Amy
The minute I stepped out of the airport, a wave of nostalgia hit me. It bugged me that the memories of last summer were all that greeted me. What about the feeling of home? What had happened to that?
I sat on a bench, waiting for my mom to come pick me up. The air welcomed me, sending a light breeze my way. It had to be in the sixties. I closed my eyes, taking it all in. Warmth. Finally.
A honk brought me out of my trance, and I opened my eyes to see my mom frantically waving in her car in front of me. I smiled at her and picked up my bag. She popped the trunk and got out of the car.
“I got it, Mom,” I said to her as she scurried over to the trunk.
“I know.” She waved me off. “Come here.”
She opened up her arms and I hugged her, wrapping my arms around her small body. I closed my eyes, now realizing how much I had missed her. She smelled of smoke and I could feel that she had lost weight. She pulled away quickly, and I realized there were cars waiting behind us. We quickly got into the car and began our drive home.
We lived about half an hour away from the airport, and I was hoping to take that opportunity to rest, but my mom had other plans.
“So I was thinking we could go out to dinner tonight as a welcome-home thing. And then tomorrow is the surprise.”
“Sure, that sounds great,” I told her, looking out the window.
“I’m so glad you came home for Christmas,” she said. “I’ve really missed you.” She tried to sound excited, and I could tell it was a little forced. I looked at my mom, and I could see her hands trembling, moving across the steering wheel. She had bags under her eyes, and her cheekbones stuck out even more than usual. I could see what my absence and John’s was doing to her.
"I’ve missed you too,” I told her. I felt the urge to ask her if she was okay, if she was eating, and how she was feeling, but I didn’t. Bringing these things up wouldn’t help anything right now. She caught me staring at her and smiled quickly before turning her eyes back to the road.
“I know I look thin,” she said. “I just hardly have an appetite. But I’m doing fine.” She cleared her throat and then added, “I joined a gardening club.”
I raised my eyebrows. A gardening club?
“Yeah, I know it’s a little weird, but I like it. It’s a great stress reliever. Keeps my head clear on my days off.”
“Well, that’s great, Mom,” I said slowly, unsure of how I really felt. Clubs? Stress relievers?
“I hope you like the surprise,” she said suddenly, smiling at me.
I smiled back, trying to hide my concern. She was trying to be happy, making an effort in front of me. How she was really doing without me, I had no idea.
When we reached the house I noticed the change instantly. It was a good change, and I had a hard time processing it. The grass was cut and green and the whole front of the house was decorated with flower beds. There were four hanging flower pots on the porch as well. The side of the house was the same, with a stone border outlining more flower beds. It looked great.
“Wow, Mom, you did all this?” I said, staring at the yard as she pulled up in the driveway.
She shrugged. “Most of it, anyway. Paul cut the grass for me and saw me planting and helped out a little. We made a pretty good team.”
“Paul?” I said, surprised.
“Yeah, he stopped by a week after you left and asked if I needed anything.” She got out of the car as I continued to stare after her. “He’s a nice boy.”
Apparently. I got out of the car and went over to the trunk to get my bag. My mom was unlocking the door, and I could feel her watching me. I stepped inside the house and the inside looked exactly the same. No flowers, thankfully. I felt myself relax. Home.
“All right, go change and whatever, and then we will head out for dinner,” my mom said, taking a seat at the kitchen table and lighting a cigarette.
“Sure,” I said, watching her as she lit it, closed her eyes, and enjoyed every second of the poison going into her body. She wasn’t fine, and I wondered how long she could keep this act going.
I walked slowly toward the beach, enjoying the weather and enjoying the quiet time after dinner with my mom. It wasn’t too horrible, but it must have been exhausting for her because she went straight to bed when we got home. It didn’t surprise me, considering how hard she had been working on being happy. That would knock me out too. She asked me all about school, friends, and boys. I told her about Dan, not that there was anything between us. But I figured that offering up a male name would keep her from giving me the “lack of boyfriends” lecture. It did.
The beach wasn’t crowded, which wasn’t surprising. Two weeks until Christmas meant no time for the beach. I stopped at the edge of the boardwalk and looked out at it. Lake Michigan didn’t compare at all to this. Frozen or not. The sun was practically down now and not much light separated the sky and water. I could faintly make out a person running and a dog barking.
“Well, well, look who it is!” Paul called out, walking toward me.
I smiled and rolled my eyes. He gave me a hug, squeezing the life out of me. I pushed him away and he laughed.
“So how long do we get the pleasure of having you in town?” he asked, throwing a stick in the dog’s direction.
“Yours?” I asked, watching the dog catch it and bring it back.
“Yep. I needed some kind of companion. Lifeguarding has been pretty unbearable without you.”
I snorted. “I bet.” The dog came up to me and sniffed my legs, walking around me. “I am one of the best.” I crouched down and petted it. It was a golden retriever puppy.
“Sandy,” Paul whispered. The dog’s ears perked up. “Don’t let her fool you. She’s a mean lady.”
“Are you turning your dog against me?”
He smirked. “So how’s your mom?”
I looked up. “I don’t know. You tell me, Paul?” I raised my eyebrows, getting my meaning across. Paul shook his head and knelt down next to me. He petted Sandy and said, “Look, I knew she’d be all alone after you left. Your fight with Seth wasn’t exactly a private conversation. So one day I stopped by to see if she needed anything. And she did, so I helped.”
“Well, thank you.”
He nodded.
“It means a lot,” I said. He looked up at me and held my gaze. I knew something wasn’t right by the look in his eyes.
“So how is she really?”
Paul sighed and sat down on the sand. “She seemed fine at first…” he began, “but then I noticed she was smoking a lot and she was trembling, so I’m not sure if she’s drinking too. She acted like everything was fine. She wanted to be happy. And from the outside she did look happy. But after a couple of weeks I could see how miserable she actually was. She insisted on doing most of the gardening herself and wouldn’t eat when I offered her food. I think she’s wearing herself out.” He sighed again and threw another stick. Sandy ran off to get it.
I sat there, still, wondering how much of this was my fault. I still had almost four years left of college. How would she look by then? Would she even make it alone that long? I swallowed back the lump that was forming.
“Amy,” Paul said softly. I held my breath in before I completely lost it. For some reason the surprise popped into my head. What could it be?
I got up and chased after Sandy, who ran back to Paul. Paul was standing now, watching me. I looked back at him for a brief moment before throwing myself into the water.
I could hear Paul calling out to me, and I knew why five seconds later when my entire body went numb from the cold water. My mind flashed back to lifeguarding lessons and the stressing of the rules. Stay out of the water during winter. Stay out of the water, period.
The water enjoyed my body, sucking every last bit of warmth out of me as if to say, who listens to those rules anyway? Apparently, I didn’t.
“Are you crazy?” Paul yelled at me. I guess he had dragged me out of the water, and now I sat on the sand wrapped in his towel with his arms around me, attempting to warm me up. I was shaking and freezing, but I really didn’t notice it. I just stared out into the water that had almost killed me. It would have killed me if Paul hadn’t been there. I stared at its fierce waves and yet, despite everything, I still found it comforting. And then I began to cry.
When I woke up, my first thought as I looked up at the ceiling was that this was not my light fixture. I rolled over, boiling under the quilt or quilts that were layered on top of me. I looked at the clock that read seven thirty and then at the largest female lifeguard poster I had ever seen.
Paul. It was clear to me now why he was always so happy every morning, I sat up and looked outside. It was already bright. I pulled the covers off of me and swung my feet over the edge of the bed. I heard a groan and then felt a hand on my foot.
Crap. The hand yanked my foot and I fell on top of Paul. Wonderful. I rolled off of him, realizing now how sore my body was. I winced.
“What are you doing?” he mumbled.
“Leaving,” I said, getting up quickly. He rolled over and I looked at him, still on the floor, going back into dreamland. No doubt a dream about the gorgeous poster woman, of course.
I crouched down and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you,” I whispered.
I walked out of his apartment, trying to figure out why the previous night was such a blur. I remembered the water and I remembered the crying. The part with Paul carrying me and taking me to his apartment slowly came back as I walked the mile home. I wondered why I had finally lost it after all these months. Seth and my mom and John were just weighing me down.
I let out a sigh, feeling somewhat lighter. I hoped Paul wouldn’t mention anything or act differently the next time I saw him. I hated that, but based on what I knew of Paul, things would be exactly the same.
My mom was still asleep when I slowly crept in through the back door. I dug around the fridge looking for blueberries. When I found them, I started preparing my mom’s favorite breakfast, blueberry pancakes and bacon.
After making the third pancake, my mom shuffled into the kitchen.
“What do you want?” she said looking at the pancakes and raising her eyebrows.
I laughed. “They’re getting cold.” She grabbed a plate and took the three pancakes and one strip of bacon and sat at the kitchen table.
“So where were you?” she asked, breaking the silence.
“Paul’s,” I said casually, flipping another pancake.
“Oh?” she said, curiosity in her voice.
I shrugged, watching the pancake sizzle, waiting to flip it over.
“And how is Paul?”
“He’s fine, Mom,” I said. I turned off the stove and grabbed my pancakes.
“Are you okay?” I blurted out, sitting down across from her. “I really feel like you are just acting fine so I won’t worry. But I do worry, Mom.”
My mom shook her head and sipped her coffee. “Look, I’m fine. I’m just…” She paused, staring at her plate. “Coping. I’m still coping. It will get better, I’ll get better, in time.” She smiled a small smile and let out a sigh before getting up and patting me on the shoulder.
“Who taught you how to make such good pancakes?” she said winking at me.
“Dad, of course,” I said, scoffing.
She snorted. “Yeah, right. He tried making pancakes once, and I was left cleaning up the splattered batter all over the place.”
“I remember that!” I said. It was horrible, pancake batter everywhere. My dad and I were always causing trouble, leaving my mom yelling at us and kicking us out of her way.
“Of course you do! You helped him!” She laughed. The sound rang in my ears. It was strange talking about the past, my family’s past. Those memories had been buried so long I’d figured they only existed for me. But I had been wrong. They were still here. At the mention of my dad, my stomach churned.
“So how is your father?”
“He’s fine.” I said, stiffly. My mom looked at me curiously.
“You haven’t seen him much, have you?”
I shook my head, my eyes filling with tears.
“Oh, honey.” She walked toward me and grabbed my face. I pulled her closer to me and rested my head on her shoulder. Even though I knew that I had chosen Chicago for SAIC, I could feel the emptiness that I thought my dad could fill. Instead, it still existed, the holes beginning to patch with every gentle rub on my back from my mom. She was the one who, after everything, was still here.
The surprise was picking a Christmas tree.
“Won’t all the good ones be gone?” I asked her as she pulled up to the store. She waved me off and got out of the car. I followed her, letting her go on with her surprise. It was a cute surprise, that she had waited for me to arrive before decorating the tree. We always had done that together after my dad left. We would put on our Christmas tunes and dance around while we decorated. It was one of the few happy memories I had from those difficult years. When he left, he took most of my mom’s happiness and memories with him. And I guess John had done the same thing. He took his memories with him too, leaving my mom with nothing except the few memories of just the two of us. It made sense why she was working so hard to fill her time with new hobbies—to keep her life worth living.
I still felt like it was unfair the way John had left my mom, treating her like she had done something wrong. In reality, she had nothing to do with his reasons for leaving, but was the one that took the blow. Again. It bothered me, and when I went over everything that had happened that day, I wondered if things might have turned out differently if I hadn’t been involved. I was conflicted inside, angry that John had kept his past from us for so long. My mom should have known the truth about his late wife, and about Seth. Yet I knew John could make my mom happy, in spite of it all. I couldn’t decide whether to hope he would come back.
My thoughts were interrupted when a wreath appeared two inches away from my face, tickling my nose.
“What?” I said, holding onto the wreath, moving it farther away to get a good look at it. It was entwined with red ribbons and a gold bow.
“It’s pretty,” I said. When no response came, I looked up to find my mom wasn’t anywhere near me anymore. A woman glanced in my direction and I turned the other way, wandering through the rows of trees. I finally found my mom, bent down, almost beneath a tree.
“Mom?”
“Hi, honey,” she called out. “What do you think?”
“The wreath is pretty,” I said.
“And the tree?”
I looked up at the tree. It wasn’t too tall or too wide—it was just right for our living room. It was also white. I smiled, remembering my complaints as a child that all the Christmas movies had snow and white Christmases. My mom always told me we would make up for the snow, but it wasn’t until my dad left that we found a way. He hated white trees; he thought they were tacky and always insisted on natural ones. But the first Christmas after he was gone, my mom brought home a white Christmas tree. When I asked her why, she had just replied, “To make up for the snow.”
John didn’t care too much for the white trees either, so we got green trees those years too. I had missed the white trees.
“I think it’s perfect, Mom,” I said.
She nodded. “It’ll make up for the lack of snow this year.”
I smiled. “Yeah, my thoughts exactly.”
A few hours later, the tree was up and covered in ornaments. My mom and I raised our glasses of eggnog and made a toast. I was enjoying my time with her, something I hadn’t done in a while. I stared up at the white Christmas tree, feeling happy and nostalgic and, for once, living in the moment.
My mom went into the kitchen just as we heard a knock on the side door. I turned my head to see the door, wondering who would be coming over this late. She gave me a curious look before going to the door and opening it. I heard a gasp, and I quickly stood up to see John standing in the doorway.
John met my eyes for a second before turning back to my mom. “Angela,” he said softly. He looked tired and defeated, as if he’d had just enough energy to get him to the door. “Can we talk?”
“John, I don’t think right now is an appropriate time,” my mom said in a voice I knew too well. She was trying to be strong by masking the anxiety inside.
“Mom,” I said, getting closer to the door. “It’s okay.”
She looked at me, her eyes wide with surprise.
“I’ll be upstairs if you need me,” I said.
I surprised myself by going upstairs and closing the door. I sat on the floor, with my back against the doorframe, listening to the sounds of muffled speech. The tone and volume varied slightly at times, but it sounded rather normal. A conversation I’m sure they both thought should have happened a long time ago.