The Guineveres (44 page)

Yet to me, she was just my mom, eccentric for sure, but I loved her more than anything in the world. “I won't always be here,” she'd say, taking my hand in her own. Her fingernails were bitten to nubs; red ridges of puffiness protruded from beneath the nail bed. At night she would rub Vaseline over her fingers, then stick a sock over her hand and sleep that way. “If you acknowledge someone won't be around forever, it won't hurt as much when they're gone, my dear. Because you can't attach yourself to something that wasn't yours to begin with.”

“Is that how you felt about my father?” I asked. Mom would give me a look like she'd swallowed a parrot to stop it from talking. We didn't speak about him.

I'd only met him once. We had gone to an apartment in the city and rung a doorbell, and when after a while a tall, clean-shaven man answered, Mom simply said, “This is her.” I craned my neck to look up at him, to see if I could recognize myself in his face because I looked nothing like my mom. Her face was round, and mine was long. Her hair was blond, and mine was brown. Her nose was a small angular button, and mine sloped down and broadened at the end. The man at the door appeared to be examining me, too. He squatted down to eye level.

“What's your name?” he asked. His voice sounded dry, but not unkind.

I froze, unable to speak, so I just stood there with fisted hands at my sides, too nervous to move.

“Tell him your name,” Mom said to me, but at that the man stood up again, patted me on the head, and asked if we could come back. We never did.

Instead, we moved from place to place a lot, staying in shabby old apartments or hotels or even back rooms of restaurants or shops where Mom sometimes worked for our food. Mom was good at “tending,” as she liked to call it. Tending to this, tending to that: cleaning, cooking, sewing, mending, fixing what was broken. On occasion, she'd disappear for hours at a time and reappear all disheveled, her hair tangled and red marks around her lips. I'd ask her where she'd been. “Oh, just tending, my dear. Just tending.” And in those instances, my face would grow hot, and I'd realize tending meant whatever Mom needed it to mean.

Mom called her strange habits quirks, but I worried about her. I had to remind her to take her medicine, or else she forgot. Nerve pills, she called them, tiny white dots no larger than a pencil tip. If she didn't take them, she'd sometimes talk to people who weren't even there, have whole conversations with them as if they were sitting right in front of her talking back. “Did you hear that?” she'd ask me, pawing at some invisible flies in the air around her. But I didn't. I wasn't gifted with visions like Mom, so maybe I wasn't gifted with faith.

Once, Mom told this nice shop owner who let us stay in his small storeroom that she knew how the world would end, that everyone's skin would turn purple and peel off and that to save ourselves we must eat raw onions and pray the rosary. Mom would go around eating raw onions as if they were apples, until one day she stopped, saying she thought she'd had enough to act as a vaccine. The shop owner asked us to leave shortly thereafter.

Maybe Mom thought if she kept moving, the curse wouldn't catch up to her. Her own sister died at thirty-three to the hour. At midnight on her birthday, the story goes, my aunt jumped off the same bridge that her mother had fallen from so many years before. Mom said she saw her swan dive to the water's surface that met her sister's body like a solid, not a liquid. “It's just our fate,” Mom would tell me. “Fate's not a bad thing. Just means you can let go.” Mom's aunt was in a car accident only a week or two before her thirty-third birthday, and my great-grandma died, too, when the family dog caught rabies and then gave it to her. She was thirty-two and three-quarters. Other women in our family went in other ways: food poisoning from improperly canned beans, childbirth, farm accidents, freak accidents, illnesses. Instead of a family tree, Mom kept a list of the dead, like a recipe of some sort, tucked inside her bra.

The year Mom turned thirty-two, we began living in the basements of churches. She said she liked the comfort of Houses of God, because churches amplified our prayers—God could hear them better. She liked to be His houseguest, she joked. And besides, if He went looking for her, He'd know just where to find her. “When in doubt, make it easy on Him,” she instructed me with an earnest look on her face, her eyes buried in the depth of her face. During the day, when she wasn't tending, she'd sit in the chapel and light candles, then stare at the flickering light as if she were reading her fortune. “I wonder how it will happen,” she'd whisper to herself. I was supposed to be doing the homework she assigned me from whatever books we could find, which usually just involved reading something and telling her about it.

“Maybe it won't,” I'd say, hopeful.

“It will, baby. It will,” she'd say back. “You've got to have faith.” The candlelight danced on my mom's face. The shadows made her jawline disappear into her neck, as if she were already fading. I wanted to hold on to her, so I did.

“Don't worry, baby,” she said after a while. “I'll always be with you in here,” and when she said this, she tapped her index finger to my chest.

“But what will I do?” I asked.

“What we all do,” she said. “Find something to love, and love it.” She pulled me close to her. “That's why I have you.” When she smiled, shadows bounced on her teeth.

The day before her thirty-third birthday, Mom and I packed up our things and headed to the old bridge where both her sister and mother had died. She promised me she wouldn't jump. She just wanted to be there the moment she was taken since it was a special place to her, as close to a family plot as she could imagine. It'd make her feel closer to them, she said. I did as my mother told me, not knowing if these would be our final hours together.

The bridge sat over the river like a shelf. The railing was made of wood, worn by weather and by years, and Mom pointed out the place where my relatives had gone over. I remember my aunt only from photos. She had light hair like my mom, but wasn't as pretty. Mom and I sat on the ledge, our feet hanging over, dangling as if we were little kids atop a chair that was too tall for us. Mom asked me to hold her hands and pray with her, and so I did. Her hands felt cold, as if she'd iced them down, even though it was a mild summer day, and I could tell just by holding her hands that she was shaking.

Mom clenched her eyes until they were wrinkled in the corners, and we sat there, hoping some higher being could hear us. She was saying things like “Save me. Please, save me.” When I heard her pray those words, I prayed, too. “I'll do anything, anything,” I prayed. At the time, I really meant it.

We prayed like that for a while on the bridge, till after dusk fell and everything looked gray and grainy. A few cars stopped to see if we were okay, and Mom just said, “Yes—we're fine! Just praying.” The drivers looked at us sideways before driving on, trying to determine if they should believe us, two people dressed in rags, hands clasped in prayer.

Once night fell, we prayed silently. I could feel the midnight hour approaching us, even without a watch. Mom was wearing one—it was the only belonging she still had of her mother's—and so when it was eleven o'clock she said, “It's almost time.” She took off the watch and handed it to me. “Wear this, baby, and think of me,” she said. “It's got powers. Special powers. Powers from beyond. Nothing bad can happen to you when you're wearing it. They told me so.”

“Who told you so?” I asked. Remember, I loved my mom.

“The angels. But sometimes you've got to let go, pass it on.” I took the watch from her and clasped it onto my wrist.

“Oh, Mom. Don't go,” I said. My throat felt like it was closing, and I could barely breathe. I grasped Mom's hand, dug my fingers into it as if I were holding on to the edge of a cliff for dear life. I was half expecting her to rise right off her seat on the edge of that bridge and into the inky sky. I'd never seen anyone die right in front of me before—or levitate, for that matter—so I didn't know how it would happen. Maybe the air would be sucked from her by the invisible mouth of an angel. Maybe God would appear.

At ten till midnight we began to sing “Amazing Grace.” Our voices rose high into the night air. The river's lapping waves beneath us sounded like applause. The moon was as bright as a flashlight beam, shining down on us and casting large shadows behind us, twice the size of our bodies. I could see a million stars in the sky. I was struck with the beauty of that moment, right before midnight, and I thought about how the impermanence of things only makes them seem more beautiful. I had to have faith. I tried to hold on to that picture of the sky—burn it into my mind so I'd remember it forever.

With twenty seconds to go, we started the countdown. Nineteen … eighteen … seventeen. “I love you,” she said. Sixteen … fifteen … fourteen. “I love you, too,” I said. My eyes began to water, but I didn't feel like I was crying. It might have been the wind, turning chilly in the night. Thirteen … twelve … eleven … “Now, remember to live your life,” she said. “Don't go around feeling sorry for yourself.” Ten … nine … eight … “Oh, Mom, don't go,” I said. Seven … six … five … “God has his own plan, baby,” she said. Four. Three. Two. “Everything happens for a reason.”

One.

Nothing.

We both sat there, as if we were frozen through. Nothing. I could feel Mom's heartbeat, but I listened for her breathing, too, and when I heard it, relief washed over me. We sat still, our feet hanging over the bridge, half numb, the night straining our eyes, even beneath such a bright moon. Then out of the darkness grew my mother's laughter, so loud I could almost see it taking shape like a big funnel cloud picking up steam as it rolled. She knew it and I knew it: She'd outrun the curse. She'd been saved.

But what did it mean to be saved? I thought it meant we'd stop moving from place to place. Maybe we'd find a home of our own and live there and grow a little vegetable garden in the backyard. Some of the churches where we'd stayed kept gardens in the warmer months. To me, a garden meant you were rooted, like the plants, and you had to wait at least until their bulbs flowered and fruited before you could move again. That's how gardens worked: through stillness.

But being saved meant something else for my mom. Something in her had shifted. That night on the bridge, as the big hand on my grandmother's watch swept over the little hand, as they both pointed to the twelve, upward, Mom was born again, but born again a different person.

“I had a vision last night,” she said the next day. Her voice was scratchy. She'd caught a cold. We were in a motel; the room was square, and the carpet was blue. It smelled like cigarettes, even though the sign said no smoking. Mom's eyes sagged heavily, as if she'd been overtaken by a drug. She'd been awake when I'd gone to sleep and awake when I woke up. I didn't like it when she got this way. She hadn't moved from her spot on the end of the bed.

“Who spoke to you?” I asked.

“Him,” she said, then gave me a look like I was sassing her. “We must get you a proper education,” she said.

I sat up in bed thinking of the possibilities contained within this phrase. No more moving. School. Friends. I hugged Mom, squealed with delight, then lay my head back on my pillow and closed my eyes to imagine where we might go, who I might meet, where we might stay. I wanted to grow lilies in my garden, because those were the prettiest flowers of all.

Mom took me shopping the next day. I didn't ask where she'd gotten the money. New coat—even though it was still summer—new shoes, new dress. “You'll need these for school,” she said. Mom was never the type to look ahead into the future, preferring instead to live in the moment. However, I'd never seen such pretty things before, still stiff in their newness. When we got back to the motel, Mom asked me if I wanted to try my new clothes on again. I said no, because I didn't want to ruin them for school. I wanted my new friends to know me as the girl who dressed neatly. As the girl with the navy blue pea coat, as the girl who wore the dress with pearls for buttons. I wanted my new friends to like me. That night I slept, and I dreamed and I dreamed and I dreamed—all pleasant dreams that lasted through the night—and I woke in the morning feeling rested. Mom told me to put on my new dress, and she called for a taxicab.

It was raining that day, just a light mist, but still I couldn't make out the sky. Mom told me that the sun and the sky were always there; it's the clouds that come and go, and so I thought of that. I stared out the window, tracing my finger against glass, trying to find the point on the horizon where the ground rose up to meet the sky, the place where heaven meets earth. “You can chase it forever, but you can't ever catch it,” Mom said. She knew what I was doing. “But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.”

“Where you going?” the taxi driver said, and Mom told him the address. I wondered how she found a new home so quickly, but I didn't care. I watched the trees tick by on the highway, tried to hold my eyes on each one individually so they didn't all blur together.

And then I saw it: this castle in the distance. As we drew closer I could see it was made of stone, and it had spires, and too many windows to count all at once. I could see a cross attached to a steeple. The steeple reached up into the sky, and I thought it might poke a hole in the clouds and reveal the sun. The taxi slowed as we drove down the gravel drive, then stopped right in front of the door.

“Another church?” I said, turning to Mom, but she leaned toward the front to get a better look through the windshield.

“This it?” he asked.

“Will you wait?” Mom asked, but I was too busy craning my neck to look at the gray building that towered above us. Moss mottled the base of the structure, so it looked dirty. I wondered what kind of people lived inside, if they were like us, if they wore the same kind of clothes I was wearing.