19 #2
“She worked as a medical transcriptionist, and she was good at it, even though the job bored her.” Some nights across the
dinner table, she’d eat in seeming slow motion. Drained and dead-eyed, with nothing to say about her day. “When I was born,
she took a few years off, but she went back to her old position once I reached school age.”
Even though it was killing something inside her. A child could see that. He’d seen that.
“Looking back, she was probably depressed, but it wasn’t diagnosed at the time.” Suddenly restless, he lifted his arm from
around Maria’s shoulders and dragged a hand through his hair, gripping a fistful at the back of his neck. “Maybe she was just
generally frustrated with her life. Her work didn’t interest her. Most of her closest friends had moved away and lost touch.
She had a shelf full of travel books, but Dad didn’t see the point of going overseas, because we hadn’t visited all the nearby
sights yet.”
In the end, they’d just drive to the Dells again. Inevitably. Even though his mom hated water parks almost as much as public
speaking.
“And when she was struggling, when she cried and tried to explain what was wrong, my father didn’t really listen to her.
Instead, he’d hold her close and list all the good things in her life.
” The story was coming more easily now. Spilling from him in a flood, unfiltered and uncontrolled and full of uprooted ugliness.
“I guess as a reminder that she should be happy, because he couldn’t fathom how someone who lived virtually the same existence he did could find it stifling. ”
Transcription work is so easy for you , he’d tell her. And just last week, you went to lunch with Janelle, remember? You can always redecorate our house if you get bored, and we
can go to the Dells next month if you need a vacation. Everything’s fine, Patty. Why are you so upset?
“He loved her with all his heart, Maria. I mean that,” he added when she looked at him with open skepticism. “But empathy
requires imagination, and he didn’t have enough of either.”
Her little nod didn’t necessarily indicate agreement, but she didn’t argue.
“Dad got a promotion when I was in third grade.” With one last tug, he let his hair go. “With his new salary, he made just
enough to support all three of us. So she quit her job and used the remaining funds from her parents’ estate to start an interior
decorating business.”
Maria’s smile was wide and bright with relief. “Good for her.”
“She’d always been artsy. Creative. Coordinating fabrics and paints and furniture satisfied that part of her.” In his LA home,
some of her design sketches were hanging framed on his walls. One of them—the one he found most beautiful; the one he loved
the most—he even remembered watching her draw at the kitchen table. “And if she was good at transcription work, she excelled at interior decoration.”
Maria tipped her head to the side. “Did she love it?”
“That first year, she was happier than I’d ever seen her before. Smiling. Energetic.”
At the time, he’d thought, It’s like someone turned up her volume .
Over their late-evening family dinners, she suddenly had so many stories to tell, and when she spoke, her voice rang with laughter and quivered with annoyance and brimmed with professional pride.
Her eyes were bright, her appetite fierce.
And when he occasionally offered his own stories from school, it felt like she listened more carefully than before.
“She was...” What was the right word? “She was present with us anytime she was home, even though she was working longer hours than she used to.”
“What did your father think of her new business?” Her voice was carefully neutral.
“Dad didn’t get why anyone would leave a steady job with a regular salary to ‘fuss with curtains and wallpaper,’ as he put
it, but he didn’t quibble with her decision. Not—” Swallowing hard, he forced himself to continue. “Not until the economy
tanked her second year in business, and she stopped getting new clients.”
“ Fy fan ,” Maria mumbled under her breath.
“She managed for a while, but once she’d operated in the red for a few months in a row...” He lifted a shoulder, as if
the end of his mom’s business were no big deal. As if it weren’t, in such painful, terrible ways, the end of absolutely everything
else too. “To Dad, there was only one reasonable solution.”
“And that solution was returning to her old job.”
It wasn’t a question but a statement. And she was right, of course.
“He didn’t browbeat her, Maria. But he has this way of framing things where it’s so hard to argue with him, because everything
he says makes perfect sense. You leave the conversation convinced that what he’d do in your position is the only safe, sane
thing to do, and what kind of fool wouldn’t choose the safest, sanest path?”
Her brows had drawn together in a pained wince. “So she went back to medical transcription work.”
“Yes.” Scrubbing his face with his hands, he sighed. “It was awful.”
For a time, his mother became a ghost that drifted through their lives. Mournful. Unsettled. Rattling emotional chains only she could hear.
Cold. Untouchable. Even with him.
“There was no more mistaking her depression.” That was the good news, such as it was. “She finally got diagnosed, found a
therapist, and started meds. And one day, she came home from work, packed a suitcase, and asked where I wanted to be. Which
one of them I wanted to live with.”
“You chose her.” Another nonquestion.
“Dad always said we were two peas in a pod. He had no idea how to deal with either one of us at that point, especially when
I was a surly little shit.” He snorted. “And Maria, I was frequently a surly little shit.”
Her laugh rang with genuine amusement, and he found himself smiling too.
“I believe you, skitstovel ,” she said, patting him on the arm. “How did your father take you and your mom leaving?”
And suddenly, he was back to feeling he might never smile again. “When she left, it broke him, Maria. He was desperate to
win her back. He gave her birthday and anniversary gifts. Hung a Christmas stocking for her on the mantel, just in case she
decided to come home. He’d call and beg her to talk, beg her to tell him what he needed to do for her to move back to the
house, and she tried once or twice. She really did. But what she said made no sense to him, and eventually she started screening
his calls.”
“What about you?” Maria’s frown pinched her forehead. “Didn’t he care that you were gone too?”
“I guess.” Re-creating his father’s thought processes had never come easily to him, to put it mildly. “I think he sort of considered me a . . . um, kind of a subset of my mom. Not something separate that he’d miss independently of her.”
Her voice turned rough. Fierce with anger. “I hope you were happier without him. Both of you.”
“Maybe?” Everything was in such turmoil for so long, happiness had seemed almost beside the point. “Mom would only accept
enough of Dad’s money to support me. I don’t know why. I guess she wanted to prove something, to herself or to him. So we
lived in a shitty apartment, and she still had to do transcription work. But she had more energy, and we spent more time together.
She’d sketch, and I’d read. Or we’d take walks, like I said.”
Now came the rest of it. The hardest part of all to talk about, which was why he didn’t. Why he hadn’t. Resting his elbows
on his bent knees, he hunched forward and watched the tiny little waves rush in to shore, one after another.
The world went on, always, and there was still beauty in it. Even when he couldn’t see that beauty. And there had been so
many years when he couldn’t, anywhere but onstage and on set, where he could be somewhere else. Someone else. Someone who
could offer and receive uncomplicated love and appreciate the resilience of the living.
For a while, Anne had reopened the world to him, but it shut tight again after she left.
And then, six years ago, he’d walked into an LA sauna and seen a woman with hair like sunshine, eyes like warm earth, and
all the strength and softness he needed so desperately.
When he reached out blindly, she clasped his hand without hesitation.
He took a hard breath. “Almost exactly two years after my parents separated, my mom died of a massive stroke at work.”
Her long fingers caressed the back of his hand. His palm.
“I’m so sorry, Peter,” she whispered. “So, so sorry, sotnos .”
He cleared his throat. Twice. “Me too.”
After play rehearsal that night, not knowing what had happened, Peter had watched in surprise as his father pulled into the
school lot and parked, hands shaking on the wheel, and that was it. That was the end of the life he and his mother had slowly
constructed, stone by stone.
Back in his old home, everything was the same, and nothing was the same. He was still a surly little shit, and Dad was still
loving, befuddled, and entirely unable to deal with his son.
But now he was also entirely unable to deal with his own grief, much less Peter’s.
“I went back to my dad.” With his small kick, a nearby pebble splashed into the water. “And he cringed every time he looked
at me.”
Maria muttered something in Swedish. Probably an obscenity involving shit. “You reminded him of her.”
At first, Peter had hoped that would pass, but his father never truly managed to let his wife go. Never managed to move on,
if only enough to see his son as a separate being. An entirely different person, who needed him.
Or if not him, someone . Anyone. Any fucking person who could help Peter grapple with the rage and agony and the crippling loneliness. The desolate,
gaping hole in his life that only his mom had filled.
But his father never found that person. Not in himself. Not in someone else.