Why They Run the Way They Do (23 page)

I was standing in the bathroom with a frothy mouthful of toothpaste, and they were in the hallway right outside the door, apparently thinking I'd already gone to bed.

“I wouldn't want to go back either,” my father said.

“Do you think I should make things unpleasant for her here?”

“You know that's not what I'm saying,” my father said. “I just think you two are having an awfully good time together. She's not recuperating anymore. She's on vacation.”

I'd held the toothpaste in my mouth so long that I was nearly gagging on it, but I was determined to stay quiet, so I let it dribble out of my mouth and into the sink.

“The doctor said the sooner she gets back into the swing of things, the happier she'll be. Her life is out there waiting for her.”

“Then her life can wait a little longer,” my mother said. “A mother knows. Don't look at me like I'm a fool. She had a terrible accident. She was. She nearly. She could have—”

“I know,” he said.

“I know,” he said.

“I know,” he said.

“Margie, I know,” he said.

On Sunday—was it Sunday? The house was so fogged with smoke that it was hard to read the calendar—we played gin. My eyes stung as I looked at the cards; our cigarettes sat smoking themselves in ashtrays as we lay down our hands and added up points. She asked me about my job. I worked for the state, making public buildings more accessible for the disabled. It was important work. People depended on me. She gave me some advice on a number of personnel situations she knew nothing about, and it was all spot-on. It was like she knew the answers to my problems before I could even get out the questions.

That night, the night before I left, I went into her room. She was lying in bed reading a magazine, and I sat on the side of her bed. When I was a child, sometimes I would come in there in the middle of the night, jolted from a frightening dream, and my father would trade beds with me, slumping down the hall to my room so I could have the safe space beside my mother. She lay the magazine down on her chest. She looked skinny in her nightgown.

“What?” she said.

“I'm sorry I don't call more often,” I said.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Really?”

I ignored her and went on. “I get busy, and it's just a whirlwind, and suddenly it's been two weeks and I haven't talked to you.”

She set her hand on my hand. We were not touchy people. I could count the number of times she'd hugged me. “I understand what's happening,” she said. “But you don't have to do this.”

“I know. But I want to. I want you to know that I think about you every day, even when I don't call.”

“I appreciate that,” she said. “But it's not like your father and I sit in this house all day waiting for our children to call. We do things, you know. We have lives.”

“I know,” I said. But secretly I did not believe her. I could not imagine having a life of my own once my children were grown. I
would
wait by the phone. I would drive them crazy. They were nine and five, and I couldn't conceive of a world when they would not be on my mind every second of every day. Was I pathetic?

“You're not pathetic,” my mother said.

Against the wishes of my doctors, my teachers, my father, and just about anyone else who cared to weigh in, I skipped the rest of sophomore year. I did the work. My mother even hired a tutor to get me through French. But I didn't go back to school. I stayed home, and the weather turned warm, and sometimes we sat on the front porch and smoked, and sometimes we went for short walks around the block, and no one hit me with a car. O. J. Simpson's glove didn't fit, my friends started coming over more, and my mother and I played fewer hands of gin. My friends, because they really were my friends, told me I reeked of smoke and that unless I wanted to join the burnouts in the smoking section (a small corner of the playground—the end of the era when this was allowed), I probably shouldn't bring my nasty little habit back to high school with me. And so in August I quit the cigarettes. And my mother dropped me in front of the high school on the first day of my junior year and went home alone. And when O. J. Simpson was acquitted, I was sitting in European History and didn't even know it.

I woke up gasping in the middle of the night, certain that something—a large appliance, possibly—was resting on my chest. I lay in bed listening to the familiar sounds of my parents' house, indulging in a bizarre fantasy in which my lungs were dirty carpets that I could hang on the clothesline in the backyard and beat clean with a rolling pin. I went into the kitchen for some cold water.

She was sitting at the kitchen table. Her face was pinched as if she were in pain. The pack of cigarettes was beside her, but she wasn't smoking.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked.

“Check the fridge,” she said. “See if there are a couple more years in there.”

“Mom,” I said. “One more thing. And then I promise that's it.”

She looked at me with slightly squinted eyes. Maybe it wasn't pain, I thought. Maybe it was just the light. “Did you kill someone?”

“No,” I said.

“Treason?”

“Seriously, okay? For one second? I just wanted to thank you.”

“All right,” she said. She closed her eyes. She set her fingers lightly on the pack of cigarettes but did not take one. It was as if she just wanted to assure herself they were there.

“Don't you want to know what I'm thanking you for, specifically?”

“For scraping peanut butter off your jelly sandwiches.”

“For not making me go back to school that year. For letting me stay home. Everybody said it was the wrong thing to do, but somehow you knew it was right.”

She opened her eyes. She took out a cigarette. “I didn't know anything,” she said. She turned the cigarette in her hand, but she didn't light it. “For all I knew, I was doing terrible damage to you,
enabling
you. For all I knew, you'd live at home for the rest of your life and never do anything, never make anything of yourself. I just made it up as I went along.”

“And look where I am now,” I said. “All because of that. All because I knew that no matter what happened to me, I could always come home, and you would always let me stay as long as I needed to stay.”

“We lucked out,” she said. “We're a lucky lot, all of us.”

“No,” I said. “It wasn't luck, Mom. It was you.”

“Stop,” she said. “It's late. You've got to fly tomorrow.”

“Mom—” I tried to take a deep breath, but my lungs were tight, so suddenly tight that I thought: I can never, ever smoke another cigarette again. “I won't stop,” I said. “Are you listening to me? I want you to hear this. Are you listening? It was
you
.”

That is what I always planned to say, what I should have said, what I would have said, if the phone call that day, that suffocating July day, the day I stood in my kitchen and watched my glistening son wrap my sparkling daughter in the badminton net, had been from my mother. But it was instead from my father, his voice calm, gentle, because I was his baby girl, and it was his job to tell me this terrible thing. Your mom collapsed, he told me. In the morning. In the kitchen. Pouring herself a cup of coffee. They'd rushed her to the hospital, but there was nothing anyone could do. She had a tumor in her brain—who knew how long it had been there? Six, eight months?—and she died in the ER.

“Did she say anything?” I asked him.

“Sweetheart,” he said. “There was no time.”

This was unacceptable. So I tell myself the story. I
make
time. I rewrite it in my head as summer turns to fall, rewrite as I drive the children to school, as I sit at my desk at work, as I lie awake in bed long after Kevin has fallen asleep. The story's not perfect by any means. In every version, my mother gets her cigarettes back, but I alter the order of things, meddle with the point of view, change the setting. It is, and always will be, a work in progress. I indulge myself in my revisions. Sometimes my father has a larger role; other times my brothers arrive with their own bags of conflict; other times my children show up and, being children, save us all from our sadness. And sometimes my mother is angrier, and sometimes she is sicker, and sometimes she is more heroic. In one version, she and I take a train across Canada. We sit in the smoking car. We play cards on the table between our seats. We steady our trembling coffees. We nap, using our sweaters as pillows. We wake and marvel at the snow, and learn our lessons this way.

The truth is, I never
saw the plane.

It was just after nine in the morning and we were in the S formation across the middle of the football field when, on the first note of “Seventy-six Trombones,” the unmistakable
squack
exploded from my clarinet. Split reed. Nothing to do but make the long walk back to the field house and get a new one from my case. I swore, broke ranks, trudged toward the squat building that sat fifty yards behind the end zone. I was sweaty and thirsty by the time I reached it—it was September, still summer, really—and I gathered my hair in one hand and bent down for a quick slurp from the drinking fountain. It was one of those awful fountains, the kind where the water trickles feebly from the hole, and I had to touch my lips to the spout to get a half-decent mouthful.

I heard it then, heard it while thinking about all the lips and tongues that had touched this fountain before mine. I heard the roar and turned my head without lifting my mouth from the cool metal. I did not see the plane. I saw, instead, the thirty-two-minus-one members of the Somerville Senior High marching band lift their eyes to the sky, gaze together as with one astonished face at something I could not see, would never see (though I would say I had, and not even the people who marched beside me would remember otherwise), the friends of my youth in the shape of an S, some with instruments still at their mouths, frozen in what would surely be the most historically significant moment of their lives, they all a part now of the unfolding future, linked forever with those on the plane simply by being the last to see them—or perhaps even be seen
by
them, a giant S with one slice missing?—as they fell.