by Anne Valente
Our mothers, as heartbroken as us. Their empty gaze, their listless silence. We knew then that they’d watched for you too, that somewhere beneath what we’d feared in them had burned a radiating hope for a different world. We knew there was no answer, beyond our mothers, and our mother’s mothers and their mothers. That this was what had always been, what they knew to do for us with the world as it was, and the undeniable threads of our blood. We wanted to ask them if we’d ever return, if there would be a time for us after every conflict had passed. But we knew at last that they didn’t know, that they couldn’t predict which way the war would go, what our nation would look like on the other side. We knew at last what they would have wanted to tell us. We knew at last that they dreamed.
We extended our hands to our mothers. We closed the newspapers, even though it broke us to do it. We drew ourselves from the floor and pulled our mothers up by leathered palms that matched the shape of their own.
We watched every search for you, without wanting. We read of every ship that trawled the Phoenix Islands, every naval aircraft that passed above Gardner Island. We memorized your radio transmissions, your final call. We walked gingerly around our mothers, headlines they too couldn’t bear, an honesty we never reclaimed past the morning of your lost flight, a candor we never forged again. We floated through summer, an unmemorable haze. A clockwork of waking and trapping and foresting and foraging, a routine rounded dull by a vacant halo of sky. We cast our newspapers aside when official searching at last ceased. We tried to ignore the continued private searches, the growing rumors that the Pacific still held your secret.
You were declared dead this winter, Amelia. Our fathers have enlisted. After every search was at last called off, all theories debunked, our fathers cast themselves off to other shores. We are finally hiding down here in our dens. We receive no news anymore, not of war, only what winds our mothers can detect. They hold their noses to the night air, their pointed ears to light gusts. We are still learning what we need to know, but we too are building those skills.
We know you are alive, Amelia. We hold the shape of your name in our ears. You were never found, not your plane or clothing, not even the compact and lipsticks you carried in the cockpit with you. We sense your movements in the pulse of air, we feel you flow still through our veins, our burning animal blood. We watch the sky for you, from the lonesome enclave of our dens, and we wait. For this war to end. For our bodies to change. For our fathers to return, a secret they’ll never know, and for the unmistakable glint of your plane above, a glint we would know as separate from stars. We wait while the lobsters grow and grow, lives we can’t help but imagine, undisturbed on the floors of a silent sea. We wait to shed our thick fur, to watch our nails recede to dull moons, to whittle down our bulk and stand tall. We wait for news that they’ve finally found you circling the globe, a bright world beyond our cold dens, a world waiting for us when we crawl up from our knees and rise.
TO A PLACE WHERE WE TAKE FLIGHT
In my head, it sounds better—in my head, I am Johnny Rotten screaming into a tattered microphone, I am Vince Neil shrieking to a sold-out arena, I am Roger Fucking Daltrey singing “Magic Bus” at the Monterey Pop Festival, and Chris is my Keith Moon. We play before thousands, a crowd that cheers wildly when Chris at last smashes his drum set and I throw my mike into the throngs, a ripple like a shockwave through the swarm. We sweat beneath stage lights, our skin like oil slicks, and we march offstage as the lights finally dim, as the crowd begins a slow chant—no, this can’t possibly be the end.
It sounds better in my head.
But here, in Chris’s leaky basement full of house spiders and worn carpeting, we are just two jerks, two nothings with no amps, not even a microphone, only the toy drum set Chris’s dad bought him for Christmas last year. We play for no one, not even Chris’s awestruck little brother, who stayed late at school for origami club—just for the basement rafters above, where the pipes leak rusty water.
But soon, we will. Not the Belmont Jr. High talent show, not Lila Duldorf’s birthday party, not even the Hi-Dive down the street—things we might have once wanted, but now we have no time. Now, we’re focused. We have a plan. We will play Moss Regional Hospital, something Chris’s dad hooked up two days ago, because he knows a guy on the board.
We will play Moss Regional in one week. We will play to save her life.
After we practice for an hour, we grab Hi-C and Twizzlers and sit on Chris’s front porch, right where we were the other day when Chris’s dad came home and told us the news. Chris said right there how fucking awesome that was, and I felt like maybe I could kiss Mr. Winchester, but instead I stuffed a Warhead in my mouth and wondered why I couldn’t say fuck in front of my own dad.
Though now, the real issue is that he’s already given up, just sits watching the same reruns of M.A.S.H. and Three’s Company over and over again while I bike to the hospital after school, or call Mom’s room if I stay at Chris’s too late.
“She knows we’re doing this, right?” Chris bites the end off a Twizzler and looks at me.
“Sure, man, she knows. I told her last night, when we talked.”
“You really think a week is enough time?”
I want to tell him we don’t have any goddamn choice, but I hold my tongue and chew on my thumbnail instead.
“Jesus, Mike, don’t pull that shit on my porch. If I find one of your fingernails later, I’m going to put it in your Coke when you’re not looking.”
In fifth grade, I’d saved a bunch of my nails and put them on Chris’s pillowcase once, when we were watching Cujo and he got up to pee. Just for spite, I bite off my thumbnail and spit it onto the porch stairs.
“Sick, man. Better not leave your Coke unattended tomorrow at lunch.”
I tell Chris he’s a dick, and we sit on the porch until the Twizzlers are gone, until an ant crawls up and carries my thumbnail away.
At home during dinner, Dad is quiet. We sit in front of the television, eating microwave dinners while Nick at Nite blares from the screen, an I Love Lucy episode featuring Harpo Marx. Dad knows I’ll call Mom when I’m finished, and I don’t know whether he’ll talk to her this time, or pretend to wash dishes again, though we’re eating out of cardboard.
“You tell your mother about your little scheme?”
I nod, but Dad’s eyes don’t move from the television. He takes a bite of nuked turkey, and he smiles a little when Lucy hides behind a doorway, afraid to meet Harpo in person.
I know he thinks I’m doing this as therapy, like how music is supposed to heal, to make Mom smile—just like pets do for sick people, why tabbies live in nursing homes. Chris too, because that’s what I said, when I told him I wanted to do this. But what I never told him, and what I never can, is that some part of me is doing it for that story she used to tell.
The healing is good. If nothing else, we’ll have that. But why I really want this, what some small part of me still believes, is that when my voice moves across the oncology floor, filtering into her IV bag, her needles, the radiation that permeates her skin, its energy will power the tools she needs to live. And by some strange miracle—but one I can actually imagine, again and again, when I can’t fall asleep some nights—the music will make her well, just like it made the ship move and fly away, the best bedtime story she ever told me.
I don’t know what’s made me think of that story lately, or why I even believe, in some small corner of my mind, that this will make any difference at all. She is sick, and I’m old enough now to stop believing in most things, and Dad said last week, after the doctor called and I found him standing in the kitchen, palms gripping the edge of the sink, you know, Mike, your mom might not be around forever.
But I want to believe. Even if I never tell Chris, even if he thinks we’re just playing for fun, even if Dad watches reruns for the rest of his fucking life. There will still be me, my energy to hers, the last porch light, like the one she used to leave on when I was out after dark.
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br /> I wait awhile to call her, after I’ve done my pre-algebra homework, after I know Dad has settled into the couch for the primetime lineup, so it won’t hurt so much that he doesn’t pick up the phone too. They haven’t been on bad terms necessarily, just distant, like maybe he doesn’t know what to say to her, or like she’s waiting for him to do something impossible that could make her stay on this earth.
I call directly to her room, since she’s been out of surgery for a few days and the ward nurse will no longer need to mediate our calls, or make sure she’s awake. She sounds groggy when she answers, like she’s been taking a nap, and she tells me she’s just watched Wheel of Fortune over a hearty dinner of Ensure.
“How is practice going? How’s Chris?”
“You know, good. We can’t really play with just singing and drums, though, so I borrowed Mr. Winchester’s guitar.”
Chris and I decided the day before that drums and vocals wouldn’t be enough, so he’d asked his dad to lend me the family’s acoustic. I knew a few chords from when Mom had shown me her old Bob Dylan albums, from when she told me they’d seen him live in 1972, when he was drunk as a skunk, as she’d said, and barely knew the words to his own songs. I’d borrowed her old guitar then, and learned “Blowin’ in the Wind” by playing my own wobbly notes for two days against the scratch of our turntable’s vinyl.
“So you remembered something from our lesson. Still listening to Bob Dylan?” Her voice brightens, and I can hear her smiling. The sound makes me want to cry.
“Nah, Mom, I’ve moved on. You know, Zeppelin, the Pistols. Motley Crue.”
“I saw Led Zeppelin once, in college. I almost touched Robert Plant’s shoulder after I pushed my way to the front.”
The thought of her pushing anything, of having the strength to elbow through a crowd, much less leave her hospital bed, is one I can’t hold onto for long.
“Mom, do you remember that story?” I blurt it out, a question I hadn’t meant to bring up.
Quiet spreads across her end of the line. “What story, sweetie?”
“You know, the story. About the ship.”
She’s quiet again, and for a second I wonder if breast cancer has stolen her memory too, if the slow spread to her brain has blocked out everything that was once me, if maybe she doesn’t even remember Dad and that’s why he’s been so down.
But then she laughs. “The ship in the Sea of Sadness?”
“Yes. The ship in the Sea of Sadness,” I say, and something in my chest floods.
“Oh God, Mike, I haven’t thought of that in so long. How do you even remember that?” She is laughing still, as if it’s the best thing she’s heard all week.
“Of course I remember. You used to tell it all the time.”
“You know, that was one of your grandmother’s stories. Not even mine.” She is reeling. Her voice sounds drunk.
“Could you tell me again?”
“What, now?”
In her voice I hear it, that I’m too old for this now, that kids on the cusp of adolescence don’t need bedtime stories anymore. If Chris were here he’d say the same thing, only he’d probably punch my shoulder and give me a dead arm, maybe call me a loser. But I tell her yes, yes I want to hear the story, now. So she tells me.
She tells me once there was a ship that sailed through the sky, a ship powered by the music of one family, a family that played flute and harp and violin and piccolo together. But one day a great storm raged through the clouds, blowing the whole family except the little boy clear away to the other side of the world, and the ship fell to the earth without any music to guide it. When the boy awoke after the storm, he was alone in a great desert of sand, on the deck of the abandoned ship, his violin broken beside him. He cried so much that the sand flooded with tears, an ocean from that day known as the Sea of Sadness.
Mom pauses a moment, like maybe she’s forgotten the rest. But then she tells me that a great blue heron heard the boy’s cries and flew across the Sea of Sadness, landing on the deck where the boy lay weeping. The heron pulled several strands from its own feathers and strung them across the broken violin, and when the instrument had been repaired, the bird handed it to the boy and flew away. The boy watched the heron take flight, then picked up the violin and played until the abandoned ship shuddered to life. He played the ship across the Sea of Sadness, the music conducting the boat toward his family. At last he found them, washed up on a sandy bank of deserted beach, and there they at last took flight, the ship at full speed as the family played together once more.
She tells the tale with precision, as if no time has passed between the last time she told it, while tucking me in, and now, relaying words across telephone wires. She asks, “Is that the one you meant?”
And I tell her yes, Mom, that’s exactly the one.
I keep a hand over my Coke at lunch, just in case Chris remembers what he said about the fingernail. But he seems too distracted to remember, making plans for our afternoon practice, talking so fast that bits of potato chip fly from his mouth.
“Oh, and I mentioned the show to Lila Duldorf. Just in case she wants to come.”
“Jesus, Chris, it’s for patients. Do you really think she’ll give a shit?”
“I can get her in. You know, VIP passes.”
“To a fucking hospital?”
“Hey, man, simmer down. You’re not the only one performing.”
I look at Chris and see my mistake in not telling him. The show is a spotlight for him, nothing more.
“Fine, whatever. Invite her. Woo her with your magic.”
Chris crushes a potato chip, drops the crumbs in my Coke.
In science class we talk about kinetic energy, how molecules rotate and vibrate, their electrons bumping into each other until friction causes movement. And for a second I consider this, how sound makes similar vibrations, wavelengths traveling across a room with enough energy to power cities. I scribble a drawing in my notebook, a guitar blaring notes into a stick figure’s heart, and shove the picture to the bottom of my bag when the sixth period bell rings.
After school Chris and I are walking across the parking lot, heading past the lined-up school buses toward Chris’s house, when Scott Barnstone comes up. He’s wearing a giant pair of headphones and his hair hangs down into his face.
“Hey, I hear you guys are playing the hospital.”
“Fuck off, Barnstone.” Chris has never liked Scott, not since they were in after-school Latchkey together in the fourth grade and Scott spat on him once from the top of the slide.
Scott looks at me. He doesn’t like me either. I accidentally clipped him once on a high-sticking penalty during gym class, when I was the goalie and he tried to check me against the net. He had a shiner for three days.
“Is it because your mom’s got cancer in her tits?”
He grins at me, a line of crooked teeth. Before I can think to say anything, Chris shoves Scott in the chest.
“You kiss your boyfriend with that mouth?” Chris says, and spits on Scott’s tattered sneakers. “Go back to your sandbox, Barnstone.”
I tell Chris we should go. That he shouldn’t say shit like that. I pull him toward the baseball fields, which we’ll cross to the tree line and Chris’s house.
“Whatever, assholes,” Scott says. “At least I’ll still have a mom after you douchebags are done playing your stupid songs.”
Before I fully hear him, I drop my backpack and punch him in the face. His headphones clatter to the pavement, and I stand just long enough to see a line of blood dribble down his chin before Chris pulls me toward the field and we are off, we are running.
When I get home later, the television is silent and Dad stands in the kitchen over a pot of Kraft macaroni and cheese. Two bowls on the table, two tall glasses of milk.
“I thought I’d make dinner tonight,” he says. He looks up from the pot, where he’s stirring the noodles and cheese powder, and smiles at me.
I leave my bag in the living room, next
to Mom’s old guitar. Chris and I planned to practice at least twice more before Saturday, but I’d also gotten out Mom’s old acoustic and squeezed in some extra prep at home.
“So how was the day?” Dad asks when we sit down. He drops two big spoonfuls of fluorescent noodles into my bowl. “Not great. I punched a kid in the face.”
The words feel awkward, as if Dad and I don’t have that ease between us anymore. Before any of this happened, he took me to the movies for whole afternoons as if he had nothing but time, and when my T-ball coach robbed me of a run, he told me my swing deserved a homer.
“He said something bad about Mom,” I say.
Dad looks up from his bowl. “You shouldn’t punch people.” I expect him to be mad, but he looks more hurt than anything. I take a gulp of milk and ask him about his day instead.
“You know, same old, same old. I visited your mother, though. I left work a little early.”
What Dad does during the day has never really occurred to me, and when I hear him say this, I wonder for the first time if he’s done this more than once. I picture him eating a sandwich alone at his desk, driving to the hospital, sitting by Mom’s bed.
“Mike, there’s something we need to talk about.”
He sets down his fork and looks at me. His lips are thin, a pencil mark.
“Your mother—well, I talked to her doctor today. And Mike, it just doesn’t look good.”
He stops talking and holds his breath, and I wonder for a second if maybe he’s trying to hold back a burp. But then he looks at me, and I know he’s trying not to cry.
“The surgery didn’t do any good. And the chemo, well, it’s not doing any good either. They say it just keeps spreading.”
I’ve only seen my dad cry once in my life, last year when we buried Sampson, the cat my parents adopted after they got married. We laid him in a shoebox and Dad dug a hole in the backyard. Two tears slid down his nose when he pushed the shovel into the ground.
