I open it. At first it looks like the chest is filled with cardboard. That’s all. Pieces of cardboard. But when my eyes adjust to the symmetry, I see it is really filled with boxes. Plain cardboard boxes stacked alongside one another. Not exactly the same size, but close. I lift one and place it on the floor. Lift out another. And then another. They’re labeled. Each one has a number on it. I pick up number 17 and open it to see a jumble of items: a small flashlight, a white linen sachet tied with a string, an empty jam jar, a pencil sharpener. The sachet smells of cinnamon, cloves, cardamom. I pass the box to Neil. In Number 4 there are a series of hollowed out gourds in the shape of utensils: a ladle, a shallow spoon, a serving fork, thick, flat chopsticks, another spoon. None of these are things my dad would have purchased. More like Lisa’s style, but she would know better than to give them to my dad. In this same box is a hardbound book titled The Eagle, but when I open the pages it turns out to be a book safe with a secret compartment. My hands are shaking now, but I keep opening them. In Number 7 are three empty jam jars and several carved wooden figurines—a whale, an osprey, a salmon. They are intricate and stunning. I put the whale in my pocket. This box also contains a knitted hat—gray with a stripe of navy, and then a scarf, this time lilac, with thin threads of heather. This scarf is feminine and soft but it’s the colors that stop me first.
Here she walks into a fabric store, she’s holding my small hand and with the other she gestures to the bolts of fabric lining the walls. We find the purples and we stand there ticking them off from lavender to plum and everything in between. “Redheads and purple,” she says with a wink. “It’s a color that makes us even taller, even better.”
So here she walks into this room, into this cabin. And I know that all of these objects have some connection to her. I open more boxes and find more items: beeswax candles, a pencil carved from a tree branch and a pressed-flower paper notebook, a pair of knitted gloves.
Neil is behind me. “What is all that?”
My hands are shaking as I take out each and every box. There are thirty-six of them. All labeled. Underneath these boxes are a small stack of documents. Papers. Letters. Some in rubber bands, some just free. I don’t want to read them, don’t want to see her scrawling handwriting again, but when I get brave enough to look I see that the cards bear my father’s name but are unsigned. I don’t recognize the handwriting. And the papers are from someone named Reza. Erica Reza, with a Portland, Oregon address. I rock back on my heels and read them. The dogs have quieted now, and I move between them on the rope rug, leaning against the couch and using their bodies to warm me. I have grown terribly cold in this room. No, these letters are not from my mother but it only takes me a moment to determine that they are about my mother. The tone is informative, kind, but not overly friendly. They are essentially progress reports. I skim them, learning that she is walking better, she is interacting with house members, she is taking her meals with the community. Inside two of the envelopes is a business card for Erica Reza, MSW. I pocket them both, put the letters back in the chest.
I’ve emptied the contents of the chest onto the carpet so I put everything back in again. Neil is looking at me, but I don’t want his looking.
“When was the last time you saw her?” Neil asks.
“She left when I was ten.”
“I know that,” he says. His voice is exasperated. “But you never saw her after that?”
“Never,” I say. “I’ve told you this. She was gone. He never found her.”
Neil shakes his head, says in a quiet, quiet voice, “Except it seems that he did.”
A current moves through me from toe to face.
Neil is staring out the window now. Thoughtful. “Maybe she can explain everything, maybe she’s had help.”
This idea breaks what is left of my kindness. “Then I should be rejoicing shouldn’t I? What luck to lose one parent and have another just waiting in the wings!”
He frowns and I can see him preparing my dad’s defense.
“I know, I know,” I snap, gesturing to the room and what it implies, “he’s never lied to me, right?”
“Ah, Ella, that would be so much easier, wouldn’t it? If you could just fight your way through this.”
A kind of sharp pleasure ignites. I can make him angry, too.
“I know,” he says, his voice cracking, “let’s go yell at your dad. That should help.”
I kneel down, gather the items from the chest all over again. I throw the gourd utensils against the far wall, rip that potpourri sachet and let the spices fly. The dogs chase them, Daisie yips with delight.
Neil silences her with a stern “No.”
Then to me, “Oh, God, Ella – we have to stop this. We’re exhausted. Maybe you need to lie down. You’ve hardly slept. We’ve hardly slept.”
I pitch a pair of gloves at the front window. “Sure, we learn that in vet school. A good night of sleep can cure anything.”
“Would you please stop?”
But I can’t. I grab the scarf and race out of the cabin. The dogs follow and dart ahead. I break into a run. Hear Neil yelling. Halfway down the beach, I startle a fisherman but I race on, only a few hundred feet and I am at the water’s edge and can throw the scarf into the waves. But the awful thing won’t sink and I have to wade in, stomp on it, drown it. My feet are instantly cold in the icy January water, but I stay where I am, and I twist the scarf with my fingers until the wool is finally saturated and gets taken away with the undertow.
Neil catches up and shouts, red-faced now, “Stop escaping! It isn’t fair. It never is.”
I am thrilled by his anger. It is not easy to make Neil lose his temper but now I am set on fireworks.
I start walking down the beach, back toward the marina. My teeth clack, my heavy wet jeans slow me down.
“Don’t do this! Not now!”
He catches up again and for the first time in our relationship, he puts a hand on my arm and he yells in my face. “Stop running away! Stop doing this!” But he isn’t angry enough, he calms down too quickly. “I know you’re not really angry with me. Please!”
But whatever he wants from me, I can’t take it. I turn away again and keep walking. Knowing my refusal to meet him in this conversation can only make him angrier. I need the explosion. I want the bright lights and smell of smoke. I hunker into the wind, my shoulders closed, my legs moving fast. I am waiting for another shout, waiting for him to push me, grab me, or kick at the sand. My thigh muscles burn from walking so fast. The back of my throat stings from my ragged breathing.
But he keeps pace with me, and the voice which reaches me is quiet. Sympathetic. Enraging. “We’ll find her together. I’ll help you. You are not alone in this, Ella.”
I half-turn toward him, I spit out the words. “I’m so not alone, I’m even pregnant.”
Telling him is so selfish. I say it to prove my own victimhood, to wrap myself up in the suffocating blanket of my dad’s death, to barricade my mother in her far away country. He has no right to think that I might want to see her again and to prove this, I give him the biggest reason.
This time he stops me, yanks so hard on my arm that we both stagger. Face each other with the wind at our throats. The dogs are yipping around us. He makes me repeat my phrase.
I watch his face evolve again, first shock, then tentative joy, then confusion. Finally, a pinched misgiving.
“How pregnant are you?”
I wait a moment. Then hazard the truth. “Not very. A few weeks.”
He is holding himself very tight, watching me. Wounded animals are either helpless or dangerous. It is difficult at first to tell which. “Why are you only telling me now?”
I study his face. His light eyes and hair. The thin scar above his eyebrow. The hollow at the base of his throat. I wait, silent, hoarding him into myself. Knowing that this will be an ending of sorts, that I can build a wall. That I must. Me building it from these images of him. Making this distance between us.
&n
bsp; “Because this is the only time we’re ever going to talk of this.”
Neil looks away from me. Moves his eyes off of me and onto his own hands and keeps them focused there. On himself. He does not look back at me. I take a breath. I feel him draw further and further away. There is a relief in this. A pressure removed. How easy it is to destroy Neil’s unmarred history. With just a handful of words I’ve created his first real catastrophe. Made him just a little bit more like me.
19
SO MAYBE THE CALL CAME WHEN I WAS at track practice. This would have been a bit of luck. The phone ringing in the late afternoon, my dad home before his once a week late night run to Bremerton. Maybe the phone rang at the exact moment that Cassandra Weltman nudged past me to win the 200M dash. Maybe while I stood, thighs burning and with my head tipped back to get more air, my father was causally picking up the receiver of the telephone at our house.
Of course my dad never casually picked up that phone because he would have known what kind of news could be waiting—that they’d found her body, or parts of her body. Only enough to identify her.
“I’m looking for someone named John Tomlinson,” the woman might have said.
I see him. I see him nod without speaking. I see the tension in the hand holding that phone. I see him accept the woman’s introduction and her careful request that he sit down, that she has something upsetting to tell him.
He would have tested the feeling of relief—how could he not?—he would have let it rise up and sit next to him at the kitchen table. Eight years. At least he would finally know. “Go ahead.”
Maybe it was a simple exchange. “We’ve found this woman. We think it’s your wife.” And then my dad jumping out of the house, racing to his car, speeding down the highway.
But then he would have had to find a way to go south without telling me. Spend the night in Portland and not let me know. And why would he have done that? Why wouldn’t he have told me about the call?
So maybe the call came while I was already away? Spending the night at a friend’s house, or at a track meet across the state? However it happened, I think about the space of those few hours as he drove south, the change in him. He would have become a man who passed on the right, on the left, who flashed his lights at slow drivers and made gestures, whose foot could not seem to touch the brake but only the accelerator.
Maybe she would have still been in surgery when he arrived. Maybe he even had to wait for her to wake up. But when she did, when he could go in to see her, what would it have been like for him to see her for the first time in so many years? To see what eight years of living mostly on the streets had done to her. He wouldn’t have been alone. Nurses, the surgeon, other staff members. A social worker.
Maybe she is incredibly thin. Maybe her hair is dirty, cut short and ragged. Maybe her skin is bruised and dirty. Maybe her fingernails are ragged. Has she done drugs? Are there bruises and needle tracks? Has she sold herself? Does it show? Is she missing teeth? Are they black?
Maybe she’s wrapped in bandages because of her accident. Maybe they’ve had to shave her head. Maybe her face is bruised, maybe her wrist is broken, several fingers bloodied and raw.
My dad waiting for the moment my mother opens her eyes.
My dad checking her face, trying to find the answers to his questions in the amount of visible damage done to her body.
Maybe my dad says her name, “Maggie?”
Maybe my mother opens her eyes. Maybe she blinks, shifts, sees everyone.
“Maggie?”
She does not answer.
“Maggie? You’ve had an accident.”
Maybe she is watching the ceiling. Maybe her body tenses and the entire room takes in a breath, because maybe she begins to scream and tear at her tubes and bandages. Scratch at her face and thrash in her bed. Because maybe everyone in the room, including my dad and the doctor and the nurses, are part of her delusion at that moment, whatever it was or whatever it had become in those eight years. So maybe she just keeps screaming and fighting, and they try really hard to stop her but they cannot. Maybe she falls into a seizure and has to be sedated. Maybe it takes a really long time for her body to settle, for her to stop hurting herself. Maybe my dad has to leave the room, speak with the social worker.
Maybe the social worker tells him that my mother is still incredibly unwell.
Maybe he cries, his body slumped against the hospital wall, his sobs shuddering through his shoulders, snot running from his nose.
Maybe they suggest she needs a lot more care. Maybe they suggest she will never be like the woman he once knew.
Maybe this is why he never says anything to me.
20
WHAT STRIKES ME FIRST IS HOW MUCH this waiting room matches my own waiting room in Wenatchee. Same black plastic chairs, same dim light, same water tower in the corner, and same coffee table with magazines and brochures. In my waiting room the brochures are about ticks and parasitic disorders of cats and animals, here the brochures are about lactation and venereal disease. But even the set-up is similar, with the nurse-receptionist tucked into the front left corner. As I hand her my filled-out information sheet, I notice that the only thing completely missing is the smell of the animals. And in Wenatchee there are no plants. Instead, here, there are ferns and orchids in a display by the window.
Ferns and orchids. I think about this, what an odd combination it is. And I see again the nurse behind her high counter with its set-in desk, and I wonder if she’s the orchid lady. There is a bright magenta hair clip in her hair, the same color as one of the orchids at the window. The exact same color, so then I think that she must be the orchid lady, and I see her tending them in the evenings when the patients have all gone, talking to them, turning their pots around to catch the earliest morning sunshine the next day. I see her scowl at the ferns. Those aren’t hers and she dislikes their spiky leaves, their deep green, their sprawl and those dusty spores on the undersides of the leaves. The ferns must belong to the doctor. And then I see the disputes that must arise, the doctor wanting her ferns, the receptionist wanting her orchids.
“Ferns belong outside,” the nurse says.
No, this isn’t what she says. She has said, “Ms. Tomlinson? You may go in now. Second door on the left.”
And so I get up. As I pass her, I compliment her orchids, but she just laughs and waves her arm at the window, “Gifts from a former patient. I’m just lucky they like that spot, I’ve got the blackest thumb.”
I have to stop halfway down the hallway to catch my breath, even lean against the wall for a moment.
“Are you alright?”
I shake my head. I’m fine. I just made a mistake is all.
“Ms. Tomlinson?” the nurse is coming toward me and I straighten up, tell her that I’m fine.
“Just a little dizzy,” I say, trying to smile. I want to ask her about the ferns now too, whether they belong to the doctor, but I bite my tongue on the words. I don’t know anything about these people. I don’t know what made me jump to such strange conclusions.
“Come with me and sit down,” she says. She takes my hand, says that I’m cold, and she leads me into the second door on the left. “You’re here for a pregnancy test, yes.”
I nod.
“Have you been dizzy for awhile?”
I shake my head. “Just this morning.”
She looks at me carefully. “The doctor should be right in. But let’s take your blood pressure first.”
She helps me off with my sweater and then slides the cuff onto my arm. I’m breathing carefully. I know how to calm myself down. I think about walking along the beach with Trapp as the nurse pumps air into the cuff. Her hand on my wrist is warm and gentle. I can see myself walking in the deep sand, my shoes off, Trapp scouring for seaweed. I place one foot above the other while the cuff tightens around my wrist, while my heartbeat grows strong and then faint again.
“You’re okay,” she says with real relief in her voice. She smiles at me, “
Scared me for a moment. You were really pale out there.”
I force a smile at her. “I’ve just been rushing around a lot this morning. That’ll teach me.”
She nods, and the doctor opens the door and shuts it behind her. The nurse gives her my blood pressure numbers and then leaves. The doctor skims my file, then nods at me. It’s been several years since I’ve seen her and she’s aged. I remember that she’s a no-nonsense kind of doctor. She likes facts and research.
“Good to see you,” she says.
I agree, although I can tell she doesn’t really remember me.
She glances at my chart, at my information sheet. “You still live in Wenatchee? Or are you back in Seattle for good.”
“Just a visit.”
She nods. “Date of your last period was …?” she scans the paperwork in front of her.
“I don’t know. I never really know.”
She’s caught up now, I can see it on her face. “You’ve had painful fibroids recently? Lots of bleeding?”
I shake my head. “Not for some time.”
“When were you last checked?”
“My regular exam,” I say, counting, “My regular exam last summer. I had two small ones, but they didn’t bother me.”
“And you’ve been trying to get pregnant?”
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