The Mother Garden (8 page)

“Becca,” Anna says.

“What?”

“It's Becca, Gray.” Gray shrugs and leans closer to the bearded man. He sits on the opposite side of Anna and she leans away from Gray as he moves over her. “I think we've got a wedding in the future.” He's drunk. Nick breathes in sharply and grabs at the beer again. I take my hand back.

After Milo's funeral, Gray collapsed in my lap on the sofa and sobbed.
I love you,
he kept repeating.
Never stop telling your mother that, Becca. Never stop telling your family how much you love them.
When I told Nick, he was mortified.

After dinner, Gray suggests that we all go for a walk. There's a trail that leads out near the pond, into the woods beyond, up a small ridge to a clearing. Nick and I spent many hours one summer with hoes and weed clippers, clearing that trail.

There's polite talking as the guests get their coats on. The blond woman isn't really dressed for a hike. She wears red clogs and a long camel-colored coat. I wonder if she's new to these parts, if she came out here to forget. She's not doing a good job, if that's the case.

There are five guests. Two of the women have permed helmets of brown curls. One is tall and buxom, the other is short and slight, but they both wear boxy wool blazers and simple neutral pants with shoes that resemble brown bricks. And there's the angular wife of the bearded man who keeps nervously reaching out to touch him as though he might vanish. Nick smooths my hair back, yanks on a handful until I'm turned to face him, then he leans down and puts his nose against my jaw.

Everyone else waits outside. Their voices are getting less defined as they walk down the lawn to the start of the trail.

“Sorry about this,” Nick says.

“About what?”

“About what,” he says, shaking his head. “Right.”

I can choose. He might be sorry about bringing me here, into this wound of family that can't seem to heal. He might be sorry for Gray's drunkenness, for Anna's silence, for the blond woman's confession, for the fact that we'll have to spend the evening in the woods with five strangers. He might just be sorry. Sorry for leaving me when he did, sorry for returning with streamers of pain rustling behind him, sorry for my mother's descent, for the fact that once she's gone, I will be without family. Sorry for the tilted world. Or simply sorry for himself.

We trail along behind the group and Nick takes my hand as we pass the pond. How long did it take Gray and Anna before they could come out here again? Before they stopped seeing Milo on the grass, Milo against the sky, Milo in all the geese flying by? Or do they still see him, feel him in the night breeze, see his thin, gangly frame scurrying out in the distance, playfully dodging them?

I move my thumb over Nick's thumb and feel a wash of tenderness.

The group has fallen silent. The wind blows through the boughs of the pine trees, rushes over the pond. Even the animals are quiet in the barn down the driveway.

There are a couple of benches by the pond, before the start of the trail, and Nick pulls me over to one. We sit close together. Behind us, the group continues to walk. Soon they'll be in darkness, the woods lit only by Gray's old headlamp.

I didn't see her hang back.

“Can I sit?” Anna asks.

“Of course,” I say, gesturing to the spot beside me.

She closes her coat around her and hunches into it, sinks to the bench. The group's footsteps disappear into the woods.

“How's your mother doing, Becca?” she asks. I have stock responses to this question, depending on who asks it. Status quo, not well, very bad. No one ever really wants to hear about it, and so I try to keep the answers short. She's dying. I could say this. Though they cut off her breasts, though her diaphragm is paralyzed from radiation and she can't breathe without tubes, she's still here. She still makes jokes about the dog and gets angry with the doctors. She can't figure out how to use her cell phone or get the stains out of the grout in the kitchen. But when I touch her skin, the heat is different. Defeat and fury lie right below the coolness of it. A frightening combination—defeat that won't do you in and fury that can't save you. And sometimes I try to imagine the silence that will fall everywhere after she dies. I call her now with an offhanded question about taxes or recipes and I think that soon there will be no answers. And the question mark will lose its curve, will grow and straighten inside of my ribs, getting so large and sharp that it finally splits my body in two.

“She's hanging in there,” I say. Anna nods. We don't look at each other.

“Give her my love,” Anna says.

Only the whisper of wind through trees, only the distant throaty singing of frogs.

“Do you want to walk, Bec?” Nick's voice is loud. Anna stands and takes a flashlight out of her jacket pocket. She twists the head of it until a dim nickel of light lands on the dirt.

She gestures with her head. “We should catch up.”

Nick walks quickly, gets ahead of us, and then stops near the trees to wait.

There's something between Anna and me right now, something warm and desperate and sad. I want to ask her what she hears when Milo comes to her, when he materializes out of wind and light. Does he simply sit near her? Is it like she's pregnant with him again? Does he get lonely? Does he tell her why he did it? How the gun felt? What that moment was like when his finger tightened around the trigger? Did he think about Anna, the powdery smell of her neck, the drugged feeling of sleeping near her when he was small? Was it brilliant, that smash of pain? Did he see colors? Did he feel love and sorrow surge up in his throat and go soaring out of him? Was that what death was? No longer needing to contain these feelings in your body? When suddenly, all the splitting song inside you
is
you. You are—finally—no longer a container—you are the things that once were contained?

Anna tried to kill herself a month after it happened. She took sleeping pills and locked herself in the bedroom. She took too many, though, and just threw them up. “I want to go with him,” she screamed at Gray, or so the story goes. She screamed this over and over until Gray loaded her up in the truck, took her to the emergency room, and had her sedated.

Anna's flashlight shines uselessly on pieces of earth and rock. We walk through the woods mostly by instinct. I reach out and grasp Nick's arm. He squeezes my hand between his arm and chest.

When we get to the top of the ridge, I can see the group at the far corner. Gray has a thermos and passes it between himself and the bearded man. The two permed women stand close together. The blond sits alone on a rock overlooking the property. Her chin rests on her knees.

Did the angular woman and bearded man have a child die, too? Were we all going to sit on top of this ridge and hum? Would the dead come floating off the tips of trees, would the girls come back in their cotton gowns, would their shrunken hands scratch at my face?

A buzzing begins in my head. I want to go tearing off down the path, across Maine, across this enormous country, back to that other ocean. But I just stand there, staring out into the night, Nick's arm clamping my hand to his side. Anna walks over to the blond woman and sits beside her. Their bodies are darker and more substantial than night, and I can see Anna's pale hand settle on the woman's neck. The woman bends toward her.

Maybe it's not Milo's return that Anna's seeking. Maybe she just wants the world to stop spinning for a moment. Maybe she's looking for stillness, a place where the questions don't haunt her, where Milo is actually gone.

At the end of the clearing, Gray laughs at something the bearded man says. Nick takes my hand in his and pulls me toward them.

W
HEN MY FATHER FIRST SUGGESTED SHE DONATE
her body to research, my mother stared at him like he'd just grown a beak. Eventually, though, she relented. “It's not like it'll do me much good when I'm dead, dear,” she said to me, signing her name with a flourish. She straightened the edges of the forms with the flat of her palm and settled down to watch a movie. We never discussed her decision again.

About two weeks after her death, my father called me at home.

“Yael, I've got some strange news.” He was using his doctor voice, clipped and clinical. “I just got a call from the lab.” My heart soared. It wasn't my mother who died! (I knew it!) The whole thing had been a bizarre mix-up—somebody else's mother. My mother was alive, sitting on a park bench in Boise eating cherries!

“They've done some work on her cadaver.” My soaring halted. “It seems that your mother's stomach was full of beads.”

“Beads?” “Yes,” he said. “Very strange.”

When my mom went into the hospital for what we knew would be the final time, my father packed his bags. He'd rented a furnished apartment in the foothills. “A blank slate,” he'd said as he showed me the empty cupboards. The apartment belonged to a large, beige development overlooking a man-made pond. I drove through the mechanical gates and found him pacing outside his front door. On the dining room table in a gallon zipper bag, the beads waited. They ranged in size. Some were like large pearls while others resembled popcorn kernels. And they ranged in color, too—blues, glossy green, bloody scarlet, others like bone or dirty stucco. I lifted a fistful and a few fell to the carpet. If my mother's skin had been translucent, she would have looked like a cathedral window.

My father breezed behind me on the way to the kitchen. “I'm having a Scotch,” he said. “You want one?” We sat on the living room floor with the beads beside us, sipping from the tumblers in silence.

I couldn't remember my mother ever wearing beads. She'd been raised in Brooklyn and despite my parents' migration to California in the 1970s, she'd never gotten hip to the bohemian thing. She liked gold jewelry. Classy little hoops hooked into her ears. A delicate gold band on her ring finger.

My mother was a woman devoid of fancy. She felt no remorse as she threw out my childhood paintings or my father's love letters. She bought tuna fish on sale and bulk flour. Were these beads her private code? Did she secretly long for color and excess? Did one bloom each time she fingered a silk scarf or expensive underwear? Or did the beads have to do with her disease? For every cell that went astray, her body produced a bead as an apology.

Finally, my father spoke. “She must have eaten them,” he said.

My father was a doctor and so the world revealed itself to him in an orderly fashion. There were things that were possible and things that were not. I reached out for a green bead and held it to the light.

“Why would she have done that?” I asked.

“We'll never know,” he said gravely.

I knew this was absurd. My mother disliked all things strange. She was a finicky eater and she'd been in the hospital for weeks before she died. Who would have fed her beads?

“I'm getting rid of them,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I'll hold on to them.” My father nodded absently and rubbed the back of his neck.

When I got home, I rinsed them off and put them in a metal mixing bowl in my bathroom. My boyfriend, Mateo, stood over them and twirled a piece of his hair, something he did when he puzzled over crosswords or talked to a difficult editor on the phone.

“It's got to be a sick joke,” he said, walking back into my bedroom. He sat on the bed. “That's just too messed up.”

“A joke?” I asked.

“I don't know. Maybe there's some sort of pathology lab fraternity brotherhood or something.”

I got off the bed.

“What?” he said. “You think all those beads just magically appeared inside your mother?”

I walked into the bathroom, locked the door, turned off the light, and shoved my hand deep into the bowl. The knobby pressure on my fingers felt good—like shoving my hands into river gravel. If there were enough of them to fill the bathtub, I'd have slept in them.

“Yael?” Mateo called.

I took a bead between my thumb and forefinger. I could make out, though the room was dark, a slight red sheen. I slipped it into my mouth and swallowed.

“Please open the door,” Mateo said, his voice grave, authoritative.

I unlocked it. The hair Mateo tugged stuck from his head like a frosting dollop and he had a piece of lint on his eyebrow. “Come here,” he said. He'd just shaved, and he smelled very strongly of lemons.
My mother is dead,
I said to myself. But the words sounded ridiculous.
Mateo is being nice to me because my mother is dead.
I pushed him aside and climbed into bed.

“I'm exhausted,” I said. But really, I just wanted to close my eyes. I wanted to see if I could feel it, that shiny red bead, slipping silently through me.

When the alarm went off, I woke feeling strangely elated.

“Teo,” I whispered. I could tell he was awake. I shoved my foot between his ankles and felt his scratchy leg hairs. “Wake up.” I ran a hand down his chest, hooked a finger in the elastic of his boxers, scooted close. He opened one eye.

“What time is it?” He lifted his head to look at the clock and groaned. “I have that meeting at eight-thirty,” he said. “Those sadists.”

Mateo and I left each other alone in the mornings. We both hated the violence of waking, hated each and every bird that chirped. But this morning the sun was coming right out of the center of my stomach. Mateo made a move to get out of bed, but I crooked my arm around his neck. I felt radiant, zinging with life.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, rolling on top of him. “I'm good.” I began to tug off his T-shirt.

After he left, vaguely puzzled and disheveled, I carried the bowl of beads to the coffee table. I gathered the necessary materials: dental floss, scissors, a sewing needle. The beads gathered on the string, and when it was long enough, I tied it off. It hit just over my heart.

I'd forgotten about it by the time Mateo got home. He came into the house, set his bag down, and headed to the kitchen when he stopped short.

“You made a necklace?” I fingered the beads. Red, dirty stucco, blue.

“What?” I said.

Mateo shook his head and raised his arms a little, then dropped them to his sides. “Yael,” he said, squinting a little. “That's just wrong.”

“I think they're beautiful.”

“Those beads,” Mateo started, and then shook his head. His voice was a higher pitch than usual. “Those beads were sitting in your mother's stomach!” He waited for me to get it, to take the necklace off and hurl it to the carpet. I put my hand over the beads.

“Do you not see that that's disturbing?”

“You said you thought it was a joke,” I said.

Mateo continued to shake his head. “I don't know how to deal with this.” He stormed past me to the patio, where he sat stiffly, staring at a tree.

“Maybe it's too hard,” he said. “Maybe I just can't take it.” I sat on the deck chair beside him. “I don't know what you want from me. Are you punishing me for something?” In the dimming light of the summer sky the beads looked almost supernatural, like a wad of colored foil burned in the center of each one. “It's just so much pressure,” he said. I looked out into the trees behind the house. It was nearly dusk and they cast long shadows over the lawn. I closed my eyes and a peaceful sensation drifted in, right where the necklace fell over my chest. It spread through my body like a vapor.

“Please take the beads off,” Mateo said. I'd climbed in bed next to him in my nightgown. The beads hung beneath the thin fabric, making a ridge.

“No,” I said. “They give me comfort.” I hadn't expected to say this, but after I did, I realized it was true.

Mateo rolled onto his back and breathed deeply. “Don't I give you comfort?” he asked.

“Of course you give me comfort,” I said. But it wasn't true. He rolled away from me.

I couldn't sleep. If they had found these beads in my mother's stomach, then wasn't it possible they'd find other things as well? Keys? Scrolls? Tiny mirrors? I crawled out of bed and went into the living room to call my father. He picked up on the first ring, sounding frightened.

“Sorry. I can't sleep,” I said. He sighed.

“I can't sleep either,” he said. “I've been feeling very odd.”

“Odd how?” I asked.

“Don't throw the beads out,” he said. “I think we should keep them in the family.” I could hear him tinkering with something on the other end; it sounded like he was playing with silverware. “Yael, actually, do you think I could come over and take a look at them?”

“Now?” I asked.

“If that's okay. I know it's late.”

Twenty minutes later, my father knocked softly on the front door. Red tinged the whites of his eyes and in the corners, a yellow gel gathered. He grabbed my shoulders stiffly and pulled. I tried to lean into the embrace, but it put me off balance.

“I don't understand,” he said. He sat, placed the bowl in front of him on the floor, and shoved his hairy hand into the remaining beads. The muscles in his jaw pulled back, but the rest of his face got very still. He rocked, grasping his upper arms, kneading the flesh as if looking for a good place to grip. Then he began to cry out. I'd never heard him cry and the noises were tentative and jagged.

Mateo padded out of the bedroom in his socks and boxers. He looked at me, alarmed. I looked at my father. I'd heard stories about this. Women threw themselves on the graves of their dead husbands, eyes rolled back, throats dilated. But I hadn't expected it from him. When my mother stopped breathing, he put his hand on her head, then pulled the sheet over her face. He called the attending nurse. He made sure the right papers were signed.

When my father quieted, I felt the small hairs on my neck and arms reorient. He hung his head, balled his hands into fists, and wept. I kneeled next to him. Mateo followed and kneeled next to me. I put my hand on my father's back. Mateo put his hand on my back. My father took some deep breaths.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

I shook my head and patted his back.

“Don't be sorry,” Mateo said. I brought out extra sheets and blankets and put my father to bed on the sofa.

Back in the bedroom, Mateo wanted to know how I was. There was a feigned sympathy in his eyes, but behind that, exhaustion.

“I don't know,” I said. I fumbled for the necklace beneath my robe. Warm from my skin, the beads felt animal and alive, as if inside of each of them beat a fragile little heart.

When I woke up, my father was drinking coffee on the sofa. Mateo had left for work.

“I'm sorry about last night,” my father said. There was a grayish tint to his skin and his sideburns were completely white. He used to look tall and brusque, always rushing away in dark polished shoes. Now he wilted in beige sneakers and jeans.

“Don't be,” I said. I went and sat next to him. Momentarily, his eyes locked on my neck.

“I made plans to go sailing today.” He changed his focus, staring deeply at the coffee in his cup. “I'm trying to get out of the house.”

“That's good,” I said. But my mind wasn't linking up to the present. I could feel only the beads.

“I'm going with a nurse from the hospital, but I just want you to know that it's not really a date.” I looked at him, still staring at the coffee.

“It's not a date,” I repeated.

“Of course not,” he said. “How could it be a date?”

“How could it be a date?”

“How could it be?” he asked.

A date? It had occurred to me that this would happen someday, but not two weeks after her death. She'd been sick for years, dying for months, but her death was new. It was like a magic trick, of sorts: now you see Mom in the bed, now you see a bed!

“I can't believe this.”

“What?”

“I can't believe you'd even think of dating right now.”

“I just told you it isn't a date,” he said.

“She just died!”

“Yael, this is hard for me,” he said. “I know it's hard for you, too. But I need to do something. I need to get out. I can't spend my days locked in the house, feeling that I never knew how to be happy and now I never will.”

Happy? Of course he wasn't happy. They'd been married thirty years and now she was dead. Why would he be happy? And that he'd never been happy? Happy was a word to be squished through the nose at birthday parties.