Pieces of My Mother (5 page)

It arrives on a Saturday. A big box covered in brown paper with a dozen colorful stamps in one corner. Seconds later, I'm bolting up the stairs to my dad's room, skipping steps as I go.

“Dad, there's a giant box on the porch, and I think it's for us!” I yell.

He walks down the steps with me and eyes the package. “Looks like it's from your mother.”

“Are you sure? Does it say her name on it somewhere?”

“Well, it's definitely her writing,” he replies. “Maybe it's Christmas gifts.”

I hold my breath, afraid to get too excited. I can't recall a box with my mom's handwriting ever arriving on our doorstep. “Oh, Dad, please can we open it now?”

“No, we need to wait for your brothers to get back home from the Conklins' house or wherever they took off to,” he says as he lifts the box, sets it in the middle of the living-room floor, and hikes back up the attic stairs.

I sit down next to the package with a box of cheese crackers. I'm six and a half now and can read a little, but not when it's that fancy, curvy writing like my mom's. But I like the way it looks, thick black ink and all the letters wearing curly tails. I pull my knees up under my T-shirt and stretch it down under my toes.

With each square cracker I pop into my mouth, I think of what could be inside the box. My mind is wild with ideas: model horses, paint by numbers on velvet, cowgirl boots, a shiny lime-green purse, a stuffed white kitten made from real fur, a set of farm animals—so many possibilities! I finish the whole box of salty orange crackers, wondering if it could be an Easy-Bake Oven.

I lay my hands on the brown paper. I imagine my mom's hands pulling the paper tightly around the box. I can see her red garnet snake ring with the tiny diamond eyes coiled around her finger. I remember her hands full of rings, but it's her face I can't see clearly now.

I run out to the porch when I hear my brothers' voices in the yard.

“Jamie! Eden! Guess what? There's a huge box that came in the mail, and Dad says it's Christmas presents from Mom!”

“Since when does Mom send Christmas presents?” asks Jamie.

“She better have sent me a T-2 model rocket,” says Eden.

“Dad, Dad!” I yell as I motion them in. “We can open the presents now!”

My dad makes a slice down the center of the box with his pocketknife. Inside the box is another box wrapped in bright, shiny pink paper. He hands that box to me and two smaller boxes to Eden and Jamie.

“How come Melissa gets the biggest one?” yells Eden.

“Biggest doesn't always mean the best,” replies my dad.

I run my fingertips across the slick pink paper. There are old-fashioned angel stickers on one side and my mom's fancy writing on the other.

“What does it say, Dad?”

“Merry to Melissa,” he reads.

I study the letters. Yes, I can see how it says that now. “Merry to Melissa.”

I carefully tear the paper, saving the part with the angel stickers and the writing on it. The first thing I see inside the box are masses of yellow yarn. Grabbing onto the yarn, I pull out a tall and skinny handmade cloth doll. She is almost as tall as me, and I laugh. She has long yarn hair, two big, leather button eyes, and a smile embroidered in pink. She is as floppy as the scarecrow in
The
Wizard
of
Oz
when he first meets Dorothy, and her long legs are thin like broomsticks. I hold her up and laugh again because even her head is floppy. I don't care—she's from my mom.

“I think your mom must have made this for you,” my dad says, sounding unsure. “You ought to think of a name for her.”

I stare at her sunny face.

“How about Jennifer?” my dad says.

“No, I need to think about it,” I say.

I look over to see what my brothers got. Some kind of building-set things.

“What did Melissa get?” asks Jamie.

“Oh, some dumb old doll,” says Eden.

I'm not much of a doll person, but I like how big and floppy she is. I will introduce her to Bun-Bun, Monkey, and Bumble-Bear, and all the other animals in my room. I could even dress her in some of my clothes.

At school on Monday, I tell the most talkative girl in my class, Kat, about the doll that I got for a Christmas present from my mom. She asks me why my mom sent it in the mail instead of just putting it under the tree. I explain that I live with my dad and my brothers. “That's weird,” she says. “Besides, Christmas happened two months ago, you know?”

Kat is a girl I want to be like. She is the smartest girl in class and talks a lot if she likes you. I try to think of something more to say. I want to be her friend.

“Her name is Merry,” I say.

“Oh, I have a doll named Merry too,” Kat says back.

“No. My mom, that's her name. Her name is Merry.”

Kat just looks at me. I can tell she doesn't want to talk to me. Then she turns and runs toward the monkey bars.

I decide that Merry is a good name for my doll.

After dinner, I tell my dad about the name. I tell him that I am going to name her Merry, the same as Mom, since she made her. He looks at me almost the same way Kat did before she ran off to the monkey bars.

I push my spoon through the top layer of stretchy skin on the butterscotch pudding we're having for dessert. It's my favorite part. “Do you think Merry is a good name for her?”

My dad stares at me and doesn't say anything. He probably still thinks it should be Jennifer. Then he says, “Your mother's name is not Merry.”

I have to think carefully.
What
is
he
talking
about?

“Her name is Mikel. Your mom is Mikel,” he says.

“But Dad, it said from Merry. Her name is Merry.”

“No, it didn't,” he says firmly. “Her name is Mikel.”

I go into my room, close the door, and pull out the square of pink paper. I study it again: “Merry to Melissa.” If that's not her name, then what does it mean? I feel like she tried to trick me. Why does she do that mysterious writing anyway? Does she even
know
how to sew a doll?

I lie down on my bed alongside the doll named Merry and try hugging her. But she is too thin and there is nothing to hang on to. I think how easy it would be to rip off her black button eyes. But that's not what I want. I just want to remember what my mom looks like. I can't recall how long it's been since her last visit when we got in the car accident and I had to get stitches and everything was ruined. I want to see her whole body at once, not just imagine her in pieces. I want to see her blue car and her blue eyes. I can see her long hair, but I can't remember how it feels. She is disappearing, fading away line by line like the invisible ink Eden got on his birthday.

I think of ways to make her come back. I could punch my fist through one of the windowpanes next to my bed. The noise would be satisfying and loud, and my hand might bleed. She might come if I had to get stitches again. She might come even quicker if I were in a hospital.

I lay my head against my doll's yellow yarn hair and pretend that it is my mom's hair alongside my face. I think I can smell her coffee and cigarette smoke. I shut my eyes. We talk about our favorite flowers. My mom tells me she likes red roses and orange tiger lilies. I tell her that I like buttercups, daisies, pink roses, and blue forget-me-nots. Maybe she would come if she knew how much I love flowers.

When I turn seven, my dad lets me drop handfuls of tiny brown seeds into the earth outside the big yellow house. The soil in our garden is dark, strong smelling, and full of pale worms. I love the gritty feel of the dirt between my fingers. I drop my seeds carefully, one by one, even though my dad says to scatter them more quickly. He reminds me that some of them will sprout, but not all. I cover them cautiously so as not to upset the particular arrangement of my seeds.

For as long as I can remember, our garden has always been a vegetable garden. Every summer we have rows of corn, cucumbers, zucchini, red lettuce, and pole beans. This year, I have begged my dad to put in some flowers other than the same old yellow marigolds that are only planted to distract the bugs. He finally agreed and let me pick out five packets of flower seeds from the gardening store. I chose Shasta daisies, snapdragons, zinnias, impatiens, and blue forget-me-nots.

“Dad, where can we plant the flowers?”

He looks at the seed packets I have chosen and then looks around the garden for some open space. He squints in the sun as he reads the directions on the back of the flat packet. “Okay,” he says. “Just so you know, some of these are annuals and some are perennials.”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

He holds up two of the packets. “These are annuals. These won't come back once they bloom. They bloom once and then they die.” I nod.

“These are perennials,” he says, holding up the other packets. “These will come in the spring or summer—then go away and come back once a year.”

I think about this.

“Sort of like Mom,” I say, pushing the lettuce seeds down into dark soil. I keep my head down, afraid to see his face, but I can tell he's looking at me as I smooth out the dirt with my hands. The silence doesn't feel right.

“It's also like the lilacs,” I say to break the quiet between us. “Those come back every Easter.”

“Yes, like the lilacs,” he says at last.

One year my mom came when the lilacs bloomed. Another time she came when the corn and lemon cucumbers were ripe. We never see her in the fall. Fall is back-to-school time. The garden begins to thin out, and the squash leaves turn yellow and crisp. We don't see her in December or at Christmas. The garden is always empty during those cold months.

As I lay out the seed packets on the ground in front of me, I also think about the wildflowers on our back hill—how every spring the bright, orange California poppies come back, as do the lupines, the bluebonnets, the buttercups, and the small purple ones that no one seems to know the name of. Now I know that my mom is the perennial type who visits and blooms once a year. When her petals begin to wilt, she hitchhikes out of town and we don't know when we will see her next. I want to tell her that someday I will bloom too.

Two days in, my mom is still unaware that I am here in Olympia—let alone in the room. She mumbles mixed-up phrases. She opens her eyes once and asks for a “lemon necklace,” then falls back into a deep, medicated sleep.

I imagine Death circling around the house like a black crow, silent in its flight, noisy when it lands.

I sit on the stiff chair next to the bed and watch her eyes shift back and forth beneath her eyelids as if she is scanning the pages of a book. I wonder what she dreams about now. My phone vibrates, telling me I have a voice message from home.

I hold the speaker close to my ear and listen. “Hi, Mama. It's me, Bella. When are you coming back? I miss you…Ok-aaay, bye.”

“I miss you too,” I whisper.

There is no way I could have brought my family here. My excuse for going alone was that it would be too difficult for Bella and Dominic to see Grandma so ill. But that's not the whole truth. The reality is I don't want my children to see
me
. I am terrified that some hideous part of me could surface when my mom dies. I don't want to lose control of my carefully guarded self.

Besides, here at my mom's side, my job is to be a compassionate daughter, not a mother. I can't imagine tending to my children's needs right now. How would I nurture them when I am wrapped in my mother's death? Shouldn't I focus on being a better daughter to my mom during her last days?

She looks almost peaceful in her medicated state. I lift one of the curls away from her cheek and hold it between my fingers. It is as coarse as the garden twine my dad strung between the pole beans. I am seized by an urgent desire to steal a lock of her hair.

In the bathroom I find a pair of scissors stored in the medicine cabinet. I open the blades near my mother's cheek and snip the curl away from her. She flinches, as if she can feel the hair being taken—as if it's painful. But her eyes remain closed. I hold the curl, a capital
C
, between my fingers and quickly wish that I could put it back. Why do I feel I have to steal pieces of her?

I walk back upstairs with the curl and pick up the antique tin box that I gave my mom just last Christmas. This tarnished tin caught my eye immediately at the flea market. Small and unique boxes have always captured my attention. When I picked this one up, my breath caught at the sight of the letters
MM
embossed on the front, the initials my mom and I share.

Below the letters were the words “Christmas 1914” and a portrait of a young woman with her hair swept up. The seller explained the story behind the box. Seventeen-year-old Princess Mary of England commissioned nearly a thousand of these tins—packed with sweets, mementos, prayer cards, and cigarettes—to give as Christmas gifts to the soldiers fighting “the war to end all wars.” I find comfort in objects that tell a story and resurrect a specific moment in history. I suppose that is why, like my father, I collect antiques. It didn't take but a moment to pull twenty-five dollars out of my wallet and buy the Christmas box for my mom.

As a child, when my mother showed up to see us, I took great pride in showing her the antique treasures in my room—my stamp collection, my glass animals, or the new marbles I had found. These were easy and safe things to share with her.

This family trait of collecting pieces of the past sometimes feels like a curse, or maybe just a distraction. But I can't let it go. Since my mom has not been able to part with anything throughout her illness, I will take Princess Mary's box home with me and find a place for it on my shelves full of memories. I move my fingertips over our shared initials on top of the tin, open the hinged lid, and place her curl inside. And suddenly I am back in my childhood room, seven or eight years old, surrounded by the treasures that provided a comfort and a steadiness I couldn't find elsewhere.