What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [74]
“Sharla, it’s Christmas Eve,” my father said. “She’s your mother.”
She sat up, wiped furiously at her face. “You’re getting divorced!”
“Yes, we are,” my father said carefully. “But she is still your mother. She will always be your mother.”
“I don’t WANT her to be!” Sharla yelled. “I don’t want her anymore! Dad, you don’t know what it’s like to go and see her. She’s crazy now!”
“She’s not crazy,” he said. “She’s different, that’s true. But she’s not crazy. And Sharla, you know she loves you very much.”
“I can’t go in there.”
We sat. The car began to get cold, and my father started the engine, turned the heater up full blast. I looked up to my mother’s windows and saw the outline of her standing there. I slumped down further in the backseat, looked away.
Finally, my father said, “I’ll tell you what, Sharla. Just go and visit for a few hours; you don’t have to spend the night, all right?”
She did not answer.
“Can you just do that, honey?”
“No!” she said, her voice breaking, and she sat up and held on to the lapels of my father’s coat, sobbing loudly again, begging him to take her home.
He stroked her head, looked over into the backseat at me.
I shook my head.
“You don’t want to go back home?” he asked quietly.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to go to Mom’s either.”
“All right,” he sighed. “All right. Just let me go up and tell her. Let me talk to her.”
I watched my father walk up the steps to the building and go in. I saw my mother leave the window to let him in.
“I just can’t visit her anymore,” Sharla said.
“I know.”
“But you can, Ginny.”
“I don’t want to, either.”
I knew what Sharla was feeling: the pull to a mother versus the great discomfort of spending time with a stranger who asked too much of you. Sharla said our mother was beginning to act desperate, that when she thought of her, she saw a creature with large, watery eyes, trembling lips, and claws for hands. I knew what she meant, though my image of my mother was tempered by some measure of compassion: I could see how much she hurt. But I could not give her what she wanted. Not the things she named, such as living with her at least part-time; not the things she did not name that were the things she wanted most, such as a move back inside me to the lit place she used to occupy. That place was gone.
In a few minutes, our father came back out of the building and got into the car. His face was a mix of sorrow and mild determination. “I wonder if you could just—”
Sharla put her hand on his arm. “Could we please go home, Dad? You said we could go home.”
He waited a long moment, then drove slowly away from the curb. I looked back up at the window. She was not there.
“She could come to the house and see you, how about that?” my father asked.
“No,” Sharla said quickly.
I agreed with her. The house was our safe place, our father’s place. She had come back only once, to supervise the two moving men who loaded her things onto the truck with Jasmine’s. She had pointed to her closet, to the china cabinet holding the incomplete set of dishes she’d gotten from her mother, to her sewing basket and knitting supplies, to a Queen Anne chair that had belonged to her grandmother. She did not take much, really. But it seemed to me that the house echoed for some time after she left, then fell deeply silent until just recently, when sounds of a normal life had begun there again.
When we got home, our father gave us each the presents our mother had given him to give to us. The packages were identically shaped, large and flat; paintings, I’d guessed. I had no desire to open mine; nor, I suspected, did Sharla. We put them under the tree with the presents we had waiting there, from our father and Georgia—Georgia had already given us Advent calendars, which we had hung over our beds. Then our father made us cocoa with marshmallows and sat us at the kitchen table.
“I want you to tell me what’s so hard for you when you see your mother,” he said. “Maybe we