A Simple Distance (2 page)

The first time we met, Cynthia, still physically shaken, hands trembling from the recency of the shock, let go our formal roles and told me things more fit for friend than lawyer. She told me how messy things had gotten.

Linda had moved from their flat but left her things behind: her bed, her couch, the kitchen table. Only took underwear, bras, and extra shoes. She had a thing for shoes. They had to match her socks and belt and the trim of her gay-boy shirts.

Cynthia’d told her to leave and to take the dog. She’d developed asthma from the dander of an animal in the house.

At first, I’d tried to refocus the discussion. I told her,
Cynthia, I need for you to clarify what you want to achieve from this process.

But Cynthia wasn’t easily led.
I need her to answer for this thing I’m left with. This thing of everything to nothing in a single day
, she’d said. That wasn’t what I meant and she knew it but continued anyway.
Linda said it had been building for months, her feelings for Cara, but she’d only just realized it now.

Resigned to Cynthia’s insistence on things emotional, I ceased interrupting. Just listened.

She told me she loved me a lot. And then she took it back. Said it wasn’t true, ever, and that now she had it with someone else.

Cynthia had gone through Linda’s photographs from before they met. The ones Linda’d never let her see, in the red box on the highest shelf so only Linda—six feet tall and go-go-gadget arms—could reach. She was a compulsive photographer of social events. Everything to look like a party. Cynthia hated that, so Linda only ever took pictures of Sadie and the dog.

Cynthia had pulled up a chair—Linda’s, red vinyl from the kitchen table—and brought it down. Dividers the size of index cards, pink and blue, separated the stages of Linda’s life. Three or four past girlfriends. The one that wouldn’t talk to her anymore, who frothed lattes into pictures across the street from their flat, naked from the waist up, at some lake. Linda behind her in the next one, bare as well. Nipples a dull gray from the low contrast of the black-and-white film, and protruding toward each other—almost touching. Lots of kissing with her different girls. Cynthia made me look. She was scared she would vanish altogether because she was nowhere in that box.

She’s turned off her cell phone to avoid my ring, but I leave messages. I’ve told her she needs to get her things out. I can’t sleep in our bed.

Linda’s things were to go from the house, leaving it empty.

The air in my lungs, Jean … Now that the dog’s gone, there’s nothing else inside.

I had to cut in.
What about Sadie?
A reminder, not a correction.

She sighed.
And Sadie
. Back.
Of course, Sadie. Always.

That was all she needed. Ready, then, to move forward with the real purpose of our discussion.

At the time, the law on the issue was in a state of flux.

Later, the day before my mom arrived, I asked Cynthia to stop by my office. A new appellate decision had strengthened her claim considerably.
This decision
, I told her,
will likely mean the difference of sole, instead of joint, custody of your daughter.

We had been discussing the upcoming hearing. Until this new decision, we’d prepared for a fight, tough but fair. I’d prepared Cynthia for the likelihood of joint custody; the rule that would guide the judge’s decision being the
best interests
of Sadie.

But the California Court of Appeal, the court that says what goes until the State Supreme Court says otherwise, had up and changed the game. Second-parent adoption, they said, was no longer valid. Not being the birth mother, Linda suddenly had no rights.

The court had just handed my client a royal flush. It was as if I’d been given all the answers to the questions on my final exam a week early.

But that wasn’t what I’d wanted to do with my life. Harm. To me, it seemed we should still be guided by Sadie’s
best interests
, set adult feelings aside. I asked just to check,
How’s Sadie?

Cynthia’s long stare out the window was a pretty good indication. That morning she’d pushed Sadie on her bicycle, new with training wheels; feet up, on the handlebars, away from the pedals so they wouldn’t get caught in the revolutions. Sadie’d said to her,
Push me so fast I can’t even stand it!
Cynthia’s hand on Sadie’s back, she’d pushed the girl faster than was safe because too much had already been denied her child. She couldn’t add to the list.

Sadie had started to get sick all on her own: ran fevers and took to bed, sweat through the night and soaked her sheets. Cynthia learned her patterns, left fresh night shirts by her pillow in case Sadie wanted to start over in the middle of the night.

She’s fine until she sees Linda
, Cynthia told me.
But when they’re together, and then Linda leaves … It’s like reopening a wound. Different every time.

Days prior, Sadie had sat silently in the front window, curled up into a ball, rocking herself back and forth. Cynthia had pulled the girl to her lap on the couch, and they rocked together, watching the ocean, its disappearing white lines, until sunset. The waves grown taller with winter. Other times, Sadie just screamed and screamed. Screeching at the top of her lungs as Linda drove away. Threw herself against the window, slapping palm to pane.

What could I say? I said nothing.

Jean?

Yes, Cynthia?

What are we doing to my daughter?

CHAPTER 3

My mother called me again the morning she was supposed to leave Baobique, but I didn’t pick up. I cursed the three-hour time difference—her ring waking me before my coffeemaker could ease me into morning the way I preferred. Just before the opening, closing, slamming doors of my next-door neighbor readying and leaving, Procter & Gamble usually anticipated my most basic of needs, had something ready for me like a silent, supportive partner. Programmable, twenty-five dollars secondhand off the Internet: unconditional love. The touch of the spoon against the inside of my mug, the reassuring clink as I stirred in too much sugar, too much cream.

I ignored her ring, lay in bed on the verge of getting up, pulling on shorts, starting the day with a jog and some music on my Walkman, but her second call caught me off guard—changed my plans.

I picked up to her raspy
Hello.

She spoke in that low voice of hers, the one that says,
I’m weak, take care of me
, the one that makes me want to scream, the one she used all those years she lay in bed without actually being sick, with her
Reader’s Digest
condensed classics and jug, always a jug, of cheap white wine, stretching the telephone cord long beyond its intended curl. I know because all those years I sat at the top of the front stairs just outside her door, and watched.

She whispered,
I’ve packed my bags and had Fatima put them in the Jeep. I was waiting for your call about England. Were you able to change the tickets?

I hated her for needing me; hated her double for choosing me second, over Auntie Lil in London; hated myself most for feeling this way.

Never having called the airline, I continued to lie.
No, Mom. The airline wouldn’t let me change them. You can’t visit Aunt Lillian. I’m sorry. She’ll have to fend for herself this time.

Hollow, like a ghost giving in, she agreed.
Okay, Jean. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll call Lillian when I reach you.

* * *

My mom told me once how kids used to tease her, call her wide hips the spreading baobab tree, pretend to take their shelter there. Yet those hips never sheltered me, and when it came my turn to do the blocking, to break the wind, call the airline, to soften the violence of its impact before it reached her small body; when it came my turn, I stood as thin as possible beside her, closed my eyes, held my breath, hoped it would just blow through.

That morning I lay in bed longer than planned, remembered a time when I was five and sick to my stomach. I had called for my mom to come help, not even help really, but just to come and maybe hold my hand. I remembered she called back from her bedroom and she said:
Oh, just do it yourself, child.

That morning I did not rise. Stared across the room at unanswered letters.

* * *

I picked her up at the gate. American Airlines, flight 2330. Baobique to Puerto Rico; Puerto Rico to Houston; Houston to San Francisco. Three legs to my mother’s journey away from her home, to mine, to rest after a year of caring for her dying brother.

As always, she had too many bags: an overnight case; two large paper shopping bags, handles tied together with twine; her purse, overstuffed. The steward helped her off the plane only to hurry her along.

Her eyes were red like the blood in those oranges whose name she used to write on the grocery lists I could never completely purchase. She was shorter, her neck more rounded, than the last time I’d seen her. It took me aback.

Oh my God! What’s the matter with your eyes?

Here, take my bags from that man and give him a dollar.

We hugged, leaned in with just our shoulders, embraced with just our forearms; pressed our cheeks together, left as much space as possible in between.

I took her luggage from the steward. Tipped him. Moved on to baggage claim.

On the drive home, her bags in both the backseat and the trunk of my Mazda, as if each day of her scheduled threeweek stay would require a distinct new outfit, she told me about her eyes.
It’s the stress that’s making me sick. Ever since George’s funeral. All those people on the porch one on top of the other, touching all my things … They tried to let them in the house, you know. My house! As if I had no say in the matter at all. Mama acts as if Godwyn isn’t even mine.

Well, the title’s joint, Mom. You both have equal say.

Jean, I’ve spent the past nine years in that house! The only reason Mama wants it now is because of what I’ve made of it.
She started to cough.

After the funeral she had lain in bed for two days, head throbbing, throat swollen and closing in on itself every time she swallowed, lungs too heavy to push all the air out, but chest too burdened to resist the exhale. Her right eye had turned red, perhaps from the exertion of pushing out the yellow mucus her head and lungs were trying to clear. Then, her left. The nurse, at the hospital named after my grandfather, said the redness was bacterial, gave her antibiotic drops to be used every four hours.

* * *

When my mom first returned to Baobique, Godwyn was practically abandoned. My grandfather, buried out back, who walked its rooms at night, was the favorite story of my cousins. To her nieces and nephews, my mom would say the ghost of her father only protected her. To her brothers, she admitted being frightened by the isolation of the house, just up the hill from Sommerset, its rough characters and drug smuggling, and not within sight, or earshot, of even a single neighbor. So Uncle Martin gave her the best bitch from his second litter. And Uncle George bought her a little handgun, like the kind my aunt shot her son-in-law with when he was beating my cousin. My mom kept it underneath her pillow when she slept, even though she never learned to use it.

Everyone thought she was crazy to move in. But later my cousins would come ’round asking about her health, hoping she’d pass before Granny, lose her hold on land they wanted to claim as their own inheritance, not hers.

The driveway, closely cut grass, she lined with yellow and green crotons. The approach to the house, small palms, just beginning to demand notice. The backdrop to the west, the Atlantic. And to the east, Morne Volcan, my mother’s strength—the mountain she’s looked to for anchor since she was a child. Volcan is covered in rainforest, shrouded in mist, bigger and more aware of its position than any other mountain on the small island. Her back porch, off the kitchen, looks at Volcan, as if to keep the mountain secret, while the eyes of visitors look toward the ocean from the public front.

Much of the estate is cliff, but parts are level enough for planting. So while her family, the Pascals, weren’t using the land, people from Sommerset, the village down the road, were.

They set up gardens.

Technically, they were supposed to pay rent to Uncle George, but the payments had never been strictly enforced because Sommerset was an important constituency of his. When my mom moved in, she decided the gardeners should start paying. The gardeners, however, thought otherwise.

Back then, my mom had a woman from Sommerset, Mrs. H, come up to help every day with the washing and cooking. Mrs. H’s husband sometimes came around to spray the fruit trees with pesticides banned in North America and to clear away underbrush. The first report of how the gardeners felt about paying rent came from Mrs. H, who’d heard it from her husband. Rumor had it that some of the men in Sommerset thought my mom was being quite presumptuous to come back to Baobique after thirty years, stay all alone at Godwyn, and tell them to pay rent for land they had been using for long before her return. Some of those men thought they should go up there late one night and
teach dat ’oman a lesson, na
, rough her up like only a man could. The rumor was repeated to my mom by the old man with the apple-core head who used to sleep in her shed at night in exchange for dinner; an arrangement which gave him food and shelter and gave my mom a second presence on the estate when she was asleep and most vulnerable.

Turned out to just be a rumor though. Unsettling only because it came from Sommerset.

* * *

My studio sat half a block from one of those trendy Bay Area streets, like 24th Street or Castro in San Francisco; 4th Street in Berkeley; mine being Piedmont in Oakland, and the whiteness of the walls offered me a blank slate of which I appeared to be in particular need.

It occurred to me, as I drove my mother home, that I had yet to place anything on those walls, and while for so long their lack of clutter had perhaps provided me with a certain solace, they had now turned into something of a little pebble fallen in my shoe that rubbed and rubbed and rubbed against my skin. I knew the walls would strike her as freakish. Again I’d be the odd duck, a failure at all things feminine, like simple decoration and sleeping with men.