Dove
My mother peeled out.
The back end of her car slid, screeched, righted itself in a furious spit of gravel. What might be, in a different car, an impressive display of wrath, in my mother’s 1992 teal VW Passat, was a carnival act, comic and grotesque, which made it all the more frightening.
The squealing sent the neighborhood dogs into whoops and howls.
Our neighbor, Mrs. Kent, summoned by the ruckus, and her insatiable curiosity, hastened outside. Poised barefoot on her front lawn, she shielded her eyes, gawking as my mother gave one final punch to the accelerator. A whining roar, and the swerving back end of the Passat disappeared inside a sparkling billow of gravel dust.
Mrs. Kent spun on her heel, peering at our house. Standing at the window, I dropped into a crouch.
I had mastered this paralyzed squat in the shadows.
Since her rupture with Rosie Mac, followed by Grandma Bella’s death, my mother, ever anxious about outsiders, had only grown more vigilant. Her inner alarms shrieked and flashed, activated by the crunch of tires, car door slams, shoes clicking up front porch steps. If they weren’t invited, my mother said, they weren’t wanted. And these days, we invited no one. We had no one left to invite. Accordingly, we snapped off the lights in the house, and hit the floor, concealed well before the first knock or doorbell ring.
I held my pose, blood thundering, until I heard Mrs. Kent go back inside.
Even then, I did precisely as my mother had trained me, crawling across the linoleum on my hands and knees, back to the bathroom.
There, I pulled myself up on the toilet and sat, hunched, hugging myself, the toes of my sneakers pressed together. A month ago, when the invitation arrived, a wedding for a young couple at our church, I had dared to ask, and lo and behold, my mother said I could go. Risking my neck, I’d pushed further, asking if I could hitch a ride with Rosie Mac. My mother had lifted her chin, and with an imperious dignity, heavy and impressive as a monument, she’d said, “Calla, you are come of age. That is your choice to make.”
This was something I’d never heard from her, and wasn’t sure I believed. Yet then, she’d helped me pick out my dress! I’d relaxed into the illusion that all was well.
But at the last minute, she’d flung open the bathroom door and staring me down, steely-eyed, commanded me not to go. I wouldn’t, she said, if I really loved her.
A loyalty test.
Curling iron in hand, I’d stood my ground. For the first time, I’d fought back.
The result?
I lifted my eyes to the mirror. One side curled, the other flat. I hadn’t had the chance to spray the curled side, and in the fracas, my buoyant curls were already falling out, limp as my body after the adrenaline rush.
My mother – gone.
Half an hour later, I left the house, locking the door, checking it multiple times, lest my mother return and find a robbed house, heaped atop my other sins. I hobbled over grass in heels, pinching, foreign to my feet. I sank into my swing.
My swing.
The last gift my father made for me.
Through the years, he’d made nearly all my gifts in his workshop, a sacred sawdust temple where I watched him work and listened to him speak about his favorite topics, including the afterlife. He told me about angels and spirit guides and something he called ‘soul contracts’ – the pacts made with fellow spirits in the invisible realm to show up for and deliver one another, while on earth enduring humantribulation.
Bullshit fairy tales, my mother called his stories.
My father was dying – or, as he said, transitioning – when he made my swing. He rescued cast off plywood from the scrap heap, and shaping the boards to fit me, he glued two pieces together, an inch and a half thick. Strong enough, he said, to hold me for life. He tied the swing to a branch possessed of lifelong fortitude, recruiting help from Mr. Kent next door, who climbed our big, shady Elm in the front yard when my father was too weak to do so. My father said, “This was my soul pact with you, Calla. Though you don’t remember and neither do I. I must have sworn I wouldn’t leave you so early, without giving you wings.”
I soon found that one belief was true.
At sixteen, my swing was still my safe space, my freedom.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
I looked up, thinking perhaps my mother had returned, restored, smiling again. Sometimes it happened. You never knew.
It was Rosie Mac. Her Chevrolet Astro minivan, blue, like a wandering fragment of Iowa sky, sailed by the shimmering rows of gold-tipped cornfields, past the sprawling red barn and tall silos of the Mueller Farm, slowing, turning by the row of dented, silver mailboxes onto our lane. Rosie Mac stayed behind the wheel, wary, eyeing our house.
When I climbed in, she turned to me. She beamed. She seemed untouched, unchanged, the way she’d always been. Her smile so big, so revealing, I could see the glint of her silver fillings, a sight that made me believe, when I was little, she was a treasure chest.
“Hiiiii, beautiful, oh my sweet Calla, hi!” She leaned across the space to clasp me. Her cloud of red hair, scented like a strawberry sundae, fuzzed against my face. Her freckled cheeks and arms, dearer to me than any starry sky. Her lavish laugh, a wild bubbling giggle, easily won, yet always a prize. These things, at least, remained. We pulled apart. Her gaze lingered. “You’ve grown up, Calla girl, even more since…” Her voice trailed off.
March. Six months past, the last time we’d been allowed to meet.
“Mom not home?” Rosie Mac’s eyes slid to the house, windows smacked shut, blinds
drawn.
“No,” I said. And that was all.
Six Months Earlier
The end arrived at my Story Party.
One of my short stories had, mysteriously, won a competition.
Grandma Bella had christened me writer from age six, when I tried to sell my short stories at her garage sales. I’d sold one, about a lion getting his first haircut, for ten cents. A fair price, I thought, for an amusing story with some real pathos – the mane chopped short, the lion’s wounded vanity, his angst – handwritten on loose leaf paper, with illustrations, and neatly stapled. My mother had set the dime in my hand. “Your royalty,” she’d smirked, shaking her head.
Grandma Bella, however, was beside herself. She’d grabbed my arm and pulled me into the shadows, as she did when she wanted to have what she called a tete-a-tete. Which meant a secret talk. Which meant a conversation without my mother. She’d pinched my dime between her fingers, rotating it, so it gleamed and glinted. “You see this?” she’d said. “This is just the beginning.”
“Beginning of what, Grandma?”
She’d leaned in close, eyes sharp, her whisper a piercing hiss. “Riches and fame.”
Therefore, when Grandma Bella found out that one of my stories had won a prize, and would be published in a magazine, she became so overwrought she baked three cakes: chocolate, yellow, and strawberry. Finding her fridge full of cakes, she decided to call some people. There weren’t many to call. There was only one, my mother’s best friend, Rosie Mac.
Rosie Mac arrived to my party, herding a flourishing yet unwieldy bouquet of balloons. As she climbed from her blue Chevrolet Astro minivan, the balloons in her grip shimmied silver in the breeze that swept off the Mississippi River, one that lifted her skirt full up. With a shriek, she pressed her skirt down – and off sailed the balloons.
We stood outside in a knot, watching them drift over the Mississippi. “Look, Calla!” Rosie Mac said. “Before they go! You can just make out the word Congrats!”
Indeed you could. I watched my Congrats! twist and bop in the breeze, away.
Next to me, my mother palmed her forehead, said, “Wow, Rosie Mac. Butter fingers.”
But to me, though I’d never say it, tracking balloons in their flight path across the river, toward Illinois, was the perfect celebration. Poetic even. Then, mingled with the scent of muddy catfish in the air, was the sudden sharp tang of sawdust. And in my head, my father’s voice. You see, Calla, even that small but meaningful ‘accident’ was planned, by you and Rosie Mac, in the spirit realm, before you were born onto earth.
I clutched Rosie Mac’s hand as we climbed Grandma Bella’s rickety old front porch steps and went inside. Grandma Bella had set out all three cakes in silver sheet pans, cold from the fridge. “Have at it, girls!” She was German, and had robust faith in our combined effort to make great headway on the cakes. Any number of cakes. Not only cake, but also liverwurst spread on white bread.
“Oh Grandma Bella, how sweet of you to do this, you sure do know how to make a cake! This German chocolate reminds me of my mother’s…” Rosie Mac chitter-chattered, on and on in that excited way where her words tripped over one another, and her cheeks reddened to match her hair. This compulsive talkativeness had amplified over the winter, and was beginning to scratch at my mother’s raw nerves. I don’t know what’s going on with Rosie Mac, but lately, she’s a bit much, hyper or something, and oversensitive, cries over nothing. We used to have fun but now she’s starting to drive me up the wall.
Frightened, I urgently wanted to touch Rosie Mac’s arm, tap her foot under the table, pinch her thigh. Anything to communicate a warning. But she wouldn’t get it.
In spite of their long friendship, she didn’t live with my mother, and didn’t understand the dark sorcery my mother was capable of doing with your heart, once she had it in her hands.
For instance, that very morning before my party, while sitting cross-legged on our porch, my notebook in my lap, searching the haze over the cornfields for writerly inspiration, my mother had climbed past me up the steps. She carried a basket, heaped full of tomatoes and peppers from the garden, slung over an arm. Setting her hand on the door, she’d turned. I’d felt her eyes, and looking up, found in her face a pure, open-hearted surrender I’d never seen there for anyone, not even my father. She said to me, in a hush near to holy, “I am just so proud of who you are, Calla,” holding my eyes with her own.
My heart, you see, was in her hands. My father had told me about the unseen component of the biological heart – an energy, he said, a force that not only maintained but felt life.Asachild,I’dcalledittheghostheart, theone that bloomed orwithered,lived ordied,incountlessways onawhollydifferentplane.
I am just so proud of who you are.
Those words, her face! I recollected my father’s favorite painter, Raphael, star of the Italian Renaissance. My father believed that Raphael was more than a painter, he was a mystic, tapped into the divine. His art unveiled hidden truths of the eternal we all knew, but had forgotten in a collective amnesia fostered by the illusion of the material world.
I thought, in that moment, if Raphael were to pop back into the earthly realm, and emerge from the cornfields just then, he would have had to sit and paint what he saw. My mother enrobed in her gardening clothes like a priestess, opening her hands, tilting my ghost heart to the light, filling it and filling it, until in unbearable ecstasy, I rose, my spirit outside my body, merging with hers.
Itwasonlyamoment,afterall.
In the very next, she could close her fist and crush it all.
This is what Rosie Mac didn’t yet know.
Anyway.
Grandma Bella said, a party wasn’t a party without gifts. I said, her party was gift enough.
She said, nonsense.
So, after pouring more coffee, Grandma Bella gave me a gift – a piggy bank, white porcelain, with red hearts for eyes and one on the snout. Grandma instructed me to open it from the bottom, and when I did, pulling free a small rubber stopper, what should drop out on the table, spinning and clattering, but a dime.
A single dime, radiant silver, soaking up all the light.
We were quiet, baffled, staring.
Finally I got it, and gasped. “The dime!”
Grandma Bella nodded. “The dime,” she said, looking right into my eyes. Then she smiled. “I told you, didn’t I? I told you I’d put it in the bank. Well, there’s the bank.” A nod at Heart Piggy. And then, across the table, she handed me a roll of bills, tied up in red silk ribbon. “I’ve been saving ever since. Consider this my investment in your writing career.”
What made it hard to breathe, as I took the money, was that, no matter how much it was, it was too much. Grandma Bella was poor. Only recently had I noted that her house, precariously perched on the banks of the Mississippi, was more than a little shambly, continually shaken from the roots by passing barges and, on the other side, the railroad tracks, trains rattling the walls, the cabinets, all her beloved knicker-knackers toppling headlong from the shelves. The way her house reeked of leaky furnace, and gave us all headaches. The way she’d stare out the window and wring her hands and say, “Someday my ship will come in.” How often I’d looked for that
ship! I imagined Grandma Bella’s ship, sailing down the Mississippi with vast, billowing sails, commanded by a pirate with a long chin and great dark mustache, stepping forward to announce through a megaphone, “Grandma Bella! Your ship – has come in!” On the deck, treasure chests, spilling gold coins.
Perhaps it was my father’s magical thinking, taking my brain captive again, but the roll of bills, the money she handed me – felt like a soul pact. I would go on and try, in my life, to summon this visionary ship to my shore, and if my quest produced treasure, I would remember her. I would fall to my knees and for the rest of my life, and thank her.
That’s when it happened.
Rosie Mac leaned in, shiny-eyed, stirring her coffee. “What’s your story about, Calla
girl? Tell us.”
Everyone waited, watching me. After all, this was my Story Party. And here was the dread moment. I swallowed hard. “Um. A girl. A girl named Juniper and…her swing.”
“Ha!” Rosie Mac winked. “I know a girl who loves her swing. So,” taking a sip, “what happens to Juniper?”
My mother ripped open a sugar packet with vigor. “How ‘bout you slow your roll, Rosie Mac, and wait to read it like the rest of us?”
“I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t wait!” Rosie clapped, and my mother rolled her eyes.
I told her that Juniper was a lonely girl. She had only one friend in the world. Her swing. Juniper and her swing shared a psychic bond. They could transfer thoughts. Therefore, Juniper knew her swing had a secret pair of wings. So she named her swing Dove.
“Dove!” My mother scoffed. “Who names a swing?”
“Then what happens?” Rosie Mac asked, serving herself another slice of cake.
I told her that Juniper and Dove hatch a plan. If Juniper can only get stronger, and swing high enough, Dove’s wings will unlatch. She’ll be freed from the tree, where she’s tied down with ropes. Together, they will fly over the Mississippi, into Illinois. Juniper has only viewed Illinois from her lonely hilltop, and she yearns to reach it like a distant shore. For Juniper, Illinois is another world entirely, magical, akin to Narnia.
“Do they make it? Do they get to Illinois?”
“Juniper tries to swing higher,” I said, “but every time she gets close, her mother calls her back to earth.”
Rosie Mac frowned. “But why?”
“To do some chore, like sweep or dust. And each time Juniper answers to her mother, Dove’s wings retreat and crumple.”
“Oh no. Oh! My goodness.” Rosie Mac pressed her hand to her bosom. “Oh Calla, that’s sad. It’s like the dusting and sweeping,” her eyebrows pulled together, “all that trying to keep order, clean up messes, it interrupts, doesn’t it? Why, shoot. It gets in the way of dreams.”
“Yes!” I rose, smacking the tabletop with my palm.
“Jesus, Calla!” My mother snapped. “Sit down! Enough with the sugar.”
I wanted to bust out of my skin and whirl around the room. But it wasn’t the sugar. The story, when I wrote it, seemed dumb. I didn’t even know why I’d written it. I was dubious when Mr. Freidman, my English teacher, asked permission to enter it in the contest. I didn’t think the story stood a chance against great writing, real writing. But Rosie’s attention to Juniper’s plight made the story seem bigger, more important than I’d realized. The excitement made me reckless. “Yes,” I said, sitting. “Juniper is sad and she’s frustrated. She wants her mother to be the guardian of her dreams, not the disruptor.”
“Of course she does! Ohhh.” Rosie’s eyes slid to my mother. A mere glance, before lifting a forkful of yellow cake to her mouth. She pointed her eyes to the ceiling.
Grandma Bella said, “What imagination you have, Calla! Something special.”
“Hey.” My mother thunked down her coffee mug. “What was that look for?”
Rosie Mac said, “What look?” chipmunk-cheeked, her mouth full of cake, crumbs falling. She swiped a napkin across her lips, leaving a smudge of the coppery red lipstick that my mother had talked her into. Before my mother, Rosie Mac, raised Baptist, had never worn a speck of makeup, not once in her life.
“Don’t play dumb with me. You know very well what look.” Rosie shook her head. “I didn’t…”
“I never ask this girl to lift a finger! All she ever does is sit on her butt, reading and writing, in her head 24/7, making up tall tales just like her father. Do I ask her to do the dirty dishes or even make her own bed? Nooo. I do it all. I’m not only the guardian, I am the goddamn
rottweiler standing at the gate of her dreams.” Mom swiveled to me, her nostrils flaring. “Go on, tell her.”
Robot like, I turned to Rosie Mac. “The story is fiction,” I beeped. “Girl and swing aside, the story bears no resemblance to real life.”
“There!” Mom said. “You see? A swing and a girl can’t talk to each other. A swing can’t grow wings and fly away. And Illinois isn’t some magic land, that’s for damn sure. Her story is fantasy. If you want to blame someone, blame her hippy dippy father. He’s the one who put all this escapism, transcend-the-real-world rubbish in her head.”
“Of course it’s fantasy,” Rosie Mac said. “I’m not denying that.” She lifted her coffee cup, tapping the rim to her lips. “But then again…”
I stiffened, shot a desperate look at Grandma Bella, who went on spreading liverwurst as though hell weren’t on the verge of tearing loose, Tasmanian Devil like, upending her rickety cabin.
My mother leaned in, eyes asquint. “Go on, Rosie Mac. Finish your thought.” The hairs on my neck rose.
Rosie Mac shook her head. “It’s just that sometimes, when young people write fantasy, they’re trying to work out some problem in their life, or I don’t know, some…knot in their subconscious.”
“Subconscious!” my mother fell back in her chair. “What the hell! Now you’re playing Freud with my kid?”
I dropped, or tossed, or rather threw, my fork on the floor. A raucous clatter. Grandma Bella pushed her chair out and stood to bring me another.
“Ma, sit!” My mother yelled. “Let her learn not to be so careless. Let her eat with her fingers.”
“Oh, good grief, Lily, simmer down. This is her party! Stop being so defensive. You take everything so personal and turn it into a fight. And truth be told, you do keep Calla on a tight leash. Does she even have a single friend? I never hear…”
“Shut it, Ma! You are the last person on earth fit to give mothering advice.”
Although the fork was in plain sight, I kicked it, then ducked under the table, pretending to search. I took a moment, hidden from view, to close my eyes and pray for us all.
Not once had my mother ever lost her temper with Rosie Mac. When they got together, there was only shenanigans and laughter. They laughed about men and marriage and marking sex days off the calendar. They laughed about what they called menobellies. I had no idea what ‘sex days’ and ‘menobellies’ were, but oh, how I loved their giggles and chortles.
Under the table, I opened my eyes. Rosie Mac’s shoes, a pair of pink and black open-toed tiny heels with a pretty, shiny buckle. On one of our shopping trips, my mother had made her try them. Rosie Mac was accustomed to loafers. But the heel, Lily, are you sure it isn’t a bit…suggestive?
Oh, for God’s sakes, Rosie Mac, it’s a kitten heel, not a stiletto!
And when she fretted about the price, my mother had yanked the shoe box from her hands, marched to the register and paid for them herself. “Here,” she’d said, thrusting the bag at Rosie Mac. “Thank me later, when you go out clubbing. You can wear these with your leather miniskirt!” The sales clerks had giggled, told them how much fun they were, how they livened up the whole place.
Those shoes, a testament to my mother’s fierce love for her best friend, burned in my chest, and I begged the universe to restrain my mother, hold her back with muscly spirit arms, lest she strike out, envenom and destroy this good thing in her life.
I grabbed my fork, and sat up, exchanging the dirty for the clean Grandma Bella handed me just as my mother said, “Out with it! Don’t beat around the bush, Rosie Mac. Say it. Say what you think. I’m a bad mother. That’s what you think.”
Rosie Mac set down her cup. “Lily! I think no such thing!”
“How dare you.” My mother’s eyes, both wild and intensely focused. “And here I thought you were my friend. All along, you were judging me.” She jabbed her finger at Rosie Mac. “And have I ever said a word, a single word, about you? How bad you’ve messed yourself up, marrying that abuser?”
Rosie Mac blanched. Her freckles, stark and bright. “Lily, please. I didn’t mean…”
Bam! My mother’s fist slammed down onto the tabletop, a lightning strike that made us all jump, along with the dishes and silverware. “Too late!” Mom slowly rose, eyes snapping, lips wrenched back from her teeth. “And just so you know, my kid can swing all day and straight into the moon for all I care. She’s had it so good she can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to grow up like we did, with a raging drunk for a dad staggering through the door at night, beating our asses clean off just for breathing.”
I held my breath. I had never heard this before.
“It’s just too bad, Rosie MacDonald. Here I thought we had something good. Well, paint me in shades of fool! I won’t fall for your sly tricks again.” My mother balled her napkin, wheeled back like a softball player, and pitched it.
Rosie Mac shielded her face, even as the napkin landed on her half-eaten piece of strawberry cake like a dab of wilted ice cream.
She flinched when the door slammed.
She’d keep flinching, oh yes, every time she remembered.
***
Rosie Mac gripped the steering wheel as we bounced down the rutted lane, and turned onto the main road. I held onto my seat belt harder than necessary. My eyes grazed the tops of the Mueller Farm silos shining back at the sun, the sky a crisp, clean, starched September blue. I wondered where my mother was hiding out. The fear crept in that, like the sheriff did sometimes, she was waiting, parked haphazardly behind the stand of burnt out trees, watching the dump trucks clang back and forth from the gravel pit. My mother, watching and waiting for Rosie Mac’s van, her teal Passat lunging out after us like a bull from behind the gates.
Trailing us, honking, yelling out the window at every stoplight.
I only wished I could assure myself that this vision was irrational.
On the main road, Rosie Mac started chirping away. What a pretty day for a wedding, and even prettier on the river bluffs, in a wildflower garden, and by evening, when the bride and groom were united, it would be utterly divine. Why, we’d all be treated to a view of a melting tangerine Iowa sunset, while the vows were exchanged. It would be hard to know where to look, wouldn’t it? At the glowing orange light, entwined in the bride’s hair, or threaded through the lace of her dress, or lighting up the groom’s boutonniere, turning the rose over his heart a luminous pink, or the light touching each tree in the distance, outlining the tall, brooding pines in halos of fire. Oh, it would be glorious, picturesque, about as close to God as you could get, outside of church. Mendelssohn and the sunset, making symphony and stained glass out of the earth.
Rosie Mac’s voice snagged.
The silence, after her manic rhapsodizing, was so profound, I didn’t hear it at first. Her weeping.
When I turned, I watched the tears shining a path down her round, freckled face.
“Grandma’shouse,”shesaid.
We sailed by the stretch of river where Grandma Bella had lived, until the clot that took her out, swift and sure, a sniper in her own brain, only three months after my Story Party. Her cabin on the river was, shortly thereafter, torn down. An easy job, considering how close it was to crumbling. I closed my eyes now, when my mother and I drove past into town. No use seeing the hole where her house once stood.
“I’m so very sorry I couldn’t make it to Grandma’s funeral, Calla.” Rosie Mac whisked a Kleenex from her purse. In absolute tatters, yet she tried pressing it to her face anyway. “I was there in spirit. I hope you know.”
I knew she’d called after Grandma’s death. The one time, since the party, my mother hadn’t smashed the phone down. I’d honed my newfound crouching skills, eavesdropping in the hallway. I heard the relish in my mother’s voice when she snarled, “Don’t bother, Rosie Mac. Who needs you? We sure don’t. Unless you want to make a scene, I’m warning you, stay away!”
My throat ached. I said to Rosie Mac, “Her ship never came in.”
“What? What, honey? Her ship?” Rosie Mac flicked the turn signal and exited, following the signs to River Point Park.
“Grandma Bella always said, someday her ship would come in. But it never did. She grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, freezing and hungry during the Great Depression. I saw an old photo of her when she was ten-years-old. She wore her brother’s big, old, cast off shoes. The front of those shoes yawned wide open. Her little toes pushed straight out into the cold. And she waited for her ship. She dropped out of school in 8th grade, even though she didn’t want to, and went to work for a wealthy family, polishing their silver. She sent the money back home to her folks. And she waited for her ship. At fifteen, she caught rheumatic fever, dipped into a coma, and hung on for dear life. She pulled through, but with an enlarged heart. And she waited for her ship. Oh, Rosie Mac.” My lips trembled. “Grandma Bella grew old and died without ever seeing her ship.”
Rosie Mac blinked. “Her ship…”
I twisted away, looking out the window. Not at the river, which held no promise, but at the grand homes perched on bluffs, all windows, like big imperious eyes absorbing the view, drawing it in as if it belonged only to them. Rosie Mac’s van filled with my father’s signature scent, the sweet tang of sawdust. And he spoke to me. Calla, a body is only a house, and once the spirit, the life force, is released back into the universe, the body is an empty house, eyes like windows, with no one home, no consciousness to look out, to see. What is consciousness? And what happens to it when the body dies?
Rosie Mac said, “Calla, I want you to know. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss your mother.”
My father said, consciousness is the hard problem of science. If anyone tells you they understand consciousness, they are full of it. I don’t care who they are, philosopher or psychic, preacher or physicist, Einstein himself, if they say they know what we are, why we’re here,
and where we’re going, they are high on hubris. The world is full of smart people who only guess. But no one knows. No one has certainty. And that’s a beautiful and terrifying freedom, isn’t it? Think of it. We are all here together, steeped in the same unsolved mystery!
Rosie Mac said, “I’m talking to a therapist. She has me attending ACA meetings. Adult Children of Alcoholics. I never knew there was such a thing! I’ve learned a whole lot, Calla.
About my life, my choices, why I’m so afraid…and well, anyway, I can’t tell you how much I’ve wished your mother and I could go to the meetings together…” she hesitated. “I don’t know how much your mother’s told you about her own growing up. I don’t want to tell you what she hasn’t.”
I knew very well what it meant to be steeped in an unsolved mystery.
I pulled from my purse a magazine, and held it up.
Rosie Mac’s hand flew to her heart. “Your story?”
“Page fifteen. I marked it for you. See?” I showed her the edge of an envelope, sticking out. “It’s called Dove.”
Her smile was sad. “Juniper’s swing.”
“I dedicated the story to Grandma Bella. She got to see it in print before she…and she said…she’d never gotten a gift like that, not from anyone, her whole life…”
“Oh, Calla girl. What a tribute.” Rosie Mac was crying softly again, the mascara she never wore until she met my mother running down her cheeks. “Gosh, if only she knew! Your mother. I don’t judge her. Look at you! Look at how you’ve turned out. You – are all the proof necessary. I’m the one. It’s true. I’m the one who’s made a mess of things.”
It’s my fault. I did it. I’m sorry. I’ll be better. I’ll fix it.
The way you clung to those words like the life preserver that would save you, pull you back to the shore of her smile, her laughter, her good graces. They were the words I rehearsed every time my mother, in a different way, peeled out.
I said, “Okay, fine, Rosie Mac. I’ll read you what’s in the envelope.” Rosie Mac said, “What?”
I’d already torn open the envelope marking my story. I pulled out the typewritten pages I’d meant for her to find and read, sometime later. Sometime after the wedding. “This is an excerpt from my original story – one I deleted. After it won the award, and I knew it would be published, I took it out. But – I wanted you to read it.”
“Wow. Okay. The uncut version. Wow.” She went very still then, her eyes on the road, listening with her whole self.
I took a breath, and read to her.
One morning, as Juniper headed outside to Dove, her mother called her back. Juniper’s stomach hurt. What was it now? She’d worked extra hard cleaning the house that morning. Her mother told her that Izzy was coming over. Izzy was her mother’s best friend.
Juniper said, “Why can’t I go swing if Izzy’s coming over?” Her mother said, “Because Izzy’s going to fix your hair.”
“Fix my hair? Why in the world is Izzy going to fix my hair?”
Juniper’s mother said, “Izzy doesn’t have a daughter. She’s always wanted a daughter. So I told her, if she wanted, she could pretend for a little while and fix your hair.”
Juniper thought that was strange, but she didn’t say so.
When Izzy arrived, they sat together outside in lawn chairs in a spot of sun. Juniper had always liked Izzy. But the feel of Izzy’s hands in Juniper’s hair, gently, patiently, untangling the knots, was a radiance of joy that made Juniper’s heart ache. Not her actual heart. Not the fleshy muscle of it. But what Juniper called her ghost heart. Where she felt longing, and love, and loss. A muscle couldn’t feel those things. Only a ghost heart. Juniper believed, as Izzy brushed her hair with the softness of a lullaby, and the generosity of light, and the worship of a butterfly at the flower, that if she could – wrong as it was – she’d pry her ghost heart from her mother’s hands and give it to Izzy instead. Because Izzy’s freckled hands, working Juniper’s snarls as though they were precious, Izzy’s hands were an ark that would keep Juniper’s ghost heart safe, as the sea deluged, and the world drowned.
Maybe a hairbrush, too, had wings.
I set the pages down. The quiet filled by the hum of tires along the interstate.
Finally, Rosie Mac whispered, “I remember that day.”
I turned to her, and before my eyes, a transformation. She sat up tall and strong. A calm on her face, though mascara-tracked, I had never before seen.
“Calla,” she said, “what if we skipped the wedding?”
I pictured two seats at River Point Park wildflower garden, side by side, draped with dusty rose chiffon sashes, the backs tied in a bow.
Two seats, empty.
“Yes,” I said.
Rosie Mac smiled. Her smile said just right, and just so, and so shall it be.
She flicked the turn signal and we headed toward the bridge.
Who knew if her choice, that simple action of her wrist, was a mere neurological impulse, born of oxytocin, a rush of chemical love creating our fate. Or, as my father would say, a choice we’d agreed upon, charting our story in a before life, a different realm, where we decided to show up for an escape, instead of a wedding.
Either way, this was a soul pact.
The sun was a melting tangerine, while Mendelssohn curled the Mississippi, and a barge glided beneath, full of black coal, glittering. A heap of jewels. A ship coming in.
Rosie Mac pointed to the sign as we whooshed by.
Welcome to Illinois.
If Raphael were to pop back into this dimension, and step out onto the deck of that barge, and peer up – up into the gleaming metal and burnished rust of a twin suspension bridge, like a Midwest river chapel, he would have no choice but to sit and paint the holy mystery he saw.
How could it be?
A blue Chevrolet Astro minivan, wings outspread.
