by Levy, Marc
One morning in October, I found myself in the middle of a tough job, wrestling with a drawer slide for a chest. The wood had come from planks that weren’t nearly seasoned enough. The slightest misstep and they’d split apart, which had already happened twenty times over. I was furious that the precious maple was rebelling against my touch. When the mailman arrived and broke my concentration, I admit I was a bit gruff with him. He interrupted me, and for what? All I ever got in the mail was bills and other paperwork from bureaucracies that eat away at life like termites.
Yet that day, he came bearing something else entirely: an anonymous letter. The beautiful handwriting on the envelope gave no hint as to the identity of the sender. I tore open the envelope and sat down to read it.
Dear George,
I hope you don’t mind that I’ve abridged your name, but hyphenated monikers run a bit long for my taste, even when they are as dignified as yours. But I digress. My opinion about your name is not why I’m writing to you today.
I can’t even begin to fathom how difficult it must be to watch your own mother slip away right before your eyes, day after day.
Your mother was a talented and courageous woman. But she was other things, as well. All we can ever see of our parents is what they wish to show us, and we in turn must choose how to see what we’ve been shown. And how easy it is to forget that they had a whole life before us. The life of which I speak was theirs and theirs only, a life with all of its dreams and fantasies, as well as the tormented hardship of youth . . .
Your mother, too, had to break free of her chains. The question is: How?
Did she ever tell you the truth about your father, the man you never knew? How did he meet your mother? Why would he abandon you? There are still so many questions. To uncover the truth, you need to go out and find the answers. Should you decide to do so, I would caution you to conduct your research skillfully. As you might imagine, someone as shrewd as your mother would not simply bury her most intimate secrets somewhere they would be easy to find. As soon as you lay your hands on the proof that will back up my claims—for undoubtedly, your first reaction will be utter disbelief—you will need to venture out to come and find me.
But not until the time comes . . . Until then, take some time to think it over. You’ve much to do. Best get started straightaway.
I hope you’ll forgive me for leaving this letter unsigned. It’s not out of cowardice, I assure you, but rather for your own good that I remain anonymous. I’d caution against telling anyone about this letter. You’d be wise to destroy it as soon as you’ve finished reading it. Keeping it will serve no purpose.
Take my words to heart: I wish nothing but the best for you and your mother.
Without hesitation, I crushed the letter in my fist and threw it across the room. Who in the world would send something like that? For what purpose? How did he know so much about my mother’s health? The whole thing was so full of mysteries, I didn’t even know where to begin. It was impossible to concentrate, a serious problem when working with saws, hand planes, and chisels. I decided to put away my tools and head out. I threw on my jacket and leapt behind the wheel of my pickup.
Two hours later, I pulled up to the gates of the nursing home where my mother had lived for the past two years. It was a stately building perched on a modest little hill in the middle of a large park. Thick, broad-leafed ivy crept up the facade of the building, which seemed to make the structure come to life whenever the wind blew. The care workers were kindhearted people struggling to attend to residents who all suffered from the same affliction. It was the same condition, but the expression of the disease was dramatically different in each patient.
Take my mother’s next-door neighbor, Mr. Gauthier. The poor guy had spent the last five years rereading the same page of a book he never got any closer to finishing. He would come back to page 201 again and again, stuck in a loop all through the day reading the very same passage, and bursting out laughing at the end every time. “Ha! What a riot! Oh, that really is something!” he’d repeat.
Mrs. Lapique was stuck in her own loop, an unending game of solitaire—which tried the patience of any sane person watching—in which she would deal the cards facedown and simply stare at them, not even bothering to flip them over. From time to time, she would graze the surface of a card with trembling hand, murmur something inaudible through a timid little smile, then draw back her finger and leave the card unturned. Then she would gather up all the cards and start all over again: graze the surface of a card with trembling hand, murmur something inaudible through a timid little smile, then draw back her finger and leave the card unturned.
Sixty-seven patients in all lived at the New Age Residence, spending their days drifting about like a throng of ghosts, wholly unaware that their lives had already passed them by.
My mother was both a hardheaded woman and a hopeless romantic. Love was her drug of choice, and her habit could sometimes spin out of control, like with any other drug. Countless times I would come home from school to find a strange man in the house with Mom. They would awkwardly pat me on the shoulder and ask me how I was doing, with sheepish looks on their faces . . . How was I doing? As well as any kid who loved his mother but loathed her “suitors.” Without exception, these men would disappear later that night or the next morning. But my mother would never leave me.
I can’t exactly say what came over me that day the letter arrived. From the moment I read it, I felt anger welling up inside me, a feeling buried away so deep I had forgotten it was even there. I longed for the possibility that the all-consuming disease that afflicted the residents would take just one day off, even for the briefest of interludes, kindly taking a bow and shuffling offstage for a moment’s relief. Mr. Gauthier would actually flip to page 202 and find the new page depressing. Mrs. Lapique’s trembling hand would actually steady and flip over a card, revealing the king of hearts in all his glory. And my mom would actually be able to answer my questions.
I caught sight of her as I entered the space and she smiled at me, one small gesture she still had within her capacity. The subject I had come to raise with her was, as a rule, completely off-limits. On my tenth birthday, I had flatly refused her gift and thrown a massive tantrum in hopes she’d finally tell me who my father was. Did he really flee like a thief in the night just before my birth? Why didn’t he want me in the first place? But my mother’s own tantrum trumped mine, and she swore up and down that she would refuse to even speak to me if I ever dared ask that kind of question again. The fight stormed all through that week, with neither of us uttering a single word to each other. Finally, the following Sunday morning, on the way out of the grocery store, Mom hoisted me up into her arms, hugged me tenderly, and covered me with kisses.
“I forgive you,” she declared with a sigh.
Only my mother had the confidence and the nerve to forgive somebody else for something that was her fault to begin with. My mother was guilty of staying silent and keeping me in the dark, and it was a heavy burden to bear, living under such a shroud of mystery. I tried asking a few more times over the years, but it never worked. If my mother didn’t fly into a rage at the first mention, she would leave in a fit of tears, casting aspersions, lamenting that nothing was ever good enough for me, and that I never failed to rub her face in it, despite all the sacrifices she had made. Finally, at eighteen, I gave up asking. After all, I already knew all that I needed to know. If my father had wanted to meet me, he would have come knocking at our front door by then.
The strange letter must have given me some nerve, because I walked straight into the nursing home, looked my mother dead in the eye, and asked the big questions point-blank.
“Why did he leave us? Did he ever come to see me? Was he one of the men who came during the day to jump your bones while I was at school?”
I instantly felt terrible talking to my mother that way. We definitely got in a lot of fights, but I had never disrespected her like that. It wouldn’t have even crossed my mi
nd to speak to her so harshly when she still had all her wits about her. Had I been dumb enough to try back then, there would have been hell to pay.
“Looks like snow,” my mother said. Her eyes drifted to a nearby table, where a care worker had just finished clearing up Mrs. Lapique’s cards and was now pushing the old woman down the hall in her wheelchair. “They made our walks shorter, which means it won’t be long before first snow. What are you doing for Christmas?”
“It’s October, Mom. Christmas is in two months, and I’ll be right here with you.”
“Oh, no you won’t!” she protested. “I can’t stand turkey! Let’s do Christmas in spring. You can take me to that restaurant I like. What’s it called? You know the one, down by the river?”
The river she was referring to was actually a lake, and the restaurant was a little snack bar that served croissants and sandwiches. Despite all that, I nodded along in agreement. Even if I was still livid, upsetting her would be pointless. She gestured down at my thumb, which was bandaged, the result of a small cut I got a couple of days before.
“You hurt yourself, honey.”
“It’s nothing,” I replied.
“Don’t you have to work today?”
My mother’s mind was perpetually floating in a very special place on the outskirts of reality. She was capable of carrying on the semblance of a conversation for a few short minutes, as long it was limited to small talk. Then, without warning, her mind would start to stray and she’d begin babbling nonsense.
“Melanie didn’t come with you today?”
Melanie and I had broken up two years before when my isolated lifestyle—which had originally attracted her—lost all its charm. After five years living with me on and off, Melanie simply took her things and waltzed out the door, leaving behind nothing but a note on the kitchen table. Her message was short and sweet. You’re a bear deep in the woods, it said.
Women really are something else. How is it they’re able to sometimes say more with one sentence than a man can get out in an entire monologue?
“You’re going to have to buy me an umbrella, you know,” Mom continued, her eyes scanning the ceiling. Then Mr. Gauthier burst into a fit of laughter that made me flinch, cackling away from a nearby chair.
“He sure is one pain in the ass. You know that I once stole it? That book of his? I didn’t find it the least bit funny. So, I gave it back to the old bum. The nurse promised me he’d be dead by New Year’s. I cannot wait!”
“That doesn’t sound like something the nurse would promise.”
“Well, she did! She sure did,” my mother insisted. “Go ask Melanie if you don’t take my word for it. Where’d she duck off to anyway?”
It was starting to get dark, which meant there wasn’t much time left before I’d have to start the drive home. I felt ridiculous having bothered my mother for what I knew to be a lost cause. With a two-hour drive ahead of me, and a whole chest of drawers to finish making by the end of the week, it was time to call it a day. I took Mom by the arm and led her back toward the dining room. Along the way, we crossed paths with a pretty nurse, who gave me a sweet, compassionate smile. What was a pretty girl like that doing in a place like this, constantly surrounded by death? My eyes were drawn to the woman’s breasts. I could just picture her, later tonight, describing her long day to some lucky guy before they made love. Why couldn’t that lucky guy be me? I wondered how it would feel to sleep by her side, to discover what she smelled like, the touch of her skin . . .
Then my mother chuckled and shattered the vision. “If Melanie could see you now! Anyway, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” she said under her breath. “She’s impossible to please, if you catch my drift. Don’t ask how I know, I just do. Full stop!”
Mom may have lost her mind, but she had managed to hang on to her obsession with always being right, down to her favorite catchphrase, “full stop”: an odd Britishism in her otherwise North American vocabulary.
She took a seat in front of her dinner and peered down at the plate with blatant disdain, gesturing with her hand that it was time for me to go. I leaned down and she offered me her cheek for a kiss. Her freckles had long since disappeared, replaced by age spots and wrinkles.
Considering that October day’s particularly strange start, it was more than fitting that it should end with another twist. My mother drew me in close, her grip stronger than usual, and whispered right into my ear.
“He didn’t leave us, honey. He never even knew.”
My heart started beating faster—faster even than the time I slipped and nearly lost my hand to a circular saw. For a moment, I told myself she couldn’t possibly be lucid.
She quickly proved me wrong.
“He never knew what?” I asked.
“That you even existed, my darling.”
I stared deep into my mother’s eyes, not even daring to breathe as I waited for more . . . and then the moment passed.
“Go on, get out of here,” she muttered, lost again. “Snow’s on its way, first snow is coming . . .”
Across the way, Mr. Gauthier was howling with laughter again. Mom tilted her head upwards, looking to the ceiling of the dining hall, her eyes sparkling and full of wonder as though stargazing on a summer night.
My mind was made up. I had no idea how, but I knew once and for all: I was going to find my father.
13
ELEANOR-RIGBY
October 2016, Croydon
While Maggie had more or less decided to ignore the whole thing, I was more determined than ever to find the truth behind the anonymous letter. I lay stretched out on my bed, rereading the letter aloud in a hushed voice, at times speaking right to the author as though he could somehow hear me.
Your mother was a brilliant and remarkable woman, capable of great good . . . and great evil. Until now, you have only known the good. “What exactly do you mean, good and evil?” I said, gnawing at the end of my pencil. I sat up and jotted down in a note, The “evil” must have been before I was born.
As I glanced over what I’d written, it suddenly hit me that I knew next to nothing about my mother’s life before she had children. All I knew came from little anecdotes my parents told, basically snapshots from their “first chapter,” and their conflicting accounts of why they eventually split up. Then, the story jumps years ahead to the night my mother came knocking at Dad’s door again.
But when it came to that ten-year gap between the first and second chapters, I was completely in the dark. I set the letter down on the bed, my mind running in circles. I had been rather young at age thirty-four when I lost my mother, but I knew in my heart that I could have got to know her better if I had tried harder. I had no excuse. I never learned a single thing about her teens or twenties. As much as it now hurt to admit, I just never asked her enough questions. Were we similar at similar ages? How much had we had in common? My mother and I shared the same eyes, facial expressions, and temperament, but that didn’t necessarily mean we were similar.
Before the letter, I never took the time to question my relationship with my mother. I certainly felt close to her. No matter the distance, I had managed to call her, even from the other side of the world. And after I gave her that laptop for Christmas, not a week went by without a video chat. But what did we even talk about, with our faces side by side on-screen? I couldn’t think of a single lasting conversation. Mum would ask about everything happening in my life and my trips around the world. But it often stressed me out to hear how much she worried about me, so I must have sounded evasive at times or, worse, wasted precious time chatting about the weather in classic British fashion.
I thought back to Michel’s blunt question as he gobbled down his scone in that drab tearoom. How was it that I cared more about people I didn’t even know than about my own family? The question stung more than a slap in the face.
Come on, Elby! How the hell did you let so much of your life pass by without finding out who your own mother really was? Was it out of respect,
or because you were scared? Or was it just simple negligence? Of course, the thought that she would be snatched away so suddenly never even crossed your mind. You told yourself you’d ask someday. But someday never came. And now she was gone.
I was surprised to find tears welling up in my eyes. I’m not the emotional type. Well, at least not that emotional.
I only knew your good side. How is it that I had to get a letter from an anonymous shit with weird riddles about your bad side to finally be interested in you? Maybe that’s why you kept so many secrets: you didn’t want to share them with your selfish brat of a daughter. My friends used to get so jealous when I bragged that you were my best friend and I could trust you completely and unconditionally. I knew I could tell you anything. Anything.
But you couldn’t tell me a thing, because every time I knocked at your door, all our time together was reserved for me, and never for you. I thought of the countless times you took me to school in the morning and then picked me up at night. And the countless times you were cleaning or taking care of everything for us kids. I could hear you out there, while I lay in bed, all alone in my room, and I never bothered to venture out and show any interest in you. So proud, with my books and my passion. But the story of your life remained sealed and unread, and now I was left only with blank pages.
Just then, I heard the door to my childhood bedroom creak open, and I turned to find my father staring at me from the hallway.
“Oh, hello, dear. I thought you were at your studio.”
“Well, I just wanted to . . . I don’t know what I wanted.”
Dad came and sat on the edge of the bed.
