Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [65]
“You okay?” Jack calls from the living room where he’s attempting to revive his manuscript.
“Alive,” I say back.
“Almost done? I have a surprise for you.”
“A few more minutes,” I sigh. Way more than a few more minutes. Where was my Real Simple, complete with the perfect organizing tips, when I needed it?
I kick a pair of Levi’s that I’d donned for my twenty-third birthday and crouch down among the debris. Piles of merino wool turtlenecks, musty from years of nonuse; my high-school yearbook with curled pages due to water damage from the apartment above; pashmina scarves that I’d bought in Chinatown when one in every color wasn’t enough; mix tapes for boyfriends whose last names I could barely remember.
But then, peeking out of an old Yellow Pages (I saved Yellow Pages??), a corner of a photo catches my eye. I cock my head to make sure that I’m seeing it correctly, but it’s unmistakable. Adrenaline races through me, and my fingers shake almost on cue. I pluck it from the dusty urine-colored pages and sink to the floor, rapt and sickened all at once.
Though I had wiped clean every image, every reminder, of my mother, I’d been unable to release her entirely, and so, as I trekked from my childhood home to my dorms, from my dorms to my adult apartments, I’d always held on to one black-and-white picture, the way that a reformed binger might a piece of chocolate. Always there, just in case you need it. When Jack and I broke up the last time around, I’d moved out, and when packing up my things, I’d stumbled upon the photo. Still burning over my mother’s note and unwelcome reentry into my life, I heaved the photo into the garbage bag, just as I had her letter. Gone and nearly forgotten.
But now, here it was all over again, like Groundhog Day for the emotionally impaired.
The shot was taken that same summer that my mother and I had lazed around the yard at dusk and chased fireflies until we were wasted. She and I are in her garden, her temple, as she liked to call it. Long after she’d showered and rubbed herself down in Charlie body lotion, she always smelled slightly of soil, and even today, I am reminded of her whenever the scent of dirt wafts through the air. We are perched between her tomato vines and her rows of basil and green beans, and she, with a bandanna in her hair and just a smudge of dirt on her left cheek, is wrapped around me from behind. I’m smiling straight into the camera, but rather than looking at the lens, she is casting down at me, a warm grin on her face, but one filled with sentimentality, not necessarily ebullience. She would leave us only five weeks later.
I stare at the photo with new eyes, eyes now of a mother, and it’s as if I’m looking at it for the first time. In years past, hardened by fury, I’d always seen the photo as literal proof of her betrayal: that she could pretend to love me so vigorously but when the time came, she could disentangle her embrace and forget it entirely. But now I can see it as so much more: that perhaps, what she was doing that day in the garden wasn’t so much as holding me with no love behind the embrace; rather, she was clutching me, as if I were a buoy and the only thing that might save her from drowning. Looking at it again, I can’t believe that I’d never seen this clearly.
Jack pops his head into the closet, snapping me from my trance.
“You ready to head out?”
“A picture of my mother,” I answer, holding it up for him.
He grasps it and pulls it closer, startled. “Jesus, you look just like her.”
I shrug, then tuck the picture into my sock drawer and wade out from the mess, literal and not.
“Your surprise, m’lady,” Jack says, ushering me to the front door.
I force a smile and follow, trying to erase the photo from my mind. Because what’s most haunting isn’t how closely I resemble my mother or even how clearly I can remember that day in the garden. No, what racks me most is how now, years later, I inherently recognize my mother’s loving yet chagrined and weary expression because it’s the same one that I wore like a mask