Mom breezes through the dining room, but doesn’t speak. She’s afraid to break the spell, too. Each time she comes in, she gets something else off the table and takes it into the kitchen. Some felt. Googly eyes. Yarn.
I let Ray go on circling ads. I hope he’ll take the next step of calling the numbers, speaking nicely over the phone, setting up an interview, dressing appropriately, and actually showing up. There are a lot of steps to take, and there’s a good chance he won’t make it past the dining room table.
Mom comes back into the room.
“Do those circles mean you’re thinking about sticking around?” she asks Ray. She picks up some pipe cleaners from the table and a hot-glue gun.
“I’m thinking about it,” Ray answers.
“You can stay here as long as you need to.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Ray says. “I appreciate it. Really.”
He looks at me and shakes his head. He doesn’t want me to tell Mom about the apartment. She smiles at him like this little bit of acknowledgment means everything to her, and I think that maybe it does. Ray makes a face like he knows it, too, then another face that means he thinks he’s a jerk. All these years, he’s thought we were happy to be rid of him. All these years, he’s been wrong. His life here has continued on without him, all of us, just waiting for him to reenter stage right and pick up where he left off. Of course, that’s easier said than done.
Mom pats Ray’s hand. They make eye contact and hold it. It’s like a searing pain to watch, and I almost blurt out the secret about Michael in an attempt to make it stop. Like divulging it will lessen the depth of the visual probing. I don’t know what either one of them is looking for—sincerity, forgiveness, truth. Then Mom lowers her eyes and smiles to herself. Maybe she wasn’t looking for anything from Ray. Maybe she just wanted him to see her.
She disappears into the kitchen again.
Ray manhandles the paper, wrestling it to the table. He gets up and grabs his keys from the key bowl.
“Where you headed?” I ask.
“Into the fire,” he says and pulls Michael’s picture from his shirt pocket. Ray looks at it and puts it back.
I hear Michael’s little voice talking from inside Ray’s shirt.
It’s a step, Mister. But you better keep stepping.
I go into the kitchen to see what Mom is doing with all the random stuff she kept retrieving from the dining room table. She jumps when I enter the room.
“Oh, Nina!” Mom says, wearing a terribly handmade werewolf mask. “You startled me.”
She motions around the room, proud of her work. On little hat stands throughout the kitchen there is a veritable Halloween boutique.
“It’s May, Mom,” I say.
As usual, I’m unsure of what she expects from me. I tool around the kitchen looking at her handiwork.
“I think your father would have gotten a kick out of this,” Mom says through the lopsided mouth hole in the werewolf face.
“Yes,” I say in agreement, well aware that today is Dad’s birthday. “He really would have.”
I finger the masks and think about Michael, Oliver, and mistakes made. I put on the cat face and walk down the hall to Dad’s den.
“That glue might still be hot,” Mom calls after me.
Dad’s den looks as if he might come in at any second, apologize for the disarray on his desk, turn on the radio by the window, and busy himself with the things the man of the house busies himself with. But it’s the way the room feels that tells the truth. It’s like walking back into your house after you’ve been gone on a two-week vacation. Nothing has been moved and even the air is undisturbed. The feeling is emptiness.
I sit down at Dad’s desk. I know the pipe-cleaner cat whiskers are a pity at this moment, but it helps nonetheless. I touch some of the papers on his desk. I want to speak out loud to him, but I can’t. Not at his grave, not in his den. Not on a train, not in the rain, not in a boat, not with a goat. Or something like that. I laugh out loud. Typical Dad—making me laugh when my feet are failing beneath me. I see now, how much I had measured myself through him. How I’d used him as my map of the world. My compass pointing due north.
Mom had used a cocktail glass to steady herself. It backfired most of the time, but she had meant well. When Lola woke up after the accident, Mom stopped drinking and poured all her need into caring for Lola. I felt left behind. It had been Dad who scooped me up and set me back on my feet. But Mom seemed to have lost touch with the rest of us.
Lola saw it, though. Lola saw everything.
She knew even then, even when she didn’t know more than my name and who I was supposed to be to her, that I was falling through the cracks in the universe, cracks that spread out like spider veins—purple and blotchy, permanent and useless.
Lola was eleven, still using crutches, still in therapy. That part seemed to take a long time. I was fourteen and on the girls’ basketball team. Lola made Ray drive her to all my games. Mom had no interest in sports; she was just trying to hold herself together. As much as Dad wanted to see the games, he had taken to working the late shift because the pay was better and there were medical bills left over from the accident and more to come. Lola sat in the bleachers and banged her crutches on the wooden seats when everyone else clapped their hands. Already she had begun to cover the braces with brightly colored leg warmers. Making everything art.
At times, I hated that she was there. She
