What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [61]
“We’ll have another birthday party for you when she comes home,” my father said. “Would you like that?”
I shrugged. No.
“I know she’ll feel just terrible when she realizes—”
“She knows!” Sharla said. “She just doesn’t care! She’s not coming back, Dad! Why don’t you just admit it?!”
My father went swiftly over to Sharla, put his arms around her. “Oh, honey, you’re wrong. You’re wrong! This just happens sometimes, people get overwhelmed, they need to get away, they just need … time! She’s coming back. She told me she’d come home in a few days, and she will, I know it.”
He had Sharla’s head pressed against his chest, and he rocked her with short, jerky little movements. He didn’t know how to do it right, how to rock. He didn’t have the smooth, dancelike movements my mother did. He was stiff, fighting to keep from crying. His fists were balled, his mouth puckered and trembling.
Sharla was not crying. Sharla’s eyes were wide open and unblinking, as cold and flat as a fish’s. Some knowledge was inside her that was too big for her; it moved other, familiar things out of the way, killed them. I looked away from both of them, out the window, then up into the black sky, asking a question I couldn’t find words for. It came to me that if an airplane flew over us, they would see only the lights coming from our house, the cozy squares of yellow that suggested warmth and safety.
Sharla was right. Our mother did not come back in a few days, or in a few days more. Jasmine’s house sat empty; I saw the philodendron on her kitchen windowsill yellow, then wither and die. A light she left on in the bathroom eventually burned out. A few newspapers piled up on her doorstep; then delivery stopped.
Our father had one phone call from our mother, on the day before she was due home. Sharla and I were sitting in the living room, where we had called our father in to watch the evening weather forecast—record highs for heat and humidity were being predicted again, and we all seemed to find the prospect grimly thrilling. When the phone rang, my father answered it reluctantly, but then his face changed. “Your mother,” he mouthed, and gestured for us to leave the room, to give him some privacy.
We went as far as the kitchen table and sat there in silence, both of us waiting to talk to her, I was sure, though Sharla would never have admitted it. At one point I made the foolish error of going upstairs to comb my hair, and when I returned to the kitchen Sharla said, “What did you do that for? Do you think she can see you? Do you think she even cares?”
“I didn’t do it for her,” I said. But of course I had.
As it happened, our mother did not ask to speak to either of us. After a long, low-voiced conversation, our father called Sharla and me back into the living room and reported only that our mother would be taking longer than she’d thought to come home. He stared out the window, immobile but for the giveaway movements of his breathing. I watched the hung-up phone, wondering if, wherever she was, my mother was doing the same. Sharla sighed, sank into the sofa, studied her nails with cool blue anger.
Finally, “When will she be back, then?” I asked my father.
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Didn’t she say, at all?”
“She said she didn’t know.”
“Well.… Can we write to her?” It occurred to me that this would be better than talking to her on the phone, anyway. What I needed from my mother was private. She knew that, too. That was why she hadn’t asked to speak to me. “Dad? Can we write to her?” I asked again.
He turned around slowly, looked at me as though he were considering the miracle of my being, as though I were standing there with a message that could save his life. I mean that the look on his face was one of extreme hope and desperation mixed, and I wanted it to be directed anywhere but at me. I had an impulse to wave my hands, to stamp my foot, and snap my fingers in his face. But then something lifted; he straightened to his full height and moved back into himself.
“Yes, you can write to her,” he said. “Of course you can.