My mother did not turn around, but her hand stopped stirring the sauce for the span of a breath. "Our lives weren't a little bit different, though, were they?" she said.
I stared at her back until I could not stand it anymore. Then I threw the carrots, the tomatoes, and the cucumber into the bowl, while the rough anger and the disappointment pressed back-to-back and settled heavy on my chest.
We ate on the porch, and afterward we watched the sun go down. We drank cold peach wine coolers from cognac glasses that still had price stickers on their bottoms. My mother pointed out the mountains in the background, which rose in swells so close they seemed within reach. I concentrated on physical things: the bones of our knees, the curve of our calves, the placement of freckles, all so similar. "When I first moved here," my mother said, "I used to wonder if it was at all like Ireland. Your father was always saying he'd take me there, but it never happened." She paused. "I miss him very much, you know."
I stared at her, softening. "He told me you were married three months after you'd met." I took a large gulp of wine and smiled tentatively. "It was love at first sight, he said."
My mother leaned back her head so that her throat was straight and white and vulnerable. "It could have been," she said. "I can't remember all that well. I know I couldn't wait to get out of Wisconsin, and then Patrick magically appeared, and I always felt a little sorry that he had to suffer when I found out it hadn't been about Wisconsin at all."
I saw this as my lead-in. "When I was little," I said, "I used to dream up these scenarios that had made you leave. I figured once that you were connected to a gang and you'd slipped up and they threatened the safety of your family. And another time I figured that you maybe had fallen in love with someone else and run off with him."
"There was someone else," my mother said frankly, "but it was after I left, and I never loved him. I wasn't going to take that away from Patrick too."
I put the glass down beside me, tracing its edge with my fingertip. "What made you leave, then?" I asked.
My mother stood up and rubbed her upper arms. "Damn mosquitoes," she said. "I swear they're here all year. I'm going to check on the barn." She started to turn away. "You can stay or you can come."
I stared at her, astonished. "How can you do that?" "Do what?"
"Just change the subject like that?" I hadn't come all this distance just to be pushed farther away. I walked down the two steps of the porch until we were standing eye-to-eye. "It's been twenty years, Mom," I said. "Isn't it a little late to be dodging the question?"
"It's been twenty years, dear," my mother shot back. "What makes you think I remember the answer?" She broke her stare, looking down at her shoes, and then she sighed. "It was not the mob, and it was not a lover. It wasn't anything like that at all. It was something much more normal."
I lifted my chin. "You still haven't given me a reason," I said, "and you are far from what is considered normal. Normal people do not vanish in the middle of the night and never speak to their families again. Normal people do not spend two decades using a dead person's name. Normal people do not meet their daughter for the first time in twenty years and act like it's an ordinary visit."
My mother took a step back, anger and pride making violet slashes in her eyes. "If I had known you were coming," she said, "I would have taken my goddamned red carpet out of storage." She started off toward the barn, and then she stopped and faced me. When she spoke, her voice was more gentle, as if she'd realized too late what she had said. "Don't ask me why I left, Paige, until you can tell yourself why you left."
Her words burned, flaming my cheeks and my throat. I watched her slip up the hill toward the barn.
I wanted to run after her and tell her it was her fault that I'd left; that I knew I had to take this opportunity to learn all the things I had never learned from her: how to look pretty; how to hold a man; how to be a mother. I wanted to tell her that I never would have left my husband and my child under any other circumstances and that, unlike her, I was going back. But I had a feeling that she would have laughed at me and said, Yes, that's the way it begins. And I had a feeling that I would not be telling the complete truth.
I had left before I had any inkling that I wanted to find my mother. I had left without giving my mother a second thought. No matter what I had brainwashed myself to believe by now, I hadn't even considered going to Chicago until I was several hundred miles away from my home. I needed to see her; I wanted to see her--I understood what had prompted me to hire Eddie Savoy. But it was only after I'd left Max and Nicholas that I thought of coming here. It wasn't the other way around. The truth was that even if my mother had lived just down the street, I would have wanted to get away.
Back then I had blamed it on Max's nosebleed--but that had just been the spark that set off the fire. The real reason was that my confusion ran too deep to sort out at home. I had to go. I didn't have any other choice. I didn't leave out of anger, and I didn't want to leave forever--just long enough. Long enough to feel that I wasn't doing it all wrong. Long enough to feel that I mattered, that I was more than a necessary extension of Max's or Nicholas's life.
I thought of all the magazine articles I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, See how lucky you are? But it had been gnawing at me inside, that part that didn't quite fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?
I saw a light flash on in the barn, and all of a sudden I knew why my mother had left.
I went up to the bathroom and undressed. I ran hot water in the claw-footed tub and thought about how good it would feel on the clenched muscles of my thighs. Riding had made me aware of places on my body that I hadn't known existed. I brushed my teeth and stepped neatly into the tub. I leaned my head back against the enamel rim, closed my eyes, and tried to will away thoughts of my mother.
Instead I pictured Max, who would be exactly three and a half months old the next day. I tried to remember the milestones he should have been reaching now, according to that First Year book Nicholas had brought me. Solid foods, that was the only one I could remember, and I wondered what he thought of bananas, applesauce, strained peas. I tried to imagine his tongue pushing out against a spoon, that unfamiliar object. I smoothed one hand over the other and tried to remember his silky powdered touch.
When I opened my eyes, my mother was standing over the bathtub, wearing a yellow wrapper. I tried to cross my arms over my chest and to twist my legs, but it was too small a tub. A flush of embarrassment ran from my belly up to my cheeks. "Don't," she said. "You've turned out quite beautiful."
I stood up abruptly, grabbing a towel and sloshing water all over the floor in my hurry. "I don't think so," I murmured, and I threw open the bathroom door. I ran to my little-girl room, letting the steam steal down the hall to veil my image from my mother.
When I first woke up, before I was fully conscious, I thought that they were at it again. I could so clearly hear in my imagination the voices of my mother and father attacking, tangling, retreating.
They were not fights; they were never really fights. They were triggered by the simplest things: a burned souffle, a priest's sermon, a supper my father came home to late. They were only half-arguments, started by my mother and quelled by my father. He never picked up the gauntlet. He'd let her scream and accuse, and then, when the sobs came, his soft words would cover her like a soft blanket.
It didn't scare me. I used to lie in bed and listen to the scene that had been replayed so many times I knew the dialogue by heart. Slam: that was my mother at the bedroom door, and seconds later it would open again, once my father came upstairs. In the months after my mother left, when I was doing my remembering, I thought of the arguments and I added the pictures I could never see, fashioning them like actors in a grainy black-
and-white film. So, for example, here I envisioned my parents back-to-back, my mother tugging a brush through her hair and my father unbuttoning his shirt. "You don't understand," my mother said, her words always hitched and high, always the same. "I can't do it all. You expect me to do everything."
"Sssh, May," my father murmured. "You take it so hard." I imagined him turning to her and grasping her shoulders, like Bogart in Casablanca. "Nobody expects anything."
"Yes you do," my mother screamed, and the bed creaked as she stood. I could hear her pacing, footsteps like rain. "I can't do anything right, Patrick. I'm tired. I'm just bone-tired. Dear God, I just wish --I want--"
"What do you want, a mhulrndn?"
"I don't know," my mother said. "If I knew, I wouldn't be here."
Then she would start crying, and I would listen to the gentle sounds that drifted through the wall: the butterfly kisses and the slip of my father's hands over my mother's skin and the charged quiet that I later learned was the sound of making love.
Sometimes there were variations--like when my mother begged my father to go away with her, just the two of them, sailing in a dugout canoe to Fiji. Another time she scratched and clawed at my dad and made him sleep on the couch. Once she said that she still believed the world was flat and that she was hanging at the edge.
My father was an insomniac, and after these episodes he'd get up in the dead of the night and creep down to his workshop. As if on cue, I'd tiptoe out of my room, and I would crawl under the covers of their big bed. It was like that in our family; someone was always
filling in for someone else. I'd press my cheek against my mother's back and hear her murmur my name, and I held her so close my own body trembled with her fear.
I had heard the cries again tonight; that's what made me wake so suddenly. But my father's voice was missing. For a moment I couldn't place the crowded wallpaper, the intruding moon. I slipped out of bed and turned in at the bathroom, then I redirected myself and walked till I stood at the threshold of my mother's room.
I hadn't dreamed it. She was curled beneath the covers, her fists pressed to her eyes. She was crying so hard she couldn't catch her breath.
I shifted from one foot to the other, nervously wringing the sleeve of my nightshirt. I just couldn't do it. After all, so much had happened. I wasn't a four-year-old child, and she was no more than a stranger. She was practically nothing to me.
I remembered how I had flinched at her touch this afternoon, and how annoyed I had been when she took my arrival as easily as she'd take an afternoon tea. I remembered seeing my face reflected in her eyes when she was talking about my father. I considered the room, that god-awful room, that she had had waiting for me.
Even as I crossed the floor I was listing all the reasons I shouldn't. You don't know her. She doesn't know you. She shouldn't be forgiven. I crawled under the covers. With a sigh that unraveled the years, I put my arms around my mother and willingly slid back to where I'd started.
chapter 28
Nicholas
Nicholas Prescott was already unofficially engaged to Paige O'Toole when they went out on their fourth date. Nicholas picked her up at that waitress Doris's apartment, a small
flea-ridden building in Porter Square. He'd left a message while she was working, telling her to wear something along the lines of haute couture because he was taking her to the top that night. He did not know that she spent an hour asking Doris, the neighbors, and finally the reference librarian at the Boston Public Library what haute couture meant.
She was wearing a simple black sleeveless sheath. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a loose knot; her eyes were wide and luminescent. Her shoes were fake alligator skin, with spike heels--the kind of shoes his college friends had called fuck-me pumps--although with someone like Paige wearing them, that term would never have come to mind.
At the end of their other three dates, Nicholas had gone no further than gently cupping her breasts, and from her quiet trembling he knew that was enough. In spite of the fact that she'd run away from home, that she was not college educated, and that she was a waitress in a diner, to Nicholas, Paige O'Toole was as chaste as they came. When he pictured her, he thought of the image of Psyche from the White Rock ginger ale label, a girl-woman kneeling on a boulder, staring at her reflection as if she was surprised to see it in the water below. The way Paige was shy to smile, the instinctive habit she had of covering her body when Nicholas touched her--it all added up. They had never spoken of it; Nicholas wasn't like that. But he believed in the strength of coincidence, and surely there was a reason he had been in Mercy when she had begun to work there: Paige did not know it, but she had been waiting for him all her life.
"You look wonderful," Nicholas said, kissing the spot below her left ear. They were waiting for the elevator.
Paige smoothed her hands over the dress, tugging as if it didn't fit her like a second skin. "This is Doris's," she admitted. "I didn't have any couture, so we went through her closet. Would you believe this is from 1959? We spent the whole afternoon taking in the seams."
"And the shoes?" The bell rang, and Nicholas took Paige's elbow to lead her into the elevator.
Paige looked straight at him, challenging. "I bought them. I figured I deserved something new."
Nicholas was sometimes surprised by the fury she held in check. When she believed she was right, she would fight to the end to make you see her side, continuing emphatically even after she had proof that she was wrong.
When the elevator touched ground level, Nicholas waited for Paige to step out first, as he'd been taught in eighth grade. But when she didn't, he turned to face her, and he saw again the expression she often had when looking at Nicholas. It was as if he filled up her entire world; as if there was nothing he could do wrong. "What is it?" Nicholas said, taking her hand.
Paige shook her head. "It's just you." She took two steps and then looked back at him, smiling. "If you had lived in Chicago, you would have passed me on the street."
"No I wouldn't," Nicholas said.
Paige laughed. "You're absolutely right. You wouldn't have been caught dead on Taylor Street."
Nicholas couldn't convince Paige that it didn't matter to him where she had come from, where she was working, whether she had a diploma. The one important thing was where she was going, and Nicholas was planning to make sure that she would go there with him. It was one of the reasons he'd told her to dress to the nines and had booked a reservation at the Empress in the Hyatt Regency on the river. They'd head up to the Spinnaker afterward, the revolving bar, and then he'd take her home and they'd sit beneath the street.-lights of Porter Square, kissing until their lips were swollen and bruised. Then Nicholas would drive back to his own apartment in Cambridge, and he would lie naked beneath the ceiling fan in the bedroom, lazily tracing circles on the sheets and imagining the silk of Paige's skin underneath his fingers.
"Where are we going?" Paige asked as she slipped into the car.
Nicholas grinned at her. "A surprise," he said.
Paige fastened her seat belt and smoothed the wrinkles out of the black skirt stretched over her lap. "Probably not McDonald's," she said. "They've relaxed the dress code."
The tuxedoed maitre d' at the restaurant bowed to Nicholas and led the way to a tiny corner table that abutted a wall of glass. The basin of the Charles River was bathed in the fuchsia and orange of sunset. Playing across the surface like skittering butterflies were the distant billowed sails of the MIT sailing club. Paige drew in her breath and pressed her palms to the glass for a second, leaving a neat steamed print when she took them away. "Oh, Nicholas," she said, "this is great."
Nicholas picked up the black matchbook in the crystal ashtray, embossed with Paige's initials in gold lettering. It was one of the reasons he'd chosen the Empress instead of Cafe" Budapest or the Ritz-
Carlton; this was one of their touches. Nicholas handed the matches to Paige. "You might want to hang on to these," he said.
>
Paige smiled. "You know I don't smoke," she said. "Doris doesn't even have a fireplace." She tossed them back into the ashtray, and then she noticed the letters, PMO. Nicholas sat back, watching Paige's eyes darken and grow wide. Then, like a little kid, she glanced around and sneaked to an empty table next to them. She lifted the matchbook out of the ashtray and her face fell, but only for a second. "It's just this one," she said, breathless. "But how do they know?"
As the meal progressed, Nicholas began to question his motive for an elegant dinner. Paige had urged him to order, since she hadn't had any of the dishes before, and he'd done that. The appetizer--a bird's nest filled with chicken and vegetables--had been delicious, but Paige had no more than touched a straw mushroom to her mouth when her lip began to swell like a balloon. She had held ice to it with her napkin, and it subsided a little, but she must have been allergic. Then when the waiter had brought the complimentary palate-cleansing sorbet, frothed in dry ice that spilled over onto your lap like the mist of a Scottish moor, Paige had argued with the man, insisting that since they hadn't ordered it, they shouldn't have to pay. She had watched Nicholas eating throughout the entire meal, refusing to pick up one of the three forks or spoons until he did. More than once Nicholas caught her with her guard down, staring at her dish as if it were another wall to scale in an obstacle course.
When the check came, the waiter brought Paige a long-stemmed rose, and she smiled across the table at Nicholas. She looked exhausted. Nicholas couldn't believe he hadn't thought of it from this angle: to Paige, this had all been work, almost a kind of test. After Nicholas's credit card had been returned, Paige bolted from her chair before he could even pull it out for her. She walked quickly through the path of least resistance toward the door, head down, not looking at the other diners she passed.