When Holly remembered her life in California, she remembered seeing everything in terms of who had less than she did and who had more, who was prettier, smarter, who had a better relationship (everyone, usually), who was getting promoted faster, because as much as they had praised her at the bank there seemed to be people they preferred. She was constantly trying to figure out how to do it better, how to get it right, and in doing so she had started to grind her teeth at night. She had chewed a soft crater on the inside of her left cheek, and was picking at the cuticles of her thumbs until they bled. She made an appointment with an internist, told him her problems, and then showed him the inside of her mouth. He peered around her tongue and teeth with a penlight, looked at her hands, and then suggested meditation. Or that’s what she thought he had said, “You’re going to need meditation.”
The instant she heard the word she felt her heart surge, as if her heart had been waiting for this exact moment. Finally! her heart said to her. At last! “Where can I learn to meditate?” she asked. Just the word in her mouth brought forth joy.
The doctor looked at her as if wondering how crazy she might actually be. “Med-i-ca-tion,” he said again, slower and louder this time. “You’ll need medication for your anxiety. I’m going to write you a prescription for Ativan. We’ll work with the dosage. We’ll have to figure out what’s right for you.”
But Holly dropped the white slip of paper in the trash can after giving the receptionist a twenty for her co-pay. However unwittingly, the doctor had told her how she would be cured. She didn’t even understand exactly what meditation entailed at that point but she knew she was going to find out. She read a couple of books, listened to some dharma talks on cassette tapes in her car, and then found a group that sat on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings. She started a sitting practice at home, getting up early before she went to the bank in the morning. Six months later some people from the Wednesday group invited her along for a weekend retreat. Later, she sat in silence for a week at a spirituality center just north of Berkeley. It was there she saw a notice on the corkboard about Zen-Dojo Tozan. She felt the same acceleration in her heart that she had felt when she first misunderstood her doctor. There I am, she thought, looking at the picture of the chalet balanced on a soft sweep of mountain flowers. She pulled the push-pin from the brochure and let it drop into her hand.
Things like this happened to Holly. At times she had a sense of being guided, and when she did she attributed it to Cal.
For years after Cal died, Holly was rocked with regret that they hadn’t been closer (and there was regret about other things as well). But since coming to Switzerland, she’d started to see that for a fifteen-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl in a stressful living situation they’d done pretty well. They yelled at one another but carried no grudges. They shoved but never slapped or pinched. They threw couch pillows at one another, not dishes. Holly corrected Cal’s homework without condescension, and Cal, in the shining memory of her childhood, had once yanked two girls off of her in the hallway at school, one by her ponytail and the other by her shirt collar, as they were attempting to stuff Holly into her locker. “You bitches get off my sister,” he had said as the bitches stumbled backwards and then ran down the hall in tears. He had hurt them, scared them senseless. Holly, who made it her business to look after everyone else, was for that one golden moment protected. By her brother.
As the two oldest children, Holly and Cal worked together to look after Albie and Jeanette, keeping them away from the stove and the knives when they were younger. And they looked after their mother too, maybe not in tandem, but they made an effort to lighten her load, to keep things from her whenever possible. The more Holly felt Cal’s presence in her life now, the more she knew he cared for her, that he forgave her. The better job she did at keeping her life quiet, her eyes open to the simple beauty that surrounded her, the better she was able to hear him. She didn’t hear him in any nutty way, they didn’t sit around and talk politics, it was more a pleasant feeling, easy enough to achieve at Zen-Dojo Tozan but she could even do it here, in the waiting area of the Lucerne airport. She believed that most of the human population didn’t avail themselves to their full psychic potential. They lived in a state of mental clutter, the bombardment of goods and services, information and striving. They wouldn’t be able to recognize true happiness if it were standing on their foot. It had been almost impossible to hear her brother when she was at Berkeley, at the Sumitomo Bank, or anywhere in Los Angeles, but in Switzerland, this place where he had never been, well, it was better.
Holly went back to her newspapers. She read about Broadway plays. She read a book review and an op-ed about flooding in Iowa. She read about the plight of women in Afghanistan. She finished half of her chocolate and put the other half in her purse for later. Seeing the time, she got up and went to stand with the families and the drivers holding hand-lettered signs. When she saw Teresa walking towards her—so tiny! so much older! how long had it been now? ten years? more than that?—she was flooded with love, such a huge wave, both her love and her brother’s. She held out her arms. “Oh, Mom,” Holly said.
Where to begin with the marvels? First of course was Holly, who, with her cropped black hair touched in gray and her Birkenstocks and wooly socks, was radiant. All those people packed together on the other side of security, all those people making a single, indistinguishable mass, and then, bam! Holly. She was something else entirely, no one could have missed her. When Teresa fell into her embrace it was as if they had never been parted. She had such an overwhelming memory of the nurse coming into her room the morning Holly was born, laying that perfect baby in her arms, the baby who was now this beautiful woman. Teresa kissed her neck, pressed her cheek to her daughter’s sternum. “I’m sorry you had to wait so long,” she said, not knowing if she meant the three hour delay or all the years it had taken her to get there.
“I had a nice time,” Holly said, running her hand across her mother’s head. She took the carry-on and her purse, slung them over her shoulder like they were nothing, like she could have just as easily slung Teresa over her shoulder too. She walked her straight to the restroom without asking if she had to go, and she did. This was the person Holly had always been: in charge, making decisions, being helpful without being asked. When Teresa pointed out her luggage at the baggage claim, Holly scooped it up and laughed.
“You pack like a Californian!” she said, thrilled by such a small thing. “I do, too.”
“How do Californians pack?” Teresa was laughing without getting the joke, her smile so wide she felt certain she was showing teeth that had not been seen in years.
Holly held up her mother’s black wheelie-bag. It was small and discreet, a footnote to all the giant bright-pink hard-sides reinforced with bungee-cords that circled before them. “Europeans pack like they’re never coming home. I think it has to do with the war.”