There is now one last thing to do, and it is not an easy thing.
I am at the window, on the dark side of the glass, watching my mother inside my stepfather’s house. There’s a motion sensor over the back lawn, but it won’t find me. I’m safe. The neighbor’s dog, chained out front, can’t hear me. When the wind picks up, I almost float.
My mother doesn’t know I’ve come back. That I’m here at this particular window near the ragged embankment of trees, to see how she’s faring in his house, with me gone.
She’s alone tonight. He has a work dinner again—I spotted him heading for the driveway in his tie—and the girls left minutes ago, talking of a party at someone’s house, contained to a gated backyard. From what I hear, no one wants to party in the woods after a body’s been found, and they think it’s ruined summer. Still, there has to be some kind of party, with the same eternal argument over who would buy beer.
The house hushes, as if a cloud moves to cover it. Inside, my mother has awakened and started moving about the rooms.
I still think of this split-level ranch, painted moss green and showing the beginnings of a termite infestation, as his house, always will, no matter how many years she stays married to him and shares the bedroom. It never stopped being his house, from furniture to what hangs on the walls to cups in the cupboard. The only place ever truly hers was the room she rented, tiny and dusty with the narrow bed and the one window, that summer she lived in the city. That’s what I used to tell myself when I thought I knew what she wanted.
I haven’t been able to go inside the house, and so I stay to the periphery, outside the walls, peering in where I can. Sometimes, some nights since I’ve come here to look in on her, I find my mother in the rocking chair he makes her keep in the hallway. She nursed me in it, the story goes. We found it at the end of the driveway, with the garbage bags on trash day, soon after the new family moved into our old house. My mother stopped the car, got out, and sat in it for a while, rocking over the gravel. It crunched. “This should be yours one day,” she said. In a fit of strength, she carried it over her head to the trunk, but it didn’t fit, so she wedged it into the back seat, with two of the legs pointing out the window. When she brought it back to the house, there wasn’t room in the bedroom she shared with him. There wasn’t room in the living room or the den, either—it didn’t match the furniture—and so here it lives, at the end of the corridor, near the tall window facing the back bend of trees. The seat cushion is blue.
On this visit, the rocking chair is empty.
So is what I can see of the kitchen.
The plush sofa in the den has the remote on it and nothing else.
I wait for many minutes to see her cross the floor of her bedroom and make her way to her dresser, which is just in view. She opens her top drawer and digs in the back, as she used to, deep in, but she doesn’t pull anything out. It’s not in there, if that’s what she’s searching for. I see her at her dresser as if she’s been keeping something precious in there, but it’s gone and not coming back, no matter how much she hopes to find it. I’ve let it go. The next thing to let go of is her.
She takes her hands out of the dresser, empty.
She gazes at the pictures pinned over her bureau. There are so many of me now. When she looks at them, I wonder what she believes and remembers, what stories she tells herself.
Now she’s closing the drawer. She’s walking past the suitcase, the one she’d packed for me that night. She hasn’t moved it from the space beside her dresser in all this time. I imagine that inside it, my clothes are still rolled into compact balls, and there are at least ten sets of clean underwear. She made sure.
She’s leaving the bedroom and heading down the hallway, coming closer.
I want her to.
Once she sits in the rocking chair and pulls the string for the light, I get that sweet, singing feeling I always do when she’s near and has come closer to the glass. She’s barefoot, and her hair is slightly longer. Her back is to me, and I can make out the whorl in the center of her ear.
She lifts a book from where she stowed it on the side table, but she doesn’t part its pages. She rubs her bare arms as if she’s caught a chill, though it’s still summer. I noticed the month on the kitchen calendar. Some years she’d go with a Degas or an O’Keeffe or even a Dalí, but this time it’s the impressionists again. She shivers as if she’s cold, as if she’s forgotten it’s summer and that everything starts and ends in summer. Summer is the time for reinvention and release. Summer is when the electricity is most charged, the night has the most potential, the roads lead in every direction, and the skies are mostly clear.
She’s in one of those moods again—the set of her face tells me. She has stopped tending the small garden patch beside the driveway. I think she’s stopped going to yoga. Sometimes she sits with a book in her lap, without lifting it to read, for hours at a time. Whenever the phone rings, she jolts and shoots a glance at it, then deflates before answering, as if she knows the person she wants to be calling won’t ever be on the line.
I want to make her understand.
I want to communicate with her, somehow, the way we used to.
All she needs to do is glance over her shoulder. My breath might leave behind the hint of a face, and she’s my mother, so she’d recognize it. Who else would? I wish my knuckles could make a sound on the glass, that they could hit so hard it’d shatter. But maybe it’s better this way. I don’t want to scare her.
It’s taken me enough visits, but the time is right. I may not be able to come back, after tonight.
I am not sure where to leave it to keep it safe from the elements, and I don’t have anything to wrap it in. Insignificant things I once owned, like my old hoodie, are long gone.
It’s as ugly as I remember. As terrible as it was the first time I saw it, in my father’s possession. But maybe when someone who’s hurt you has stolen something from you, and kept it from you and priced it for sale on his wall, you can’t rest until it’s returned to your hands. Even if you didn’t know it existed, wouldn’t you want control over it, if you knew? She might tear it apart with scissors, or douse it in gasoline and light it up in the pit in the backyard. She might bury it in garbage at the dump, or scratch the canvas clean away to bald white. Or she might not see herself in it at all.
But I want her to know she can trust me, even now, to protect her heart.
I know she tried to protect me.
I leave it propped up against the glass. Just as I touch it—warm and cold at once—I feel the electricity where I used to feel my fingers, and I have to move back. I’m fighting the wind to stay even this close.
She’s standing. Her eyes have gone wide. I swear it. This time she sees me. This time we have a dark moment together, across time and space, through glass.
She’s reaching for the door. She’s breathing so fast. I’m not.
But once she opens it, she doesn’t look into my eyes or anywhere near where I am. She doesn’t say hello or invite me in. She bends down and reaches out. Her hand is like my hand—same fingers, same fingernails—or at least it used to be.
She finds it and lifts it into her arms. She knows what it is. How could she not? I’m just not sure if she knows who brought it here.
She checks the backyard. She puts a hand over her eyes, searching.
I know she wants to call out to me, but she doesn’t. She’s not yet ready to admit it out loud, to say my name.
Behind the house are only trees, but she spends a long moment scanning the fringe, as if I could be out there somehow and might have climbed all the way to the top.
She grasps the painting closer in her arms, and shuts the door to the night. She fiddles with the lightbulb, but it’s dead, so she heads to the kitchen. From there she heads to the living room. She never looks to be sure again, and she never lets it go.
I could watch her from the window for the whole rest of the night if I wanted. I could wonder what’s running through her mind, what pieces are connected from rooftop to rooftop until they meet here, where she lives.
I do wonder what she’s thinking now as much as I wonder what she was thinking then, standing on the topmost point of Catherine House, her toes curled at the edge. Did she believe the stories about Catherine? Did she know the opal would help her get back home? Did she expect a whole other future to catch hold of her in the air, one that might hurt, talons on her back, carting her away? Or did she just fall, an accident, a mistake . . . one that led to today?
I’ll always wonder.
I hold steady in the glass for a long moment, longer than I should, seeing straight through to the inside rooms, because there’s no reflection. Then, when I’m ready, I let the wind tug me away.