When the Lights Go Out

“We saw our baby,” I told him, whispering the words into his ear. “We saw the heartbeat. Everything is fine.”

  jessie

  I’m out the door early, hurrying to the side of the carriage home to collect my bike, but when I arrive, I see that she’s gone. That she’s not there. That the spot where I left her last night is completely empty.

  There’s a moment of panic.

  Someone has stolen Old Faithful from me.

  My heart picks up speed, my face warming with frustration and anger and fear. I look up and down the alleyway as my heart sinks. For a minute, tears well in my eyes. I could cry.

  But then I remember leaving Old Faithful tethered to the bike rack outside the Art Institute. No one has taken her from me. I left her there.

  I take the Brown Line out to Albany Park, getting off at Kimball. From there it’s a walk to Mom’s and my old home, a classic Chicago-style bungalow that’s boxy and brick with a low-pitched roof on a street where every single home is a replica of the next. The desperation has gotten under my skin now, a do-or-die need to find my birth certificate, to find my social security card, to figure out who the hell I am. I need to make a final sweep of the home to see if there’s anything there, anything I may have missed. Because the estate sale will kick off soon, and then it will be too late. Everything that was once mine will be gone.

  I’ve only been gone a couple of days. But as I make my way down the sidewalk, I feel homesick. I miss Mom more than ever. I miss my home. The sight of the for-sale sign plunged into the green grass makes my stomach churn, my Realtor’s pretty face smeared across the corner of it. I’d picked her, this Realtor, because I saw her face and name on a similar sign somewhere down the street. There was a number to call and so I called it. And like that, the house is on the market and soon, any evidence of my time with Mom will be gone.

  The house looks different than it did before. The only thing still here are the ghosts we’ve left behind. Aside from our house, the rest of the block looks annoyingly the same, as if no one noticed that I’d left or that Mom died, which most likely they didn’t. The only person I see outside is our neighbor Mr. Henderson from next door. There he stands on his own front porch, thinning hair standing vertical, a cigar in hand. Smoke billowing around his head. Mr. Henderson wears corduroy pants, slippers, a fisherman cardigan. Though as far as I know, he doesn’t fish. Instead he teaches English lit at a local college and is pretentious as all get-out. Mr. Henderson couldn’t be bothered to help after Mom’s cancer spread to the bones, leaving her far more susceptible to fracture. She fell one morning when I was at school, shattering a hip, lying there on her back, calling out an open window for help.

  He heard her cries as he sat there in his own front room, sucking away on his cigar. No doubt he heard her cries, though later, as the ambulance carried her away and he stood watching from his porch steps—merely a snoop and not a Samaritan—he claimed he did not.

  I pay extra attention to the sidewalk as I walk along, taking care not to step on the cracks. Not that it matters because Mom wouldn’t feel it anyway if my footfalls broke her back. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

  I cross the street, refusing to say hello to Mr. Henderson, refusing to meet his curious eye. I dig into my bag for the keys, climbing up the stairs and to the front door.

  This neighborhood has been around for near forever. Most of the homes are circa 1920-something, during some sort of housing boom when thousands of bungalows sprung up overnight, fulfilling dreams of homeownership for that exploding middle class. Because the homes were practical and affordable. And because there were a ton of them. Up and down the street, all I see is nothing but trees and brick, trees and brick. Trees and brick as far as the eye can see. I have no doubt Mom chose Albany Park to live because it’s relatively affordable, a good place to raise kids. Money was a luxury Mom and I didn’t have. Not that I can say I grew up poor, because I didn’t. But Mom was frugal and we weren’t rich.

  We planned a big dinner out for when the cancer was finally in remission for the second time around. Gibsons Steakhouse. Mom was going to buy a new dress to wear because she never spent money on herself. Any time there was a little extra to spare, she spent it on me.

  Needless to say, Gibsons Steakhouse never happened.

  The day Mom found out the cancer was back, she was sitting outside on the front stoop when I got home from school. She’d been to the doctor for back pain, the kind that no amount of ibuprofen could fix. Pain she hadn’t told me about until that afternoon. She thought it was a herniated disc, back strain, sciatica. Effects of the job.

  As it turned out, it was the breast cancer, back for vengeance. Metastasized to the bones, the lungs.

  She told me to sit. She held my hand, caressed each finger one at a time while I committed to memory the length and shape of her fingers, the asymmetry of the knucklebones, the blue rivers of veins that swept across the thinning skin.

  She said to me that day on the stoop, Jessie, I’m dying. I’m going to die.

  I cried. But she said it was all right. She wasn’t afraid to die. She was stoic. When? I asked, like some stupid child. Like Mom had any way of knowing exactly when it would happen.

  What she said was Sooner or later we all die, Jessie. It’s only a matter of time. And this is mine.

  I unlock the door and step inside. I’m inundated with the smell almost immediately. The smell of Mom. Her hand lotion, Crabtree & Evelyn’s Summer Hill. It nearly knocks me from my feet. It’s diffused through the rooms and if I didn’t know any better, I’d think that Mom was still here with me. Heart still ticking, not yet dead. I hear that death rattle, the saliva pooling there in the back of her throat. The nurses’ gentle footfalls, close enough to touch. As if they’re still there, still walking in orbits around me. Lathering lotion on Mom’s hands and feet, turning her every few hours to keep bedsores from forming on her skin.

  The smell of the lotion is overpowering. It binds to the millions of tiny little hairs in my nose, bringing me to my knees every time I breathe. Mom.

  And I find that I’m looking for her, half-certain that when I turn she’ll be standing there in the arched doorway of the kitchen, sagging body leaning against the doorway because she doesn’t have the energy to hold it upright anymore, a soft cotton hat covering her bald head. Asking how I got along at school today in that way that she does, teeth gritted through the pain that managed to breeze in and past the narcotics sometimes.

  How’d you get along at school today, Jessie?

  But it’s not real, I remind myself.

  The nurses are not here.

  Mom is dead.

  And only then am I aware of the silence. Of the earsplitting silence that now worms its way through the cracks of our home.

  I don’t know where to begin. I searched the entire home already, but I look anyway, starting in my bedroom, planning to work my way down in search of the social security card. I pluck desk and dresser drawers from their tracks. I dig beneath clothes I’ve intentionally left in the dresser drawers, those I no longer need. I lift rugs from the floor and check beneath. I canvass my closet. No luck.

  I make my way to Mom’s bedroom, where I see that the liquidator has begun to tag items for sale. Mom’s clothes now hang from a rolling rack beside her bed. I run my hands over a knit cardigan, her favorite. If I’d had my wits about me at the time, I would have had Mom cremated in the cardigan so she could spend all of eternity in it. But instead she wore a hospital gown, white and wrinkled with snowflakes, a single tie on the otherwise open back. The funeral home gathered her body from the hospital within hours after she died. But there was a mandatory waiting period before the cremation could begin. Twenty-four hours, in case I changed my mind.

  I spent those twenty-four hours parked outside the funeral home’s doors, sitting on the curb because they didn’t have a bench. And because I couldn’t bring
myself to go home without Mom.

  The liquidator will take some 40 percent of all sales, which is fine by me. Anything so that I don’t have to be involved in the process, so that I don’t have to watch our possessions walk out the door in the arms of someone new.

  I pull open the closet door to reveal a large walk-in. It’s empty now, all of Mom’s clothes moved to the rack beside the bed. Only hooks and a mirror remain—a silver-framed oval mirror that Mom and I used to make silly faces in front of when I was a girl. I’d stand on a chair so that I could see inside, and there we’d stare at our reflections side by side in the glass.

  The mirror hangs on the closet wall, an oversight only, for it won’t be long before the liquidator pulls that too from the wall and sticks a price tag on it, snatching memories right along with it, memories of my crossed eyeballs, Mom’s fish face.

  I run a hand along the glass, remembering how sometimes we didn’t make silly faces at all. How sometimes I’d just sit on the floor beside her feet and watch as Mom stared at herself, her dark hair and eyes so unlike the dishwater-blond hair that sat on my head, the tufts of eyebrow hair that stuck straight up, same as they do now. Unlike me, Mom didn’t have dimples. My dimples are much more than simple holes in the cheeks, but more like deep comma-shaped gorges. I didn’t get those from Mom. There isn’t one feature on my face that came from her.

  Even as a kid, I saw the way Mom looked when she stared at her reflection in the mirror. She looked sad. I wondered what she saw. For some reason I don’t think it was the same pretty face that I saw.

  I’m about to leave when I spot something out of the corner of my eye, something I’ve never noticed in Mom’s closet before. Something that would have otherwise been hidden behind the hems of clothes, except that now there are no clothes to taint the view.

  I have to look twice to be sure that it’s there, that I’m not only imagining it’s there. What it is is black, metal, covered in louvers. A door. A boxy little door that hovers less than a foot above the hardwood floors.

  I drop to my hands and knees and pull on the door’s knob, finding a crawl space on the other side. A crawl space. I never knew we had a crawl space before.

  The space is dark and dingy, the ceiling low. The floor is dirt, covered only by a thick sheet of plastic. I can’t believe I never found this place before. How many times did I dig my way through Mom’s closet for clues as to who my father could be? But as it so happened, I never dug far enough. Instead I gave up when I got to the clothes, taking for granted that there was nothing on the other side but a wall.

  Only one time did Mom bring my father up all on her own, without my begging. I was twelve years old. Mom had had a glass of wine before bed. She said to me that night, seconds before she fell asleep, head draped over the rock-hard sofa arm, A long time ago, I did something I’m not proud of, Jessie. Something that shames me. And that’s how I got you.

  The next thing I heard was the sound of her half-drunk snore, but by morning I couldn’t bring myself to ask what she’d meant by it.

  I reach inside the crawl space and drag something out. What it is, I don’t know. Not until I get it into the closet’s light do I see that it’s a plastic storage bin, and the adrenaline kicks in at the prospect of what I might find inside. My social security card, for one, but more likely, something having to do with my father, which suddenly, in this moment, takes precedence. Something Mom kept tucked away so that I wouldn’t find it.

  I tear the lid off, finding photo albums inside. I find myself feeling hopeful, wondering what I’ll find in them. Photos of Mom, photos of my father, photos of Mom and her own mom and dad.

  But of course not. Instead it’s me. All me.

  I set the album aside to take back to the carriage home with me.

  I crawl toward the crawl space, feeling blindly inside for another box. I can’t reach far enough in to grab it, and so I have to crawl in through the door. Inside, the space is only about thirty-six-inches tall. I’m not fully in before claustrophobia settles in. The dirty floors and wooden beams close in around me. The darkness is smothering. The only light comes from behind. I find another storage bin and drag it out backward, through the access panel and onto the closet floor, grateful for a little elbow room.

  I open the lid and have a look, hoping that this is the mother lode I’ve been in search of. The answer to all the questions I have. But it’s not. It’s nothing, just a bunch of inconsequential items in a plastic storage bin, which makes me realize this isn’t a secret crawl space at all, but just a crawl space. For storage. For stuff Mom had no other place to put.

  She didn’t intentionally keep this a secret from me. I just never knew it was here.

  I sigh, feeling uncomfortable and glum. I rise to my feet, stretching my hands above my head, arching my back. But my movements are quick and careless. The blood flees my brain as I stand up, leaving me light-headed and dizzy. All of these nights without sleep are taking their toll on me. I reach for the wall to steady myself, crashing into the mirror as I do. I watch on helplessly as the mirror loses its hold on the wall and I can’t catch it in time. I’m too slow to stop it from falling.

  It slips from its nail and slams to the ground, scratching the wall as it does, leaving a four-foot scrape in the paint. The entire mirror shatters before my eyes. Broken glass spreads like spiderwebs, chunks falling to the hardwood floors. And all I can think about is bad luck. Seven entire years of bad luck that await me now.

  I curse out loud, wondering if there’s any hope of salvaging the mirror. I start to gather the biggest chunks in my hand, careful that I don’t step on the tiny shards of glass.

  My eyes are so caught up in what’s happening on the floor that at first I don’t see the small compartment dug into the wall. A little recess carved there into the drywall, hidden behind where the mirror should go. A hole that’s been fitted with a sturdy box.

  And I think for a moment that my eyes deceive me. That I’m only imagining the compartment is there. Because why in the world would there be a secret storage compartment on Mom’s closet wall? I rub at my eyes, certain it will disappear as I do. But sure enough, it’s still here.

  For at least twenty seconds I stare at that box without moving.

  Mom had a stash of personal stuff she kept hidden from me.

  I think of all the times Mom and I looked together in the mirror when I was a girl. All I ever saw was a mirror—our own silly expressions looking back at us through the glass—but for Mom it was a portal to her private world, a gateway to the things she didn’t want me to see.

  It feels an enormous invasion of privacy for me to snoop but I can’t help myself. I reach my hand inside Mom’s secret box. There’s only one item there. It’s a scrap of glossy white paper pressed into the corner of the box. My chest clenches. I hold my breath.

  This could be something.

  Or, like the plastic storage bins hidden in the crawl space, this could be nothing.

  I have to use a fingernail to emancipate the scrap. When I do, I turn it over in my hands to see. It’s a photograph that some part of my memory reminds me I’ve seen before.

  But with the memory of the photograph comes the memory of Mom’s face. Openmouthed and afraid. She knew I’d seen it. But what happened next has been wiped clean from my brain’s hard drive. Either that or entombed beneath a gazillion other memories, harder than others to dig up.

  Mom hid this photograph from me.

  It’s the kind of photograph that looks a little dated, a little old. Not crazy old, like archaic. But older than me. The colors are faded, the blues a little less blue, and the greens a little less green than they used to be. It’s a picture of a lake. A long seashore of blue. Tan sand, darker where the water hits it. White ripples of waves. Evergreen trees line the edges of the lake. There is a pier suspended over the water, one that looks unsound, unsafe. Like at any moment it could sin
k into the lake and get carried away with the waves. If I squint my eyes up tight, there’s a boat out there on the water. A sailboat, just a simple sloop with a single white mast. That’s what I see.

  Mom knew a whole lot about sailboats, which she relayed to me when we used to walk past DuSable Harbor on occasion, hand in hand. See that one over there, Jessie? she’d ask, slipping her hand away long enough to point at it. I’d pretend to look. Pretend to look because I didn’t really care, her words falling on deaf ears. That’s a cutter, or, that’s a catamaran, she’d tell me. She had a book on them, a heavy coffee-table book called Sailing. Though as far as I knew, Mom had never once stepped foot on a sailboat in her entire life. At least not since I’ve been alive. I forget sometimes that Mom had a life that preceded mine.

  But the lake and the sailboat are only an afterthought to the image I see, because there’s also a man in the photograph, one with brown hair and a large stature. He’s tall and husky with thick wrists exposed by a flannel shirt that’s rolled up to the elbows. There’s a watch on a right wrist, a hat in his hand. He stands with his back to the camera, blurred at the edges because he wasn’t standing still when the shutter button was pressed. He’s not centered on the photo paper, as if he was moving away when the picture was snapped.

  The photograph wasn’t meant to be of him.

  The central object is the sailboat. The picture is of the boat. And the man only got in the way. By today’s terms, a photobomb.

  The man stands with his hands on his hips, left knee bent a bit. His head is pitched to the right. He has blue jeans on—saggy ones, not formfitting. The ends are fraying, turning white. One of his gym shoes is untied. Strands of hair move in the wind.

  I wish that he would turn and look at me, so that I could see his eyes, the shape of his nose. Whether we look anything alike.

  Is this man my father?

  Why did Mom hide this photo from me?

  Why did she not want me to know anything about this lake or this boat or this man?