Authors: Dan Chaon
I can’t remember that we talked, though we must have. Perhaps
we spoke of the weather, or whatever mundane daily activities we’d gone about; maybe we joked about the “news” in those supermarket tabloids she liked to read. I believe that was the year Princess Grace of Monaco died, in her own mysterious car accident. We might have discussed that.
But it was the things that we didn’t talk about that seemed most present. I wanted to know what she
really
thought of me; what had
really
happened between her and my father; what she was going to do with her life now. But it was as if we were deep underwater—those conversations drifted over the surface, far above us, like the rippling shadows of rafts and swimmers that fish might notice, and startle at.
I said, “So … what are your plans for the year?”
“Oh,” she said, and sighed. “I don’t have any idea. I’ll probably just do the same old thing. Live here in the house, take care of your dad’s books, and try to get by.”
She was silent, as if the process of “getting by” were fraught with secret perils. A couple of kids came running along her stretch of beach, laughing and calling out, their flashlights bobbing like will-o’-the-wisps. We watched as they ran off toward the spot where the bodies were discovered. The lights dipped and swayed as the kids ran past, growing smaller in the distance.
“That part of the beach is going to be haunted,” I said. “Don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?” she said sharply.
“Oh, you know,” I said. “The way people make things up. When something like that happens.”
“Hmm,” she said suspiciously. “Well, that’s the way people
are,” she said. “Full of stupidity.” She looked at me as if I might be one of them, a spy from the world of the ignorant. She tilted her head back and breathed out a long trail of smoke. “I don’t think about it,” she told me, firmly, and frowned. I thought, as she gazed out toward the water, she looked troubled. The tall cottonwoods alongside the house trembled a bit in the breeze. She stubbed out a cigarette and lit another one.
This was the way my mother had always been, as far as I could remember, though you don’t notice it as a child—or at least, I didn’t. It seemed the natural course of things. I can’t really guess what her life was like, from day to day. I recall only little things, mostly. I remember how, when she took out her curlers, she would let me put my fingers through the holes in those tight, tubelike curls. I would stretch her hair out to its full length and then watch it bounce back, perfectly, into its hollow shape against her skull. Then she would brush her hair until the curls turned into a kind of bubble around her head, perfectly round, like a helmet. She would hair-spray it until it was stiff. This was her late-morning ritual. She would drink coffee and watch TV, or do crossword puzzles. When I wanted a hug or kiss, she would give it to me.
I don’t think she was ever vivacious. Her laughter, if it came, had a grudge underneath it. I have seen early pictures of her and my father where she appears to be laughing, yet still she seems self-conscious about it, glancing a little off to the side, uncomfortable. She is never especially pretty in these younger pictures—there is too much hardness and cautious ambivalence in the set of her features. It is my father who seems to have a glow about him.
You can tell in his face, in the way he looks at her, that he is in love. He is a little in awe of her, it seems—as if she is an older sibling who will always, always outdo him, but he doesn’t mind.
In the middle years of my growing up—between, say, nine and thirteen—she was depressed a lot. I knew why. I was told why. It was because of my sister, Teresa Joy, who died.
Teresa joy wasn’t actually a real sister, though that was what my parents always called her. “Your sister,” they said. She was a stillborn baby, whom I never saw. My parents had a grave for her, though, with a little headstone that they decorated with flowers on Memorial Day. There were, I learned later, a number of miscarriages between me and Teresa Joy, though none of them got very far along. Teresa Joy, on the other hand, was one of those flukes. She strangled on the umbilical cord, and there was nothing, apparently, the doctors could do.
I remember the time my mother tried to kill herself. No one ever spoke of it as such, but at that age I was old enough to put it together. I recall the ambulance coming to our house, the men trying to put her on a stretcher and her just aware enough to struggle with them—flailing her arms when they lifted her, her mumbled protests through lips that seemed claylike and unnatural, moving like a badly dubbed Japanese film. “No, no, no,” she said. “No, no.” I think now that she must have taken an overdose of pills.
My father and I were at The Fishhead one night, talking. He wanted me to play pool, and though I’d never been any good at any sort of game, I agreed. I figured it was something I owed him, something a father and son should do together.
“That’s all right,” he said as the cue ball I’d hit drifted in between the colored balls it was meant to strike. “Good try,” he said as he squeaked blue chalk onto the end of his stick.
I don’t know why this should have called up an image of my mother in extremis, but it did. Perhaps it was the way he glanced over his shoulder, edgily, worrying that someone might laugh at my ineptitude. Perhaps it was simply that we had been talking about her.
“You remember what she was like when you were a kid,” he said. “She was something else, then, boy! You might not have known it. She was intense.”
“Intense?” I said. An image sparked in my mind—her, struggling with the ambulance drivers. Where was my father at that moment? Standing aside? Watching? I couldn’t remember. He leaned over the pool table and ran the stick between his fingers.
“I don’t know,” he said. “She keeps a lot of things bottled up inside her.” He struck, sending a striped ball into a pocket. He stared as it vanished. “Ah, Sean,” he said. “You know I tried to be a good husband to her. You know that I tried to be good to you both. I was a good dad to you, wasn’t I?”
“Sure,” I said. “Of course.”
He was a little more drunk than usual, I thought. He was looking at me in that crafty, sidelong way of his, as if he had a secret and was trying to decide whether or not he could trust me with it. He’d squint one eye and fix on me with the other, sizing me up. He might say something interesting if he had a few more.
“You feel like having a shot?” I said slyly.
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind,” he said.
I went back to the bar and brought back two glasses of bourbon, neat. He was in the process of finishing off our second game. He named the pocket for the eight ball, defeated me again, and then took his glass of whiskey, clicking the glass against mine with a muted pride in his victory.
“You need some more practice, my son,” he murmured teasingly.
Little did he know that I had scored a small victory of my own—for as soon as we sat back down at the bar, he began to rub his chin ruefully, studying his own reflection in the mirror behind the rows of liquor bottles. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “You know what I think? I think she did it on purpose, that woman.”
“What?” I said. I was still thinking of my mother.
“That woman that drove into the lake,” my father said. “I think she did it on purpose. She had it planned out, you see? That’s what they’re not getting. She had it planned out. Maybe the husband was in on it, too, I don’t know about him. But she definitely knew what she was doing.”
“Dad,” I said. “Why would someone do that?”
There must have been something snotty in my tone of voice, because he snorted as if I’d offended him. “Why do people do anything, Sean?” he said. He looked at me, a slow, drunken film over his eyes, a sad and scornful look. “Do you think you can say why people do what they do? They teach you that in college?” He stared at me thoughtfully, and later, when I was older, it was something I recalled, that expression. It was the stare of a
man who has realized that he doesn’t know his son and his son doesn’t know him. He shrugged. “Ah, well,” he said.
“I just asked,” I said. “I’m not doubting you.”
He put his hand to his forehead, soddenly. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “You probably don’t remember this, you were just a kid at the time. You remember when Teresa Joy was born?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You know, your mom—she was real upset. She was having a rough time of it. Women go through a lot of bodily changes when they give birth, hormones and that. You’ve been to college, you probably know more about it than I do.” He paused for a moment, and I shifted self-consciously.
“No, not really,” I said. “I didn’t take that kind of course.”
“Mm,” my father said. He gazed down, running his thumb over a wet circle on the bar’s varnished surface. “Well, anyways,” he said. “She was depressed. You know that. We struggled with it, I felt like … I had to watch her. You didn’t know what she might do. She … well, she was at a point where she was a danger to herself. You remember. But it was hard. She had never been a weak person, you know, and … I wasn’t … I can’t say I was doing so well that I could be the person for her to lean on. I never thought I’d have to, you know? I thought she’d always be herself—like she was.
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “I think about this one night. She wasn’t sleeping much then, you know, and I don’t know what woke me up, but I suppose I heard her out there in the kitchen moving around. Those days you had to sleep like you were half-awake, in case something happened. She’d tried stuff.
“So I got out of bed, you know? Maybe I was still part in a
dream … it must have been sometime after midnight, which was not all that unusual for her back then, she’d wander around at all hours. But I had a funny feeling. And so I got up and I sort of—called to her, but she didn’t answer. So I went out to the kitchen and then I could smell the gas from the stove.
“She wasn’t herself then, Sean,” he said apologetically, though I was just sitting there, my face neutral and attentive. “She wasn’t even there, not really. I could see that. She was just standing, looking at the burners of the stove. I guess she’d blown out the pilot light. I could smell it pretty strong. And then I saw that she had a cigarette—it wasn’t lit—she had a cigarette in her mouth, and she was fingering her lighter in her hand, waiting. Thinking about it. I don’t know what I said. I think I said something like, ‘Honey, don’t.’
“I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t think I panicked at all. I guess—I don’t know, when she finally looked up at me, there was part of me that wanted to let her go ahead and do it. I loved your mom a lot, and she had those eyes. Those eyes, boy—I could do a lot of things when she looked at me a certain way. I just thought—a part of me thought—well, why not? Everything has gone to shit. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s just a matter of a second. Like that family. The
Morrisons
,” he said cynically. “The big God damn mystery people. That’s what we would have been. They would have writ it up in the papers, like ‘Family of Three Dies in Mystery Blaze,’ or some crap, and they would have yammered and gossiped and wondered …”
“But,” I said. “She didn’t do it. She decided not to do it.”
He gave me a tight smile. “I reckon she didn’t,” he said. “We’re still here, aren’t we?”
I felt my skin prickle. Would I have awakened when the air
caught fire? I wondered. I saw myself, myself at nine, sitting up in bed as a red-orange cloud rushed into me, the flash of a single synapse. Would it have hurt? What would it be like, to suddenly cease to exist? I felt my back tense at the image of that bright red burst, that blotting out. What about me? Weren’t they thinking about me at all? But I didn’t say this.
“What stopped her?” I said at last. “Why didn’t she—?”
My father shrugged. “That’s all I’m saying. It’s a second. I don’t know. We might have looked at each other for a minute or five minutes—who knows? But then she just—turned off the stove. Walked over and opened a window. There wasn’t any … big scene. I don’t think we ever talked about it again.”
“Why not?” I said, and my voice felt hushed and ragged. I stared at the neon letters above the bar, which spelled out
BEER
.
“What was there to say?” my father said. “What do you say about something like that?”
Years later, I would try to replay this conversation in my mind, thinking it might hold some clue. I can only make up his exact words, though they sound honest in my imagination. I can picture my drive home that night—I parted ways with my father, awkwardly on the sidewalk outside the bar, standing near our cars, and there was a moment when we might have hugged but didn’t. “Good-bye, see you tomorrow!” “Good-bye, sleep well!” I must have gotten in my car and put the key into the ignition and my hand on the wheel. The night must have been dark, maybe with a little rain, and the thick trees along the roadside were heavy with foggy moisture, and the yellow lines in the middle
of the slick highway kept dividing, pulling apart like blurry amoebas beneath my beery gaze.
All of this must have happened, but what I really remember is the image of my mother with her lighter and the room full of gas. I remember a particular faux-velvet red nightgown she would have been wearing, I can see her naked, bony feet against the black-and-white kitchen tile. I can see my room, when I was nine years old, the taped posters and drawings of robots on the walls, the microscope, the rock polisher, all of that
stuff
is vividly imprinted. I remember television shows I watched more clearly than I recall what was going on between my parents.
My mother was asleep when I got home, and would have been angry to find me stumbling in drunk at all hours, as I’d promised not to. But she didn’t wake. I distinctly recall standing over her bed, watching her. The quilt was pulled up to her neck. She was breathing deeply, loosely, her mouth slack and vulnerable and innocent. Her knees were pulled up near her belly. Rain made a sound like sleep outside the window. She didn’t appear to be dreaming. It was quiet.
I want to tell you that something else important happened that summer, that the mystery of the Morrisons was solved, that I finally understood my parents’ relationship, that my mother herself became suddenly clear to me. I want to say that I finally confronted my mother, shortly after the conversation with my father in the bar, that we had an in-depth conversation. I wanted to—I meant to talk to her.