“Ready, Buck?” my father would say, and sometimes Buckley said “Roger,” or sometimes he said “Takeoff,” but when he was most
frightened and giddy and waiting for peace he just said “Yes!” And my father would take the thin cotton top sheet and bunch
it up in his hands while being careful to keep the two corners between his thumb and forefinger. Then he would snap it out
so the pale blue (if they were using Buckley’s) or lavender (if they were using mine) sheet would spread out like a parachute
above him and gently, what felt wonderfully slowly, it would waft down and touch along his exposed skin—his knees, his forearms,
his cheeks and chin. Both air and cover somehow there in the same space at the same time—it felt like the ultimate freedom
and protection. It was lovely, left him vulnerable and quivering on some edge and all he could hope was that if he begged
him, my father would oblige and do it again. Air and cover, air and cover—sustaining the unspoken connection between them:
little boy, wounded man.
That night his head lay on the pillow while his body was curled in the fetal position. He had not thought to close the blinds
himself, and the lights from the nearby houses spotted the hill. He stared across his room at the louvered doors of his closet,
out of which he had once imagined evil witches would escape to join the dragons beneath his bed. He no longer feared these
things.
“Please don’t let Daddy die, Susie,” he whispered. “I need him.”
When I left my brother, I walked out past the gazebo and under the lights hanging down like berries, and I saw the brick paths
branching out as I advanced.
I walked until the bricks turned to flat stones and then to small, sharp rocks and then to nothing but churned earth for miles
and miles around me. I stood there. I had been in heaven long enough to know that something would be revealed. And as the
light began to fade and the sky turn a dark, sweet blue as it had on the night of my death, I saw someone walking into view,
so far away I could not at first make out if it was man or woman, child or adult. But as moonlight reached this figure I could
make out a man and, frightened now, my breathing shallow, I raced just far enough to see. Was it my father? Was it what I
had wanted all this time so desperately?
“Susie,” the man said as I approached and then stopped a few feet from where he stood. He raised his arms up toward me.
“Remember?” he said.
I found myself small again, age six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of
his feet.
“Grandaddy,” I said.
And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and he was fifty-six
and my father had taken us to visit. We danced so slowly to a song that on Earth had always made my grandfather cry.
“Do you remember?” he asked.
“Barber!”
“Adagio for Strings,” he said.
But as we danced and spun—none of the herky-jerky awkwardness of Earth—what I remembered was how I’d found him crying to this
music and asked him why.
“Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.” He had held me against him then, just briefly,
and then I had run outside to play again with Lindsey in what seemed like my grandfather’s huge backyard.
We didn’t speak any more that night, but we danced for hours in that timeless blue light. I knew as we danced that something
was happening on Earth and in heaven. A shifting. The sort of slow-to-sudden movement that we’d read about in science class
one year. Seismic, impossible, a rending and tearing of time and space. I pressed myself into my grandfather’s chest and smelled
the old-man smell of him, the mothball version of my own father, the blood on Earth, the sky in heaven. The kumquat, skunk,
grade-A tobacco.
When the music stopped, it could have been forever since we’d begun. My grandfather took a step back, and the light grew yellow
at his back.
“I’m going,” he said.
“Where?” I asked.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart. You’re so close.”
He turned and walked away, disappearing rapidly into spots and dust. Infinity.
W
hen she reached Krusoe Winery that morning, my mother found a message waiting for her, scrawled in the imperfect English of
the caretaker. The word
emergency
was clear enough, and my mother bypassed her morning ritual of an early coffee drunk while staring out at the grapevines
grafted on row upon row of sturdy white crosses. She opened up the part of the winery reserved for public tastings. Without
turning on the overhead, she located the phone behind the wooden bar and dialed the number in Pennsylvania. No answer.
Then she dialed the operator in Pennsylvania and asked for the number of Dr. Akhil Singh.
“Yes,” Ruana said, “Ray and I saw an ambulance pull up a few hours ago. I imagine they’re all at the hospital.”
“Who was it?”
“Your mother, perhaps?”
But she knew from the note that her mother had been the one who
called.
It was one of the children or it was Jack. She thanked Ruana and hung up. She grabbed the heavy red phone and lifted it up
from underneath the bar. A ream of color sheets that they passed out to customers—“Lemon Yellow = Young Chardonnay, Straw-colored
= Sauvignon Blanc…”—fell down and around her feet from where they had been kept weighted by the phone. She had habitually
arrived early ever since taking the job, and now she gave a quick thanks that this was so. After that, all she could think
of were the names of the local hospitals, so she called the ones to which she had rushed her young children with unexplained
fevers or possible broken bones from falls. At the same hospital where I had once rushed Buckley: “A Jack Salmon was seen
in emergency and is still here.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“What is your relationship to Mr. Salmon?”
She said the words she had not said in years: “I’m his wife.”
“He had a heart attack.”
She hung up the phone and sat down on the rubber-and-cork mats that covered the floor on the employee side. She sat there until
the shift manager arrived and she repeated the strange words:
husband, heart attack.
When she looked up later she was in the caretaker’s truck, and he, this quiet man who barely ever left the premises, was barreling
toward San Francisco International Airport.
She paid for her ticket and boarded a flight that would connect to another in Chicago and finally land her in Philadelphia.
As the plane gained height and they were buried in the clouds, my mother listened distantly to the signature bells of the
plane which told the crew what to do or what to prepare for, and she heard the cocktail cart jiggling past, but instead of
her fellow passengers she saw the cool stone archway at the winery, behind which the empty oak barrels were stored, and instead
of the men who often sat inside there to get out of the sun she imagined my father sitting there, holding the broken Wedgwood
cup out toward her.
By the time she landed in Chicago with a two-hour wait, she had steadied herself enough to buy a toothbrush and a pack of
cigarettes and place a call to the hospital, this time asking to speak to Grandma Lynn.
“Mother,” my mother said. “I’m in Chicago and on my way.”
“Abigail, thank God,” my grandmother said. “I called Krusoe again and they said you were headed for the airport.”
“How is he?”
“He’s asking for you.”
“Are the kids there?”
“Yes, and Samuel. I was going to call you today and tell you. Samuel has asked Lindsey to marry him.”
“That’s wonderful,” my mother said.
“Abigail?”
“Yes.” She could hear her mother’s hesitation, which was always rare.
“Jack’s asking for Susie, too.”
She lit a cigarette as soon as she walked outside the terminal at O’Hare, a school tour flooding past her with small overnight
bags and band instruments, each of which had a bright yellow nametag on the side of the case.
HOME OF THE PATRIOTS,
they read.
It was muggy and humid in Chicago, and the smoky exhaust of double-parked cars made the heavy air noxious.
She burned through the cigarette in record time and lit another, keeping one arm tucked hard across her chest and the other
one extended on each exhale. She was wearing her winery outfit: a pair of faded but clean jeans and a pale orange T-shirt with
KRUSOE WINERY
embroidered over the pocket. Her skin was darker now, which made her pale blue eyes seem even bluer in contrast, and she
had taken to wearing her hair in a loose ponytail at the base of her neck. I could see small wisps of salt and pepper hair
near her ears and at her temples.
She held on to two sides of an hourglass and wondered how this could be possible. The time she’d had alone had been gravitationally
circumscribed by when her attachments would pull her back. And they had pulled now—double-fisted. A marriage. A heart attack.
Standing outside the terminal, she reached into the back pocket of her jeans, where she kept the man’s wallet she had started
carrying when she got the job at Krusoe because it was easier not to worry about stowing a purse beneath the bar. She flicked
her cigarette into the cab lane and turned to find a seat on the edge of a concrete planter, inside of which grew weeds and
one sad sapling choked by fumes.
In her wallet were pictures, pictures she looked at every day. But there was one that she kept turned upside down in a fold
of leather meant for a credit card. It was the same one that rested in the evidence box at the police station, the same one
Ray had put in his mother’s book of Indian poetry. My class photo that had made the papers and been put on police fliers and
in mailboxes.
After eight years it was, even for my mother, like the ubiquitous photo of a celebrity. She had encountered it so many times
that I had been neatly buried inside of it. My cheeks never redder, my eyes never bluer than they were in the photograph.
She took the photo out and held it face-up and slightly cupped in her hand. She had always missed my teeth—their small rounded
serrations had fascinated her as she watched me grow. I had promised my mother a wide-open smile for that year’s picture,
but I was so self-conscious in front of the photographer that I had barely managed a close-lipped grin.
She heard the announcement for the connecting flight over the outdoor speaker. She stood. Turning around she saw the tiny,
struggling tree. She left my class portrait propped up against its trunk and hurried inside the automatic doors.
On the flight to Philadelphia, she sat alone in the middle of a row of three seats. She could not help but think of how, if
she were a mother traveling, there would be two seats filled beside her. One for Lindsey. One for Buckley. But though she was,
by definition, a mother, she had at some point ceased to be one too. She couldn’t claim that right and privilege after missing
more than half a decade of their lives. She now knew that being a mother was a calling, something plenty of young girls dreamed
of being. But my mother had never had that dream, and she had been punished in the most horrible and unimaginable way for
never having wanted me.
I watched her on the plane, and I sent a wish into the clouds for her release. Her body grew heavy with the dread of what
would come but in this heaviness was at least relief. The stewardess handed her a small blue pillow and for a little while
she fell asleep.
When they reached Philadelphia, the airplane taxied down the runway and she reminded herself both where she was and what year
it was. She hurriedly clicked through all the things she might say when she saw her children, her mother, Jack. And then,
when they finally shivered to a halt, she gave up and focused only on getting off the plane.
She barely recognized her own child waiting at the end of the long ramp. In the years that had passed, Lindsey had become
angular, thin, every trace of body fat gone. And standing beside my sister was what looked like her male twin. A bit taller,
a little more meat. Samuel. She was staring so hard at the two of them, and they were staring back, that at first she didn’t
even see the chubby boy sitting off to the side on the arm of a row of waiting-area seats.
And then, just before she began walking toward them—for they all seemed suspended and immobile for the first few moments, as
if they had been trapped in a viscous gelatin from which only her movement might free them—she saw him.
She began walking down the carpeted ramp. She heard announcements being made in the airport and saw passengers, with their
more normal greetings, rushing past her. But it was as if she were entering a time warp as she took him in. 1944 at Camp Winnekukka.
She was twelve, with chubby cheeks and heavy legs—all the things she’d felt grateful her daughters had escaped had been her
son’s to endure. So many years she had been away, so much time she could never recover.
If she had counted, as I did, she would have known that in seventy-three steps she had accomplished what she had been too
afraid to do for almost seven years.
It was my sister who spoke first:
“Mom,” she said.
My mother looked at my sister and flashed forward thirty-eight years from the lonely girl she’d been at Camp Winnekukka.
“Lindsey,” my mother said.
Lindsey stared at her. Buckley was standing now, but he looked first down at his shoes and then over his shoulder, out past
the window to where the planes were parked, disgorging their passengers into accordioned tubes.
“How is your father?” my mother asked.
My sister had spoken the word
Mom
and then frozen. It tasted soapy and foreign in her mouth.
“He’s not in the greatest shape, I’m afraid,” Samuel said. It was the longest sentence anyone had said, and my mother found
herself disproportionately grateful for it.
“Buckley?” my mother said, preparing no face for him. Being who she was—whoever that was.