Did I imagine it, or did my father sound nervous? Mom could say all she wanted to about coming West to find Cam and me; it dawned on me now that she’d left for other reasons as well.
“Sure, I can do that. Listen, what’s going on with you two, anyway?”
“None of your beeswax,” he said. “A little misunderstanding. Just get your mother to call me ASAP.”
My mother and my landlady, Louise, arrived about an hour later, while I was playing with the baby on the floor and wondering whether to call the police. Mom’s face was flushed from exertion and she looked pleased with herself. She was wearing a huge necklace of bright red and yellow beads.
“Oh, hi Louise!” I said. I’m glad you two have met.” I aimed to sound casual, but my voice strained tight as elastic around my unasked questions. I waited to see what explanation my mother might offer for her absence.
None was forthcoming. Instead, she gave me a look that said,
See what it feels like?
Meanwhile, Louise squealed and clapped her hands. “Oh, there’s our little miracle darlin’!”
At first, I thought she meant me. But then I heard babbling at my feet, where Paris was using my leg to pull herself up to a standing position.
Louise scooped the baby up and cradled her in one meaty arm. “You precious little pumpkin pie,” she murmured. “Who’s happy today? Who’s got a smile for Louise? Who needs a kiss?”
Ignoring Paris’s wailed protests, Louise bussed the baby and played out the whole hyperbolic “this little piggy” routine on her toes. Well, at least I wasn’t going to get evicted for housing a child.
My mother hung back, smiling not just at me, but at the baby. “Hello, Jordan,” she said. “Feeling any better after that good sleep? It’s time for a fresh start!”
“Sure, I’m better. And you look great.”
I felt pinpricks of irritation at being kept in the dark about my mother’s activities, but it was true: Mom looked terrific. Her perm had softened into finger curls around her face, which was pink from her recent outing, and her gaze was bright. She had erased five years since yesterday.
“Thank you,” Mom said briskly. “I’m so glad you’re well. We have a busy day ahead of us!” She rubbed her hands together, grinning like a cruise ship hostess.
“We do?”
“Yes! We’re going to track down your brother.”
“I’ve already tried to find him, Mom. Nothing but dead ends.”
“Yes, but you didn’t have me helping. Today you’re driving me to Berkeley. Somebody must have a clue about your brother’s whereabouts in Nepal.”
Ah, I had her there. “Oh yeah? In what? I was car-jacked, remember.”
Louise handed Paris back to me after one long, last, lipsticky nuzzle that left a ring of red on Paris’s left ear. “Take my car,” she said. “I won’t need it today, and it’s the least I can do.” She gave my mother a look, then started up the stairs to her apartment. “Hang tight and I’ll toss down the keys in two shakes.”
A minute later, Louise dropped her keys down from the landing. The keys spun in the air, flashing like silver coins into my mother’s outstretched hands.
“Hey, you had a phone call,” I remembered, once Mom and I were inside and gathering up things for Paris’s diaper bag.
“Who was it?”
“Oh, gee, Mom. I didn’t catch his name. Who on earth could it have been? Your boyfriend?”
“Him?” My mother sighed and tossed Louise’s keys into the air several times, like a gangster with a lucky coin. “He can wait.”
“S
o what will this little foray prove, exactly?” I asked my mother as we climbed into Louise’s ancient Volvo wagon. “Other than the fact that Cam’s really gone, and that we’ll be damn lucky to get across the Bay Bridge in under an hour at rush hour.”
“Watch your mouth,” Mom said.
“What about calling Dad back? He doesn’t know anything about the baby yet.”
“Your father doesn’t need to know everything.”
Louise’s ancient Volvo sagged on the driver’s side, its shocks completely gone. Still, it wheezed up the hills with determination. Louise had attached a single sticker to its crooked bumper: “God sees what you’re doing, and is she ever pissed!” I leaned into the corners to compensate for the car’s sag, gritting my teeth each time I had to wrestle the stick shift into gear. My mood was not improving.
“So what’s up with you and Dad?”
“What makes you think anything’s going on?” My mother’s voice sounded high and strained.
“Uh, let’s see. How about the fact that you’re 3,000 miles from home? You’re the one who maintains the myth that Dad can’t dress and feed himself.”
“Have you ever known your father to press a shirt? To turn on the stove?”
“You’re making my case for me.”
“Never mind. I can take a hint. I’ll find a hotel this afternoon.”
“Mother, that’s not my point and you know it!”
“Shush. The baby’s almost asleep.”
I glanced in the rear view mirror. Paris’s head listed to one side like a sunflower and her eyelids drooped. “I just want to know what you and Dad are fighting about,” I whispered.
“Your father and I don’t fight. You know that.”
“But you had a little misunderstanding, Dad said.”
“What else did he say?”
I shrugged. “Nothing.”
My mother sighed. “That’s par for the course. Sometimes we go a whole day without having a real conversation. If he’s not doing yard work, it’s just Dad in front of his new flat screen TV, locked in battle with guests on talk shows.”
It was true. Mom puttered in her kitchen or went off to church, while Dad lounged in his recliner or obsessively tended the lawn. One Saturday, I’d come home unexpectedly and watched him mow the grass in carefully widening circles around a single dogwood tree, then reverse direction and do it all over again, until the grass was as smooth as a billiard table. My mother threatened to have the lawn cemented over years ago.
“So why have you stayed with him this long?” I ventured.
My mother sighed. “Your father wasn’t always a nice man, Jordan. In fact, he was an ass, those years he was drinking. But he was always present. Every night. And a good provider. You could say that much for the man. Think about Grammy, the year she died.”
“Dad was good to her,” I agreed. When Grammy came to live with us that year, my father was the one who converted the dining room into a replica of her mobile home bedroom, putting Grammy’s scarred pine dresser right beside the rented hospital bed and gathering all of her ceramic animals on it. And it was Dad whose hand Grammy held at the end.
“The truth is that I’m lonely now, without you and Cam around,” Mom said.
“What about your friends?” I asked, wrestling the Volvo through a narrow street and dodging a bicycle messenger.
My mother turned a little in the seat to look at me. “Even friends can’t make up for distance in a marriage. Besides, as old as I am, there’s a lot of competition for friendship: Alzheimer’s, cruises, divorces, heart attacks, Florida condos. Hardly anybody in the neighborhood remembers me from before my hair turned gray. They’re all dead or missing in action.” She faced the windshield again and added, “I’ve been thinking of leaving your father.”
I gripped the steering wheel, stricken. It was unnerving to have the one person I’d always depended on for everything from clean sheets to tomato soup tell me that her foundation was crumbling. Mom’s foundation was my bedrock. “Why now? Why didn’t you leave Dad when he was drinking?”
She shrugged. “The years Dad was drinking, all those black years, I clung to the idea that someday your father would wake up and realize how good we had it together. Meanwhile, I drove myself crazy, looking after you kids, the house, his moods. Felt like an eternity at the time. Turns out, though, that kids grow up before you blink.”
My mother glanced at Paris over her shoulder and then at me again, briefly. “After you left, I got to thinking about Cam, about how I failed him, and I started worrying again about you and your health problems. You and Cam are my life, Jordy, but your father never wanted me to spend the money to see you. You chose to leave, is how he sees it, so it’s your loss.” She reached across the seat and touched my leg. “I had to let him know that he can’t ever stop me from seeing my own children. That’s just not going to happen.”
I took my mother’s hand in mine, afraid to look at her for fear I’d do something stupid, like cry. We covered the next couple of miles in silence, slowly winding through the Berkeley streets.
After a few minutes, Mom said, “It’s not just for the baby’s sake that I need to find Cam.” She took her hand back so that she could clutch the purse on her lap. “It’s for my own. I feel so guilty.”
“Why? I don’t understand how you failed Cam. Why is it your fault that he’s such a screw-up?”
She flinched, and for a minute I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then Mom pulled a tissue out of the vast reaches of her purse and pressed it to her eyes. “I need to say I’m sorry for not standing up for him all those years. After you went away to college, there were a couple of bad years when Cam caught the worst of it when your father was drinking. But I suppose you know that.” She glanced at me. “Cam must have told you.”
“Cam never talks about it. But I knew something was going on.” My knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “Why isn’t Dad the one saying sorry? You didn’t do anything but good, all our lives.”
Mom tucked the tissue into the sleeve of her dress. “Your father was an alcoholic. He was the victim of a disease. I had my wits about me, but still I sat back and did nothing, because I was afraid. And fear should not be the boss of your life, Jordan, especially when it’s your own children who need protecting. Your father should certainly make amends, but this is my journey, too.”
I didn’t answer, caught up in a single, crystal revelation: Cam had always run away from us, from everyone, because doing anything remotely responsible– like having a job, or even letting you know how to find him–meant to Cam that he was like Dad, the last person on earth he’d ever want to become.
Half an hour later, we reached Shepherd Jon’s house. I drove straight up the driveway of the big Victorian. Val was probably gone by now, too. Paris woke when I shut off the engine. I carried the baby up the flagstone path and held her up so that she could ring the front doorbell. Paris giggled and pressed the bell hard with her thumb, like she was squashing a bug.
“This place could stand a little TLC,” Mom murmured, surveying the peeling trim paint, unkempt bushes, and filmy windows. I knew her fingers must be itching for a rag and window cleaner.
“Jon, the owner, inherited this house from his parents,” I reminded her. “He’s not too keen on housekeeping.”
My mother snorted. “Of course not. He’s letting the house go to ruin as a passive revenge.”
I stared at her. “Why, Dr. Freud. You amaze me.”
The door popped open a crack, making us both jump. Val peered out from within the dark, musty interior of the house. “Damn,” she said, staring at me in feeble recognition. “You have a baby now. That was quick.”
“Yep.” I introduced Val to my mother, who took the other woman’s hand in hers and pressed it tightly, like a foreign dignitary visiting a host ambassador.
Val was an ambassador of sorts, as the only walking, talking representative of Cam’s life in Berkeley. She looked no better than the last time I’d seen her. Her hair was matted into short, stiff yellow ropes, and her complexion had the waxy pallor of someone used to sleeping during daylight hours. On the up side, she was dressed. Val wore a faded cotton skirt, t-shirt and battered leather sandals, the hangdog sort of ensemble I associated with aging women academics.
I didn’t have high hopes for this visit. But Mom used her Avon lady manners to insinuate our way into the kitchen, where she convinced Val to scrounge around for tea. The tea was surprisingly fresh and strong, a loose leaf Assam that Val spooned out of a tin on the counter. Empty boxes– cereals, crackers, pasta–littered the kitchen counter and floors, most of them torn open in ways that suggested foraging raccoons. I wondered what Val would do for food once she’d grazed her way through the rest of Jon’s pantry.
Val plopped down on one of the wooden chairs at the table and began shoveling teaspoons of sugar into her teacup. I counted six before she said, “It’s so good to see somebody. Thanks for stopping.”
It had never occurred to me that Val, if she were here at all, might actually be happy to see us. “Have you heard from your house mates?” I asked. Too soon for letters from Asia, I thought, but Jon might have called to check on the house.
“Not a word! I feel like an abandoned dog.”
“Surely not,” my mother protested. “They’re only roommates.”
Val gave her a level look, or at any rate a less stoned look than usual. Maybe she’d smoked her way through every hidden stash at this point and run out of money to buy more. “Jon, Domingo, Melody, and Cam are more than just roommates. They’re family,” she said, articulating each name, each word, with the precise diction of a high school principal awarding diplomas.
“Your real family wouldn’t leave you in the lurch like this,” my mother asserted.
Val barked a short, unpleasant laugh. “My own father set the gold standard in abandonment.”
I waited for my mother to take the same hard line on pity parties with Val that she adopted whenever I wallowed in my own personal travesties. Instead, Mom laid a gentle hand on Val’s own larger, rougher one. “That’s terrible,” she said gently. “Without family, a person is cast adrift.”
Val’s eyes brimmed with tears. To my horror, my own did, too, as Val responded to my mother’s mothering by recounting her Dickensian life: evil stepfather, miserable boarding school, on the streets by age sixteen. Jon had taken her in at her lowest. “I owe him my life,” Val said.
Paris was starting to whine. I left my mother huddled with Val in the kitchen and wandered out to the greenhouse with Paris on one hip. The orchids were every bit as abandoned as Val, yet continued to thrive without Jon. He must have them on some sort of automatic watering system.
When the complex odors started to make me feel dizzy, I strolled around the main house and entered it again through the front door. The tables were thick with dust and a desperate cat had apparently run out of space in the litter box. I climbed the stairs to Cam’s room, ignoring Paris’s burbled demands to be allowed to crawl up the stairs by herself.
Cam’s bed was covered with the same tired striped sheets I’d seen last time. He’d left the bathrobe my mother bought him hanging from the door. I fingered its tattered terry edges, heard something crackle in the pocket, and thrust my hand in to extract a single sheet of paper, a neon pink flyer for a Chinese restaurant.
I was about to replace it when I noticed that the back was covered with Cam’s cramped handwriting. Cam’s writing had always been difficult to read; it was faint and spidery, as if he were as fearful of committing his thoughts to paper as he was to committing himself to anything else in life. My heart pounded hard, but why? I wasn’t going to steal anything. Only look. And Val was hardly the sort to bound upstairs and catch me snooping, especially when she had a captive audience downstairs.
I set Paris down on the floor and studied the paper. The handwriting was badly smudged and Cam’s thoughts seemed barely connected. The entire first paragraph was devoted to a dentist’s visit gone bad.
No pot to piss in, so forget the root canal and crown. Christ, I could buy a car for that. Had it pulled instead. An hour of fucking torture, the demonic Dr. twisting at the tooth with those damn pliers, me humming that mantra Jon taught. I may be the jewel in the eye of the lotus and all that, but this jewel is one rotted carcass. Jon says suffering and illness are directly related to the unstable nature of the mind. Smart dude. Stress guarantees thought patterns that fuck up the flow of life.
Cam rambled on from there, parroting Jon’s pedestrian philosophies of life, then added,
Tooth hole’s so sore I can’t even eat a cracker. On the other hand, who the fuck cares about crackers? Sold my pain meds to help pay my astro dentistry debt. Bad enough your body rots, but then you’ve got to pay the piper too. Now Jordan’s here like a busy little beaver sawing logs, dragging them into the middle of the stream and diverting the natural flow of events. Jordy’s always been a busy little beaver. Me, I just want to be the stream.
Seeing my name written in Cam’s hand made the hairs rise on the back of my neck, as if he had walked into the room and spoken it. I glanced up and saw Paris, who was now gumming the foot board and grinning at me with her father’s blue eyes, with my eyes.