Norma
A BETTER DAUGHTER WOULD HAVE MOVED BACK INTO her childhood home after her father died. A better daughter would have taken care of her mother, kept her company, played Scrabble with her during the long winter evenings, taken her to medical appointments and accompanied her to church on Sunday mornings. A better daughter would have cared enough to see what was happening to her mother. She wouldn’t have passed off her mother’s sudden forgetfulness as simply a result of age and loneliness. A better daughter would have understood what was happening when her mother put milk on the stove to warm and forgot about it, burning the milk and filling the kitchen with smoke.
But I was not that daughter. Nothing kept me from being her, but I couldn’t imagine moving back into a house so quiet and dark, the curtains still drawn against the daylight. After all those years, decades between Norma the quiet girl and Norma the quiet woman, I still felt the heaviness of Mother’s lost babies, and I didn’t want to be weighed down by them all over again. I had my own pulling me down.
I called every evening at 6:30 p.m., after she finished washing the dishes and before she sat down at the little table, a glass of her favourite whiskey and her crossword puzzle book in front of her. I replaced being a good daughter with being a scheduled daughter, someone who would do the minimum and still be considered dutiful by anyone who might be watching. I made the forty-five-minute drive from my apartment to my mother’s house once a week, on Saturday mornings. We went out for lunch, and I took her shopping, gathered the garbage and took it out to the bin at the end of the driveway. The whiskey bottles were still hidden away at the bottom of the bag, but there were fewer now without Father. I mowed the lawn in
the summer and shovelled the walkway in winter. I used her money to pay someone to plow in case of emergency.
Time quickens the older you get, as if the universe is trying to push you toward the finish line, to make room for the younger, the stronger, to mark your brief place in history and move on. Our tenth Christmas without Father came in the blink of an eye. I was staying the night as I did each year. Aunt June was driving up the next morning. She and Alice had gone to the same Christmas Eve party for years, so it was only Mother and me. It was a cold night. A thick layer of wet snow had fallen a few days earlier, and then the temperature dropped and froze the top layer. The faint yellow of a street lamp and the gleeful colours of Christmas lights from the neighbour’s yard gleamed off the crystalline crust. Light is more vibrant in the cold, like it knows that people are stuffed away in their houses, miserable from lack of sunshine, and it needs to put on a show. A pleasant substitute for warmth. After Mother went to bed, I opened the curtains and admired the lights of the Christmas tree against the darkness of the night. I sat in the quiet, with only the creaking of the house to keep me company. I squinted my eyes to blur the lights of the tree like I used to when I was a kid. When the need for sleep finally forced me to bed, I left the lights on. A Christmas tree without its lights makes me sad, and I couldn’t bear to unplug it.
The red block letters told me it was 3:14 a.m. when something pulled me out of a deep and dreamless sleep. I sat up and listened, but the world was quiet. It was the dark, deep quiet that comes when the world is at rest. I had just gotten comfortable again, the pillows perfectly placed under my head, when a loud noise lifted me out of the bed and into my slippers.
“Mother?” I made my way down the hall to her room, but it was empty. The bedside lamp was on but turned over, lying on the floor, the shade tilted, throwing weird shadows on the walls.
“Mother?” I ran down the hall, unsure of where to go next. In the light cast by the Christmas tree, I caught a glimpse of her. She was outside in the cold, in nothing but a nightgown, her back bent as she reached into the snow over and over again. She had left the front door, so rarely used, wide open, and the cold was drifting in.
“Mother, what are you doing?”
She looked at me, startled. Her eyes were round and watery, her skin pink from the cold. She had nothing on her hands or feet to protect her from the winter air.
“Oh Norma, good. Help me find it.” She bent down again, throwing handfuls of snow into the air.
“It’s freezing and you’re in your nightgown. Come inside.” I tried to take her by the shoulders and lead her to the front door, but she pulled away and bent to search the snow.
“I have to find it, or your father will be annoyed with me.”
I stopped as my weight fractured the crust of ice and my slippered feet sunk into the cold snow beneath.
“Find what?”
“My wedding ring. I lost it and I can’t find it, and I know it’s out here somewhere. The last time I saw it, I was planting the rhododendrons. He’ll be home soon, and I don’t want him to think I’m absent-minded.” She turned from me and headed deeper into the front yard. I stood dumb as the sound of frozen snow snapped and cracked and echoed in my ears.
“Mother.” I took a deep breath and made my way toward her. “Father died. And you lost your ring thirty years ago. He got you a new one, remember?” I took her hand and showed her the ring, the one she rarely took off, even when she was sleeping, doing dishes or gardening. After losing the first one, she paid special attention, and only took the ring off once a month at the jewellery store to have it cleaned. She wouldn’t leave the store when it was being done, and always waited patiently until the ring was placed back on her finger.
She stared at her hand in the dim light. Both hands were cold and red, stiff from searching. Her bare feet had sunk deep into the snow, and once the panic of searching for the ring was over, I had to help her lift her legs to get indoors. I wondered if she knew that her brain was failing her, taking everything she’d painstakingly built over seven and a half decades, stealing my father from her a second time. If she did know, she didn’t let anyone else into her world of lost memories and confusion until that night.
I walked her to the bathroom and sat her down on the toilet while I ran a bath to warm her. I didn’t know if I was supposed to scold or comfort, to hold her hand while she tried to remember, or chide her for being so foolish. Instead, I helped her undress and nearly cried when she moved her arms up to her chest to hide herself, her face falling in a state of embarrassment. I realized once again that I loved her, and simply being the dutiful daughter disrespected the life she had given me.
“Mother, give me your hand. I’ll help you into the bath.” She gingerly accepted my help, and I eased her into the lukewarm water. “I’m going to go make us some tea. You just sit here and relax, okay?” I took her chin in my hand and turned her gaze away from the dripping faucet. “Okay?”
“Yes. I’ll stay here.” Her voice was barely a whisper and she sounded so small. I wanted to crawl into the bath, gather her into my arms and warm her myself. I wanted to hold her hands in mine until the proper colour returned. Instead, I made tea, with extra milk and sugar. I sat on the toilet as she hummed Christmas songs and sipped. I reached over to turn on the tap and warm the water when I saw her flesh pimple and her body shiver. Her hands and feet turned pink and then white, and I asked her to wiggle her toes and she did. She finished her tea and I helped her dry off and got her into a fresh nightgown and back into bed.
That night, I slept in the same bed as my mother, curled up in the spot long occupied by my father. I smelled the soap, and I remembered the arm slung across me, her snores soft, her words quiet and kind when I was small. I remembered her swaying me, cooing, “It was nothing but a dream. Mother is here now.” I felt an intense love for my mother that night. Something that I am trying my hardest to recapture now.
For someone who carries little affinity for religion, I seem to be burdened with an inordinate amount of guilt. I sublet my apartment and moved back into my childhood home, the one thing I’d promised myself that I’d never do. As I carried the last suitcase from the car, I felt a heaviness settle over me. It dragged my shoulders down, bent my back and pushed the air out of my lungs.
“Misery comes in threes,” Mother used to say, counting unfortunate events on her fingers and announcing that the world had righted itself when the third event was over and done with. A child gone missing, a robbery at the local legion, the death of the neighbour’s cat—all held the same status to her, each one a prong of the misery trident. When Alice passed away in her sleep shortly after Mother’s diagnosis, I counted on my fingers: two. I dreaded what three might bring.
Alice had simply gone to sleep, and while she was resting, the blood in her brain overflowed its banks and took her away. An aneurysm, Aunt June said between sobs. So, I bundled Mother into the car and set out for Boston. I loved Alice, more than I understood before that phone call. She had been my saving grace, always on the other end of the phone when I needed her.
She was Aunt June’s tether to the world, and I wondered what Aunt June was going to do now. I prayed she wouldn’t come unravelled and leave me, too. I wouldn’t allow her to be the third prong.
The funeral was small and sweet. A few family members attended, but most of the mourners were long-time friends of Alice and Aunt June. After the funeral, everyone was invited to a karaoke bar, a place where Alice and Aunt June used to spend time. I couldn’t imagine it and was annoyed at Aunt June for hiding this side of herself. She had always been fun, but not drunk-karaoke fun. I don’t like learning things about the people I love after they’re gone, but that seems to be the way of it. We ate fried food, drank beer and talked about Alice.
“I’ve known her so long that I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know her,” a tall woman named Candice said as she wiped a tear from her cheek. Aunt June gave her a hug.
“I met her when I first got to Boston. We were in the same English class at university,” Aunt June said, her voice wobbly. “The rest, as they say, is herstory.” The others laughed quietly. “Well, let’s not mope—she would be annoyed. Alice never got angry, but she would be annoyed with us if she could see us like this. Let’s sing!”
Aunt June headed to the stage and grabbed a microphone. Someone unseen turned on the stage lights, casting her in neon pink. A moment later, Aunt June was swaying and singing “In the Blue of Evening.” Aunt June’s voice cracked near the end of the song, and everyone clapped. Mother huffed in her seat, clutching a whiskey.
“That was playing the first time she and I got a beer together. We always sang that one.” Aunt June stood alone in the pink light until Leonard took her hand and helped her down from the stage before taking the microphone himself.
“For Alice. She always understood my predicament.” Leonard held up his drink before launching into an enthusiastic and off-key rendition of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” and everyone laughed. It was nice to see them smiling, singing along, raising their glasses into the air for a clink. “To Alice.”
So many people sang so many songs, each one prefaced by a memory of Alice. I learned more about Alice and Aunt June in an hour than I had in the last four decades.
Mother, on the other hand, sat in a corner booth, slouched down, both hands wrapped around her glass, eyeing everyone. When it came, it was so sudden I didn’t really have a chance to react, to try to stop her outburst.
“She was a freak, you know!” Mother hollered from the booth, slamming her drink on the table and trying to stand. “I don’t know why I’m here. I know that woman.” She pointed to the large cardboard photo of Alice, which had rested beside the urn at the funeral. “You’re a freak, too, you know. She took you from me and made you a freak,” she yelled at Aunt June. She tried to step out from the booth but caught one leg behind the other. As she fell to the floor, she hurled obscenities, words I didn’t think my mother knew. The room went quiet except for the hum and whiz of the karaoke machine and Mother’s voice, cursing and slurring. Spittle gathered in the corner of her mouth as she lay on her stomach on the sticky floor. I rushed over, took her under the arms, lifted her up and herded her out the door as she yelled the entire time. I turned back to see Aunt June in tears, one of her friends holding her hand and another with an arm wrapped around her shoulders. There was a look of betrayal on her face. She’d kept my mother’s secret, and my mother had repaid her in the most brutal way.
Mother fought me all the way to the emergency room and slapped a nurse who was trying to help her. I wanted to be angry and tell her to behave, but instead I helped to hold her down while a different nurse gave her something to calm her. She had cut her arm in the fall and bruised the right side of her face. Her eye was bloodshot. The nurse bandaged her up, and an orderly helped me get her to the car. I put my jacket against the window and laid her head there so she could rest.
On Sunday morning a week later, I dropped Mother at church, where there were people I could trust to keep her safe and calm. Then I visited Shady Oaks retirement home, a benign name for what was essentially a prison for the dying. I pressed the little rubber button and a horrible buzzing echoed down the hall. Behind the thick glass doors, a nurse peeked around the edge of her desk and, with the same buzz and a click of metal locks, she let me inside. The fluorescent lighting was dim, and the air was pungent with the smell of urine and disinfectant. The hallway was painted yellow. Old watercolours hung on the wall, their edges curled and sticking out from the corners of the frames. My shoes squeaked on the cold linoleum. I can only assume that the decor didn’t concern the owners since the tenants wouldn’t remember it from one day to the next. The place reeked of
sadness, and it only got worse the further down the hall I walked. The first person I saw was an old man, slumped over in a wheelchair, asleep or unconscious, his arms strapped to his chair. I stopped and stared.
“It’s a safety precaution. Ernest hits people. Don’t worry, we have the family’s consent, and they are soft cuffs,” a nurse said to me. I almost turned to leave, but she took me by the hand. “I know how difficult this is, but we value our clients and their well-being. I promise.”
It was hard to believe her, standing there with the old man snoring and gasping in equal measure. I could hear a woman singing old folk songs from somewhere down the hall. But I stayed and I listened. And it broke my heart.
“AUNT JUNE, I don’t know what to do.” I was crying into the phone, a tissue held to my nose.
“Norma, listen to me. They can take care of her. It’s what you have to do.”
“But she made me promise.” I sniffed and put the phone on the table to blow my nose. “God, I wish I could talk to Alice.”
“Me too, me too.”
Years before, the day after her diagnosis, when she finally came out of her room, my mother sat across from me at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in her hands and a frown on her face. “Promise you won’t put me in one of those places where they make you wear diapers and lock you inside.” There was genuine fear in the waver of her voice. “They leave you there to sit in your own filth.” She stopped to compose herself and took a sip of coffee. “You’ll forget me if I’m in one of those places.”
I reached across the table and took her hand, and I promised.
“Norma, honey, I don’t mean to sound cruel, but she’s not going to remember,” Aunt June said. “She has trouble remembering that your father is dead. And I love my sister, God knows I do, but she always was a bit selfish. To make you promise something like that? Just selfish. You need to live your life, too.”
The day I dropped my mother off, Janet, my friend from so long ago, met us at the door of Shady Oaks. She took me into a hug, squeezing the life and the tears out of me. Mom was having a good day, and she cried when I left.
“Norma, sweetheart, where are you going? Wait for me.” She was already in her slippers and a cardigan. Her clothes were put away and her pictures were placed on the little dresser.
“Mom, I’m going home now. You’re staying here, remember?” My heart was racing, beating loudly in my ears.
“Yes, right. I remember. I’m staying here to relax, and you’ll be back to get me tomorrow. Yes, I remember now.”
“No, Mother. You live here now.”
Janet came in with some tea and cookies and set them on the little table beside her chair. Mother laughed, a small, uncomfortable laugh. “Norma, why would I live here when I have a perfectly good house to live in?”
“Mother, we talked about this. It’s not safe for you to live there anymore.”
She looked at the tea and followed the line of steam upward until she was looking at me. Her mouth turned down, her eyes glistened, and she nodded slowly.
“Okay, then, Norma. Okay, then.” She took a sip of tea and pretended we couldn’t see her cry.
I had to get out of there.
“I’ll be back to visit all the time. They are going to take great care of you. I’ll bring Aunt June by to visit, I promise,” I babbled in my failed attempt to keep my tears at bay. I placed a kiss on her forehead, turned and left. I left her sitting in a chair beside her bed, her tea still warm, the lap quilt she’d made as part of her church group draped across her, and a rolled- up towel on her lap, something meant to occupy her hands.
The metal locks clicked, the buzzer echoed, and I left Mother. I sat in my car crying until my eyes burned.
THE HALLWAY FILLED with the voice of an old lady singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” She sat in one of the chairs in the hall; people strolling past her occasionally reached out to hold her thin, cold hand. I took it for just a second. Mother’s room was at the end of the hall, and I hurried my steps. I’d been visiting regularly, but the day before, I’d gotten a call. My mother, the quietest and most solemn person I’d ever known had started screaming, gibberish mostly, laced with profanity. And she was getting violent. She was remembering less and becoming more scared of the strangeness around her. The day before, she’d thought she was a child and the nurses were
kidnapping her. She fought them. When I quietly entered her room, she was sleeping. Her frail arms, outside the blanket, were black and blue where the nurses had had to restrain her. I sat at the edge of the narrow bed and traced the bruises with my fingers. The skin was soft and papery. She woke up and looked at me, sadness in her tiny eyes. She tried to sit up, but I helped her back down to her pillow.
“I am . . . there’s a . . . My daughter, Norma, would know . . . I can’t think clearly, they put something in the Jell-O.” She was trying to find the words, but they seemed locked up somewhere. A few snuck out but never the right ones. She started to cry.
“They hit me on the head, you know. They hit me on the head and took my words. They hit me and took my words and my memories.” She rolled over and turned her head to the wall. And for the third time in my life, I crawled in bed with my mother, snuggling my head into her neck, my breathing matching hers, our sobbing synchronized.
“Shhh, it’s just a dream. I’m here, Mother. It was just a dream.”
Before she fell into sleep and I untangled myself, she whispered, “You make sure to tell Norma what they did to me. She’ll take care of me.” In a frame next to the bed was a picture of me when I was eight. There was also one of her and Father on their wedding day. It was black and white, but I knew the blue of the dress, the tiny sequins sewn into the bottom hem in the shape of bluebells. I’d seen the dress hanging in the closet my whole life. No one had ever worn it. I tried to wear it for my own wedding, but she wouldn’t have it. I had to have a new dress; I had to have the best. I sat on the edge of her bed, watching her shoulders move up and down with the rhythm of her sleep. I kissed her on the top of her head where her hair had thinned so much you could see the pink of her skull, and I left her.
I don’t cry anymore for my parents. I miss them, yes, but I think that as the ones we love get older, we just start to separate from them, like oil from water, a line separating the living and the dying, the living carelessly gathering at the top. When Father died, the grief was so close to the surface. I wasn’t prepared. There was no time to get used to a world without him. After he and Alice died, our already small family was reduced to three. Then my mother began to slowly disappear. Aunt June and I were quickly becoming a family of two.
It was a Sunday in May, almost five months after Alice’s funeral, and Aunt June was coming to visit my mother. She hadn’t seen her there yet. I
think she had a lot of forgiving to do. But after selling her apartment building to Leonard for a dollar and moving into the brownstone Alice left her in the will, she finally felt she had the emotional strength to visit. I had always envied their sibling love, the way they could shout at each other and say hurtful things but show up at the next birthday as though nothing had happened. I always felt that I had missed out on the true, unfiltered, unconditional love of a sibling.
I picked up Aunt June at the station at 10:30 a.m. As she stepped down from the train, she swiped away the offered hand of a young man. Despite her eighty-two years, she still had an energy about her. Even in grief, she was a comfort. As we pulled into the parking lot of the home, I tried to explain to her what to expect, but she patted my hand and quieted me.
“It’s okay. I’m an old lady. I know how these things go.”
Mother wasn’t sad that day. She wasn’t happy either. She was just there, her gaze falling on something over my shoulder. Aunt June tried to talk to her, to share a memory, but Mother looked at her blankly and smiled.
I got up to get us coffee, and as I was returning to the room, I overheard my mother.
“June, do you remember when we got her? She was so small and quiet.” Mother rolled her head on the back of the chair to face Aunt June, whose face went as white as a ghost’s.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lenore. Have you been dreaming again?”
Anything uncomfortable in this family was always the result of a dream.
I took a step back, out of sight.
“Oh June, you remember. She was just tiny and sweet. She didn’t even cry when I put her in the back seat.”
I heard Aunt June cough. I walked in and handed over the hot coffee. “Aunt June, what’s she talking about?”
She stood, her back to me, and said nothing for far too long. “Aunt June?”
“Oh, you know how their minds work. She’s just confused. I’m going to grab a Popsicle from the little fridge. Lenore, do you want a Popsicle?”
Mother nodded, and Aunt June moved past me and out the door. Mother looked at me and smiled.
“You look just like my Norma. She’s my daughter. She never comes to visit me anymore.” A tear slipped down the dried river of wrinkles.
“Mother, it’s me, Norma. I’m here.” I sat my coffee on the small table beside her and took her hand, but she’d laid her head back again and closed her eyes. Aunt June hadn’t returned, so I let go, gathered my stuff and left. It was best to leave when she was asleep.
I found Aunt June sitting at a picnic table outside, sucking on an orange Popsicle, her coffee nowhere to be seen. The heat took my breath away when the automatic doors opened. I sat on the other side of the picnic table, and she handed me the other half of the Popsicle meant for my mother. I took it. It was sweet and already starting to melt.
“Damn your mother.”
I didn’t say a thing as we both waited for her to find the words she was looking for. “Damn her. Leaving me to do this. And damn your father, too. He was always far too lenient with her. He gave in to her every single time. Every single goddamn time.” She looked over my shoulder at the empty fields in the distance. “I kinda hoped I would die before I had to tell you this.”
“I’m adopted.”
She looked at me, surprise on her face.
“Don’t worry, Aunt June. I figured it out a long time ago. Their earlobes were attached to their heads, and mine aren’t. And there is no Italian relative.” I reached up and pulled on my ear, taking another lick of the Popsicle.
“Adopted?” she said. “You knew they weren’t your parents?” “Yup.”
“You seem very calm about it.”
“I’ve known for decades, Aunt June. I’ve had time to adjust.” I winked at her, but she didn’t smile.
“And you’ve never wanted to find your parents?”
“No. I figure they gave me up. Probably best to let the past stay in the past. And Mother and Father were good to me. For the most part.” I’d come to a comfortable understanding of my parents since my father’s death and my mother’s disease. They’d been so careful with me, always worried. They’d walked around like the ice under their feet was cracking and splitting. Their emotional distance came from fear, fear of losing me. I knew this now.
“Well, here’s the thing.” Aunt June played with the empty Popsicle stick, shoving it between the wooden slats of the picnic table over and over
again. “You weren’t really adopted per se.”
I stayed quiet. The sun seemed to get hotter. Absolutely nothing could have prepared me for what came next.
“Your mother and father had had a fight, and she’d taken the car for a drive to clear her head. You need to understand that your mother had always wanted to be a mother and the miscarriages had taken their toll. It was hard on both your parents.”
She paused.
“She was driving through the back roads, crying. She wasn’t in her right mind. And she saw you, sitting on a rock all by yourself, eating a sandwich.”
She finally looked me in the eye. “What do you mean, she saw me?”
“She saw you on your own, and in her mind—remember, she was grieving another lost baby—in her mind, you’d been abandoned. So, she pulled over and offered you a piece of gum and the shade of the back seat, to get out of the sun. You were so quiet and trusting.”
My heart raced, and a lump formed in my throat. Anger and confusion knotted into a ball in my stomach. My mouth went dry.
“Are you telling me that my mother kidnapped me?” She was quiet.
“Aunt June, for fuck’s sake, talk.”
I don’t anger easily, and I don’t swear often, and Aunt June jumped at my abruptness. She didn’t say anything; she just nodded her head and reached across the table to take my hands. I pulled them away.
“Goddamn your mother, leaving me with this.” I looked at her across the table.
“I don’t even know what to say.” I swung my legs out from under the picnic table. Both legs shook as I placed my feet on the ground. I walked unsteadily to the car and waited for Aunt June, my hands so tight on the steering wheel that my shoulders began to ache. On the drive to the train station, Aunt June tried to talk, tried to explain, tried to defend herself, my parents.
“You’d already been with them a month when I found out. It was too late then to do anything,” she tried to explain. “At least that’s what I told myself. Of course, I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t listen. She already loved you so much, and I know she had a weird way of showing it.”
“And Father. He just let her keep me like a found kitten? He was a judge, Aunt June.”
“Yes, and that was convenient. He had a birth certificate drawn up for you, and no one was the wiser. They moved one town over, where no one knew them. Now, I’m not sure what he did when she brought you home, but by the time I got involved, he was resigned to it, I guess. You need to understand how much she loved you.”
I ignored her until she stopped trying to explain. She turned on the radio, but I turned it off. I didn’t get out of the car to hug her; I just dropped her there at the curb outside the station and drove away, watching her wave goodbye in the rear-view mirror. I wasn’t ready for details. I needed time to let the secret sink in.
I stopped and bought a bottle of red wine. An expensive bottle. A bottle befitting the news that my entire life had been based on a crime. I used a coffee mug to drink it. The wineglasses were dusty and in need of washing. It felt warm and burned going down, but there was something therapeutic about the act. I sat at the table in the small kitchen, picking at the threads of an old tablecloth my mother had made years ago, once white, now yellowed with age. I sat and drank and pulled at the loose threads, until I found one that gave way and unravelled the whole thing, watching as the thread piled up on the floor, letting the truth of it all sink in and swallow me whole.
I thought of my decisions. My decision to make teaching my career, my decision to leave motherhood to those better equipped, to sacrifice Mark for my own sanity. And I thought they were wise and carefully considered. In my wildest dreams, I could not fathom making a split-second decision to steal a child. The deception was even greater because there were people who knew, who could have stopped it, could have rectified it, and they didn’t. They chose to stay quiet and, in doing so, created a home life so heavy it almost crushed me. And I wanted to hate them, I wanted to rage against them, but I couldn’t. The rage wouldn’t come. Instead, it turned itself into sadness, into tears. Alice once said that anger and sadness are just two different sides of the same coin. Every time I started to feel angry, the coin flipped, and I cried.
I didn’t visit my mother again that week or the next. I needed some time to lapse between the truth and her. So, I filled my days with cleaning the house and running to the grocery store to secure boxes to pack away our
shared lives. I wrapped my grandmother’s china in old newspapers and placed each dish carefully in the box.
“But Norma,” she would say, “generations of our family have eaten off those plates.” And I suppose, to Mother, that justified their importance, their sacredness. I found it amusing what my mother considered sacred, now that I knew. I packed up my father’s suits, still hanging in the closet, dust piled on the shoulders of his jackets. I gave all her craft supplies to the ladies from the church, donated the everyday dishes and furniture to the Salvation Army, and piled the photos on the floor. As I looked through the pictures of me as a child, I knew I would have to call my aunt. I knew I needed to see what was in the box she took from my mother’s closet before she told me the truth.
I turned on the radio to drown out the silence and quiet the ghosts. I wandered aimlessly from room to room. I walked the edges and looked into empty closets. I dragged my finger along the windowpanes and brought up dust, a sure sign that my mother hadn’t lived in her own home in a while. I hummed with the music and stood at the sink, staring out the window. I wondered how I could have been so naive, how I didn’t figure it out.
My diary, I thought.
I hadn’t touched anything in my own room. Mother had kept it the same as the day I left, nothing out of place. Only the Noah’s ark lamp that I had taken with me was missing. Old textbooks wrapped in brown paper sat on the bookshelf by the window, dusty and faded where the light rested during the day. I took one down, the one labelled Introduction to Chemistry, and opened it. I knew Mother would never think to take down a science text for her own reading, so when I was young, I covered a notebook with brown paper and doodled on the cover. It creaked when I opened it, and there on the first page, in my loopy grade-school writing, was the title: “Norma’s Personal Thoughts—Please don’t read!” Each o had been made into a little heart. I smiled thinking about myself back then. I ran my hand over the thin paper as I sat down on the bed, the old springs welcoming me back.
There on the pages, written decades ago, were the dreams that I now knew were memories of a life stolen from me. I slid off the bed and onto the floor as the room filled with the scent of potatoes cooking and the campfire. I used my finger to outline the figure of a doll, the eyes far apart and made of buttons. I read stories I had written about Ruthie, and her brother Joe. My grief was hard and fierce. Sounds came from my mouth that I could never
have imagined, wild and broken. The heaviness of that house, of my mother’s love and my father’s distance, pushed me to the floor. The notebook fell from my hands as I gasped for air, the dust of the carpet scratching my throat. The enormity of my mother’s lie was coming into focus. I don’t know how long I stayed on that floor, the same one where Mother used to comfort me when I had my dreams. But when I woke, the sun was sneaking in through the blinds, tracing thin lines of light on the floor. I watched as the sun pushed a line over the top of my hand, the skin starting to wrinkle and colour with age, and I thought to myself, I wonder who I am. I wonder if they miss me.
