When Time Is a River

by Susan Clayton-Goldner

  The stage was set for the opening scene. A neonatal intensive care unit. Stone waited with the other actors behind the backdrop.

  As the last ticket holders filed into Mountain Avenue Theater and surveyed the auditorium for empty seats, Brandy stood backstage and scanned the rows for Christine and Kathleen.

  The lights were still bright, and she spotted one of the reporters from the Tribune who’d covered the candlelight vigil. He stood on the sidelines, clamping his camera onto a tripod.

  Again, she searched. She found her father in the third row, an empty seat beside him, but no sign of Christine. Kathleen sat three rows behind him.

  Just when Brandy was about to give up, she spotted Christine hurrying down the aisle. Her father stood and waved until she spotted him.

  Brandy smiled. Her stepmother had kept her promise.

  When Mr. Pritchard beckoned her from the opposite wing, Brandy hurried across the stage. “Carla came down with the flu. She’s puking her guts out. Isabella and Jenny are never on stage at the same time. Can you play Carla’s part, too?”

  Brandy opened her mouth, but no words came out.

  “You’re about the same size,” he said. “So, I suspect her costume will fit. You know her lines. And if you forget something, just ad lib.”

  Jenny was the teenage bimbo who’d given birth to baby Isaac. She wore tight leather pants, a halter-top, and constantly chewed gum. She had some of the funniest lines in the play. “I…I guess so. Sure,” Brandy said, realizing she did know the lines. “It may not be perfect. But I can do it.”

  The lights dimmed. One minute until show time.

  Brandy headed for the prop table in the wings.

  In a moment that didn’t register as real time, she closed her eyes and concentrated. She knew what Isabella wanted and just how far that character was willing to go in order to get it. And she understood, better than ever now, that actors must believe they are the characters they play. Everything she needed to become Isabella was contained in two memories. The day Emily disappeared and the night of her escalator accident—the sound of her mother’s scream.

  When the stage lights came on and the curtain lifted, Brandy grabbed a crib mobile, then burst onto center stage as a frantic Isabella, determined to make Isaac’s hospital room look like the nursery she’d planned for him.

  A rubber doll, the baby that Isabella and her husband, Walter, had arranged to adopt before its birth, lay hidden inside a plastic isolette attached to monitoring devices. Isabella was about to see the severely deformed and hydrocephalic infant for the first time. She felt a surge of grief as she approached the isolette. With tears brimming, she said, “I can’t believe how much I already love him.”

  Her chin quivered and the air seemed to tighten around her. She stood profile left, at the edge of the bassinet. All self-awareness drained from her body as she leaned forward into Isabella’s first look at the baby’s swollen head. “Hello, little pumpkin,” she said. “Hello, baby Isaac.”

  In the moving pictures inside her head, the infant stared up with a steady gaze, eyes shining for one improbable moment before they closed, claimed by sleep.

  Jolted by a strange combination of hope, horror, and love, she remained shaken, but on guard beside him. She was Isaac’s mother.

  She was Isabella.

  A mother afraid for her child.

  A mother.

  Once again, Brandy heard the low animal sound that had simmered for an instant, that boiled up and over until every gaze in the emergency room was glued to her mother’s open mouth. And she plunged deeper into the memory of her mother staggering toward the hospital gurney where Brandy lay, her left cheek mangled.

  Deep inside the memory, Brandy felt the stab of a suture needle as it dove into her toddler flesh and resurfaced. Transparent thread tied in a hundred separate knots. Powdered, antiseptic smell of gloved hands. The blood as it spread along cotton strands, staining the starched white fabric of her dress.

  A voice inside Brandy’s head kept her in control.

  Breathe.

  You are Isaac’s mother.

  You are Isabella.

  She turned toward the nurse. “Do you think he hears me? Does he know how I…”

  Somehow it all fell into place, the pace and rhythm, the way the actors projected their voices, the subtle moments where silence was more convincing than speech. Brandy released her hair and changed into the leather jeans and halter top, grabbed a piece of bubble gum when she played Carla’s part. Her switches between Isabella and Jenny were seamless.

  In her final scene, Brandy, as Isabella, said goodbye to her dead baby. “I will send prayers into the night sky with your name on them, Isaac. Each time a child takes his first step, you’ll walk beside him, the grass peeking up between your bare toes. And in the morning, when the day awakens, it will be my son’s face that shines above me.”

  Then, without warning, Brandy thoughts lingered on her mother. And in Brandy’s mind, the final words she uttered to baby Isaac belonged to Sophia Rose Michaelson. “You mustn’t ever think our time together, though short, didn’t matter. I learned everything I will ever need to know about love from you.” Her voice wobbled, on the edge of tears.

  At precisely the right moment, Stone—who’d wanted to back out of the adoption and had refused to see the baby—appeared, carrying a stuffed puppy meant for their son. Their eyes met and lingered. A single tear dripped down Brandy’s cheek. Stone moved toward her. When the lights dimmed, Brandy picked up her guitar and sang the song she’d written for her mother.

  At curtain call, Brandy was last to run onto the stage. She stood next to Stone, still shaken by the final dialogue, the song about her mother. When he grabbed her hand and lifted it, the entire audience rose, applauding until the curtain finally closed.

  As she stepped into the wings, the reporter tapped her on the shoulder. “I’m Quinton from the Medford Tribune. I heard you sing at the candlelight vigil for your sister. You were amazing.”

  She turned and smiled. “Thanks, Quinton.”

  “And now I see you can act, too. You were damn good up there. You brought the house down.” He told her he wanted to do a feature story and would need some photographs.

  “Let me just say hello to a couple people and I’ll be right back,” she said, heading towards Christine and her dad.

  Doctor Sorenson waved.

  Brandy waved back.

  Before she got through the crowd to her dad, she ran into Detective Radhauser and Gracie.

  Radhauser wrapped her in a bear hug. “I’m speechless. And to think I was going to suggest you become a detective.”

  Gracie hugged Brandy, too. “Don’t pay any attention to him. You were fabulous. The look on your face was so believable my eyes filled with tears. Go for the Oscar, Brandy. I hope we’re both around to cheer you on.”

  Christine hugged Brandy from behind and unclipped the barrette holding her hair. She lifted the thick mound of dark curls and let them tumble, unrestrained. “There you go,” she said. “A regular Julia Roberts.”

  When Brandy turned, Christine opened her arms. Brandy stepped into them. And they stood like that, their breathing the only sound Brandy heard in the noisy auditorium. She felt a new softness toward her stepmother, as if they were survivors in the same life raft.

  “Where’s Emily?”

  “My mother is babysitting. Can you believe it? She had Emily in her lap reading a story when I left.”

  * * *

  After the final performance and the cast party on Saturday night, Brandy said goodnight to Stone, eased the front door open, then stepped inside and closed it softly. It was after midnight and she assumed her father and stepmother would be asleep. She tiptoed through the entryway and into a thin stream of cherry-smelling smoke.

  Her father sat alone in the darkened living room, his pipe in his hand. He flipped on the light. “I want you to know how proud I am of you. The way you stepped in when Carla got sick and played her rol
e, too. What a talent.” He reached into his stack of Saturday’s edition of the Medford Tribune and flipped to the article. “Did you see this?”

  Only about a hundred times. Every person she knew had clipped it out for her. She nodded and hoped he’d drop the paper back into his stack.

  Ignoring her nod, he read Quinton’s opening paragraph out loud.

  When Ashland High School’s Brandy Michaelson steps into a role, the audience feels that piercing physical reaction that comes from witnessing the extraordinary—the raw material from which stars are made. On stage, it is as if she is transformed, no longer made up of flesh and bones, but points of brilliant light. Like a sparkler on the Fourth of July, you can’t take your gaze away—this young woman is simply irresistible. She flipped between the leading roles of Isabella and Jenny so skillfully most of the audience didn’t realize she played both parts…

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Two weeks later, Brandy slipped into Emily’s room and stood beside her bed, watching her sleep and trying to decide how to approach her dad and Christine.

  From the soft murmur of voices and the clink of glasses, she knew they were sitting in the living room, sharing a bottle of wine. The sound of their voices was the sound of home.

  Fear for Emily had reconnected the three of them—given them a new appreciation for the value and comfort of family. They understood what mattered most was who you were to someone else. Christine would never be a mother figure to Brandy, but she could be a friend or a big sister.

  A tree branch brushed against the window with a soft, scraping sound. Brandy looked out at the backyard. The upper sky was dark, but the lower sky was still streaked with pale light. She thought about her mother, the way Brandy had made a legend out of the woman who’d been in a mental hospital most of her adult life.

  Brandy sighed, then tucked the blanket over Emily and stepped back into the hallway. As she moved closer to the living room, she heard her father offer to hire a nanny so Christine could finish her degree.

  “Somehow it doesn’t matter to me now,” Christine said. “Everything I used to want or complain about feels so trivial. When you lose your child, all the meaning goes out of your life.”

  “Emily’s back now,” her dad said. “And it’s important you finish your education.”

  “I’ll have plenty of time once Emily is in school.” Her stepmother’s voice held a private peace. Brandy didn’t know how Christine had gotten to that place, only that she was there.

  But for Brandy, something was still missing.

  Again, she hesitated. The time to tell them would never be right or easy. Brandy collected herself, coaxed her feet to move, then sat on the living room step.

  She cleared her throat.

  Both her dad and stepmother looked at her.

  “Do you remember what you told me about life being a circle?” Brandy asked her father.

  He nodded, took another sip of his wine.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about that. And I hope this won’t upset either of you too much, but I want to visit my mother.” She held her breath. Waited for her stepmother’s reaction to Brandy’s wanting to see the woman who’d tried to kill Emily.

  In the quiet that followed, her dad stared at her for a long moment.

  “I wondered if I could borrow one of your cars.”

  He glanced quickly at Christine, then swallowed. “When?”

  “Tomorrow. Salem is not quite a four-hour drive. Please. I’ll go up and come back the same day. It’s really important to me.”

  The room grew so quiet she could hear each tick of the grandfather clock in the entryway. Brandy had counted five of them when Christine reached across the sofa and laid her hand on Dad’s knee. “Go with her. Brandy shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

  * * *

  With her guitar case in hand, Brandy stood beside her father, looking out the French doors at the courtyard of the Madrone Psychiatric Institute. On the grassy yard, beneath a big-leaf maple, her mother rocked on a wooden glider. Spots of lichen furred the soft gray wood. She was dressed in a pale blue smock, like the ones children wear over their clothes when they paint. She cradled her right arm, palm up, in her left one like a baby.

  Brandy opened the doors.

  Her dad took her hand as they stepped onto the brick patio. His face was a mask of sadness.

  She thought about the wedding album and his life with her mother. He’d kept almost nothing except his memories—and maybe they were the heaviest baggage of all.

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “I need to do this alone.” Brandy squeezed his hand, then let go and moved toward the glider.

  Her mother’s hair was clean, pulled back from her face and fastened at the nape of her neck in the same way Brandy had clamped hers for the play.

  She had a moment when she wanted to go back inside, wondered if her actions were selfish, or if this visit might trigger other things in her mother she didn’t want to see.

  Breathe. This woman was her mother. And in spite of Brandy’s jumbled feelings about everything that had happened, she longed to find a way to connect them. She thought about the many roles she’d played in an attempt to become someone else. Making herself up from bits and pieces of other people.

  Though keenly aware of her mother’s limitations, Brandy was rooted in this woman and she wanted to be a daughter now. But how would a daughter, even one devoted to her mentally ill mother, act at a time like this?

  In the garden beside the patio, a fat bumblebee crawled up a coneflower, lifted into the drowsy air and sailed west where the sun hung, gold and pink, as if it would be there forever. Brandy watched the bumblebee fly, then stepped across the grassy yard.

  Her mother kept rocking, tapped a slow beat on her cradled arm with her index finger and didn’t appear to notice Brandy as she took out her guitar. “I wrote a song for you.” She pulled a chair close to the glider and strummed a few chords.

  A child is born and she learns to sing.

  She sets her heart on elusive things.

  But fate steps in and dreams come crashing down.

  Her illusions gone, a truth reclaimed,

  Nothing ever stays the same.

  And all the while, the world spins round.

  A child is lost and a mother found.

  But what it takes, to change the tide,

  Is just one single, just one single,

  Slender slice of time.

  When Brandy finished the song, she put her guitar back into its case. She glanced toward the patio where her father sat, wiping his face with a handkerchief. When her chest tightened, Brandy looked away. She couldn’t imagine what this must feel like for him.

  “The escalator accident wasn’t your fault, Mom. You always told me to be careful. You loved me so much.”

  As the trees swished softly above them, Rose lifted her hand and touched Brandy’s cheek.

  The unexpected touch released a confusing wave of tenderness inside Brandy. She tried to maintain her mother’s gaze. It seemed impossible, staring directly into this woman’s eyes—this woman who’d tried to kill Emily—it was a burden Brandy couldn’t carry for more than a few seconds without looking away.

  But as the sun flattened and hovered for an instant before it dropped into the horizon, Brandy realized all she had to do was finally meet her mother, and it grew easy.

  When her mother smiled, Brandy saw something of the young woman turning a cartwheel in the wedding album.

  Brandy smiled back.

  And then she saw the opening, a stirring deep in her mother’s eyes, a place wide enough for a daughter to slip through. In that moment of understanding, Brandy was aware of the incredible elasticity of life, how each night we wait for the sunlight, the rising up of what once seemed lost.

  She sat beside her mother, reached for her hands and held them.

  Her mother’s skin felt so cold that Brandy’s own seemed hot in comparison. As some of her heat transferr
ed, she understood how much this woman needed her. That in this moment, Brandy could be helpful by lending her mother the warmth inside her hands. And for the first time in her life, Brandy felt beautiful.

  This was their beginning.

  ABOUT SUSAN CLAYTON-GOLDNER

  Susan Clayton-Goldner was born in New Castle, Delaware and grew up with four brothers along the banks of the Delaware River. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona's Creative Writing Program and has been writing most of her life. Her novels have been finalists for The Hemingway Award, the Heeken Foundation Fellowship, the Writers Foundation and the Publishing On-line Contest. Susan won the National Writers' Association Novel Award twice for unpublished novels and her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

  Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Animals as Teachers and Healers, published by Ballantine Books, Our Mothers/Ourselves, by the Greenwood Publishing Group, The Hawaii Pacific Review-Best of a Decade, and New Millennium Writings. A collection of her poems, A Question of Mortality was released in 2014 by Wellstone Press. Prior to writing full time, Susan worked as the Director of Corporate Relations for University Medical Center in Tucson, Arizona.

  Susan shares a life in Grants Pass, Oregon with her husband, Andreas, her fictional characters, and more books than one person could count.

  Find Susan online:

  Website - http://susanclaytongoldner.com

  Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/susan.claytongoldner

  Twitter - https://twitter.com/SusanCGoldner