She sipped champagne from a plastic cup and looked at herself in the mirror. She forced herself to look.
She remembered sitting in our living room then, with me and my sister, my brother and father, on the first New Year's Eve that all five of us had stayed up. She had shaped the day around making sure Buckley got enough sleep.
When he woke up after dark he was sure that someone better than Santa would come that night. In his mind he held a big bang image of the ultimate holiday, when he would be transported to toyland.
Hours later, as he yawned and leaned into my mother's lap and she finger-combed his hair, my father ducked into the kitchen to make cocoa and my sister and I served German chocolate cake. When the clock struck twelve and there was only distant screaming and a few guns shot into the air in our neighborhood, my brother was unbelieving. Disappointment so swiftly and thoroughly overtook him that my mother was at a loss for what to do. She thought of it as sort of an infant Peggy Lee's "Is that all there is?" and then bawling.
She remembered my father had lifted Buckley up into his arms and started singing. The rest of us joined in. "Let ole acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind, should ole acquaintance be forgot and days of auld lang syne!"
And Buckley had stared at us. He captured the foreign words like bubbles floating above him in the air. "Lang syne?" he said with a look of wonder.
"What does that mean?" I asked my parents.
"The old days," my father said.
"Days long past," my mother said. But then, suddenly, she had started pinching the crumbs of her cake together on her plate.
"Hey, Ocean Eyes," my father said. "Where'd you go on us?"
And she remembered that she had met his question with a closing off, as though her spirit had a tap--twist to the right and she was up on her feet asking me to help her clean up.
In the fall of 1976, when she reached California, she drove directly to the beach and stopped her car. She felt like she had driven through nothing but families for four days--squabbling families, bawling families, screaming families, families under the miraculous strain of the day by day--and she was relieved to see the waves from the windshield of her car. She couldn't help thinking of the books she had read in college. The Awakening. And what had happened to one writer, Virginia Woolf. It all seemed so wonderful back then--filmy and romantic--stones in the pocket, walk into the waves.
She climbed down the cliffs after tying her sweater loosely around her waist. Down below she could see nothing but jagged rocks and waves. She was careful, but I watched her feet more than the view she saw--I worried about her slipping.
My mother's desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of--the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end? She was thinking reach the waves, the waves, the waves, and I was watching her feet navigate the rocks, and when we heard her we did so together--looking up in shock.
It was a baby on the beach.
In among the rocks was a sandy cove, my mother now saw, and crawling across the sand on a blanket was a baby in knitted