“That was a long time ago. And it got discredited, remember?”
“My point is if the police find out Mom didn’t come home, things could get complicated.”
Sweet Caroline thinks about it, biting at a nail. Mom clicks her nails on her teeth when she’s worried, but Sweet Caroline bites until she bleeds.
“This is a crisis. We need to call Dad,” she says.
“That’s the worst time to call Dad.”
Dad’s idea of a crisis is having to make dinner on a weeknight.
“Why don’t you call the yoga studio just to make sure she’s not there,” I say.
“What will you do?”
“I’ll check the house.”
“Don’t leave, Sanskrit.”
“I’m not leaving. I’m going down the hall.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Stay here and call the yoga studio. I swear I’ll be right back.”
Sweet Caroline stretches out her arms like she’s going to reach for me, but she doesn’t. It’s funny how she’s so tough and so vulnerable at the same time. She gets scared and suddenly she wants a big brother.
I wait for Sweet Caroline to get on her phone, and I head down the hall.
I slip into Mom’s room.
It’s dark. I crack open the blinds, and light floods in. I look at her pillow. The letter is gone.
I check between the sheets and under the bed, just in case it fell. Then I look back at the pillow.
Gone.
Does that mean Mom came home and found it?
I rush back into the living room.
“Your wife has disappeared,” Sweet Caroline is saying into the phone.
“Hang up.”
“It’s our father,” she says, holding her hand over the receiver. “I’m informing him of current events.”
She speaks into the phone: “I don’t know where she went, Daddy. I just know she never came home.”
I hear Dad’s voice coming through the earpiece.
“You have to come and get us,” Sweet Caroline says. “We’ll find Mom and then you can drive us to school.”
Dad’s voice again.
“An hour’s too long!” Sweet Caroline says.
She looks at me, desperate.
What can I say? Everything is difficult for Dad. That’s why we don’t call him when it’s not his weekend.
Sweet Caroline thinks for a second, then she says into the phone, “You have two unsupervised, unfed children here. What if the big one happens and we have no water in the house?”
Dad says something, then Sweet Caroline puts down the phone.
“He’ll be over in five minutes,” she says.
“That was mean of you,” I say.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” she says.
“How could she just leave you here alone?”
Dad says it like he’s angry, like parents should be responsible for their children at all times. That’s easy for him to say when he only has to be responsible one weekend a month.
“That’s why we called you,” Sweet Caroline says. “It’s weird of her.”
“Have you checked all her usual haunts?” Dad says. “Runyon Canyon, the yoga center, that colon cleansing place …”
“Gross, daddy.”
“It’s not my fault. Your mother is nuts now,” he says.
Sweet Caroline clamps her hands over her ears.
“You married her,” I say. “You must have seen something in her.”
“People change,” Dad says.
He’s looking at Mom’s altar as he says it. There’s
a little picture of Guru Bharat on the table next to a candle. I never noticed it before.
“Maybe they can change back,” I say.
“Why are we standing here talking about unimportant things?” Sweet Caroline says.
Dad sighs. “You’re right,” he says. “Let’s take a ride and see what we can see.”
“Someone has to stay here,” I say.
“Why?” Sweet Caroline says.
“What if Mom comes back and nobody knows it, and we’re still out there looking for her.”
“She’ll call us,” Sweet Caroline says.
“Good point,” Dad says.
“She lost her phone,” I say.
“Really? That’s a problem,” Dad says.
“I’ll stay and you guys go. Then if something happens, we can call each other.”
Sweet Caroline looks at me, trying to figure out if I’m up to something.
“I don’t know about this—” Dad says.
“I’m an adult,” I say.
Sweet Caroline opens her mouth to say something.
“Practically an adult,” I say, cutting her off.
“Alright then,” Dad says. “It’s you and me, Sweet Pea.”
He heads for the car with Sweet Caroline at his heels.
Once they’re gone, I pace the house. I sort through
the gift baskets, eating various chocolates.
I check my phone, making sure the ringer is on so I’ll hear it.
I pace some more.
Eventually, I end up in my bedroom. I lie down and stare at the ceiling.
I don’t know how much time passes before I hear the front door open. I’m thinking they must have found Mom.
“Sweet Caroline?” I call out.
There’s no answer.
I hear footsteps in the hall. Mom’s door opens and closes.
“Mom?” I say.
Still no answer. I try her door. It’s locked.
I hear crying inside her bedroom.
“Can we talk, Mom?”
I feel like I’m outside of my body. I’m dizzy and cold.
“Mom?”
She won’t answer me.
I walk into the living room and lay down on her meditation mat. I can feel the indentation of her body from laying on it so many times.
One time when we were still a family, Dad took us up to Mammoth Lake during the winter. Zadie refused to come. He said he spent his childhood running in the woods and saw no reason to repeat the experience.
I still remember that trip. We stayed in a cabin, and I touched snow for the first time. Mom was raised on the East Coast, and she told us stories about the snow when she was a little kid. One night there was a big snowstorm, and Mom got us all to go outside the next morning.
“Watch this!” she said.
She lay back in a snowbank and waved her arms up and down by her sides and scissored her legs open and closed. She hopped out of the indentation so she wouldn’t damage it.
“I made a snow angel,” Mom said.
I looked at the indentation and I saw what she meant.
Dad lifted up Sweet Caroline and me and laid us in the indentation. We both fit perfectly, curled together in Mom’s impression in the snow.
That was a long time ago. Mom and Dad loved each other then. At least it felt like they did.
I settle against the impression in Mom’s meditation mat. It’s shallow, hard, barely there. I try to fit my body into it, but we don’t match anymore.
“Sanskrit.”
Mom looks at me from the hallway. Her face is puffy and red. She blows her nose into a tissue.
“I thought you’d still be asleep,” Mom says. “I’d get home and you wouldn’t even know I’d been gone all night.”
I glance at the clock in the kitchen.
“It’s eight thirty, Mom. We’ve been up for two and a half hours.”
“I lost track of time,” she says. “Where’s your sister?”
“With Dad.”
“Your father is in the house?”
Dad’s not allowed to come in without Mom’s permission. The judge told him it’s not his house anymore, even if his father was the one who bought it.
“He’s driving around looking for you with Sweet Caroline. She called him because we were worried. You didn’t come home last night.”
“I did come home,” she says.
It seems like she’s going to sit next to me on her mat, but she doesn’t. She goes into the kitchen and leans against the counter.
“I came home after my drive and I found your letter,” she says. “At first I was shocked. All those hurtful things you said. I was confused. But the guru helped me understand.”
“You saw the guru?”
“I went to see him, and we talked all night.”
“What did you talk about?”
“You.”
“I don’t like you talking about our family with strangers.”
“He’s not a stranger. I trust him. We have a connection.”
“How can you have a connection? You just met him.”
“Some day you’ll have a connection with a woman, and you’ll understand what it’s like.”
I try to imagine telling Judi everything about me—the problems with Mom and my feelings about Sweet Caroline and my father. It seems impossible to share that stuff with another person.
“He helped me to understand you,” Mom says. “And to figure out what I should do.”
Mom comes over and sits across from me on the floor.
“Sanskrit, you said I’ve been a bad mother to you.”
“Not bad,” I say.
“That’s what you said in the letter. Is it the truth?” I’m so uncomfortable, I can barely sit still. “Is it?” she says.
“Yes.”
I brace for Mom to get angry, but she doesn’t. She just nods her head.
“The guru told me I needed to be a hundred percent honest with you. Like you were honest with me.”
She closes her eyes and takes a breath.
“Here it is: I try to be a good mother, but I fall short. Sometimes I want to be better and I don’t know how, and sometimes I don’t want to be better. Sometimes I wonder why I’m a mother in the first place.”
“You’re a mother because you had kids.”
“There was a lot going on when I had you. Family pressure—”
“I don’t want to hear this.”
“You need to hear it. You’re suffering because of it. Because of my bad choices. Your letter made that clear. At first I was angry that you would even talk to me like that, but then I realized you were right.”
I try to change my position on the mat. My legs are falling asleep, my thighs numb and tingling.
“Your letter woke me up, Sanskrit.”
“I wrote it when I was really angry—”
“The truth was too painful for me to look at on my own. You helped me, Sanskrit. The guru said that your name was more than just a name. Maybe I knew before you were born that you were going to bring me the message I needed to hear, and that’s why I called you Sanskrit.”
“How would he know?”
“Oh, sweetie,” she says.
Mom leans towards me, legs crossed, her hands on her thighs. She can stay in this position for hours. Maybe even days.
“I have to do better. I have to be a real mother to you.”
“I’d like that.”
“But how can I love you, when I don’t love myself?”
“What does that mean?”
“If I don’t learn to love myself, I can never be the
kind of mother I want to be. The guru explained that to me.”
“You’re saying you want to be a good mother?”
“More than anything,” Mom says.
She scoots closer, her knees against my knees.
“That’s why I’m leaving,” she says. “The guru is going back to India, and I’m going with him.”
“How does that make you a good mother?”
“This might be hard for you to understand at your age, but I’ve put everything else in my life first. It’s time for me to put
me
first. My happiness. My joy.”
“This doesn’t make any sense.”
“The guru is my chance at happiness. There’s real love between us. A spiritual love, not like I’ve had in the past. It’s a new start for me, Sanskrit. ”
“Wait—What about us?”
“That’s why I need to talk to your father. You’re going to live with him while I’m away.”
“That’s impossible. He can’t even keep a plant alive.”
“Sweet Caroline told me he has a cactus.”
“He lives in an apartment!”
“A nice apartment.”
“You’ve never seen it!” I say.
“It will bring you and your sister closer.”
“Who wants that? Mom, this is crazy.”
Mom stands up and crosses her arms over her chest.
“I’m shocked that I’m getting such flack from you. I thought you’d be happy for me.”
“Why would I be happy?”
“I’m doing it for you,” she says. “Because of your letter.”
“But I didn’t mean what I said. It was just angry stuff. You know how people get angry sometimes and say things they don’t mean? That’s what the letter was.”
“I know that’s not true.”
I can’t think straight. My head is going a mile a minute.
“When are you leaving?” I say.
“In a week,” she says.
She reaches out and puts a hand on my chest. My heart chakra or whatever she calls it. She keeps her hand there like she’s trying to comfort me. But it just feels like she’s pushing me away.
“One week,” I say.
“Yes,” Mom says with a smile.
“My life is just beginning.”
That’s what Mom says to Dad. He sways on his feet like he’s been hit.
Sweet Caroline stands to the side, rubbing tears from her eyes.
Mom just broke the news to them, and they look like they’ve been in a car accident.
“ ‘My life is just beginning’? What kind of statement is that?” Dad says.
“An honest one,” Mom says.
I watch from behind the kitchen counter. I duck down a little so one of the gift baskets is in the way. My family is less painful when viewed through cellophane and foreign chocolate.
“You’re forty-one years old. Your life has been going on for a long time,” Dad says. “We had a marriage. We had children.”
“Have
children,” I say. “We’re still here.”
“Of course you are,” Dad says.
“What about my bat mitzvah?” Sweet Caroline says.
“Oh, that’s right,” Mom says, like she just remembered Sweet Caroline is getting bat mitzvahed in the fall. “I’m sure I’ll be back for that.”
“You don’t sound sure,” Sweet Caroline says, biting at a nail.
“This is a new chapter for me,” Mom says. “I don’t understand why I can’t get a little support from the people around me.”
“Because it makes no sense!” Dad says.
“I don’t expect someone whose life has been on hold for twenty years to understand.”
“That’s a low blow,” Dad says.
“It’s true,” Mom says. “Your father wouldn’t fund your start-up, and you crumbled.”
“That’s not how it happened,” Dad says.
But that is how it happened, at least as I understand it. Dad refused to work for Zadie’s terry company and tried to get Zadie to fund his tech start-up instead. Zadie refused, saying it was a big waste of money. Dad has spent his life trying to prove him wrong.
“Please stop fighting,” Sweet Caroline says.