Fell of Dark (2 page)

Mother

MY FATHER DIED ALMOST
nine years ago, and my mother hasn't slept a night in what was their bed. I've seen her slumped on the couch, but usually, almost always, she sleeps in an armchair. Not a reclining armchair either. She piles blankets on top of her and falls asleep half sitting, her legs propped on the ottoman; a crossword puzzle, a pair of reading glasses, and a fine-point felt-tip pen on her lap. Sometimes a nail file. Sometimes sections of a newspaper. Sometimes her checkbook propped open by her finger. Most often a crossword. She sleeps with her face lit by the floor lamp shining down over her shoulder.

Whenever I see her like this, I feel sorry for her and for myself. I feel sorry for her because I can't ever believe she's comfortable or sleeping well. Sorry for myself because I've never been a good enough son, even with the miracles, to persuade her, just once in nine years, to sleep lying down.

I know my mother is a mother when I walk by her in the middle of the night. I might bump into the ottoman or ripple the air enough by my quietest step, and she'll come to the surface with a nervous question.

“Are you all right?”

“Can I get you something?”

“Do you have a headache?”

Only a mother would wake up like this. Or only a widowed mother.

I'll stand over her for a while looking at her face. My mother. She's right-handed, and when she drinks tea, she holds her left hand to her chest, cupped, like she's protecting an invisible bird. For her, my father's death was a wound that never healed.

I ask her, “Do you want me to turn off the light?”

In a defenseless voice, sounding much younger than me, she'll say, “Yes, please,” or, “No, thank you, leave it on.” When she asks me to leave the light on, I wonder about what hall in her memory would go black without that floor lamp shining right into her face.

There are times when she'll barely wake and mumble. I can't make it out. It's her dreaming language. I'm convinced she's trying to ask me if I'm all right even as she's flying or fighting a troll with a sword.

The worst, though, the very worst, is when she wakes up and says, “I'm sorry.” She must be talking to my father.

Last night, I went to the kitchen for a drink, and my mother asked if I had a headache. I told her no, but I did have a headache. It woke me up. I knew snow was coming. After a long time, I went back to sleep. I looked out this morning, and three inches had fallen. The snow kept coming. My head felt better. Sometimes, the headaches are as simple as that.

My mother belongs to the sisterhood of beautiful women. If I didn't believe in some kind of god, I'd think a committee, the Committee of Appearance, discussed her over a lunch of cocktails. They got drunk and dreamed up one of those women who comes along every hundred or thousand years. Luckily, one voice of reason kept the committee from being totally merciless. She doesn't have dimples, and she has a hole in her heart.

They returned to their office, the Committee of Appearance, down the hall from the Committee on Death and Disintegration, and put their heads on their desks and forgot what they'd done.

Her eyes are two diamonds, glittering, honest, and almost impossible to look at with the naked eye. Even I find it hard.

I do believe in a god, though, and I have to think my mother shows His sense of humor and mercy.

One day, I know, your beauty will blow me apart. You will have no mercy at all.

My mother has a plum-colored mouth. Her skin is soft and cool and blue. Have you ever held a woman as thin and purple as a blade of strange grass? As fragile as that? My mother, when I hug her, moans a little, which means she feels good.

When I was young, my mother brushed through her straight black hair every morning. Her hair hung down to her waist back then. Once, when my father was already gone, though I didn't know that meant forever, she twisted her hair into a rope for me to hold. I couldn't get my hands around it, and all her hair slipped out. Oranges. I smelled oranges.

“Darling,” she said. Then, she handed me her hairbrush and put her hands in her lap. “You've watched me a hundred times. You know what to do.”

The silver brush was one of my mother's heirlooms. It was her mother's, and it felt heavy in my hand. I heard the sound of the bristles in her hair, like papery wings. Butterflies flew up out of her hair.

“Does Daddy brush your hair?”

“No,” she sighed. “His hands were too big and clumsy. You're doing wonderfully, sweetheart.”

I felt proud, and my mother reached behind to pat my leg.

“Mama, can you have two husbands?” My mother laughed. “Can you?”

“Why do you ask?”

I couldn't answer, and she turned to face me. All that beauty.

“Erik, my son, my only son.” She held my chin and kissed my forehead.

My mother could never be my wife, but she would be my first love all the same.

First Miracle

LAST NIGHT, I WENT
to sleep with a headache, and I had a dream you rode up to me on a bicycle. I couldn't make out your face, but I knew it was you. Your bicycle was like my father's, except your basket was more girly, woven out of willow or something. You put your hands on my head and said, “I wish I could take away the pain.”

“You could make it snow,” I said, “or get me a new head.”

You laughed, and the snow came.

Sometimes, I've gotten other people confused with you, like my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Quist. I loved her, but I was six, and she was twenty-six when we met. She told me her age in the hallway outside the teachers' lounge.

Older boys from the school, sixth graders, or Mr. Jimson, the science teacher, would come to her classroom to visit her or offer to help with anything she might need. She always said no to them, but never meanly. Just no-thank-you. This one morning, she tried to take too much in her hands, and I had been hanging back watching her, pretending to fix a book cover or something, and she simply couldn't make it all work out.

I said, “Can I help, Mrs. Quist?”

She seemed surprised to see me there at all, like I was a two-headed cow. Then she looked relieved. “Yes, Erik. Would you please carry these books and follow me to the teachers' lounge?” I remember a little gold pendant with a green stone, and she had on perfume.

I walked next to her, carrying her books, listening to her heels strike the hall floor, and at least one older boy stared out from the walls. For conversation, I said, “How old are you, Mrs. Quist?”

“Twenty-six,” she said, “but never ask a woman her age, Erik. I might not have answered if I were thirty. I might've gotten annoyed.”

“How old is Mr. Quist?”

“Thirty-four.”

We were almost to the teacher's lounge. I don't know what got in my head, but I said, “Would you be sad if he died?”

Mrs. Quist stopped short. She looked down at me, and I could tell she didn't know what to say. She didn't look angry, just confused. She kneeled down, and I said, “Would you?”

“Erik.” She took the books from my hands. “I don't know how you know what you know, but you do. I can see that.”

“You're not happy.”

She kneeled there, staring at her shoes or mine, I couldn't tell, and then she stood up. “You go and play.”

This wasn't the miracle. There are sad women everywhere. I see it.

No. Mrs. Quist might have loved me because I could think and read and write and talk and play music and sing and run and do my math homework without any help. Mrs. Quist might have loved the six-year-old boy she hoped to have for herself in her own son. Or maybe she saw in me a man she couldn't wait to see fully grown and would know she had some part in making.

Mrs. Quist loved me, I know it, and after our exchange outside the teachers' lounge, her attitude toward me changed a little. She looked at me almost shyly. She looked at me like she knew she couldn't hide her life and thoughts from me. She couldn't.

I loved her because she loved me.

Poor Mrs. Quist. The miracles started with her. Nothing complicated. I gave her a flower, and the flower never died. Simple.

It wasn't much of a flower at first. I picked a sickly white tulip from someone's yard and brought it to school for Mrs. Quist. I'll admit I spoke to the flower, whispered into the cup of petals, before I put it into a mug of water. The water was straight from the tap.

The flower got stronger in the water, and it wouldn't die.

When she first noticed it, Mrs. Quist said, “Thank you, somebody . . . Oh, Erik. A spring flower. The first tulip.”

As it got stronger, she said, “Look how big and bright it is now. I didn't think that would happen at all. I should always expect a surprise from you, Mr. Lynch.”

The last day of school, she stopped me before I left her classroom. “This flower won't ever die.” She said it like that, not a question.

“No,” I said. “Why would it?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Because flowers die.”

“You can kill it, but it won't die by itself.”

Mrs. Quist rubbed a petal between her fingers. What could she have been thinking at that moment? She might have been frightened, confused, or sad. I don't know.

“I'll take it home with me and bring it back in September.” She put her hand on my head, then on my shoulder. “You're some kind of boy.”