Authors: Marian Palaia
“If I could fall in love I would. But I don’t know how.” Or, “I don’t trust myself. I’ve made too many bad decisions. But stay close.” He didn’t mind the “stay close” part, even if it could sound like she was playing him, but what it sounded like didn’t matter because he didn’t think she was that kind of girl—didn’t think she knew how to
be
that kind of girl—and staying close was what he wanted. So he tried.
But their versions of close, and of staying, were different. Frank hung in there, because Frank was good that way. Which, as it turned out, was probably the whole problem. She was barely keeping it together, and she told him—once only—that sometimes he made her feel bad. Just him, a not-fucked-up person. All right, then. He thought maybe someday it would change, and he’d be ready if it did. Ready like spaghetti. Ready like something.
She made enough money at the bar to get another flat, and the cops broke up the encampments at the park, but she still knew where to find those guys, down on Sixth Street or in the alleys, in their refrigerator boxes, or in an SRO for a night or two when the checks came first of the month. Andy, the swamper, had a second job cooking down at Harbor Lights, the only place in town a broke junkie (and weren’t they all that?) could go to detox without a seventy to eighty percent chance of dying from the jones. When Riley and Andy got to be friends, Riley would show up sometimes with one or two of her mates and Andy would feed them out the back door. Because they weren’t going in. No way. And she wasn’t about to try talking them into it, because she wasn’t going in either.
Dear Riley,
This is the part I hate most. All the times I’ve caught myself thinking if I never had him, or had given him up, then I would never have felt that awful pain of him going missing. And of you going missing after him. Sure, all that pain is still alive and well, but now—and it has taken me completely by surprise—it’s like something I can carry, and not something that’s constantly sitting on my chest. Crushing me. I want the same thing for you. I wonder what it is like to be you, now. I wish you would tell me. I have your last letter here. It’s two years old. You were delivering newspapers. You wanted to go to school. Now? I don’t know. It’s all just echo.
That other letter. What were the words they used? “Presumed dead.” Whoever thought that was something tolerable to say to a person should have their heads examined.
I went missing too, didn’t I? Your mom: MIA. And stayed missing for a long time, probably when you needed me most. Or maybe I just want to feel like you ever needed me. Like you ever needed anyone but your brother. But you did, and I was your mom.
Now that I have reached, or can at least imagine I see, the end of this ten-year-long dark tunnel (exactly what it feels like), it is time to admit (confess?) some things, and the first is I barely remember you leaving, sweet girl. There’s just the one glimpse. You with your little blue suitcase, standing on the bottom step of the bus. I can see the driver behind you, his hand out for your ticket, but you’ve turned back around toward me and the baby, and you have this funny look on your face. I tried to decipher that look then, and have been trying to ever since. Seems it was some combination of defiance (you were not going to cry), fear, wonder, relief. Gratitude. I know you, and I believe that about you, that you were grateful. You smiled. Just one of your quick sideways smiles, and god knows what it meant, but I held onto it. Slim was still so tiny, only a couple of months old. But he was getting healthy by then, so alive—tough as old boots, the doctor told us later. His lungs were working on their own, almost like nothing had ever been wrong, like they hadn’t been the size of sparrow wings when he was born, and about as much use for breathing. He didn’t cry much the few weeks we had him after you left, but he had a holler that would scare the squirrels out of the trees when he was really mad about something. He definitely took after you in that way. You were a very determined child.
At the bus station, he was in that old carriage of Mick’s and yours your father had dug out of the attic. Cleaned it up and rolled it into your bedroom one morning while you were still asleep. I don’t know where he found that ribbon, or that
bow
(!). I really don’t know what he was thinking at all. The baby was still in the hospital, and you were spending most of your time in bed, or lying out in the wheat fields, still as death, staring up at the sky. Maybe he thought you’d stay, be a mom, get married to that boy. Or some local boy if we could find one that would have you. I knew better. You were never going to be that much like me.
Did you ever do the math, Riley? I’m sure you have. It’s not so hard to calculate. At twenty-five, you will be the same age I was when you were born. Your brother was (is? what a tempting word “is” is) eight years older than you. So what were the odds? I know a lot of girls have babies at seventeen and eighteen, some even on purpose, but (this is so hard to say) that was not meant to be my life. Did you know I got all A’ s in high school? Heck, I got an A in calculus. I probably never said, because it didn’t really matter anymore, but I was going to go to college, among other things. I wanted to be an astronomer. Remember looking at the constellations? You can still see them here. I wonder if there are any stars at all where you are, in that big city. All that ambient light.
I don’t know how you feel about it now, but I’m glad you didn’t stay. I’m glad you didn’t stop your life here. Is that a terrible thing? Maybe you wish now you still had him, that somehow he could hold you steady, that you hadn’t let him go. I don’t know. We’ve never had those conversations, and I don’t know how to start, or if I should, or how it would end. I’m afraid it would be with me losing another piece of you. And lost as you already are these days, or as I think you must be, you still probably understand, maybe better than most, that kids don’t necessarily hold you steady. Even if they do, somehow, hold you in place.
I wonder where you keep him. Is there some secret place inside you, like the one where I keep Mick? A mother’s place, even if “mother” is a word you can’t quite make apply. I imagine you rolling your eyes. And biting your lip. Like you do. Did.
The thing is I never really got used to the idea of being a mother. With you, maybe, more than with Mick, but then it was almost like you were his and not mine, and it was for such a short time before, like I said, we both went missing. With Mick it was just like having a little brother. I was so young, and I’d always wanted a brother. I used to bother my mom about it endlessly, but she always said if I wanted one, I’d have to go out and get my own. A strange thing to tell your kid, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean it that way. I think if I’ve realized anything in this life, it’s that no one teaches you how to be a parent. You just do it, and it works out like it works out. She was just trying, like every other mom in the world, to do what she thought was best, or what would get her and her family through another day without blowing a gasket.
But what I was saying, what I keep trying to say, is I don’t think I ever felt like a MOTHER, like an “M is for the many things you—” Ha. I don’t even know how it goes. But isn’t that what nine months (or seven) of carrying them around is all about? Making sure you get that? I don’t know. It’s all so very blurry. Our options then were the same as yours. Foster home. Adoption. Keep him and get married, to someone, somehow, or stay single and let the whole town talk. Or leave town, but go where? I didn’t even know a place I wanted to go. Florida sounded nice. I liked the idea of the ocean. (We have that in common, you and me. But you went and found it.) And the coat hanger option. Actual coat hangers. I knew a girl in Chinook—her team used to play basketball against ours—who tried that and died at sixteen, or maybe she was seventeen by then (it doesn’t really matter, does it? Or maybe it does to someone, like her mother). In some back room, alone except for that limp rag of a little one sliding out of her on a river of blood. So they said. So I remember. There were other stories too. More than you might think, although you surely heard some too. And the memory of them still, after all this time, makes me want to tear my own head off. I didn’t want that to be me, even more than I didn’t want to marry a man I barely knew. My dad said he was a good one, though, who would take care of us. A widower. A neighbor. His wife died in the car overnight one winter, coming back from town in a blizzard. Slid off the road and ran out of gas. She was still warm when they found her. He told me that on our wedding night, and he cried. I had always thought men never cried. I thought they couldn’t. I slept on a cot in the nursery for months, but gradually we became a team, learned how to love each other in a kind of precarious way. Dad was right. Your father is pure good. I never was in love with him, but now I know that’s not always for keeps either, and what we have has survived a lot. And I do love him. And I had to realize early I wasn’t what he wanted either. Buck up and get on with my life. Mick made that possible. And necessary.
I believe you knew. I have to think Mick would have told you. Or maybe you figured it out for yourself. There was nothing about the two of them that was the same. Nothing. But it worked. It was beautiful. I love them both for that. It could have gone so wrong. It could have been so much harder than it was. I was pretty lucky, after all, in my little unluckiness.
Mick’s real father? He was nobody, really, by which I don’t mean he wasn’t somebody in his own right (we all are at least that, aren’t we?). But besides that, he was just a boy who worked on a neighbor’s ranch one summer. He was from Fargo, and I think he was some kind of Scandinavian, like they are out there. He had the bluest eyes and the softest blond hair. He looked like James Dean. Of course I had to dig that out of my memory later on. Mick was sleeping in the backseat, and you weren’t even walking yet, and we were at the drive-in to see
Giant
. I nearly died. But your father was there. Of course I didn’t say anything. It was crazy, with Mick there right behind us and all. Just crazy. I felt like I was sitting on the electric fence, or like all my nerves were on the outside of my skin. It took me days to get over it, over wanting to feel like that again. If he’d showed up at the door, I would have taken him out to the barn. No question. Even now, maybe, though it’s probably impolite of me to say it. I can’t imagine you minding.
I told Mick when he was twelve or thirteen. He asked me because one of the kids at school—the son of one of my high school friends—called him a bastard. I was so angry, and I wanted to lie, but I didn’t. Mick was so smart you couldn’t lie to him (and I’ve always been a lousy liar anyway), and he wasn’t really even upset. He just wanted to know.
What is it I’m even trying to explain to you? I hate to think I’m making excuses for not being altogether present all the time, for not always (ever?) being entirely there even before Mick went off and disappeared. The thing was, I knew. And sometimes I could drag myself back, from wishing to be somewhere else, someone else. I remember I used to practice, actually in the mirror, how to talk to you the way I imagined I was supposed to. I’d say, “Riley, let me see your homework.” “Mick, does that girl’s mother know she’s riding on that motorcycle with you?” Sometimes I’d make myself laugh. Other times it would just open a hole in me. Because I didn’t know
how
. I was making it up. And even though now I recognize that’s what all parents do, when you’re in it, and everything you see or hear says you’re supposed to know, it just makes you feel wrong. Add to that how young I was, and how much I really did want to be, or at least be able to go, somewhere else, wanted Mick to really be my little brother, and for you to be his so I could escape, go off and be what I was meant to be. Glamorous and smart and educated and alone. Like Jackie Kennedy. If only for a little while. Then I could come back, knowing something different and exotic, and settle down. Be satisfied.
I would never have traded either of you for diamonds, but sometimes I wonder. I can’t help it. I can’t help but think of all the children born as that stupid war was ending who maybe wouldn’t have been. Hard to imagine, once another being enters your universe. But I don’t have to tell you, do I.
Or why we couldn’t keep him. I was still so cracked open over Mick. So close to blowing it the first two times. Your father wanted to keep Slim and raise him. He loved that baby so much. But he let me give him away. And Slim is fine. His other “grandpa” still writes. We got a letter just last week.
This probably isn’t fair, writing you now with all of this. Maybe I think if I tell you what I know you can use it to find your way back. Not here necessarily—I think you’re probably gone from here for good—just back from wherever you are. There was so much emptiness in your voice the last time I talked to you. I keep thinking I’m going to get a call someday. From San Francisco. From someone other than you.
Obviously, this is not where I was meaning to go with this, or maybe it was. Either way, here we are. I started out just wanting to explain something, like where I was when I should have been with you guys. All three of you. At home, appreciating my family instead of a million miles away or at the damn window, envying the hawks their wings, their freedom. Christ. I was, I
am
,
so bad at so many things.
I used to think making love with that boy was my original sin, like in the Bible, the sin that had already started to make the rest of my life tumble over, little by little, like dominoes. When you fell off the roof and nearly died, and then when Mick left, even before they lost him, I felt like I was paying for those afternoons in the hayloft, for sneaking out at night to meet that boy by the river, shuck my clothes like a lizard slipping its skin. I couldn’t help myself even if I’d wanted to, and I didn’t want to. It’s all I could think about. I wanted to melt into him, melt him, like butter. Now I wonder if it was the same for you. The not being able to help it. The feeling like God was going to make me pay and pay.