefully I pushed Him out of my head, I had little choice in the matter. He was still charting my course; He was still pulling the strings.
I knelt, thinking I should look the part, but I did not let prayers form on my lips. Almost directly in front of me was the statue of the Virgin I'd wreathed as May Queen.
The mother of Christ. There aren't that many blessed women in Catholicism, so when I was a child she was my idol. I always prayed to her. And like every other little Catholic girl, I figured that if I was perfectly good for the twelve or so years left in my childhood, I'd grow up to be just like her. Once on Halloween I had even dressed up as her, wearing a blue mantle and a heavy cross, but nobody knew who I was supposed to be. I imagined Mary to be very peaceful and very beautiful--after all, God had chosen her to bear His son. But the thing I loved best about her was that her place in heaven was guaranteed simply because she'd been the mother of someone very special, and sometimes I'd borrow her from Jesus, pretending that she was sitting on the edge of my bed at night, asking me what I'd done in school that day.
I seemed to know so much about mothers in the abstract. I remembered when I had learned during a social studies unit in fifth grade that baby monkeys, given the choice, picked terry-cloth figures t
o cling to, rather than wire ones. Once, in a doctor's waiting room, I had read of coyotes, who howl if their cubs get lost, knowing they will find their way home by the signal. I wondered if Max would be able to find safety in my voice. I wondered if after all these years I'd be able to pick out my mother's.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a familiar priest heading toward the altar. I did not want to be recognized and shamed into penance. I ducked my head and pushed past him in the aisle, shivering as my shoulder caught the strength of his faith.
I drove away from Saint Christopher's to the place where I knew I'd have to go before I left to find my mother. Even as I approached the Mobil station, I could see him from a distance. Jake was handing a credit card back to a buttoned-down lawyer type, taking care not to brush his blackened hand against his customer's. The man drove away in his Fiat, leaving a space for me.
Jake did not move as I pulled my car up beside the unleaded tank and got out. "Hello," I said. He clenched and then unclenched his fingers. He was wearing a wedding band, and this made my stomach burn, even though I was wearing one too. It was all right for me to go on, but I somehow had expected Jake to be just the way he had been when I left.
I swallowed and put on my brightest smile. "Well," I said, "I can tell you're overwhelmed to see me."
Jake spoke then, his voice running and low as I had remembered it. "I didn't know you were back," he said.
"I didn't know I was coming." I took a step away from him, shielding my eyes from the sun. The facade of the garage had been updated with fresh paint and a sign that said, "Jake Flanagan, Proprietor." I turned back to Jake.
"He died," Jake said quietly, "three years ago."