I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (25 page)

“Did it go into his spine?” I ask. Julia looks confused. “And then into his brain?” She doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “Did he have a bump on his forehead? A tumor?”

“No,” she said. “He had leukemia. There was nothing on his forehead. Look at the pictures—there’s no bump.” Where did I get this information? Why have I believed this for twenty-seven years? No spinal cancer, no brain cancer, no tumor on his forehead. She seems almost insulted that he could have had some kind of deformity, her boy.

After looking at his photos, when I look in the mirror, I see him in my face clearly. I see his mother. When we were going through the photos, I said, “He’s so beautiful.”

Julia said, “He looks like you.” I couldn’t say anything.

Mark gives me the five blue tapes, each about the size of the palm of my hand. White in the center, a hole in the middle of each. Tommy is on these tapes. He is alive on these tapes. I don’t know how to play them. “Tommy 1st Birthday 1,” and 2, 3, and 4. Another one is “Plymouth Beach 5 m and Tommy Smith & Mikie 8 m.” He’s inside these. Maybe even the sound of his voice, his laugh.

We’re meeting my aunt’s sister and her husband at an Irish pub. Julia and Mark like to go there and sing along. But the singer is late. Julia has driven us to the pub. Mark seems a little drunk, drinks a large beer there. I think I am to blame for this, I have opened this up. I ask Mark what he’s going to have, and he says something like a T-bone, some kind of meat item. And then he says something to me, laughing a little, that I don’t understand at first, can’t respond to. But then I hear it, he said, “Beef, like Tommy.” He’s talking to me about Tommy, regardless of what it does to him.

I wind up insulting the husband of my aunt’s sister. He wants to know if I like some writer of mysteries or thrillers, and I just say, “No,” based on the name. I make a face. It’s unkindly arrogant of me. The man says, “Are you a Democrat?”

I say, “Yes.”

He says, “That explains it.”

“I feel as though I’ve been pigeonholed,” I say, laughing a little. Walking to the car, I say, “I hope I wasn’t rude.” I ask my aunt and uncle, “Are you Republicans?” It’s 2009.

Julia says, “Yes.”

Mark says, “Do you want to get in another car?” I laugh a little. Surprised.

Now that they know why I’m visiting them, there’s no pretense of being there to write. I’m there to see them, so they stay with me all day. Julia gets a new cell phone at the store. We take two of the dogs to the beach in the Jeep, walk in the cold wind and sun. I had nothing warm enough for that—my one sweatshirt Florida-thin—so Julia gave me one of Mark’s, fleecy inside, gray, with the name of a college that doesn’t exist. A man played a bagpipe beside the ocean. The sun was setting fast over one of the bodies of water on either side of us—sound or bay, I don’t know which—Mark driving with determination on the windy road, so we could get
to see it over the water before it disappeared. Julia could see the red through the trees, “Look, look, it’s falling.” I looked, but Mark kept going, trying to get us to that beach. When we pulled into the parking lot, facing the ocean, there was a bright cap for a moment, then just the sea.

The last night, we pick up Mark’s aunt Ellen and go to a nice restaurant for lobster. I’m worried I won’t know how to eat it. So I copy what Ellen does. Julia had said she was unsure if Ellen knows I’m Tommy’s mother. Ellen knew he was adopted. She’s so close to Mark. Having saved him from the Brockton slum, transporting him to Boston to live with her, sending him to private school. But maybe they kept the part about me a secret.

Still, Julia said that Ellen lived in Boston when Tommy was sick, and she went to the hospital every single night. Can she see Tommy in my face? We don’t mention him at dinner. But when we drop her off, Ellen blows me a kiss. At the homeless shelter, anytime I blew a kiss to a child in the hallway, she would hold her hand to her face, catch it. Always surprised. Like me.

In the morning, Julia goes to work, and Mark seems a little nervous to take me to the bus station. He says, “Do you have everything. Kleenex?” It’s as if there’s been some slippage of time—that he’s forgotten I’m not eight or even eighteen. “I’m just trying to think of things your mother would want you to have.” My mother. I know it’s confusing—I’m confused too.

At the bus station, I’ve got the time wrong—I’m there far too early. “Do you want to come back home?” Mark asks. I don’t want to bother him, don’t know how to manage this good-bye. Home.

“No, I’ll be fine—I’ll stay here.” He says something about calling him, and I misunderstand. I think he means I can call while I’m waiting for the bus. I say, laughing, “If I get bored?”

Mark says, “If you need anything.” I don’t mean to be offhand, slighting him in any way. But it sort of feels that way, that
I could be misunderstood. I can’t manage all the words. I don’t know what to say. On the ride there, in the car, I’d turned toward him and said, “Thank you for being Tommy’s parents.” It was all I could do in the light of day, leaving. I’d told Julia too—when we’d first talked on Saturday morning. She’d asked if I regretted giving Tommy to them. “I can think of no better parents for him. You were perfect,” I said. “I do wonder about the water though.” The city, I meant.

5.

After that, I get on the bus to Boston, take a train to the museum. That’s when I see her—Guanyin. The Bodhisattva of Compassion. She’s been here in Boston since 1912, from China. I see her kind eyes, her three small discs like stone coins at her fingertips. She’s smiling at me with her eyes sort of closed and open at the same time. I have an envelope in my purse with the pictures of my son that I’d never seen before—I’d taken twelve of them. I have the tapes of him at the beach, his first birthday in the hospital. “Tell them the tape is old,” my uncle had said when he handed them to me. “The tape could be too brittle to handle,” he’d said, his words made staccato by his crying. I think he’d opened one of the reels then, film the color of root beer, transparent. “You can have them put on a DVD. We tried, but we couldn’t do it.” He’d asked me to make a copy for them too. He mentioned the brittleness again, his crying like a gun that would quiet, go off. Surprising all of us. The pictures and tapes that had been in a secret drawer for twenty-seven years are in plastic bags in my purse.

I didn’t know who the stone woman was, her hand lifted 1,429 years, since
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580. I’m on my way to a stranger’s house in a nearby city because I have no money for a hotel. I’ll take another
line of the train. But I’ve come to the museum first. For years, I’ve missed the haystack on fire that I’d seen here.

That time, I’d left my family on the Cape, rode the bus back and forth to Boston. It was ten, fifteen years ago. I’d happened on the room of haystacks then, the cool ones too, the cathedral and river. So surprised, I’d stopped. The light stunning me as if the painter had placed his hand on my face. I’d wept. And after seeing the paintings, on the bus ride back to the Cape, I’d wanted to get off in the dark in Brockton. Find my son’s grave. But I’d just sat in my seat and been carried over the bridge.

Now it’s been so many years since I’ve seen those paintings, I don’t expect to see them again. It had just been a special show, I thought. On this visit to the museum, I get lost immediately. In the tomb from Egypt, there are hundreds of boats with tiny people holding oars, to help the dead. I wonder who is helping them now that all their boats are here, all their tiny people. The caskets are empty. I’m sure this isn’t what the Egyptians had in mind.

I hurry to find Dürer’s prints, but it’s really his face I was hoping to see, the painting with his long hair. The book that he touched is under glass. One room turns into another, and then the haystack is in front of me again. This time, its light enters my body like a beam between my breasts. When it makes me cry again, I’m worried a man in a dark suit like a guard is laughing at me. He’s sitting in front of the painting, on a bench. I stand behind him to look in peace. It’s raining outside, and I’ve got to get back to South Station, find the train line that goes to Newton, Boston College. I have to meet people I don’t know—friends of my poetry publisher—and converse, sleep in their house. When I turn away, it’s like turning away from the ocean.

So, I was rushing, but then the woman in the statue sees me. The Bodhisattva is made of carved gray limestone with traces of gilding—maybe that’s what makes her shine—from the Northern
Zhou or early Sui dynasty. Her name is a nickname for Observing the Cries of the World. She’s a mother. I don’t know this when I see her in the oblong room, having hurried through one door to get through another, but her gaze is so loving it holds me at her feet. There is another disc below her waist, another in her dress, below her knees. I wonder how stone can be so full of kindness, of her. The house is on fire, but she’s waiting on me, on everybody. She won’t go until no one is suffering. I stay with her awhile. Veils fall from her wrists of her gown, like calm water. I don’t touch her.

6.

On the train to Newton is a beautiful little girl in a purple coat. She’s speaking a language I don’t know, everyone’s eyes averted. When I smile at her, her father, she whispers to him, points to another seat away from me. “No, no, we’re okay here,” he says in English. I try not to look at anyone, focus on fabric, canvas of a coat. It’s already dark, near 5 p.m. I don’t mean to cry, blink it away. Newton is bright even at night, gingerbread houses downtown. I find the house where I’m staying—a two-story, two-family house. Follow my directions to go around back, open the unlocked main door, go up the skinny wooden staircase banging my suitcase that barely fits between the walls, sticks in the corners. I can barely lug it up, my purse flying around my wrist. Sweating in the cold. It’s just this one night here, and tomorrow night I fly out. I knock on the door of the people who are taking me in—two teachers, one a poet. They know almost nothing about me, except that their friend, Rick, director of the press that published my last two poetry collections, has asked them to help me.

The poet is very tall, her husband calm—both kind. Inviting me to sit with them, have dinner. He sits at the top of the table,
and she’s across from me. They ask if they can take my hands, say a prayer. When I give one hand to the husband, one to the wife, they hold onto me, making a circle. When the husband, uncertain, asks his wife if a particular prayer is okay, it’s almost too much, their sweetness. But my heart has calmed down. After dinner, they come upstairs with me to my private apartment—office, bedroom, bath—and ask me to read to them, poems. And we trade readings—the poet and I, poem for poem. In some poems, she writes about Mary Magdalene. They sit on the other two couches, listening and asking me to read more. My bed is dozens of colors of pink and red in pillows and quilts, like the tiny flowers in fields.

There aren’t many books on the city of Brockton. But I’d found someone who had written about towns all over America that had gone to ruin. And he’d written on Brockton. I’d been wanting to email him, to ask him how to find out if the city killed my son. But I couldn’t decide how to phrase it—questions about illness and water, factories and shoes. I didn’t want to bug him. It turned out that the author teaches at the same college as this couple. The poet knew him. Not well, but he was in her department. She said he didn’t suffer fools. She asked if I had contacted him yet. When I said I hadn’t, she said, “I’ll just email him, and see if he can see you during his office hours.” Which she did, before we went to sleep. For some reason, before she goes downstairs, I tell the poet about seeing Guanyin that afternoon. She says, “Another mother.”

In the morning, the husband checked their email—“He wrote back,” the husband said. The poet went over to the computer, and read the message. “He says that writing about Brockton is a fine thing for a poet to do.” That sounded nice. “He’s on sabbatical and not in the office, but he said for you to give him a call,” the poet said. She wrote the number down. It took me all day to call. I’d walked to the college, seen the dead pile up in a Civil War exhibit. My son’s pictures in my purse—the tapes, the locket. Right before
I left Newton, I sat on the couch upstairs, heart frantic again, called. He answered right away. “You’re not the only one,” he said, “to ask about this.”

I’d told him my story briefly, explained my interest in the health of the city and potential links between its manufacturing history and illness, specifically childhood leukemia. When I’d mentioned that the ex-VP from Knapp Shoes had said that there had never been tanning of leather for shoes in Brockton, or even Massachusetts, he reminded me of one of the old shoe factory guys he’d written about in his essay on Brockton. How the guy said he could never get the yellow from the leather out of his hands. I wondered if he meant that that kind of stain could be a preface to others. But he didn’t know where to tell me to look beyond the library, newspaper, local colleges—what I’m after isn’t in his area of expertise. “You can’t go to the boosters, the Chamber of Commerce, with this kind of thing,” he said. His main advice, though, was to show up in person, look around. “Brockton,” he said, “never disappoints.”

7.

I’d thought it was a good thing to finally go to see my aunt and uncle, to say my son’s name. A breakthrough, as my aunt had said. But not telling my family, the subterfuge, the not doing what other people wanted me to do—it cost me. Over the holidays, someone posted a link to a suicide prevention group—I clicked it and watched a video. A woman who had survived a suicide attempt explained that you can have something unresolved in your life, your past, something that lies low, but then something else can happen—a crisis—and it can uncover that sleeping thing too. She said it’s important to remember that there are other ways to make the pain stop besides death.

In the weeks before I flew to see my aunt and uncle, some sleeping thing started to wake up. I felt darker and darker. I would overhear myself thinking, “You don’t deserve to live.” Or “You’ve had your life already. It’s over now.” I thought of death as sleeping, a nice sleep. This wasn’t the suicidal ideation of my twenties, the long slow slide into a dark cavern. The thoughts were quick, brief, as if they’d slipped in from some outside source. I was worried. I knew it had something to do with taking action, with fear. It had to do with being Tommy’s mother in the world, even though I still felt as though I wasn’t allowed to be this, to say it out loud. To show up at his real parents’ home and ask to know about his life.