A Simple Distance (14 page)

* * *

I came out to my mother when I was twenty-two, at the intersection of Van Ness and Market—one of the busiest in downtown San Francisco. At the time, it seemed like as good a place as any. Looking back, I might have waited until she’d completed her left-hand turn.

I guess it didn’t occur to me that the news I was gay would be as distracting to her as it was to me.

We were on our way to dinner at a Mexican restaurant whose taco salad with the lettuce bowl my mom liked so much, a precursor to her subsequent attempts at edible landscaping at Godwyn—her purple cabbages always winding up in some pot of soup or another down the road in Sommerset.

We stayed in the intersection long past our green arrow, a line of angry drivers growing behind us as I coached her through the necessary acceleration, and then off to the side of the road.

I apologized for my reckless timing and we made a pact not to mention the matter again until we got to the restaurant. After our flan, my mom looked at me and told me to
be careful
, not to mention what I’d told her in the car to anyone until after I’d been accepted to law school, told me not to jeopardize my plans over something like this.

Except for my confirmation that,
no
, I was not actually sleeping with anyone at the time, that was all she asked, all I answered. But later on, distracted in the parking lot, not remembering where she’d parked, I heard her say, not to me really, more to herself; she said,
I could never have told Mama that
.

CHAPTER 17

My mother might not have shown me how to live my life, maneuver its twists and turns or weather its storms, by being, herself, a shining example of grace. And perhaps I could learn to forgive her for that.

But the lack of her touch was less troublesome to me than the lack of my own back.

There was something about Susan that never felt quite right, something threatening I couldn’t quite place my finger on. Maybe it was because that threat was inside me, not her. And I’d been looking at the wrong person.

It’s easy enough to say I was not loved the way I needed, but not that it left me unable to love in return; harder to admit I’d lost faith in the idea that my body could have melted to someone’s touch; so stiff had I become from sitting frozen to my spot at the tops and bottoms of those stairwells to which I had followed my mother. Waiting. Watching.

It seems to me there are two types of mistakes. There are those you pay for all at once, like a fine or a traffic ticket, and there are those mistakes you pay for little by little, over time, like walking away from someone you shouldn’t, coming home Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, alone to the same bare walls and the cumulative harm repetition brings.

I don’t know exactly which part of me never wrote back to Susan. But it was a part of me that, like my mother when I was just a child, crawled into her bed after work every day and stayed there for years.

Some things you don’t get over for a long time: You can say goodbye, fly thousands of miles, pass month after month, all without really moving forward.

The things that make you stick in time to this spot or that can take years. Or they can happen in an instant.

I don’t consciously think much about the day my Uncle Martin found Susan and me making love on the cliffs at Godwyn, about the bulge in his pants and the hatred in his voice stopping me cold in my tracks, gasping for air, searching shaky ground for some semblance of cover.

I don’t think much about the letters I received, like clockwork, every week from Susan after we left Baobique, asking me
how on God’s green earth
I could hide from her. Yet I pictured her asking me those questions as I read each and every one of the letters, her surgeon’s hands grasping the air in front of her, trying to stitch our severed pieces back together—the only constant at the end of that grasp, the emptiness of a fist closing in on itself.

It was that last letter that got me. Startled me into panic. When Susan said she’d come to the States, I didn’t know what to do. No one had ever just handed themselves to me that way before.

And I wasn’t ready. It was as if I’d been nodding off at the top of the stairs and my mother had risen, washed her face in the porcelain sink next to her bed, opened the door to the master bedroom, and gleefully asked me what I wanted for dinner.

Susan’s letter came to me like that, an offer I was simply not prepared to accept.

* * *

Standing outside Godwyn’s shelter, like Granny’s big copper to catch the rain, I dreaded going in to my mother, felt as if I was leaving the storm just to enter its eye.

Inside the house, Fatima had finished the chicken and rice, grated enough soursop into juice to fill two pitchers: one for the fridge, one for the freezer. She wrapped up her things in a crinkly plastic bag and started down the drive before waving goodbye—maybe so I couldn’t find something else for her to do before she went. Like me, she didn’t seem to mind the rain; took her sandals in her hand.

That left just me, my sleeping mother, and Uncle George and Grampy come in from the weather. The four of us, a cacophony in my head I wished would hush.

Shhhhhhhh
. The rain agreed.

Something to do would help. I still had Cynthia’s hearing to try as soon as I returned to California; the continuance was only good until then. So I searched around for a nubby pencil, a couple sheets of loose paper, and worked on my opening statement—to soften the head of the hammer the new appellate decision just placed in my client’s hand:

It is not easy to live right. It is not easy to be a mother. Like most of us, Cynthia was not given a blueprint with which to raise her daughter. She does not have an agenda. She does, however, have a biological and, at this point in time, a legal right to Sadie that Linda does not.

And while life is not usually as simple as that, this case is.

Would that it wasn’t, though. Would that I could have argued Linda’s side instead of Cynthia’s.

Family. There are many things that symbolize it. But let’s take just one. Home.

Their house having signified home for Linda, Cynthia, and Sadie for the past four years. 5050 Great Highway, San Francisco. Their very own house. Bought with their very own savings. Painted, mowed, cleaned, repaired with their very own hands. Kept dry with a $50 sump pump, two garden hoses, a screwdriver, and four-hour checks, ’round the clock, to keep the rainwater from rising to the top of the crawl space under Sadie’s room and coming inside. Their house. Home to two grown women, one small child, and one slightly overweight corgi, all of whom felt safe inside since their first night of arrival, in the cold of February with both heaters broken and a fireplace unsafe to use. Family. With a backyard brown from the sun nine months out of twelve, except for the bright green path directly above the leaky sewage pipe, upon which grows the healthiest grass in the neighborhood. Home. At the edge of Golden Gate Park and above what was once the shifting water of the Pacific. Land reclaimed.

Up until three weeks ago, Linda was, legally, Sadie’s second mother. And she did what mothers do: She put a roof over her daughter’s head; she put food in her daughter’s stomach; she kept her warm and dry in winter. Today, Linda continues to do what family does for family. Fight.

This one, though, is a losing battle. The courts have spoken.

Soon, I would likely win my first real case. And I wished I wouldn’t.

Like it or not, I had a responsibility to my client. Just as, like it or not, I had a responsibility to my mom. But those mantles others saw on me, of daughter and attorney, I did not wear comfortably. All this speaking for others had me losing my own voice.

CHAPTER 18

S
o it is true. You do exist.

Susan’s voice, crisp and direct, called me back. And instantly I was in Baobique again. My heart raced.

She continued, linen skirt in bold batik, walking firmly as her words,
I’d heard the U.S. Postal Service hadn’t disbanded. The only other possibility I could think of for so many unanswered letters was that you’d passed on. Like your uncle. Or maybe you were a ghost all along, a figment of my overactive imagination.

I let her swing away, held still for all she had. I deserved it. Didn’t answer. I waited with my eyes on her espadrilles.

She’d cut her hair short against the heat; black wirerimmed glasses framed her green eyes.

But I couldn’t look her in the face, for fear she’d see through to something I wasn’t ready to show.

And she, not vindictive, changed the subject for me all on her own. Softened,
I hear your mummy is not well. I’ve come to check on her.

I rose from my paper at the dining room table—let lie my future argument, etched thick in lead, put down my mother’s pencil, and brought Susan to her room.
Thank you
, was all I could say.

In her bedroom, my mom was as I’d left her the night before, naked under the cotton sheet, so flat and motionless she could have been dead. But wasn’t. I could see her chest rising, falling, rising, falling, to some slow internal clock.

Susan took her side, moved mechanically, unencumbered by the years that this image took me back, seeing my mom in bed again while the world swirled in chaos outside cedar planks, nearly rotted through.

I stuck close to the perimeter of the bedroom, only there to answer questions when asked.

Has she ever been like this before?

I stared blank at the bed, then right to closed shutters.

Susan’s were not the first letters to which I’d withheld a reply. Once or twice a semester in college, my mom would write me. Her scrawl, legible to only the two of us—lines and lines I never read. I would take her letters from my mailbox in the student union, hide them deep under the books in my backpack, then pile them up at the back of my sock drawer as soon as I returned to my dorm.

How could I tell Susan,
Yes, she slept through my entire childhood. Can’t you see the scars?
I couldn’t. And that’s not what she meant anyway. So I told Dr. Hill the truth:
Yes. For some years, when I was young, she had long spells like this.
Hoped she could help.

We are not as quick to medicate for a major depression in Baobique as they are in the States. Supplies are expensive. So I think we should wait a bit and see if she comes out of it on her own.

Voicing statements that sent me crashing, without even a hint of apology for what she’d just said about my mother, Susan moved to the shutter, turned its creaky wooden handle counterclockwise, and threw it open.

Defensive at her nonchalance, I pushed back,
My mother’s not that depressed.

Susan looked at me like I was a complete idiot, left the bedroom. Me, standing in the middle of it, staring at my mother’s flaccid face.

Sharp and too-loud behind thinning walls, the telephone rang analog from the dining room bureau and scared me from my spot.

I hated talking to people there, but Susan was a guest, so I was the only one to answer. Unfortunately, Fatima’d remembered to remove the receiver’s lock.

I picked up to my uncle, CarCom to CarCom.
Jean, this is Martin. Granny is ill. Is Susan at Godwyn? I just spoke with Leonard and he said she went to check on Sophie.
His voice breathy with alarm.

Oh my God. What’s wrong with Granny?

Where’s Susan?!
he yelled, but not at me. A boy, Uncle Martin teetered toward tears.

From across the bureau, Susan had heard, heeded my tone, took the receiver from my outstretched hand. She listened to my screaming uncle, unruffled.

* * *

It took us some time to move my mom to the backseat of Susan’s Subaru. She used smelling salts to wake her. We dressed her in practical clothes: sweat pants and rubber gardening boots.

Sometimes it took a whip, sometimes a carrot, to keep my mom moving. But for Granny it took the strength to hold that whip, that carrot, out in front of my mom. Trouble followed when she lost her grip.

Gain title! Gain title!
That’s all my mom was ever thinking about. Her world manageable, maybe, only one thought at a time. Everything else, just too much.

But things were changing by the minute. Her eyes mostly closed, right then it was up to me to see it all; adjust accordingly.

Ever since I’d known Granny, all she’d ever done was sit on that porch of hers, tell us all what to do. Up until that morning, with Mr. Hill and his threats about Uncle George.

Susan pulled us up to Granny’s wrought iron gate, cut the engine, and, before I had time to even turn to the backseat, was halfway inside Tours’ cement walls, sea blast chipping away. Susan with Granny, left me with my mom. I went to her grudgingly, like I’d pulled the short end of the stick for that particular event; unbuckled her; patted tiny slaps on her cheeks to bring her to.

Charles will be here by tomorrow morning.
Uncle Martin, not two inches from Susan’s heels, as my mom and I approached.

Through Granny’s bedroom door, opening onto her front porch, I could see her lying there. Motionless as my mother would have liked to be, if I wasn’t underneath her left armpit, dragging her into the second bedroom.

Before laying her down, I pulled off her rubber boots. After, covered her, clothed in soft cotton. Her tight curls flat with sweat against her forehead.

That morning, a sea change, everyone lying down by afternoon.

It seemed, sometimes, the way they carried on, at each other’s throats at every second, there was no love lost between my mom and Granny.

I knew my mom felt closer to Auntie Lillian, all the way in England, than she did to Granny, just across the hall. Auntie Lil took my mom in some, during second form, after Granny’d given up on enforcing her futile One-Mile walks and started regarding my mom more and more with disgust and dismissal.

Jean
, Susan broke my reverie,
I’m going back to the hospital. I have rounds to do. You should stay near your granny, she is not well at all.

Will she be all right?
I whispered. Some things should not be voiced so loudly.