The Year My Mother Came Back

by Alice Eve Cohen

“So,” he continues. “You can go to camp this summer. You have only three restrictions: avoid contact sports, no jumping from high places, and don’t fall down.”

  “But what if I do fall down?”

  “Don’t. Just don’t. That’s all there is to it, no falling. Falling would be bad. The X ray looks great. You look great.”

  She does look great, sitting on the examining table in oversized, hospital-issue gym shorts, finally rid of all that hardware. And even I can see that the new X ray looks excellent. The once scary gap in her femur is filled in with solid bone, good as new and five centimeters longer.

  “Looking ahead,” he says to me, “you’ll have to make a decision about the second surgery. The next one is at your discretion.”

  “Does ‘at your discretion’ mean the second surgery is optional?” I ask.

  “No, of course not. We’re not going to let Eliana wear a shoe lift her whole life. It’s the timing of the second surgery that’s up to you. As you know, I recommend completing the lengthening process before she enters high school. Come back in October for X rays. Have a good summer.”

  “Can you close the door, Mom?” Eliana whispers, as soon as Dr. Campbell leaves the room.

  I close the door.

  “Can anyone hear us?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” She sits very still on the examination table, her shoulders tense.

  “What is it, Honey?”

  “I will never, ever, have leg-lengthening surgery again.”

  “We don’t have to talk about it now. We can think about it again in a year.”

  “I won’t change my mind in a year. I mean it, Mom. I refuse to have this surgery ever again.”

  “I promise you won’t have surgery during middle school. You don’t have to think about it for four years. You might change your mind when you’re in high school.”

  “Mom!” She looks me in the eye, silencing me, making sure she has my undivided attention. “I won’t change my mind.”

  ELIANA IS NOT yet happy, but she’s on the mend.

  Julia is über-happy.

  Michael is reasonably happy.

  I allow myself cautious optimism. We made it through the darkest times of this terrible year. Maybe, just maybe, I’m, I’m—

  ON THE LAST day of May, my alarm radio wakes me with the terrible news: “Dr. George Tiller, the prominent and polarizing abortion provider, was killed Sunday, gunned down during morning services at his church in Wichita, Kansas . . .”

  No!

  I think back to that terrifying time, ten years ago, when I found out that I was six months pregnant. I had every reason to believe the fetus was injured, could imagine no good outcome, feared I’d never be able to love my baby, felt so hopeless that I thought about killing myself. I scheduled an abortion with Dr. Tiller in Wichita, and I began to feel less trapped. The suicidal thoughts abated. I decided to have the baby.

  If I hadn’t been given a choice, would I have taken my life?

  I don’t know.

  If I hadn’t chosen to give birth, would I love Eliana as deeply and completely as I do now, or would my feelings have been subverted by despair, guilt, and anger?

  I don’t know.

  I never met Dr. Tiller, but I believe he saved both of our lives. I need to tell Eliana about him. I want her to know he was part of her life. I’m not keeping secrets from her anymore.

  “Eliana, do you know what an abortion is?”

  “Duh, I’m in fourth grade.”

  “Well, when I was in fourth grade, I didn’t even know—Oh, never mind. I want to talk to you about something important.”

  I tell her about Dr. Tiller, about his work and about his murder. I tell her the story of her birth. Everything: the good parts and the bad parts. No more secrets.

  “Does it upset you to know that I wanted to have an abortion?”

  “No, I was just a fetus. I don’t care what you thought of me before I was born. I care what you think of me now.”

  I hold her close. “I love you so much.”

  “I know.”

  Before this moment, I’ve never forgiven myself for that time when I didn’t want Eliana. When I didn’t want to be her mother.

  I think about the terrible years after Mom’s surgery, when my loving mother disappeared and was replaced by a gray stranger who—it seemed to me—no longer wanted to be my mother. I finally understand that she was always there. That she couldn’t help being sick and sad. That she was doing the best she could. That those years were as painful for her as they were for me.

  I’ve never forgiven myself—or my mother—for the crime of maternal ambivalence.

  I forgive my mother.

  I forgive myself.

  “I KNOW IT’S not logical.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” asks Michael.

  “No. Whenever I start to feel really happy, I’m scared that the Evil Eye will get me. Like the way my mom died, just two weeks after saying that she was happy for the first time in years.”

  “You’re not joking?”

  “I wish I were.”

  “I thought you used the Evil Eye as a literary device.”

  “That, too.”

  “I mean, if you enjoy thinking about the Evil Eye—”

  “No! I don’t enjoy it, not at all. It makes me feel stupid and cowardly.”

  I start to cry. Michael must think I’m a moron. He’s probably stifling a laugh, but he pulls me onto his lap and hugs me.

  “Listen up, Alice. Don’t worry about the Evil Eye anymore. It’s a waste of your time. Don’t think about it. You’ll be fine. Nothing bad will happen. Just don’t worry.”

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  “Good.” And he kisses me. He kisses me again. He’s a great kisser. I’m so in love with this guy. He pulls me down beside him and we kiss some more, and we unbutton, unzip, undress, caress, make love.

  I lie with my head on his chest, content and happy.

  I’m happy.

  Lightning didn’t strike. I didn’t spit three times through my middle and index finger. I didn’t throw salt over my left shoulder. I didn’t turn a glass upside down. Nothing bad happened.

  Take that, Evil Eye!

  MICHAEL AND I visit the girls at camp in Maine. Julia is a counselor, Eliana a camper. We watch Julia teach an organic baking class, and I sample the most delicious cookies I have ever tasted. We hike to the lake to watch Eliana’s swim class.

  “I have exciting news,” Julia tells us at our picnic lunch. “Next week, I’m going to meet my biological grandmother.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way. She lives in Maine, and she’s driving to camp to meet me. She’s my birth father’s mother. Zoe has been in touch with her and told her I was working here.”

  “That’s fantastic.”

  “I know! Isn’t it?”

  “You think you’ll ever meet your birth father?”

  “One day, probably.”

  “Wow!” This is all good, but my head is spinning.

  “Oh, by the way, Mom,” says Eliana, “there’s something I need to tell you. I didn’t think I should write this in a letter, because I thought it might make you nervous.”

  “I’m nervous already. What is it?”

  “We went to an island and I jumped from a thirty-foot cliff into a lake.”

  “You jumped from a thirty-foot cliff?”

  “Yup. Like about twenty times. It was so fun.”

  My heart ricochets around my chest like a pinball machine. “And . . . and your leg felt okay?”

  “Totally! Oh, and last week I was trampled by a llama.”

  “Trampled by a llama?”

  “Yeah, by Alex, my favorite llama.”

  “What part of you did Alex trample?”

  “My right leg. I was taking him for a walk, and his feet sank in the mud, which freaked him out. He panicked, tried to run, knocked me down, and trampled my right leg. It hurt for a few minutes, but I’m total
ly fine now. I figured it would be better to tell you in person.”

  “You know me well.”

  After lunch, Julia enlists us to help paint the set for the camp play. She’s codirecting, and Eliana is acting in it.

  We paint cardboard cartons, under a dazzling blue sky.

  “Gorgeous day,” I say.

  “It’s gonna rain,” says Julia, painting a box with efficient brush strokes.

  “Yup, it’ll definitely rain,” says Eliana, getting as much paint on her jeans as on the box.

  “You’re kidding, right?” I say.

  “Nope,” says Julia.

  “It’ll rain,” says Eliana.

  “But there’s not a cloud in sight,” says Michael.

  Crash of thunder.

  “Grab the boxes!” shouts Julia.

  It’s a downpour. We run inside. Soaked. Laughing. Happy.

  Let’s see if I have this right: My daughters love the calm before the storm, and they love the storm, and the calm after the storm, which is a truer sort of calm. And because they no longer need me to protect them from changing and unpredictable forces of nature and emotion, and thirty-foot cliffs, and freaked-out llamas, I am free to let go of my habitual, anticipatory dread of both storm and calm.

  NINE

  I dream about my mother. She’s a little girl in a white cotton dress, running with her Grandfather Jake in his peach orchard in Oklahoma. She’s a teenager, studying late at night in her dark, unhappy house in Brooklyn. She’s a fashionable Barnard student, typing papers. She goes on a date with Ira, the handsome Coast Guard officer back from the war, the one she was waiting for. She’s on a research team with Margaret Mead. She gives birth to Madeline and is madly in love with her first-born child. She has a miscarriage, and then another, and another. She holds me in her arms, relieved that I made it. She comes home on a winter day with baby Jennifer. She takes me campaigning for civil rights. She plays tennis with Ira. She makes chicken soup. She naps on the hammock and birds alight on her book. She types and types and can’t finish her dissertation. She gets sick. She’s furious because I suddenly have breasts and she suddenly has none. She suspects Ira of infidelity. She types and types. She visits me at college, we have a picnic, somebody takes our picture. I treat her to lunch at the Indian restaurant. She’s happy for the first time in years. She is sleeping beside Ira, suddenly sits up with her head in her hands, slumps back on her pillow. She has had a ruptured aneurism. I see it through her eyes, I see the blood and her blurred vision, I feel the unbearable pressure in her head, I hear the sound of the ambulance siren and then nothing.

  THE LAST TIME I saw my mother was the day I took her to the Indian restaurant, when she was fifty-seven and I was twenty-two, a year out of college, on the cusp of adulthood.

  That was the year my mother came back.

  She came back as herself, the way I remembered her, the way I wanted her to be, after years of sickness and sadness and anger; and after my years of stormy teenage sadness and anger. She finally came back. For one year. And at the end of that year, she died.

  I WALK THROUGH the Ramble on a windy July morning, and sit on a wooden bench in a grove of trees. The air smells like honeysuckle. A sparrow lands on the bench beside me. It hops closer. I remember when birds loved to land beside my mother on the hammock.

  A wind rustles through the leaves, which flash their shimmering silver underbellies like they do before a storm. There’s a stirring in the trees, with much birdsong and flying about. The sparrow flies away. I wipe tears from my eyes.

  Mom, Mommy, Louise.

  She flies under the leaves toward me, shimmering but invisible. The wind picks up, and I feel the warmth of her and the chill of her.

  A warm, salty breeze wraps itself around me. It’s my mother’s hug. I want her here with me. It doesn’t matter whether she’s a ghost, or a memory, or my idea, or her idea, or God’s idea, or dust, or sound waves, or transfigured molecules, or an echo from the Cosmos. She’s here with me.

  Mom throws salt over her left shoulder and over my left shoulder. In the next gust of wind, the salt floats and billows and swirls around me, blowing my long hair in all directions, and protecting me with salty swirls of luck and courage.

  My mother is back.

  “I love you,” I whisper.

  “I love you,” echoes the wind.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my brilliant editor, Andra Miller, for her insight, wisdom, and enormous patience; and to Sally Wofford-Girand, my remarkable agent, for her expert advice and personal warmth, and for finding the perfect home for this book at Algonquin.

  Many thanks to my smart friends who generously read drafts and shared invaluable insights and suggestions: Juliette Carrillo, Barbara Kancelbaum, Melissa Kraft, Kathy Mendeloff, Jacqueline Reingold, Ricki Rosen, Susan Stephen, and Heather Tait. To my writer friends and colleagues who brainstormed with me over cups of coffee and glasses of wine, and gave me courage when I most needed it, thanks to Libba Bray, Randi Epstein, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Ruth Ozeki, and Jon Reiner. Thanks to the Upper West Side Writers Gang for our collective mulling, laughing, and cheering on; to Abigail Thomas for teaching me how to write courageously; to my colleagues at the New School Writing Program for their support and inspiration; to my students, from whom I’m constantly learning; to my friends Galia and Steve Moors, whose living room salons were safe havens for trying out early chapters-in-progress.

  I’m indebted to the Writers Room, where I began this project, and to the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, for three weeks of uninterrupted writing in a utopic setting, with three meals a day, a room with a view, and the exhilarating company of fellow artists.

  I’m grateful every day to my remarkable sisters, Madeline Cohen and Jennifer Cohen, my best friends and confidantes, who helped me remember details about our childhood and who offered thoughtful feedback and support throughout the project.

  Boundless love and gratitude to my amazing family—my husband Michael and daughters Julia and Eliana—for allowing me to tell the story of our turbulent year. (Of course, if you ask them to tell the story, they would each tell it differently.) Eliana, thanks also for allowing me to publish your poem.

  Deepest love and gratitude to my late parents: my affectionate, encouraging, and whimsical father, Ira Cohen; and my wonderful, complicated, loving mother, Louise Giventer Cohen.

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2015 by Alice Eve Cohen. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  eISBN 978-1-61620-431-0