Never Coming Back Read online

  When I didn’t feel brave, I sometimes spoke out loud in a hearty, World War II movie commander sort of way and kept speaking this way until 1) I felt braver or 2) I couldn’t stand the sound of my hearty commander voice anymore so 3) I had to take action.

  The tape came off in a satisfying duct-tape way. Three photos were what the box held, photos of me. Me as a baby, me as a toddler, me as a little girl.

  In the first, I was zipped into an orange snowsuit and someone—Tamar?—had propped me against a snowbank. The sun glinted off snow and my eyes were squinted shut. You couldn’t see my legs or my arms or anything besides my face. I was an orange blob against a glaring pile of white.

  In the second, I was sitting on her lap. A birthday cake with two candles was on the table in front of us. A third candle stuck out of the side of the cake: the to-grow-on candle. Tamar’s tradition. In this photo, her face was in shadow, but you could still see how soft it was, how long her hair was, curving around the curves of her cheek. She had always been a thin woman, my mother. Some might call her scrawny. But in this photo, her face was the soft face of a girl.

  Which she was. Twenty years old. Much younger than I was now.

  In the last photo my face—maybe I was four? Five?—poked through a giant wooden cutout of a strawberry. Strawberry Fields Forever, which was a pick-your-own place north of Boonville. This photo was one I remember being taken. Tamar and I had gone up early in the morning to pick strawberries. We and another family—a mother, a father, five or six children—were first on the field. It was a foggy day, the kind of day when noise came randomly, a voice suddenly clear in your ear and then fading. The kind of day that steadied you with the blurring of outlines and the narrowing of surroundings. I remembered crouching, holding the green pasteboard berry box in one hand, reaching under the green leaves of the plants to find and pluck the strawberries with the other. My fingers stained red. I remembered looking around to see where my mother was. She was not next to me, but out of the fog her voice came floating, a few rows or many rows away, impossible to tell. She was singing “Hallelujah.” She sang it over and over, first a little higher, then a little lower, then a little slower.

  The sound of my mother singing was not unusual. She sang when she was working, when she didn’t know, or forgot, that I was around to hear. Maybe she thought she was alone now, there in the fog, so it was okay to sing, to raise her voice to the clouds come down to earth. To the berries, hiding beneath the green leaves. To the dirt, rich and dark beneath her sneakers. Maybe she didn’t even know she was singing.

  I crouched between rows of strawberry plants, that fog so thick that wisps of it curled around my hands and the berry box. I was alone and she was alone, and the voices of the other family, the one with all the children, came to my ears intermittently from wherever they were in that big field.

  The berry box was full of strawberries and I put one in my mouth. So sweet. So red. The color red fused with the sensation of sweetness in that moment. Berry after berry, sweet-red sweet-red, listening to my mother sing the song that I didn’t know yet was her favorite song from her favorite singer, and when her song came to an end I began picking again and rapidly filled another box and then another and then another, so that when we met again at the end of the rows, there in the fog, she would look at the berry boxes and know that I had not wasted my time, and she would be proud of me.

  We sat together on the porch, Jack and Dog and I, thinking about that day and her song and looking out at the woods beyond the cabin. The fairy lights glimmered in their silent way.

  * * *

  The photo of me in the snowbank was more substantial than the others, heavier somehow.

  “Because, hello, there’s another photo stuck to the back of it, Clara,” I said out loud. “Well, well, what do you know?”

  This is what happens to people who live alone and who live in their heads. They carry on running conversations with themselves, or with the ashes of their departed dogs, or with the fireflies that blink among the pines at dusk, or with their bottles of whiskey. They say things like “Well, well, what do you know?” out loud to themselves. They use the royal we, like this:

  “What do we have here, Clara?”

  What we had here, Clara, was a small photo printed out on regular copy paper from a color printer. It was not me as a baby or a little girl. A curl of tape on the back of orange-snowsuit me had stuck to it and turned it into a twofer photo. It was not my high school graduation photo, as the minute I saw it I realized I had expected it to be. It was a photo of Tamar. My mother. Ma.

  Except not really.

  “Ma?” I said to the photo. I brought it up closer to my face and studied it, then tipped it this way and that underneath the lamp. I recognized the shirt she was wearing; it was one she had worn for a year or so when I was in high school, a shirt unusual for her because it was pretty. A white gauzy shirt shot through with blue embroidery, a non-Tamar kind of shirt. “Ma?”

  The woman in the photo—my mother, at least partly—said nothing. Her eyes were bright.

  “Who are you looking at, Ma?”

  No answer.

  “More to the point, what’s that look on your face?”

  It was not a look of I have something on my mind or Hurry up, I’m going to be late to work or What is my strange child up to now or Can you just take the picture already because You know I hate having my picture taken. It had not been me who took the photo, because I would have remembered that look on her face. And the look on her face was one I could not place, because I had never seen it before, this soft, young look.

  Strange.

  My mother’s legacy to me: three photos of her daughter, ones she must have found in that whirlwind week she spent clearing out the house, giving everything away, packing up the rest and moving herself out. It was the habit of the Amish to pay cash for everything, and I imagined her walking into the place where she lived now and placing a shoebox filled with hundred-dollar bills on the reception desk. Here. Take care of me and whoever I will become. The image made my heart hurt. Yes, it was an image I had imagined up right then and there, but imaginings make unreal things real. See the look on my mother’s face as she walked into the nursing home alone, her shoebox of money clutched to her narrow chest. Shouldn’t she have had someone with her on a day like that, a day when she had just left behind her entire life? Shouldn’t a family member, like a daughter, have been with her? Ma.

  I put the shoebox with the three photos of me in it back into the cabin. The last photo, the one of my mother in her pretty shirt, I took with me into the Subaru, and out into the night we drove, me and my young mother, seeking calm and steadiness on the winding Adirondack roads.

  * * *

  It took a long time to find calm, if calm is another word for the kind of exhaustion that comes after outdriving your own mind. Call it calm, call it exhaustion, the Subaru and I were north of Long Lake when my brain finally stopped buzzing and I turned the car around. We hugged the curves of the road, headlights on high because so few others were out. A small bar appeared around the bend north of Inlet—a bar I’d passed but never been to, a twinkling-lit bar—and I put the blinker on and pulled in.

  Jukebox and conversation and dinging register, the bartender busy with bottles and glasses and shaker, one server maneuvering around the tables and stools with her tray lifted high. Where did bar-in-the-middle-of-nowhere people come from? Did they live nearby? Were they just passing through? Had they come upon this place like me, out of happenstance and chance?

  “Gin gimlet, please,” I said to the server when she made her way over to me.

  “Ice?”

  I shook my head and she nodded and wove her way back to the bartender. I watched him make it, the way he upended the bottle without even looking, the way he shook and then strained it into a martini glass and placed it on the server’s tray. His fingers were long. Piano player’s hands, if it were a requirement that piano players all have long, slender fingers, w
hich it wasn’t. Then the server was back with the gimlet. She put it on the table and tilted her head, squinting at my pushed-up sleeve.

  “What’s your tattoo?” she said, and pointed at the thin, black spiraling line.

  “Wire,” I said. “Holds me together when things fall apart.”

  I smiled so that she would think I was joking, even though I wasn’t. I had gotten the tattoo seven years ago, when Asa died in Afghanistan.

  “Huh,” she said. “Do things fall apart a lot?”

  I shrugged in an ask-but-not-answer way. Unimpartable information. I nodded at her own tattoo, black words I couldn’t read on the underside of her arm. “What’s yours say?”

  She twisted her arm so that half the sentence was visible.

  “‘Everything was beautiful,’” I read, “‘and ​—’”

  “‘Nothing hurt,’” she finished. “It’s a quote from a Kurt Vonnegut novel.”

  “Why that particular quote?”

  She shrugged in the same way I had—I see your unanswer and I raise you mine—and threaded her way back through the tall barstools to the bartender, who was waiting for her with a new tray of drinks.

  A slice of lime floated in the gimlet as if the gimlet were a tiny swimming pool. I pushed it, just enough to get it sailing. Enough of this dead man’s float, little lime. Time to swim on your own. Push. Push. Now it was bobbing around the perimeter of the glass. Good job, lime. Remember to breathe.

  I looked up to see the bartender smiling. Had he been watching the lime and me and our swimming lesson this whole time? Probably. That was the kind of look he had on his face. An I know exactly what you were doing kind of look. I quit talking to the lime—the bartender had ruined things and now the little lime would never progress beyond dog-paddling—drank the gimlet and then began mushing the lime into pulp with the tiny red straw. Death by drowning. Death by pulverization. The server started in my direction once the glass was empty but the bartender said something to her and she shrugged and he came around the end of the bar.

  No tray, no order pad, just him and a black T-shirt and jeans and boots like the boots my high school boyfriend used to wear. Don’t look at the boots, Clara. Look up. No, don’t look up. Look at the empty gimlet glass with the mushed-up lime pulp. Don’t say anything. But the bartender was as good at silence as I was. He knew its power. He knew I would break eventually, and eventually I did. I dragged my gaze up from the drowned-lime pulverization at the bottom of the glass and looked him in the eye.

  “Another one?”

  I nodded. He picked up my glass and went back behind the bar and mixed and shook and strained and poured. Bartenders were dancers, dancing three-square-foot, tightly choreographed bartending ballets. Then he returned with a bowl of buttered popcorn and the drink, two slices of lime this time. The limes could keep each other company in their gimlet swimming pool. They could sink or swim together. They would not be alone either in life or death. I didn’t try to smile or talk. I didn’t do anything other than be what I was, a tired gimlet-drinker who wanted to sit on a high stool and prevent a lime or two from drowning.

  “Long day?” he said, and I nodded. The bartender gave off the same feeling as the bar itself had when it had appeared, twinkling-lit, around the curve of Route 28. Kind. Was that the word? Warm. The photo of my bright-eyed mother with that look I had never seen before on her face rose up in my head, my mother who was never coming back. Everything I had not said to her, everything she had not said to me. Yes, a long day. A pushing-back-the-lump-in-my-throat day. A willing-myself-through-it day.

  The bartender put his hands on the tabletop, just the fingertips. As if the tabletop were a piano and he was getting ready to play a prelude. A soft, slow prelude. Maybe a Chopin prelude, the one I used to play to myself late, late at night in college to end practice, in one of the soundproof piano rooms in the basement of the music hall. Me and the piano and lamplight and the heavy door with the small, square-paned Triplex-glass panel. Sunshine and Brown knew where to find me late at night, if I wasn’t in my room and no one had seen me. Me and my piano and my piano hands, smoothing the keys up and down, one foot keeping the beat. The bartender’s hands reminded me of those days. They reminded me of my own hands.

  “Drink slow,” he said, “and drive safe.”

  I ate the popcorn and I drank slow and I drove safe, twelve miles from Inlet to Old Forge, the oldies station coming in and out in flashes on the radio. Static was all right sometimes, like the white noise you might hear from outside a closed door to a room where a small party was happening, a party of people who knew one another and loved one another. Comforting.

  My hands on the steering wheel remembered the feel of the piano keys in that practice room and the one Chopin prelude that always ended my nights. The cool touch of the shining keys under my fingers. The sound of the giant stringed instrument filling the tiny room with its cinder-block walls and ceiling made of acoustic tile. Why music? was the question sometimes asked of me. Why music when you don’t ever play in front of anyone? When you don’t even want to play in front of anyone? That tiny room. That enormous instrument with its hidden strings, the enormous sound that poured forth from my fingers. You seriously never played any instrument until you got to college? That was another question, to which I used to shake my head and smile and shrug the way I had smiled and shrugged at the tattooed server tonight.

  My hands on the steering wheel. The bartender’s hands on the bottles and glasses. Tamar’s hands stretching forth into the air when she searched for a word. Drink slow and drive safe. The car and I crested a steep hill in the darkness and the Tug Hill Plateau spread out below us with a sky filled with stars. For a minute it felt as if we might fly.

  * * *

  What went wrong between me and my mother had gone wrong a long time ago, and the beginning of the wrongness could be boiled down to Conversations Late at Night in the Kitchen Where Clara Is Finishing Her Mohawk Valley Community College Application for $400. It was January, and the application was due. Asa had broken up with me in September. MVCC was half an hour away. My broken heart and I could live at home and go to school part-time and work part-time.

  Tamar, suddenly: “Clara, you’re not going to school in Utica.”

  Clara, confused: “What are you talking about, Ma?”

  Tamar, resolute: “No.”

  Clara, bewildered: “Ma?”

  Tamar, finale: “New Hampshire is where you’re going to college. Two states away.”

  That was her. That was a Tamar remark. She was a say-it-once kind of person. I looked up at her in disbelief. She was standing next to the kitchen table with her hands jammed into her jeans pockets. The application’s pages were strewn around me, nearly complete. I had filled the boxes in, one by one, in my neatest all-caps printing. I had written and rewritten the essay.

  “Ma? Is this a joke?”

  She shook her head, a violent back-and-forth, her hands still balled up in her jeans pockets, big lumps halfway down her thighs. Then she pulled them out and swept the pages of the application together, and before I could rise up from my chair and stop her, she was ripping them. Tearing them up, in halves and quarters, torn paper drifting down from her ripping hands.

  “Ma!”

  “You’ve been accepted already,” she said. “It’s something called early decision.”

  She showed me an envelope, from a college in New Hampshire, a Dear Clara Winter, We are delighted to inform you that letter, dated a month prior. Grants and work study and scholarships.

  What? How? Who? I shook my head in bewilderment.

  “I didn’t apply to this school,” I said. “There’s a mistake.”

  “There’s no mistake,” she said. “I filled out the application for you. Annabelle and I did it together, last October.”

  She turned and walked out of the kitchen. It was late. The table was strewn with torn paper. I remembered the sound of her footsteps going up the stairs, the littered table, my gallopin
g heart. I sat there for a minute, fingers pressed on my neck, trying to slow the beats by pressure alone, which did not work now and did not work then. A feeling like lava rose from my gut and streaked down my arms and legs, filled my head with molten rage. Wild heart trembling, I tore out of that kitchen and through the dark living room, pounded up the dark stairs and shoved open the door of my mother’s dark room.

  What I remembered after that was screaming, mine, words ripped out of my heart and flung at Tamar, who was invisible in the darkness between us but whose caught breath I could hear. When I thought about it now, which I tried never to do but couldn’t help, all I heard in my head were fragments. Who are you, what are you, Asa is good, Asa is kind, Asa loved me, what did you say to him to make him go away like that? What kind of mother doesn’t want her daughter to be happy, doesn’t want her daughter around, what kind of mother throws her daughter out. That kind of thing. That was what came back to me. I didn’t know if those fragments were real.

  “You know what kind of mother does that kind of thing? Your kind of mother. The kind of mother who didn’t want me in the first place and now can’t wait to get rid of me. The kind of mother you are. The kind of mother who only wants to hurt the daughter she didn’t want in the first place. A nothing kind of mother. A nothing. You’re a nothing.”

  That was real. Those words happened. They spat themselves out of my mouth and into that dark, invisible air and I didn’t know how many more would have followed them except that there was a click, a tiny click, and then lamplight pooled on my mother’s face. She was sitting straight up in bed, that narrow twin bed she slept on as long as I could remember, and she was staring at me. Her eyes were dark lakes and her hands were hovering in the air, palms turned to each other, rising to cover her ears and then lowering. Trembling. I had never seen my mother’s hands tremble. I had never seen my mother with that look on her face. I had never seen my mother’s hands lift to her ears like that, trying to fend off words, sounds, rage, hurt.