slightly cupped in her hand. She had always missed my teeth – their small rounded serrations had fascinated her as she watched me grow. I had promised my mother a wide-open smile for that year’s picture, but I was so self- conscious in front of the photographer that I had barely managed a close-lipped grin.
She heard the announcement for the connecting flight over the outdoor speaker. She stood. Turning around she saw the tiny, struggling tree. She left my class portrait propped up against its trunk and hurried inside the automatic doors.
On the flight to Philadelphia, she sat alone in the middle of a row of three seats. She could not help but think of how, if she were a mother traveling, there would be two seats filled beside her. One for Lindsey. One for Buckley. But though she was, by definition, a mother, she had at some point ceased to be one too. She couldn’t claim that right and privilege after missing more than half a decade of their lives. She now knew that being a mother was a calling, something plenty of young girls dreamed of being. But my mother had never had that dream, and she had been punished in the most horrible and unimaginable way for never having wanted me.
I watched her on the plane, and I sent a wish into the clouds for her release. Her body grew heavy with the dread of what would come but in this heaviness was at least relief. The stewardess handed her a small blue pillow and for a little while she fell asleep.
When they reached Philadelphia, the airplane taxied down the runway and she reminded herself both where she was and what year it was. She hurriedly clicked through all the things she might say when she saw her children, her mother, Jack. And then, when they finally shivered to a halt, she gave up and focused only on getting off the plane.
She barely recognized her own child waiting at the end of the long ramp. In the years that had passed, Lindsey had become angular, thin, every trace of body fat gone. And standing beside my sister was what looked like her male twin. A bit taller, a little more meat. Samuel. She was staring so hard at the two of them, and they were staring back, that at first she didn’t even see the chubby boy sitting off to the side on the arm of a row of waiting-area seats.
And then, just before she began walking toward them – for they all seemed suspended and immobile for the first few moments, as if they had been trapped in a viscous gelatin from which only her movement might free them – she saw him.
She began walking down the carpeted ramp. She heard announcements being made in the airport and saw passengers, with their more normal greetings, rushing past her. But it was as if she were entering a time warp as she took him in. 1944 at Camp Winnekukka. She was twelve, with chubby cheeks and heavy legs – all the things she’d felt grateful her daughters had escaped had been her son’s to endure. So many years she had been away, so much time she could never recover.
If she had counted, as I did, she would have known that in seventy-three steps she had accomplished what she had been too afraid to do for almost seven years.
It was my sister who spoke first:
“Mom,” she said.
My mother looked at my sister and flashed forward thirty-eight years from the lonely girl she’d been at Camp Winnekukka.
“Lindsey,” my mother said.
Lindsey stared at her. Buckley was standing now, but he looked first down at his shoes and then over his shoulder, out past the window to where the planes were parked, disgorging their passengers into accordioned tubes.
“How is your father?” my mother asked.
My sister had spoken the word
“He’s not in the greatest shape, I’m afraid,” Samuel said. It was the longest sentence anyone had said, and my mother found herself disproportionately grateful for it.
“Buckley?” my mother said, preparing no face for him. Being who she was – whoever that was.
He turned his head toward her like a racheted gun. “Buck,” he said.
“Buck,” she repeated softly and looked down at her hands.
Lindsey wanted to ask,
“Shall we go?” Samuel asked.
The four of them entered the long carpeted tunnel that would bring them from her gate into the main terminal. They were headed toward the cavernous baggage claim when my mother said, “I didn’t bring any bags.”
They stood in an awkward cluster, Samuel looking for the right signs to redirect them back to the parking garage.
“Mom,” my sister tried again.
“I lied to you,” my mother said before Lindsey could say anything further. Their eyes met, and in that hot wire that went from one to the other I swore I saw it, like a rat bulging, undigested, inside a snake: the secret of Len.
“We go back up the escalator,” Samuel said, “and then we can take the overhead walkway into the parking lot.”
Samuel called for Buckley, who had drifted off in the direction of a cadre of airport security officers. Uniforms had never lost the draw they held for him.
They were on the highway when Lindsey spoke next. “They won’t let Buckley in to see Dad because of his age.”
My mother turned around in her seat. “I’ll try and do something about that,” she said, looking at Buckley and attempting her first smile.
“Fuck you,” my brother whispered without looking up.
My mother froze. The car opened up. Full of hate and tension – a riptide of blood to swim through.
“Buck,” she said, remembering the shortened name just in time, “will you look at me?”
He glared over the front seat, boring his fury into her.
Eventually my mother turned back around and Samuel, Lindsey, and my brother could hear the sounds from the passenger seat that she was trying hard not to make. Little peeps and a choked sob. But no amount of tears would sway Buckley. He had been keeping, daily, weekly, yearly, an underground storage room of hate. Deep inside this, the four-year-old sat, his heart flashing. Heart to stone, heart to stone.
“We’ll all feel better after seeing Mr. Salmon,” Samuel said, and then, because even he could not bear it, he leaned forward toward the dash and turned on the radio.
It was the same hospital that she had come to eight years ago in the middle of the night. A different floor painted a different color, but she could feel it encasing her as she walked down the hall – what she’d done there. The push of Len’s body, her back pressed into the sharp stucco wall. Everything in her wanted to run – fly back to California, back to her quiet existence working among strangers. Hiding out in the folds of tree trunks and tropical petals, tucked away safely among so many foreign plants and people.
Her mother’s ankles and oxford pumps, which she saw from the hallway, brought her back. One of the many simple things she’d lost by moving so far away, just the commonplace of her mother’s feet – their solidity and humor – seventy-year-old feet in ridiculously uncomfortable shoes.
But as she walked forward into the room, everyone else – her son, her daughter, her mother – fell away.
My father’s eyes were weak but fluttered open when he heard her enter. He had tubes and wires coming out of his wrist and shoulder. His head seemed so fragile on the small square pillow.
She held his hand and cried silently, letting the tears come freely.
“Hello, Ocean Eyes,” he said.
She nodded her head. This broken, beaten man – her husband.
“My girl,” he breathed out heavily.
“Jack.”
“Look what it took to get you home.”
“Was it worth it?” she said, smiling bleakly.
“We’ll have to see,” he said.
To see them together was like a tenuous belief made real.
My father could see glimmers, like the colored flecks inside my mother’s eyes – things to hold on to. These he counted among the broken planks and boards of a long- ago ship that had struck something greater than itself and sunk. There were only remnants and artifacts left to him now. He tried to reach up and touch her cheek, but his arm felt too weak. She moved closer and laid her cheek in his palm.
My grandmother knew how to move silently in heels. She tiptoed out of the room. As she resumed her normal stride and approached the waiting area, she intercepted a nurse with a message for Jack Salmon in Room 582. She had never met the man but knew his name. “Len Fenerman, will visit soon. Wishes you well.” She folded the note neatly. Just before she came upon Lindsey and Buckley, who had gone to join Samuel in the waiting room, she popped open the metal lip of her purse and placed it between her powder and comb.
Twenty
By the time Mr. Harvey reached the tin-roofed shack in Connecticut that night, it promised rain. He had killed a young waitress inside the shack several years before and then bought some new slacks with the tips he’d found in the front pocket of her apron. By now the rot would have been eclipsed, and it was true, as he approached the area, that no rank smell greeted him. But the shack was open and inside he could see the earth had been dug up. He breathed in and approached the shack warily.
He fell asleep beside her empty grave.
At some point, to counter the list of the dead, I had begun keeping my own list of the living. It was something I noticed Len Fenerman did too. When he was off duty he would note the young girls and elderly women and every other female in the rainbow in between and count them among the things that sustained him. That young girl in the mall whose pale legs had grown too long for her now-too-young dress and who had an aching vulnerability that went straight to both Len’s and my own heart. Elderly women, wobbling with walkers, who insisted on dyeing their hair unnatural versions of the colors they had in youth. Middle-aged single mothers racing around in grocery stores while their children pulled bags of candy off the shelves. When I saw them, I took count. Living, breathing women. Sometimes I saw the wounded – those who had been beaten by husbands or raped by strangers, children raped by their fathers – and I would wish to intervene somehow.
Len saw these wounded women all the time. They were regulars at the station, but even when he went somewhere outside his jurisdiction he could sense them when they came near. The wife in the bait-’n’-tackle shop had no bruises on her face but cowered like a dog and spoke in apologetic whispers. The girl he saw walk the road each time he went upstate to visit his sisters. As the years passed she’d grown leaner, the fat
