He paused and sniffed once.
“The problem was,” he went on, “she took to it. I mean, eventually she liked it. After your father’s year was up, well, she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She kept going out. It had bored itself into her some way. It wasn’t about instinct for her. It was about taste.” He licked his lips and thought for a moment. “That’s the difference. It came from a different place inside her. Your father, he tried to get her to stop. Like an addiction. She got pregnant with you, and he thought that might settle her down. But it didn’t. She went out anyway, her belly all swollen up. What I heard is that people revered her, almost, like she carried the full moon inside her. I was still too young to go out myself, but I heard.”
He paused again briefly.
“She was still going when I went breach,” he said. “This was, you know, three or four years later. Everybody knew her secret by then. They’d all gotten suspicious when it went on so long. They figured it out—that she was a pretender. But there wasn’t any…disparagement in it. See, she chose the thing that was forced on the rest of us. We—we loved her, even, because she loved us. I’m not saying you have to understand it. I’m just telling you how it was. Your mother, she was—she was rare.”
I looked over briefly to see his face in the darkness, the glistening orbs of his eyes. I caught a quick glimpse, then looked away again. His story was a private one.
“You,” he said. “I saw her in you. Ever since I got back. You want to know the truth? The truth is I don’t want to see her anymore. It’s been too long. The time comes you have to stop looking at ghosts.”
It was a long time before he spoke again. For a while I thought he had forgotten I was there, but I waited patiently—as one does for revelations.
He eventually went on. “Did he…your father…did he tell you how she died?”
“Car accident,” I said.
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “That part’s not true. But he can’t be blamed. Sometimes the lie’s necessary. Sometimes the truth is nocturnal. The light hurts it.”
He paused again, sighing. I thought he might stop there, but then I realized the story had gone beyond him. The story would get told, as sometimes stories do, one way or the other, regardless of willful human instruments.
“It wasn’t any car accident,” he went on. “It was the third night of the Lacuna.”
The Lacuna was the sixth full moon of the year, the still midpoint around which the rest of the year rotated. June, when the fireflies were out.
“We were down at the quarry. Your mother was there. You were at home, asleep in your crib. She was real still and quiet that night. I remember it. She had this grin, a faraway grin, like she was laughing at some joke nobody else heard. The rest of us, we were at each other one way or another. You know how it is. Foul. But she was a spark, a glistening thing in the middle of us all. She reminded us that we didn’t know a thing about love. It was like that.”
There was a catch in his voice, barely perceptible. A tiny tremor, the kind that means a massive fissure has quaked open somewhere deep, deep underground.
“That’s where we lost her. We hunted for her. We did. The police came the next day. And firemen. But nobody could find anything. Maybe, we thought, maybe she’d come home to us. We liked to think it. Your father thought it. He thought it for a long time.”
Then he was quiet, and I wondered if he was done. But after some time had passed, he rose up again, and this time he leaned over and pointed a long, wavering finger right in my face, as though condemning me for reminding him of my lost, moonlit mother.
“But this is what I’ll have you know,” he said, his voice hard. “She was better than us. Better than all of us. She went after the real thing of what the rest of us were just playing at. And she found it. God help her, she found it.”
So there were others who felt the loss of my mother, maybe even more than I felt it, because I had only known the myth of her. Maybe that was what I saw in the eyes of those storekeepers who gifted me with free ice cream or barrettes or jars of maraschino cherries. Maybe in me they saw the reflection of my mother, whom they had lost on the narrow horizon.
And maybe that was the peculiar smell that I breathed in from the purple giraffe I had cuddled to my chest on many nights of my childhood—the odor of loss, which is like sumac and fallen leaves.
“But where?” I said, my voice small. “Where did she go? Where did you lose her?”
There was the quiver in his voice again, and a sound in his mouth like it was chewing on something—but I understood that he was only chewing on his own story, trying to swallow back down what was getting retched up.
“It was that mine,” he said.
The mine. Map the mine. Hair like straw. Papier-maché skin. Gray. A mouth that would swallow you up. I felt sick.
“She just got up and walked away,” Mr. Hunter said. “That’s how it was. She rose up, and everyone stopped and waited, because it seemed like she might say something—and we listened when she said things. But she didn’t say anything. She stood up, and she turned her back on us, and she walked into the mine. See? The dark got her.”
Those sunken eyes that looked only inward.
I wanted to run. I wanted to be split from my own skin.
“It was done before we knew it,” he said. “When we realized she didn’t intend to come back, we went in after her. But those mine tunnels—you’ve got no chance. There are shafts sunk everywhere that go straight down into nothing. You can’t see two feet into the mouth of the thing. She didn’t pause or turn around, she just walked forward. And then we couldn’t see her anymore.”
Sometimes death is a found mother.
And that’s how I found mine.
*