What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [27]
“They’re okay,” I told Sharla doubtfully, when I came back into the kitchen.
“I know,” she said irritably, and in her anger was the same fear I felt.
Sharla and I slept in our beds that night. It felt odd, not being outside on our quilt first. At one point, I woke up, full of resentment at my mother for having discovered us and taken away this simple pleasure. “Sharla?” I whispered.
She was sleeping. I looked at our clock. Two-ten.
“Sharla!”
“What?”
“Want to sneak out?”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“They said not to, we’ll get in trouble.”
“They won’t catch us, they’re asleep.”
“How do you know?”
“They’re always asleep by now. They’re always asleep a long time ago.”
Sharla turned on her side, away from me. “You check. If they’re sound asleep, maybe.”
I got out of bed. I’d go to the bathroom first. If the flushing toilet didn’t wake them, our creeping downstairs surely wouldn’t. I wanted to do something more tonight. I wanted to take a walk somewhere we’d never been.
I turned on the bathroom light and there was my mother, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Her feet were bare, her nightgown pulled up over her knees. She looked at me, squinting in the light, said nothing.
“Mom! What are you doing?” I said. I was angry; she’d scared me.
“Well, I …” She seemed a bit angry herself. Her cheeks were pink, her breathing rapid. “As you can see, I’m sitting here.”
“How come?”
She rose, squeezed past me. “Not everything I do is your business.” She looked at herself in the mirror, pushed the sides of her hair back. Then she left.
I stood for a moment, stunned. Why was she behaving this way? I hadn’t done anything, had I? No. I flushed the toilet, turned the faucet on and off, and went back to the bedroom.
Sharla was asleep again, and I didn’t wake her. I lay in bed for a while, then went to see if Jasmine’s bedroom light was on. No. And yet I believed I could feel her wakefulness.
I wonder now if my mother didn’t owe it to me to say something at that point. To say something about what she must have been thinking. Or feeling. Or planning.
I had a friend who got leukemia and for the longest time would not tell her seven-and nine-year-old sons. In the interest of protecting them, she tried to pretend that her frequent doctor’s visits were outings with friends, shopping trips, appointments with the dentist. At the point when she was losing all her hair and she finally had to tell them, they said they had thought she was tired of them. This is a woman who sat immobilized at the kitchen table holding her older son’s pajamas on the day he first went to nursery school, willing him to be safe on the bus, in the classroom, on the monkey bars, at snack time.
If there is a fault I, too, have as a parent, it is over-protectiveness, I know. But I’ll tell you this: my children know they can depend on me to tell them the truth. If ever something started happening in me the way it did in my mother, I’d tell my children. I’d tell them something.
One morning I awakened to the sound of thunder and pelting rain. I pulled the sheet up higher, then reached for the bedspread to cover me. It felt good to wake up chilly after so many hot nights. I saw that the fan had been turned off and the window closed; I shut my eyes to feel better the head-to-toe pleasure of having been cared for in my sleep. The thunder came again, a sound so loud it made the whole house seem to shake.
“Sharla?” I said.
No response. She couldn’t be sleeping! I called her name again; again I heard no response. I got out of bed, peered down at her. I noticed no give-away eye movements, no secret smile, only the no-access blankness of a face deep in sleep.
I stretched, put on socks and my robe and headed downstairs for breakfast. I wanted French toast; I was visualizing a fat pat of butter melting over two perfect slices, warmed syrup being poured over that.
My mother was sitting at the kitchen