by Peter Heller
“It’s Mombo.”
“It’s early for you. Even for New York.”
“I can’t sleep.”
Hank braced himself. That could be a prelude to many things, the best of which was the story of a stubborn case. Other possibilities included anxiety about his marriage or his next assignment. Or simply that she was too brokenhearted. She hadn’t been herself for months. Hank was one of the rare young men who was fascinated by his mother. Her life often seemed much more interesting than his own, which he thought was an inversion of the natural order, and may have been part of the reason he got into writing adventure stories. Well, he had also inherited his mother’s restlessness. He refilled his mug and took the phone back out to the Adirondack chair.
“And?” he prompted.
“I was wondering how you were doing,” she said.
“You mean am I eating a vegetable?”
“That, too.”
“You should try one, it’s kind of fun. Full of vitamins.”
“Hank—”
“Kim’ll come back, Mombo. I think.”
Silence. His mother cleared her throat. “Are you—”
“Drinking? Not yet.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, I just had the most interesting talk with a young woman exactly your age. Very pretty.”
“Whoa! Are you trying to set me up? Has it gotten to that?” He almost laughed.
“No, no. I just—”
Hank set his cup down on the arm of the chair. The mug said Trouts Fly Fishing and had a watercolor graphic of a speckled rainbow leaping for a mayfly. It was corny but he liked it. It gave him some comfort, especially on waking to a half-empty bed.
“This woman called you?”
“Yes.”
“She wanted to tell you a story?”
“Yes.”
“She wanted to hire you?”
“I’m not sure. Yes, probably. I haven’t heard the full story, but there’s something about it.”
“If she does—want to hire you—will you take it?”
“That’s what I’m not sure about. It’s been an exhausting year. Are you eating regular meals?” she said.
“Mombo, I made green chili yesterday. And I got an assignment from Brad at BusinessWeek. About the surfing industry, go figure.”
“Oh, great. How’s the poetry?”
He deflected the question. “I caught a twelve-pound carp below the stadium yesterday.”
“In the Platte? Wow. On what? Remember when you took me down there and we caught a body?” She had taught him to throw big streamers in the Ausable when he could barely hold a rod, and a few years ago in Denver they had snagged the body of a young man one morning. She had. That was another story.
“How could I forget? I got the carp on a Clouser crayfish. Number eight. Mombo?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t worry,” he said.
“Why on earth would I ever worry about you?” She kissed the phone and hung up.
The second morning after Gabriela’s visit, Celine woke to breakfast in bed. She had dreamed of a big hospital on an empty gray beach. The hospital didn’t seem to have any doctors and there were hundreds of empty rooms. Musical scores were taped onto the green doors instead of charts.
She sat up and felt for her oversize tortoiseshell reading glasses.
“Oh, Pete.” She reached up for a kiss. On the silver tray was a soft-boiled egg in its cup, the tiny spoon, toast, marmalade, coffee, and an envelope. On the envelope her name, in blue ink, in a free and flowing hand. She ate the egg, drank half a cup of coffee, and then opened the letter with the penknife she kept on the bedside table. Inside were five or six sheets of fine, pale blue stationery, handwritten, and she didn’t have to flip to the end to know who it was from.
“It was under the door,” Pete said. “She must have come very early.” Celine heard a trace of respect. For some reason Pete always admired people who got up even earlier than he did. She read:
“Dear Celine, Thank you. For the wonderful dinner and for your kind attention. Your willingness to listen. It means the world to me.
“I was telling you about the death of my mother. What happened next. Easier, I think, if I write it. After the accident, Pop tried. He did. The next two months after the funeral are a blur. I remember that we flew out east and spent a few weeks up in the Adirondacks at a cabin a friend had loaned us. Near Keene Valley. We spent a lot of time swimming in icy-cold water beneath a waterfall and we didn’t say much. I remember the way these tiny bubbles came up through the black depths of a stone pothole.” Celine let a warm memory overtake her: She might have swum in that very pool, it was probably on Johns Brook, beside the first lean-to shelter. She so loved that country. She had taught Hank to fish there, and to start a fire, before he entered first grade. She continued reading: “He took me canoeing on Saranac Lake and we caught fish. When school started, I know he must have been getting drunk at night because he forgot to wake me up.
“Sometimes I had to pull and drag him out of bed. He would resist and moan and then when he woke up and his bleary eyes focused I would see that he was awake and that he was seeing me and he would stare. Not like at me, Gabriela, his daughter, but like down a long street where he would find me and search my face, at first desperately, then with some kind of relief, then with growing anguish, and I knew he was not seeing me but the face of my mother.
“I cannot describe the effect this had on me. It made me feel both desperate to be consoled and also like a ghost. I would tell him that I was hungry, and often there was nothing in the fridge or pantry and he would take my hand and, still wearing the same clothes he had the night before, he would walk me down the hill on Clayton. He’d take me to the bakery on Haight and buy me a blueberry Danish and a carton of milk and then walk me to the French American School. That was the year of the Summer of Love, which of course I didn’t know then, but I remember the colorful clothes, and all the smells of what must have been pot and patchouli and sweat, and people playing guitars and all kinds of drums, and handing out food. There was this one kid with beautiful blond hair to his waist who handed out apples. It was his thing. He gave me an apple almost every day. Sometimes we took the streetcar on Divisadero for a few blocks just for fun. I didn’t care that Pop was unshaven and rumpled. I would cling to his hand. He was a very handsome man, even with a three-day beard, and I could see the way the young mothers looked at him and talked to him when he dropped me off, a mixture of maternal pity and lust. I could not name it then but I felt it—that he was desirable. I could see the way women, even my teachers, lit up, the way they changed when they talked to him.
“Well, he was a National Geographic photographer and an adventurer and just so handsome and he had just lost his beautiful wife.”
Celine closed her eyes. Nineteen sixty-seven was the year Hank had started at Saint Ann’s, which had recently opened. There was no Summer of Love in Brooklyn Heights, but it was a wonderful, exciting time. They were living on Grace Court and her own marriage was still strong—she would not have felt the pull of the dashing photojournalist. Everything with Wilson would not unravel until Hank was at boarding school. That’s when the drinking started. A few years she would rather forget.
“In the afternoon it was the same,” Gabriela wrote. “He often forgot to pick me up. There was often no dinner. When he came out of his reverie and realized that an eight-year-old girl can’t live on vodka the way he did, he would rouse himself and off we would go to the Mediterranean restaurant on Haight, or the Japanese place on Cole that’s gone now and I would eat nothing but tempura. God, I would have been roly-poly but for all the meals I missed.”
Celine paused again. She could see it—there was something ascetic in the beauty of the young woman, and now she knew where it had come from: deprivation.
She continued reading: “Did I ask him about Mom? I don’t remember ever asking. Is that crazy? Maybe not. The
re was a hole there, it spoke for itself. I didn’t want any other explanation, I guess, anything at all that would get the Absence vibrating any more than it was, because the Absence was an utter ache, a black ball sitting very still in the middle of my chest. I knew that if it moved too much—that the vibrations of questions and half answers would tear me apart, cell from cell. I intuited this.
“That was third grade, with Miss Lough. I remember it was on the second floor of the new building on Grove.” Celine had heard of the French American International School. It was a very progressive private school that started about the same time as Saint Ann’s, and like Hank’s school it began with just a few kids. “She was very tender with me. Sometimes when Pop forgot to pick me up she would wait with me outside, and then she would glance at her watch and try not to look too sad. She was very kind. Then she would whistle out a sigh and take my hand and say, ‘What shall we sing while we walk?’ It was lucky she had a boyfriend in the Haight. I took it all in stride. When you’re that little you don’t know any better. I don’t even think I was unhappy, I don’t remember that as a particularly bad year. I missed Amana terribly. Jackson, too. As far as I was concerned this was the way life went when you were seven or eight. Sometimes your mother didn’t come home for good, forever. Sometimes your father forgot stuff, sometimes you went hungry.
“And then one evening, at the end of our year with Miss Lough, Pop came home with a loud buxom cigarette-smoking nurse named Danette and they got married at city hall and she cleaned him up and put food in the cupboards. Not long after that she caught him looking at me across the dinner plates and she went and plucked up the picture of Amana on the hall table—she’s on the deck of some ferry, smiling into the wind with the hair blowing across her face—I loved that picture so much—and Danette stomped back and held it up to my own face and practically spit at Pop, ‘Every time you look at her you see her,’ and jabbed her finger at Mom. I felt as if she were jabbing it into my own chest, I winced and started to cry.
“ ‘That’s enough!’ she said. ‘I can’t live like this. You’—she aimed her finger at Pop and her chest heaved, she was wearing a low-cut V-neck thing with no bra and there was a lot of chest to heave—‘you figure out how this is going to work!’ and she slammed out the front door.
“The next week they put me in my own apartment downstairs. With my own key and my own food. I was eight.”
Celine set down the page. “You lived in your own apartment in third grade?” she murmured to no one. She drained her coffee cup and refilled it from the carafe Pete had brought with the tray. “You’re kidding.”
Why didn’t her teachers know that? she thought. They should have. Well. Gabriela’s words didn’t feel like an indictment of her teachers or her family, but Celine might have taken them that way. Gabriela must have realized it, because the next line read: “Maybe I didn’t know how screwed up that was. Pop told me the building was one big house and I was going to have a special treat usually reserved for older girls, I was going to have my own big room and even my own kitchen. You know, I could always tell when he was lying. Especially to himself. Sometimes I felt that way when he talked about his travels.”
She thought about the young woman she had met the other night. Gabriela had a remoteness and a self-reliance that might make her unapproachable. And a sadness, she realized now. Very quiet, underneath it all.
Celine continued: “Pop was often in Ecuador shooting for the Smithsonian, or in Guatemala for National Geographic. He loved to ski in the Andes. The other parents had a heroic picture of him, I could tell. He spent a lot of time in South America and someone later told me that the rumor was that he worked for the CIA. Ha. What people always thought about someone who had a life that was just a little interesting or exotic. And when they saw him—this was later, after the first months of sodden grief—in his tight black T-shirts with his strong arms and clean jawline and his hair like James Dean’s with the swept-up wave in front, his easy laugh, and especially with the air of having just been somewhere exotic and dangerous—it was like a breeze that came off him, you could smell it—everyone was charmed by Pop.”
I bet, Celine thought. She always thought it was interesting that the most charming people—if you scratched the surface—were often the saddest. Celine topped her cup to warm it up and found her place at the bottom of the page.
“Well, that was the part I wasn’t sure I could get through. Not so bad after all. I think I realized as I was writing it that every family is screwed up once you scratch the surface. After all, how many little girls before me had an evil stepmom? Ha!”
That was one way of looking at it.
“It never got easier with Danette. I kept trying to think of her as a mother, but it was too painful, and as young as I was, I think I understood that some relationships are as inevitable and unchangeable as the seasons. I gave up. I spent time with Pop whenever I could, I kept a protected space in my heart for him, for us, but I had to be almost surreptitious. I lived downstairs, I went to school, I grew up. And then something happened.
“Thank you for reading this. I’d like to tell you the rest in person—the reason why I looked you up. I’ll be here until tomorrow afternoon. If you think you have the stamina—there’s not much more—I’ll run down to see you.
“With gratitude and affection, Gabriela.”
And her cell number. Celine set down the letter and reached for the phone on her bedside table and called.
Gabriela literally ran. She met Celine on the dock at the same spot they’d been two nights ago, but now she was in pale green running shorts, training shoes, and a fitted T-shirt of an Alaskan salmon colored in blocks like a Rothko. Fine beads of sweat misted her cheeks.
A warm, mid-September late morning, the dock bustling with tourists. Celine said, “You didn’t bring the file.” She stretched up and kissed the girl on both cheeks.
“I’m sick of carrying it around. I thought that if you wanted to see anything I’d copy and send it. I’d like to hold on to the originals anyway. Where were we?”
“You had your own apartment. You were all of eight.”
“Okay. Whew.” Gabriela blew a stray hair out of her face. She leaned on the railing and watched snowy gulls gyre out from under the bridge. “I missed Amana terribly. But I didn’t feel—I don’t know—like an outcast or anything. When you’re little you accept things, as I said. I guess I thought that this was something that just happens to some little girls. They get their own apartment. They cook their own meals. Some days I even got myself to school. Thinking about it now, that was crazy—”
“Back up. You didn’t join them for dinner? You didn’t go up for breakfast?”
“I had a key. It was a big, pale blue Victorian with a few apartments, it wasn’t like it was supermax or anything. And I did sometimes. Dinner, never breakfast, because in the morning they were usually hungover and a little mean. She was, and Pop in his morning-after fugue was helpless to protect me. So I ate cold cereal for breakfast, I mean I had a fridge and all, and Danette made sure I had generic cornflakes and ramen and cheap hamburger. She clearly didn’t want me to show up at school looking starved and then have Social Services come in. Remember she was a registered nurse, she had a professional reputation, and I guess she had her pride. A monster never sees itself as a monster. Remember poor Grendel.”
“Right. Poor Grendel.”
“I had a step stool, the kind little kids use to brush their teeth, and I had it by the stove so I could stir the noodles and cans of soup. I learned to fry eggs. For my ninth birthday Danette got me an omelet pan.”
“What did your father get you?”
“A trip to the Ice Capades.”
“Did Danette come too?”
“Yes, of course. She would have never let us go off to something as celebratory as the Ice Capades alone. It would be like letting Pop have some kind of ghost date with Amana. I know, it’s so fucked up. He couldn’t get three seats together because of course
he remembered and got the tickets at the very last minute, so I sat in front of them. Pop bought me like three cotton candies and a tub of popcorn because I guess he felt guilty and I got sick. I threw up on the sidewalk and Danette threw a fit.”
“Wow.”
“I know. But before I got sick, Pop used his press pass and we went backstage and I met the Hula-Hoop lady.”
“Who was that?”
“She was a Romanian, tall and blond and sequined, terribly glamorous, perfectly in the Olympic figure-skater vein, but she did her act with Hula-Hoops! She could twirl, like, a dozen, on her arms and everything, while she skated. I thought she was the most queenly thing I’d ever seen. I still have a picture Pop took of me in my pink princess dress with a plastic tiara on my head staring up in unadulterated awe at this six-foot ice queen.”
“This all sounds like some strange nightmare. It almost makes me woozy.”
“I know. Please don’t hate my father. I’m coming to understand. That he did the best he could. I’m convinced that he loved my mother more than anything on earth. More, even. With more love than can exist in the universe. It was too much. To lose her. Which makes his running with me up the trail even more heroic.” Her tone shifted. It deepened and saddened like rain when the wind stops and it falls straight down through trees. “I think he tried to live every day just so he wouldn’t die.”
I think he tried to live every day just so he wouldn’t die.
The line would become a refrain Celine couldn’t shake, like the chorus of a song. That was one way of putting it. Why some of us put one foot in front of the other. Celine had done enough of that in her own life. She wasn’t much older than the little girl in this story when she lost, for all intents and purposes, her own father. And just a few years later, something much more devastating.
