You Have Never Been Here

by Mary Rickert

  He sits in the recliner. “They were in the bedroom. They’re your responsibility now.”

  “Are these—”

  “Bloodstone, it’s called. At least that’s what your mother said, but you know, like I told you, she was already getting the Alzheimer’s back then.”

  “Bloodstone? Where did she—”

  “I already told you.” He looks at me, squinty-eyed, and I almost laugh when I realize he is trying to decide if I have Alzheimer’s now. “She wouldn’t stop. She almost drove me crazy with her nonsense. She kept saying it, all the time, ‘Why’d he have to die anyway?’ You get that? ‘Anyway,’ that’s what she said, ‘Why’d he have to die anyway,’ like there was a choice or something. Finally one day I just lost it and I guess I hollered at her real bad and she goes, ‘What if you could save the world? What if all you had to do was sacrifice one life, not your own, but, oh, let’s say, Tony’s, and there would be no more war, would you do it?’ I reminded her that our Tony—” His voice cracks. He reaches for the remote control and turns the TV on but leaves the sound off. “She says, ‘I know he’s dead anyway, but I mean before he died, what would you have done?’ ”

  “And I told her, ‘The world can go to hell.’ ” He looks at me, the colors from the TV screen flickering across his face. “The whole world can just go to hell if I could have him back for even one more day, one more goddamned hour.” For a moment I think he might cry, but he moves his mouth as if he’s sucking on something sour and continues. “And she says, ‘That’s what I decided. But then he died anyway.’ ”

  I look at the red spots on the stones. My father makes an odd noise, a sort of rasping gasp. I look up to the shock of his teary eyes.

  “So she tells me that these stones were given to her by her mother. You remember Grandma Helen, don’t you?”

  “No, she died before—”

  “Well, she went nuts too. So you see, it runs in the women of the family. You should probably watch out for that. Anyway, your mother tells me that her mother gave her these stones when she got married. There’s one for every generation of Mackeys, that was your mother’s name before she married me. There’s a stone for her mother and her mother’s mother, and so on, and so on, since before time began, I guess. They weren’t all Mackeys, naturally, and anyhow, every daughter gets them.”

  “But why?”

  “Well, see, this is the part that just shows how nuts she was. She tells me, she says, that all the women in her family got to decide. If they send their son to war and, you know, agree to the sacrifice, they are supposed to bury the stones in the garden. Under a full moon or some nonsense like that. Then the boy will die in the war but that would be it, okay? There would never be another war again in the whole world.”

  “What a fantastic story.”

  “But if they didn’t agree to this sacrifice, the mother just kept the stones, you know, and the son went to war and didn’t die there, he was like protected from dying in the war but, you know, the wars just kept happening. Other people’s sons would die instead.”

  “Are you saying that Mom thought she could have saved the world if Tony had died in Vietnam?”

  “Yep.”

  “But Dad, that’s just—”

  “I know. Alzheimer’s. We didn’t know it back then, of course. She really believed this nonsense too, let me tell you. She told me if she had just let Tony die in Vietnam at least she could have saved everyone else’s sons. There weren’t girl soldiers then, like there are now, you know. ’Course he just died anyway.”

  “Tony didn’t want to go to Vietnam.”

  “Well, she was sure she could have convinced him.” He waves his hand as though brushing away a fly. “She was nuts, what can I say? Take those things out of here. Take the box of them. I never want to see them again.”

  When I get home the kitchen is, well, not gleaming, but devoid of pot roast. Robbie left a note scrawled in black marker on the magnetic board on the refrigerator. Out. Back later. I stare at it while I convince myself that he is fine. He will be back, unlike Tony who died or Robbie’s father who left me when I was six months pregnant because, he said, he realized he had to pursue his first love, figure skating.

  I light the birch candle to help get rid of the cooked meat smell, which still lingers in the air, sweep the floor, wipe the counters and the table. Then I make myself a cup of decaf tea. While it steeps, I change into my pajamas. Finally, I sit on the couch in front of the TV, the shoebox of stones on the coffee table in front of me. I sip my tea and watch the news, right from the start so I see all the gruesome stuff, the latest suicide bombing, people with grief-ravaged faces carrying bloody bodies, a weeping mother in robes, and then, a special report, an interview with the mother of a suicide bomber clutching the picture of her dead son and saying, “He is saving the world.”

  I turn off the TV, put the cup of tea down, and pick up the shoebox of stones. They rattle in there, like bones, I think, remembering the box that held Tony’s ashes after he was cremated. I tuck the shoebox under my arm, blow out the candle in the kitchen, check that the doors are locked, and go to bed. But it is the oddest thing: the whole time I am doing these tasks, I am thinking about taking one of those stones and putting it into my mouth, sucking it like a lozenge. It makes no sense, a strange impulse, I think, a weird synapse in my brain, a reaction to today’s stress. I shove the shoebox under my bed, lick my lips and move my mouth as though sucking on something sour. Then, just as my head hits the pillow, I sit straight up, remembering.

  It was after Tony’s memorial, after everyone had left our house. There was an odd smell in the air, the scent of strange perfumes and flowers (I remember a bouquet of white flowers already dropping petals in the heat) mingled with the odor of unusual foods, casseroles and cakes, which had begun arriving within hours after we learned of Tony’s death. There was also a new silence, a different kind of silence than any I had ever experienced before in my eleven years. It was a heavy silence and, oddly, it had an odor all its own, sweaty and sour. I felt achingly alone as I walked through the rooms, looking for my parents, wondering if they, too, had died. Finally, I found my father sitting on the front porch, weeping. It was too terrible to watch. Following the faint noises I heard coming from there, I next went to the kitchen. And that’s when I saw my mother sitting at the table, picking stones out of a shoebox and shoving them into her mouth. My brother was dead. My father was weeping on the porch and my mother was sitting in the kitchen, sucking on stones. I couldn’t think of what to do about any of it. Without saying anything, I turned around and went to bed.

  It is so strange, what we remember, what we forget. I try to remember everything I can about Tony. It is not very much, and some of it is suspect. For instance, I think I remember us standing next to the Volkswagen while my dad took that photograph, but I’m not even sure that I really remember it because when I picture it in my mind, I see us the way we are in the photograph, as though I am looking at us through a lens, and that is not the way I would have experienced it. Then I try to remember Robbie’s father, and I find very little. Scraps of memory, almost like the sensation when you can hear a song in your head but can’t get it to the part of your brain where you can actually sing it. I decide it isn’t fair to try this with Robbie’s father because I had worked so hard to forget everything about him.

  I wonder if all my mother has really lost is the ability to fake it anymore. To pretend, the way we all do, to be living a memory-rich life. Then I decide that as a sort of homage to her, I will try to remember her, not as she is now, in the nursing home, curled in her bed into the shape of a comma, but how she used to be. I remember her making me a soft-boiled egg, which I colored with a face before she dropped it into the water, and I remember her sitting at the sewing machine with pins in her mouth, and once, in the park, while Tony and I play in the sandbox, she sits on a bench, wearing her blue coat and her Sunday hat, the one with the feathers, her gloved hands in her lap, talking to some man and
laughing, and I remember her sitting at the kitchen table sucking on stones. And that’s it. That’s all I can remember, over and over again, as though my mind is a flipbook and the pages have gotten stuck. It seems there should be more, but as hard as I look, I can’t find any. Finally, I fall asleep.

  Two weeks after my father’s birthday, Robbie tells me that he has enlisted in the Marines. Basically, I completely freak out, and thus discover that a person can be completely freaked out while appearing only slightly so.

  “Don’t be upset, Mom,” Robbie says after his announcement.

  “It doesn’t work like that. You can’t do this and then tell me not to be upset. I’m upset.”

  “It’s just, I don’t know, I’ve always felt like I wanted to be a soldier, ever since I was a little kid. You know, like when people say they ‘got a calling’? I always felt like I had a calling to be a soldier. You know, like Dad with figure skating.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Don’t just sit there, Mom, say something, okay?”

  “When are you leaving?”

  He pulls out the contract he signed, and the brochures and the list of supplies he needs to buy. I read everything and nod and ask questions, and I am completely freaked out. That’s when I begin to wonder if I have been fooling myself about this for my whole adult life, even longer. Now that I think about it, I think maybe I’ve been completely freaked out ever since my mother came into my room and said that Tony’s body had been found in a Dumpster in Berkeley.

  I start to get suspicious of everyone: the newscaster, with her wide, placid face reading the reports of the suicide bombings and the number killed since the war began; my friend Shelly, who’s a doctor, smiling as she nurses her baby (the very vulnerability of which she knows so intimately); even strangers in the mall, in the grocery store, not exactly smiling or looking peaceful, generally, but also not freaking out, and I think, oh, but they are. Everybody is freaking out and just pretending that they aren’t.

  I take up smoking again. Even though I quit twenty years ago, I find it amazingly easy to pick right back up. But it doesn’t take away the strange hunger I’ve developed, and so far resisted, for the bloodstones safely stored in the shoebox under my bed.

  When I visit my mother it is with an invigorated sense of dread. Though I grill her several times, I cannot get her to say anything that makes sense. This leaves me with only my dad.

  “Now, let me get this right, Mom believed that if she buried the bloodstones—are you supposed to bury just one, or all of them?—then that meant Tony would die, right, and there would never be another war?”

  “He had to die over there, see? In Vietnam. He had to be a soldier. It didn’t matter when he died in California; that didn’t have anything to do with it, see?”

  “But why not?”

  “How should I know?” He taps the side of his head with a crooked finger. “She was nuts already way back then. Want my opinion, it was his dying that did it to her, like the walnut tree.”

  “What’s a walnut tree have to do with—”

  “You remember that tree in front of our house. That was one magnificent tree. But then the blight came, and you know what caused it? Just this little invisible fungus, but it killed that giant. You see what I’m talking about?”

  “No, Dad, I really don’t.”

  “It’s like what happened with . . . It was bad, all right? But when you look at a whole entire life, day after day and hour after hour, minute after minute, we were having a good life, me and your mom and you kids. Then this one thing happened and, bam, there goes the walnut tree.”

  That night I dream that my mother is a tree or at least I am talking to a tree in the backyard and calling it Mom. Bombs are exploding all around me. Tony goes by on a bicycle. Robbie walks past, dressed like a soldier but wearing ice skates. I wake up, my heart beating wildly. The first thing I think is, What if it’s true? I lean over the side of the bed and pull out the shoebox, which rattles with stones. I lick my lips. What if I could save the world?

  I open the lid, reach in, and pick up a stone, turning it in my fingers and thumb, enjoying the sensation of smooth. Then I let it drop back into the box, put the lid on, shove it under the bed, and turn on the bedside lamp. For the first time in my entire life, I smoke in bed, using a water glass as an ashtray. Smoking in bed is extremely unwise, but, I reason, at least it’s not nuts. At least I’m not sitting here sucking on stones. That would be nuts.

  While I smoke, I consider the options, in theory. Send my son to war and bury the stones? Did my father say under a full moon? I make a mental note to check that and then, after a few more puffs, get out of bed and start rummaging in my purse until I find my checkbook, with the pen tucked inside. I tear off a check and write on the back of it, Find out if stones have to be buried under full moon or not. Satisfied, I crawl back into bed, being very careful with my lit cigarette.

  There’s a knock on my bedroom door. “Mom? Are you all right?”

  “Just couldn’t sleep.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure, honey.”

  Robbie opens the door and stands there, his brown curls in a shock of confusion on his forehead, the way they get after he’s been wearing a hat. He still has his jacket on and exudes cool air. “Are you smoking?”

  I don’t find this something necessary to respond to. I take a puff. I mean, obviously I am. I squint at him. “You know, people are dying over there.”

  “Mom.”

  “I’m just saying. I want to make sure you know what you’re getting into. I mean, it’s not like you’re home in the evenings watching the news. I just want to make sure you know what’s going on.”

  “I don’t think you should smoke in bed. Jesus, Mom, it really stinks in here. I’m not going to die over there, okay?”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody knows something like that.”

  “I have to go to bed, Mom. Don’t fall asleep with that cigarette, okay?”

  “I’m not a child. Robbie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Would it be worth it to you?”

  “What?”

  “Well, your life? I mean, are you willing to give it up for this?”

  I bring the cigarette to my lips. I am just about to inhale when I realize I can hear him breathing. I hold my own breath so I can listen to the faint but beautiful sound of my son breathing. He sighs. “Yeah, Mom.”

  “All right then. Good night, Robbie.”

  “Good night, Mom.” He shuts the door, gently, not like a boy at all, but like a man trying not to disturb the dreams of a child.

  The next day’s news is particularly grim: six soldiers are killed and a school is bombed. It’s a mistake, of course, and everyone is upset about it.

  Without even having to look at the note I wrote to myself on the back of the check, I call my father and ask him if the stones are supposed to be buried when there’s a full moon. I also make sure he’s certain of the correlations, bury stones, son dies but all wars end, don’t bury stones and son lives but the wars continue.

  My father has a little fit about answering my questions but eventually he tells me, yes, the stones have to be buried under a full moon (and he isn’t sure if it’s one stone or all of them), and yes, I have the correlations right.

  “Is there something about sucking them?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Did Mom ever say anything about sucking the stones?”

  “This thing with Robbie has really knocked the squirrel out of your tree, hasn’t it?”

  I tell him that it is perfectly rational that I be upset about my son going off to fight in a war.

  He says, “Well, the nut sure doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

  “The fruit,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “That expression. It isn’t the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree, it’s the fruit.”

  The d
ay before Robbie is to leave, I visit my mother at the nursing home. I bring the shoebox of stones with me.

  “Listen, Mom,” I hiss into the soft shell of her ear. “I really need you to do everything you can to give me some signal. Robbie’s joined the Marines. Robbie, my son. He’s going to go to war. I need to know what I should do.”

  She stares straight ahead. Actually, staring isn’t quite the right description. The aides tell me that she is not blind, but the expression in her eyes is that of a blind woman. Exasperated, I begin to rearrange the untouched things on her dresser: a little vase with a dried flower in it; some photographs of her and Dad, me and Robbie; a hairbrush. Without giving it much thought, I pick up the shoebox. “Remember these?” I say, lifting the lid. I shake the box under her face. I pick up one of the stones. “Remember?”

  I pry open her mouth. She resists, for some reason, but I pry her lips and teeth apart and shove the stone in, banging it against the plate of her false teeth. She stares straight ahead but makes a funny noise. I keep her mouth open and, practically sitting now, almost on the arm of the chair, grab a handful of stones and begin shoving them into her mouth. Her arms flap up, she jerks her head. “Come on,” I say, “you remember, don’t you?”

  Wildly, her eyes roll, until finally they lock on mine, a faint flicker of recognition, and I am tackled from behind, pulled away from her. There’s a flurry of white pant cuffs near my face, and one white shoe comes dangerously close to stepping on me.

  “Jesus Christ, they’re stones. They’re stones.”

  “Well, get them out.”

  “Those are my stones,” I say, pushing against the floor. A hand presses my back, holding me down.

  “Just stay there,” says a voice I recognize as belonging to my favorite nurse, Anna Vinn.

  Later, in her office, Anna says, “We’re not going to press charges. But you need to stay away for a while. And you should consider some kind of counseling.”