Leaving Home: Short Pieces (4 page)

The note is inside the refrigerator, propped against a carton of orange juice.
I’m taking a break,
my mother has written
. Don’t worry about me.

“What’s she taking a break from?” I ask out loud.

“Sanity,” my brother Devon answers. “People don’t leave notes in refrigerators.”

Devon, who is eighteen and apparently knows everything, is looking at this the wrong way, in my opinion. Granted, I’m three years younger than he is, but I think Mom has shown a peculiar genius in leaving the note between the leftovers from yesterday’s lasagna and the bottle of canola oil: she knew that a message on the kitchen counter could easily be overlooked; but no matter what direction we were pulled in after school; no matter how much French verb conjugation I had to slog through or how many hours Devon spent making a racket with his garage band -- eventually, we will give into our growling hunger and find something to eat.

“Maybe we should call Dad,” I suggest.

Pretty much, a bomb would have to detonate inside our living room to warrant a phone call to my father during business hours. He works on Wall Street, trading futures.

He leaves at 4:30 AM to beat the traffic going into the city from White Plains, and he gets home after seven. The irony doesn’t escape me: he is so busy tracking what
might
happen that he’s hardly around to enjoy the here and now.

Devon shrugs. “She probably went out to…do whatever she does. You know.”

But the truth is, I have no idea what my mother does with her spare time. I mean, I guess maybe she likes to jog every now and then, or hit a good sale at a mall. I think sometimes she goes out and has lunch with one of her friends. But mostly, my vision of her is firmly planted in our house, like a vine too twined to be transplanted. Just like I used to believe that my kindergarten teacher slept underneath her desk, it is hard to picture my mother existing outside the boundaries of my home, of my life.

“She’ll be back in time to make dinner,” Devon says, and then he reaches out and messes up my hair. It is totally out of character for him – Devon is more likely to
accidentally
drop my toothbrush in the toilet than show me any sisterly affection – and somehow this compassion makes me feel worse, as if he is being nice to me in the way that people are nice to cancer patients or mentally challenged kids or anyone else who’s had such bad luck that you want to compensate with kindness. I go soft inside, like the egg that my mother cooks for us when we are sick. She serves it in a little half-cup with a daisy painted on the side. I always wondered what would happen if Devon and I both got sick at once; since there is only one egg cup.

I realize, with a little shiver, that I have never seen my mother sick. I mean, sure, she gets colds and allergies, but how can someone survive over a decade without being so sick she just crawls into bed and has someone else wait on her hand and foot? Then again, who would fill that role for my mother? I consider what it might be like to feel lousy, but have to cook yourself your own egg and put it in the daisy cup.

And that’s how I realize my mother will not be home for dinner, for breakfast, maybe not forever.

Just so you know, I’m not stupid. I may only be in ninth grade but I get straight A’s; I score off the charts on the standardized tests we have to take at school. In this, I am the polar opposite of my brother, for whom school is not a journey, but a condition you outgrow.

I am, however, invisible. Devon’s surly enough to take up all the parenting time allotted to both of us. I hardly ever talk to my father, because he’s so busy that it seems ridiculous to think he’d care about what grade I got on my science project. And my mother’s usually running in a thousand directions at once.
I’ll listen in a minute
, she says, but then she never quite gets around to it.

A little while after we find the note, I track Devon down in the garage, wailing on his bass while two of his friends play the drums and the guitar. This week they are calling themselves Goths in Thongs. Last week, it was the Undead Puppies.

Devon sees me and stops playing. “What,” he says, an accusation.

“She’s still not back.”

He rolls his eyes. “Jenna, it’s only been an hour.”

I cross my arms. “I called her cell phone and she didn’t answer.”

“So what? Maybe she turned it off. Maybe she’s at a movie.”

“Dude,” says Yak, who plays the drums. That’s not his real name, by the way. I think it’s Absalom or Alistair or something like that. “Is there a problem?”

“Our mother’s gone missing.”

“Sweet,” Yak says. “Could she take mine with her?”

I leave them alone in the garage and sit on the edge of the porch. There are flowers all along the edge of it – a net of purple and cobalt; a startling orange tiger lily, its open mouth raw and pink.

The portable phone I’m holding (just in case) rings, startling me. “Hi,” I say breathlessly, but it is only my father. He calls every day from the station, to let my mother know which train he’s catching. I think it’s less about her peace of mind and more about making sure his dinner is hot when he gets home.

“Pumpkin,” he says. “Mom around?”

“No,” I tell him. “She left us a note –“

“Well, tell her I caught the 5:58,” he says.

“Look, Dad –“

“Gotta run, honey, if I want to make this train…”

He hangs up, and I let the phone fall into my lap, where it rings again almost immediately. “Dad?” I say, picking it up.

“No,” my mother answers, “it’s me.”

“
Mom
? Where
are
you?”

In the silence, I can hear other people talking – loudspeakers, announcements I can’t quite make out. “Jenna, listen, there’s meatloaf for supper,” she says. “It’s in the tinfoil on the second shelf of the fridge. You can open up a bag of salad, too.”

“You mean you won’t be here for dinner?”

“Did you talk to your father?” she asks.

“He said he’s catching the 5:58.” My throat closes like a fist. “Mom, what’s going on?”

For a moment, she’s quiet. Then she says, “I’ll call you when I get there.”

“Get
where
?” I demand, but an electric eel of static crackles in my ear.

“Jenna,” my mother says. “I’m losing you.” And as the line goes dead I think,
No, it’s the other way around
.

#

By nine o’clock at night, we are all sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for the phone to ring. My father is still wearing his dress shirt, but it’s creased like a map and the sleeves are rolled up past his elbows. In front of him is the bowl of Life cereal he didn’t really eat for dinner, solidifying into cement. “Jenna,” he says, for the bazillionth time, “you have to remember
something
.”

It figures, the one time anyone wants to listen to me, I can’t remember anything important. I have already told them everything Mom said; the problem is, we really need to know what she
didn’t
.

“Could it have been an airport?” Devon asks. “Is that what the announcements sounded like?”

“I don’t know.”

My father has already called the police, but they told him that you can’t file a missing persons report for twenty-four hours. And besides, it’s not really a missing person if the person herself
chose
to go missing. That, the sergeant said, is just bad luck.

He scrubs his hands over his face. “Okay,” he says, as if telling himself this might make it come true.

I have been tugging at a thread on the placemat in front of me. “Do you think it’s something we did?” I ask, my voice so tiny that it rolls like a pebble to the center of the table.

At first, I assume that nobody’s heard me, or that they’ve ignored me, which is par for the course. But then Devon looks up. “I forgot to fold my wash. She asked me, like, ten times, but I never got around to it. And I kind of didn’t take out the trash either.”

His face pinkens. “It was
pouring
, and I knew she’d do it if I didn’t, anyway.”

“I told her it was practically child abuse to make me take the late bus home after soccer practice, when she was just sitting here anyway and could come pick me up,” I admit. “And remember when you wouldn’t stop playing your stupid guitar and she was trying to balance the checkbook?”

“Maybe it wasn’t just us,” Devon says, and he turns to my father. “Did you guys have a fight?”

My father scowls. “Of course not. We barely had time to talk last week, much less fight. I was busy working on that Hashomoto deal.”

I rub a crease into the placement with my thumb. “Maybe it’s not something we did. Maybe it’s something we
didn’t
.”

The phone rings, and my dad answers it on speaker phone so that we all can hear.

“Ian,” my mother says. “Hi.”

Although we’ve all talked about how we’re going to tiptoe around conversation when the moment actually arrives, my father completely blows it. “Charlotte, where the hell are you?”

“San Francisco!” I can hear the smile in her voice, bright as gold. “Can you believe it?”

“Mom?” Devon interrupts. “Is this because of my laundry?”

My brother can be such an idiot. “Mom,” I pipe in, only because I want her to know I’m here, too, listening. “Is the weather nice out there?”

My father and Devon look at me like I’m crazy. “Charlotte,” my father says evenly. “You’ve made your point. You can come back now.”

“I’m not making a point, Ian. I’m just…taking a vacation.”

A vacation. My mother is taking a vacation. From all of us.

“I don’t understand,” my father says.

“Well, you should,” my mother replies. “I’m doing what you do, every day: trading futures.” As soon as she hangs up, Devon dials *69.

“Good evening, the Ritz-Carlton,” a honeyed voice says. “How may I direct your call?”

My father pushes a button, disconnects us. “Mom’s staying at the Ritz-Carlton?” I ask.

“You could cut off her credit cards,” Devon suggests. “I saw that on Law & Order, once.”

“I’m not cutting off your mother’s credit cards,” my father replies. “This is just her way of going on strike.”

“Maybe we should cross the picket line, then,” Devon suggests.

“We,” my father announces, “will hardly even notice she’s gone.”

#

That night, we make a plan. I will be in charge of dishwashing; Devon – in spite of his lousy track record – will do the laundry. Dad will take over vacuuming and mopping of all floors. When we go to bed, the house is sparkling, perfect. Mom will come home, I think, and will be absolutely stunned.

Assuming we can keep it up.

My father comes in to tuck me in, even though he usually doesn’t do that anymore. He sits down on the edge of my bed. “Dad,” I ask. “What do you do, for real?”

“I’m a trader, honey. You know that.”

“Yeah, but what do you
do
?”

“Say I want to buy oil for the house for next winter. I can commit now to buy it at a certain price arranged by the oil company. But maybe I have a different view about what the price of oil is going to be. Maybe I think that war will break out again, and the price of oil will rise. Maybe I think that after the election, the price will drop. My job’s about hunches…if I think the price will be lower in the future, I can agree to sell oil a year from now that I don’t own yet. If I’m right, I can buy that oil in the future and immediately resell it to the company I contracted with and make a profit. Of course, if the price of oil actually goes
higher
, I lose big time. Basically, I’m betting on the future. And I can bet it’s going to get better, or I can bet it’s going to get worse.”

I wonder what commodity my mother thinks she is trading in. Love? Respect? Self-confidence?

My father leans over and kisses my forehead. “You look so much like her.”

I have heard that all my life. “Do you really think she’s just taking a vacation?”

“How could it be anything else?” my father says, but I get the feeling he’s asking me, not giving me the answer.

#

Before you could see the hairline cracks in our family – when Dad was actually home for dinner; before Devon hit puberty and became the slouched, hairy, sarcastic beast that he is now; back when my mother seemed
happy
– we used to play a game at dinner. Each night we’d take turns asking a question for which there was no easy answer:
If you had a million dollars, what would you do with it? If you could change
one event in history, what would it be? What would the title of your biography be, and
who would you want to write it?

I can’t remember all the answers, but there were definitely some that surprised me. Like when Devon said that if he had to choose one person to have dinner with, it would be Nelson Mandela, when I would have bet my entire state quarter collection that he hadn’t even known who Nelson Mandela
was
. Or when my father said that the one thing he’d take to a desert island – the only thing he needed – was not his Blackberry, but my mother. The one that sticks in my mind, though, was a question my mother had asked:
If you had to have amnesia for the rest of your life, and you could only keep one
memory, what would it be?