Never Coming Back Read online

  “She raised me by herself. North of Sterns, which is a tiny town. Where I grew up is woods. The foothills, half an hour south of here.”

  “I know where Sterns is,” he said. “Did she get tired of country life? Is that why she moved to Utica?”

  No. Tamar had not gotten tired of the country life.

  “Early-onset Alzheimer’s,” I said. “Stage Six already. She lives in a nursing home with a memory-care wing.”

  Shut the hell up, Clara. But I was a robot now and the robot part of me, unlike the real me, had no trouble saying the word Alzheimer’s. The bartender stood on the other side of the bar, the wash rag in his hands, but his hands weren’t moving. The words spilling out of me had made their way into his head, and he was preoccupied with my mother, that shadow woman forming and reforming herself in his brain.

  “It’s progressing pretty fast,” I said. “She’s cold all the time. Which is a sign.”

  I had told him too much, way too much. And too little, way too little.

  It was impossible now for Tamar to materialize in his mind the way she should. From this moment on, when the bartender thought of my mother, what sort of woman would he picture? Not the fierce queen of the north woods. Not the level-eyed tough-as-nails Tamar. I willed his hands to start moving again.

  You gave her away, I thought, You just gave your mother away. She was in the hands of the bartender now, and she would be there forever, a partially formed woman who would live in his head as Alzheimer’s first and Tamar, the silent and fearsome woman who had lived so firmly in this world, a distant, distant, distant second. This was why my mother had not wanted anyone to know her situation.

  My eyes blurred, and then the bartender came around the curved end of the bar and bent beside me. He was saying something but I didn’t know what. What I knew was that his hands were warm and his fingers smelled like soap and lime and he kept them tight on my shoulders.

  * * *

  “When’s the dipshit?” Tamar said. Dipshit now stood for the entirety of Jeopardy!: Alex Trebek, the contestants, the game itself. She waved her hands at the knothole, which was her new term for the television.

  “Ma? Can I tell you something?”

  “Yes.”

  I leaned in. She was frowning, but at the television, not me. Her fingers began sketching birds, or flowers, or words, or patterns without meaning, in the air between us.

  “Sometimes I wish I had a baby.”

  “Yes.”

  “Asa’s baby. Then he would still be in the world, somehow. He would still be here with me. With us.”

  “Yes.”

  Was she with me? Was she understanding me? Tell her. Ask her. Sunshine’s and Brown’s voices, egging me on. I kept going.

  “Sometimes I imagine a baby. I make him up, what he would look like, how old he would be. If I had him when I was eighteen he’d be fourteen now. I wonder what he would be like. What he would be doing now if he were alive. If he had ever lived.”

  Words spilling out of my mouth. Things I had told no one, not Sunshine or Brown or anyone, about the un-baby I sometimes dreamed up, the baby who had never been and never would be.

  “Yes,” she said. “Okay.”

  “It’s like he’s living somewhere nearby. A parallel world.”

  “Yes. Okay. The parallel world.” She pronounced parallel with slowness and precision. Pa. Ra. Llel. The parallel world, where the lost ones lived.

  “Ma?”

  She looked at me with her eyebrows up. Translation: “What? Spit it out.”

  “Did you ever think about not having me and Daphne?”

  She wrinkled up her face. She made a brushing motion with her hand, a you-and-your-endless-questions kind of motion. She was abruptly with me, the fog mostly clear and the entire bay stretched out in front of us, glittering and bright. I had the urge to scoop her up and make a run for it, belt her into the front seat of the Subaru and take her somewhere far away, as if somehow a complete change of place would keep her mind right where it was in that moment. The Grand Canyon, the Tetons, the endless beaches of the Florida Panhandle.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t.”

  “But abortion was legal by then. You didn’t even consider doing something?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  —–—–

  —–—–

  —–—–

  My mind, skipping beats, circling around what she had just said. I hadn’t ever thought of that possibility.

  “Wait. You didn’t know you were pregnant? But how could you not know?”

  She gave me one of her looks. A Tamar look. My hands bore down on the couch cushion, gripping its edges so hard that my fingers hurt. She was there. She was right there with me in that moment. But for how long? Long enough to answer?

  “I was eighteen.”

  She lifted her shoulders. A tiny movement, bird bones against invisible air, but it was enough. Because with that movement an image of an eighteen-year-old girl came floating into my head, a feather of an image that landed there and would be there forever. A motherless girl wearing a lumber jacket, standing in the chill of an upstate New York fall, two babies growing inside her.

  “You were too far along by the time you realized?”

  She nodded. My question, asked and answered. Except not really.

  “But if you had known? Would you ​—”

  She clamped her hands on the cushion and pushed herself up from the couch. Away from the dipshit and back to walking. Back to the strolling of the hallway, the endless journey to choir practice. Maybe it was a moot point to her. She was a girl who had lost her mother the year before, she had only her nontalking dad. The beginning of me was the end of all her plans: Florida, adventure, a new life. I picked up the book of the week, Harriet the Spy, and followed her down the hall and added it to the pile by her bed.

  * * *

  Tamar got Dog for me when I was twelve years old. The school counselor had called her to express his concern.

  “He said you didn’t seem to be yourself,” she told me. “He said you were hardly talking in class anymore and you were always sneaking off to the library. He said it was a ‘marked change’ from sixth grade.”

  She only told me this years after the fact, when I was eighteen and heading to the college in New Hampshire into which she and Annabelle Lee had strong-armed me, the college where they didn’t allow dogs in dorms. Where I would be without Dog, my constant companion, for the first time in six years, a fact that tormented me. Be sure to take him on a walk every day, one hour minimum, I kept instructing my mother. Be sure to give him a pig ear every other day. Be sure not to let him jump on anyone when they come to court. Be sure to rub his belly every night when he jumps up on your bed. IF he jumps up on your bed. Do you think he’ll jump up on your bed when I’m gone? Because he never had. It had always been my bed he jumped up on.

  This conversation happened as she was driving and I was riding shotgun. We were past Hogback Mountain and closing in on Brattleboro, where we would head north, the backseat of the pickup crammed full with us and Dog and my belongings, but what I was really doing was asking her if Dog would be sad without me, if it would be too hard on him.

  “Clara.”

  That was her Calm down voice.

  Life changed when I was eleven and twelve. First when the old man, the one I used to visit every Wednesday night when my mother was at choir practice, died. And then when I entered seventh grade, the first year that Sterns Middle School included not just seventh and eighth grade but also ninth. A whole new territory of clanging lockers and stern teachers and a group of ninth grade boys who lined up on either side of the bus entrance and rated the girls as we walked into school on a scale of 1 to 10. A few girls were 10’s. A few were 1’s. Most were 4 or 5. The boys sometimes called out bonus points or demerits for certain physical attributes. One girl, who grew up north of Sterns and was the first one on the bus in the morning and the last one off in the afternoon and liv
ed in a trailer with a rusted door that hung partway off its hinges, was a –3. Day in and day out: –3, until eventually her nickname was Minus.

  Me? I was a nothing, because after the first two weeks I got off the bus and headed straight to the loading dock at the back of the school, where the custodian always had the big double doors propped open, and I threaded my way through the bowels of the furnace room into the back hallway and from there to my locker.

  “And the counselor was right,” Tamar said, on that long drive from Sterns to New Hampshire. “You weren’t yourself.”

  “But what does that even mean?” I said. By then I had trained myself to make everything a reason to argue. “When you think about it, no one’s ever really herself. In an existential sense, I mean.” I listened to my own words and tried to convince myself that in some existential way they made sense.

  “Bullshit,” Tamar said. “Decide you’re going to be your real self and then be your real self.”

  I remembered looking at her from my vantage point in the passenger seat, observing her unblinking eyes on the road, the set of her mouth. She did not know what the word existential meant, nor did she pretend to. She must not have cared what it meant either, because if she did, she would have asked me. And she would not have felt bad or dumb or ignorant when she asked, because that was the kind of person she was: always and only her real self.

  Dog was present for that conversation, sandwiched between a sleeping bag—which Tamar thought might come in handy for extra warmth at college—and the heavy-duty black plastic garbage bags filled with clothes and towels and my winter jacket and a lamp and books and notebooks and laundry detergent and shampoo. The drive to the White Mountains was nearly six hours. He occasionally muscled his head up from between the overflowing garbage bags, which acted as a kind of restraining device, and pushed his nose into my shoulder. I kept reaching back to stroke his head and scratch him under the chin. I worried about Dog on that drive. What if a bigger truck came barreling up behind us and rear-ended us? Tamar and I were belted in, but all Dog had for protection were the garbage bags. Would he go catapulting through the windshield? He wasn’t a huge dog. He was lean and long-legged, lacking bulk and mass.

  “What are you thinking about?” Tamar said at one point. We were halfway to campus, halfway to the place where I would spend the next four years.

  “Dog. What if we get rear-ended by a semi and he goes flying through the windshield?”

  She shook her head. Her strange daughter. We stopped for gas, we stopped to let Dog pee, and then we were there, at a gray stone building, with all the other freshmen and parents and crammed cars.

  Tamar hauled bags up to the third floor alongside me. She first cranked the truck windows down a few inches so Dog wouldn’t overheat—no animals allowed in the dorms—and I glanced through the first-floor- and second-floor-landing windows each time I labored up and then ran down the stairs, to make sure that he was okay in there while we moved me in.

  Then I was moved in. Then Tamar and Dog were in the truck, backing up, doing a slow five-point turn, inching their way back out the road we’d come in on, past all the other parents and their sons and daughters. She turned once and waved, a tiny wave. Dog’s eyes were on me the whole way until the truck turned around a curve and disappeared.

  And that was it.

  I didn’t remember much else of freshman orientation. I remembered meeting my roommate, Sunshine, and how she crossed out “Samantha” on her ID card and wrote in “Sunshine” in permanent marker, and I remembered meeting Brown, who lived in the room directly below ours. I remembered getting my own ID card, figuring out class times and buildings and how to fall asleep surrounded by hundreds of breathing and talking and laughing and drinking and vomiting and smoking and dancing and crying and singing people instead of by two: my mother and Dog.

  Did I think about my mother and Dog much?

  If I said no, that once I got there it was a blur, making my way through those first few weeks, meeting people and professors and figuring everything out, that would be true. But it would also be a lie.

  I pictured them, Tamar chopping wood and taking Dog on his walk, the two of them sleeping in the silent house under the silent stars in silent Sterns. But I couldn’t think about that for more than the second it took the scene to flash itself up into my head before I had to shut it down. Calm down, Clara. Breathe.

  It was just the two of them, was why. The two of them in the one house and each of their days was exactly like the one that came before and the one that would come after. Unlike the way it was for me. Me and a thousand others my age around me and my life, my life that was blowing open, the ceilings and doors and windows of that life I had known in Sterns, the life my mother was so insistent I leave, now disappearing.

  * * *

  The next time I saw Dog in real life, after I left for my first year of college, was on Parents’ Weekend. It had been only two months. Two months since I watched them disappear around the bend, Tamar driving and Dog with his head hanging out the half-open window, staring at me, unblinking.

  Everything was different by then. I talked different I ate different I dressed different I studied different, focused and deep-down scared because everyone around me was smart. They all raised their hands right away during class discussions while I was still trying to understand the question being asked. They were all uppercase Confident College Students to my lowercase clara winter. It was a different world I lived in now, and I was a different girl in it.

  That Friday I waited outside Mulberry Hall with everyone else who was waiting for their parents. There would be a Parents’ Tea and a President’s Dinner and a football game and a Campus Walkabout and a Sunday Brunch and I had the schedule in my hand as I waited. I was wearing the new boots I had bought at the boot store downtown, the real leather boots that took every penny of the money I had made over the last two months serving up breakfast in the cafeteria, my work-study job. Scrambled fried hardboiled poached. I had never heard of poached eggs before and if I had landed on Eggs for $400 and it turned out to be the Daily Double, I would’ve bet it all that Tamar had never heard of them either.

  Then she and Dog were there and I forgot everything.

  “Ma!”

  She had parked somewhere—where, I didn’t know; I hadn’t seen the truck pull up even though I was outside watching for it—and Dog was on his rarely used leash. They were making their halting way through the crowds of parents and children.

  “Ma!”

  Sunshine was next to me, waiting for her family, and she looked at me with curiosity, but I didn’t look back. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted again: “Ma! Ma!” but it was Dog who heard me first, or smelled me, because suddenly there he was. A bounding blur of fur leaping into the air and shoving himself against the unfamiliar leash, trying to get to me. Then he was on me and we were both on the ground, me with my arms around him, both of us pushing our noses into each other’s necks because there he was. There he was, and there I was, and a lump rose up in my throat. Dog.

  Tamar was there too, then, her hand white-knuckled around his leash. Jeans and white Keds that she had re-whitened for the occasion with roll-on polish. The roll-on marks were evident. She was wearing her lumber jacket. It was a cold day but I wore only a sweater because that was what we did back then in college: we pretended we weren’t cold, we pretended that a crewneck sweater was all we needed even on a day of bitter wind. Her hand touched my shoulder.

  “You’re cold.”

  That was the first thing she said. I looked up from the ground at her Tamar face looking down at me. This was the longest I had ever been away from my mother. Her hair looked shorter. Dog had climbed up onto my lap with his paws on my shoulders. He was still pushing his nose into my neck, my hair, my collarbones.

  “No I’m not.”

  “You are, though.” Her palm was on my cheek. “Your cheek is like ice.”

  “I’m not cold at all,” I lied.

/>   I took her and Dog around to all the classroom buildings, to the dorm where Sunshine and I had hung India batik prints on the walls to “warm them up.” A phrase that belonged to Sunshine, along with the batiks, a phrase and a thing I’d never seen before that fall. I told Tamar that my classes were lots of work but great, that I studied lots but it was nothing I couldn’t handle, that I had made lots of friends—the word lots kept coming out of my mouth—that the sleeping bag was coming in handy, that on Friday nights we all walked into town with our fake IDs for pitchers of happy-hour beer and 2/$5 Cape Codders and screwdrivers, followed by dancing at The Excuse, that the cafeteria food was really not bad at all, even poached eggs, once you got used to them.

  What was really happening was that I was pushing it all at her, all this information, all this breeziness and chatter, because what was done was done. She had forced me out of Sterns and out of upstate New York and out of everything I had known until now. She had banished me from my own life, and even though I had raged and fought against her grim decision, I had gone along with it, hadn’t I? I could have run away, couldn’t I? I could have flat-out said no. But I hadn’t.

  I had always assumed I would live in Sterns, where my childhood friends grew up and would continue to live, solid black arrows of parents and children and grandchildren within a few miles of one another. In leaving, I had thought my mother was forcing me out, but the truth was this: she had seen a bigger life for me than I had imagined. And she had been right.

  But right didn’t mean easy. I couldn’t take the presence of her, the literal Tamar presence of her, her in her re-whitened sneakers and her jeans and her lumber jacket held together with duct tape patches on the inside, her hand still gripping Dog’s leash.

  I wanted her so much.

  I wanted to be in her kitchen, my kitchen, our kitchen, sitting next to her by the woodstove. I wanted Dog, Dog with the old stuffed monkey that Asa had given him dangling from his jaws, turning three times in a circle before thumping down onto the rug beside us and tucking himself into a fur comma. I missed her so terribly, now that she was there, right beside me, and I had to shut down that terrible missing so that it wouldn’t crush me with its power.