Other times she slips out the motel door and pads over to the back of the cigarette outlet where they leave out a couple chairs for employee smoke breaks. There, she likes to pull one chair in front of the other and put her feet up and sit and watch the interstate stretching west toward Greensboro, then Winston, and then somewhere past all the lights: the mountains, where Cherokee is. Lyle used to talk about the mountains during his truck-driving days: hundreds of miles of monsters on the horizon, darker than the darkness of the sky at night.
At the Embers, it’s never really dark—with the interstate and the fast food signs and the gas station lights of nearby Graham glowing orange—like something almost on fire, like a cigarette, like something hot in her chest that says: There is no future. There is only this. The firmness of this chair holding you up. A little girl somewhere in town who doesn’t understand the word custody and misses her asshole dad. Not Lyle, but the possibility of Lyle. This nonstop river of cars headed who knows where. Somewhere—maybe thirty miles west—a woman who cannot sleep. A woman who is dying. A woman who can’t figure out how she is supposed to let go.
20. The Anniversary
A year after my mom’s death—August—I’ve just had a round of radiation for some new cancer in my spine—and now we’re on the Cape, back at the flagpole: Gin for Jan, I’m calling it, a circle of Adirondack chairs on the bluff. She loved the cocktail hour. Some of my closest friends are with us—Tita and Drew, Adam and Melissa—but otherwise it is just our new little family unit: me and John, our kids, my dad, Charlie and Amelia.
Anniversaries make me nervous—the way you are supposed to be able to summon your feelings about someone or something because they match up with a day of the year. Sometimes being in the exact place helps, because it summons the intangibles of smells and the way the light looks.
Following that logic, we should all be gathered tight in her stale bedroom—but being here on the island evokes plenty. Not only her death—do her ashes still somehow surround us in the grasses?—but her life. We are all slightly sunburned from a day at the beach, we’ve been taking turns in the outdoor shower, we are sipping wine from mismatched cups, the pack of kids—six boys—are running wild by the boulders, concocting a play they want to put on for the grown-ups tonight: Revoloosh On!, a sort of improvised Hamilton off-shoot featuring mostly dramatic battle scenes. We have promised to trek down to their roughshod amphitheater out by the compost pile to be their audience as soon as we’ve made it through the first round of drinks.
“Have you been able to feel her at all?” I ask Charlie.
“I guess if feeling the absence of her is feeling her, I feel her,” he says. “I keep having the sense that we’re waiting for one more person to sit down to dinner, to enter the room. Like she’s in the bathroom and she’ll be back in a sec.”
“Yeah, I’m having that exact feeling a lot, too,” I say. “And the feeling that I’m getting away with something that she is about to call me out on.”
Family vacations were often the time where she most liked to keep it real. You’d be relaxing in the hot tub together and all of a sudden she’d start saying, “You know what I’ve been meaning to talk to you about?” and in an instant you are whirling through a universe where is it obvious to everyone but you that you have been failing at life in some deeply subtle but disturbing way, where wearing socks with holes in them is fundamentally disrespectful, where you have irrevocably spoiled your children by allowing them to negotiate for dessert after they have clearly violated dinnertime rules.
I can tell my dad has been feeling it, too: Should we go off on a picnic, even though we’re getting a late start? Can we spend the whole day reading by the window? Did anyone sweep the kitchen today? No one is here to tell us what we should be doing. I keep decluttering the coffee table in the living room from a place of fear.
“I can give you a thorough talking-to, if it would make you feel better,” Charlie jokes.
Usually my parents slept in my dad’s parents’ old bedroom, but this year he chooses to sleep in the bedroom that was his grandmother’s. So John and I take my grandparents’ quarters—a big west-facing room with a private bathroom, a view of the bay, a nice draft when the predominant wind blows, and a screen door leading out onto the porch.
I sit on the edge of the bed and examine through the faded mirror on the dresser the mass of curls on my head, livelier than usual in the salt air. My face is tan; I’m wearing a tank top. I don’t look sick.
“I’m definitely going to die in the winter,” my mom told me once, a few years ago. “Summer is so kind. Winter always seems like it has it in for me.”
Now I can feel her sitting right here on the bed with a book, late in the afternoon like this when the light shifts and the breeze picks up, my dad headed down the path for some predinner fishing just offshore in the boat. She is everything but absent. As a little girl—and even a teenager—I loved to come and find her here, to have her to myself, even though I knew it risked being told about all my latest shortcomings. Just to sit with her and enjoy the quietness around her—the way so many children seem to love to do with their mothers without understanding how we disturb that quietness with our very presence. Just now, I hear Benny galumphing down the hall toward me: “Mom! Where are you? I need to nuzzle you!”
*
The visceral anniversary of her death doesn’t come until after summer has officially passed, and of course it comes as a surprise. The end of September. We are home from the Cape. The kids have returned to school. Charlie and Amelia have just arrived in town. They’ve decided to escape the Western Mass winter and come live down here for a little while at my dad’s house while Charlie works on finishing his dissertation.
They have a new dog—Luna—a young, bouncy pit mix that likes to get in the middle of everything. She hardly ever stops moving, and she’s still recovering from a run-in over the summer in the woods with a skunk. Charlie and Amelia can barely control her.
The second night after they move into town, Luna and my Dad’s geriatric fat beagle Clyde get into a nasty fight over some food, and Luna rips Clyde’s face up pretty badly: chunks of flesh torn from his snout. Clyde, already well on his way to complete dementia, becomes completely incontinent. The house is a minefield of puddles and piles of shit, and Clyde is too fragile to undergo what it would take to patch his face. The next morning, my dad decides to put him down. The vet offers to come out to the house.
My dad calls me: “We’re doing it in about ten minutes.”
“Okay,” I say, jumping in the car, texting John a jumble of autocorrect nonsense at the stop sign. “Luna a Soul Train Clyde; running to my dad’s; herbed late; patting him down; FUCK. None of that. We have to put Clyde down. Long story. XO.”
Already the first signs of déjà vu are setting in.
When I get to the house, I can tell Charlie is kind of a mess, and Amelia seems freaked: They’ve had Luna shut upstairs all morning, and Clyde is wandering around listlessly in the garden.
“This is so awful,” says Amelia, sitting at the patio table with her knees wrapped up under her chin.