Chapter Twenty-Two
Sarafina pizza in open box, with original anchovy smile, photo by Margaret Vittorio: Pictures of Mars
“Keep Me in Your Heart” by Warren Zevon: Music of Mars
“Are you going to be okay doing this?” Mom asked.
It was a Friday night. For the first time in weeks, I was doing my regular shift, alone. I realized something: I had barely been alone since those horrific early hours I learned about you. My people were keeping me tethered to Earth, even if I couldn’t see the cords.
“I think so,” I said. “Yes.”
“I’m here. I’m a phone call away.”
I realized something else. She was. She had been. I felt her there. More than I ever had, maybe in my whole life. My eyes traveled to the books on our end table, right out in the open. Eating Disorder Recovery. More Than a Body. Returning to Myself: Life Beyond ED.
She saw me seeing. “I’ve been going to a counselor.”
I wanted to cry. I was relieved, but also…hesitant. Not believing entirely. She’d gone before, and it hadn’t lasted. Moving the food around her plate, the restricting, the exercise, the disappearing—it started up again. “I’m glad,” I said.
“So much time has been wasted.” I made a face. I mean, it wasn’t forced on her or anything. Maybe it sounds cold, but you lose your warmth after so many years out in the cold yourself. “I’ve wasted so much time. Of my own. Of yours, and the boys’.”
I didn’t say anything. I waited for her to veer off into self-pity or blame.
Blaming my dad, mostly, for his lack of attention and care.
Self-pity for all the stress of being perfect, the perfect wife and mother and member of her community.
This is what we’d heard before, after actually fearing for her life and after years of her denials.
“I’m going to be late,” I said.
She came over to me. I was wearing my parka, but her hug was hard enough for me to feel the puffy fabric squish, to feel her pressing my actual body.
In some ways, I wanted to punish her and not press back.
But I didn’t. I hugged her. She was there, and I was there, too.
She was right, about all the wasted time.
You couldn’t get it back. There weren’t too many things that were very important, truly important, when it came right down to it.
Maybe it was trite to say. Simplistic, too.
But why, then, did we need to be reminded of it all the time?
Why were we constantly forgetting that who we loved was all that mattered?
I hadn’t even driven myself anywhere since that night.
The people who loved me worried I was too distracted and distraught, not capable of focusing on the details of moving a vehicle.
They were right, you know. Even right then, my car seemed like an old and distant friend, someone I was once close to but had mostly forgotten.
It began to rain, and I had to search for the wipers, flicking my turn signal on accidentally.
I was one tiny person in the dark on a tiny planet in a large, endless universe.
I passed other tiny people in their cars, too.
On their bikes, at stoplights, their minds full of worry over that nasty thing someone just said or did, or what they were having for dinner, or what grade they got, or what grade they’d better get, or else.
So many tiny people with tiny worries, too often forgetting about the largest stuff all around them.
I remembered Lily telling me this one night on Tiger Mountain: If you blasted off, zoomed two hundred miles from Earth, the distance from Seattle to Salem, Oregon, you could see our landmasses, our glittering lights.
Just past the moon, we looked like the moon ourselves, and past the planets, we looked like a star.
Nine billion miles from home, our planet went dark.
We were so tiny, we were invisible. From that distance, it looks like we aren’t even here, like we don’t exist. But we are here, and we do exist. From out there, though, it would take belief to think so.
I pulled into the delivery parking for Papa Angelo’s.
The building was aglow, bright and bustling, our own starlight.
I could see Maurice in there, and my father at the counter, lights within lights.
God, how I wanted to talk to you about this, this Papa Angelo’s star.
I so badly wanted to tell you about Mom, about everything that was happening now.
I wanted to tell you about flicking on my turn signal instead of my wipers.
I needed to talk to you about missing you.
I walked through the front door to a familiar call.
“Bella!” my dad said. “Get your butt in there! People are waiting for their hot pizza!” A couple at a table smiled, and so did the mom and dad sitting with their small children.
It was a show, so I saluted. Maurice lifted a hand in greeting over by the pickup counter, and I lifted mine back.
George was in the kitchen with the cooks.
“You’re ready,” George said, and pointed to my first small stack of padded bags for the night. I’d be back for more, and back again. A full shift, tomorrow night, too.
People were waiting. And how hot a pizza was and how right we got their orders were important to the tiny people on the tiny planet, and important to us, as well. I was supposed to hurry.
But on that long metal kitchen counter, I saw the circles of dough being prepared, the sausage eyes, the mushroom noses, arugula hair, the anchovy/orange-pepper/pepperoni smiles. There were two, three, four of them, all smiling at me.
I hadn’t taken a photo since you left. The happiness I felt about photography, my fragile new dream of maybe studying it that I’d shared with only you—who cared anymore, you know?
But I got out my phone and opened the camera.
I still didn’t have a plan yet, a plan that would lead to this, us here, right now. I just wanted to show you.
Click, and there they were. What you created, existing. Just pizzas, but never say that to my dad, or any of us.
The first photo, Mars. If we’d sat and planned it out, we might have chosen something different, but there it was, a row of your smiling Sarafinas. I looked down at my phone, and the image made me so freaking sad, but I couldn’t help but smile back, too.
My father had popped his head through the kitchen door, and I could see part of Maurice, peering through the open area of the pickup counter. They didn’t say anything about dawdling or getting my ass in gear, though, none of the shit all of them usually gave me. They didn’t say a word.
It was another thing not on the Golden Record. Silence, you know. The many types of silence, but loving silence most of all.
I drove home at the end of my shift. I’d made it. I’d dragged myself through the current, and I’d gotten to the other side.
It seemed wrong, that normal night. To have one.
To have those moments where I forgot entirely that you were gone.
I couldn’t say that other word yet, the one that started with a d.
But the point is, I’d been busy. I hadn’t thought of you for a few stretches of time.
The guilt crawled into my stomach and chest, squeezed my heart.
Which is probably why I played that song.
I’d stayed away from music, same as Sandrine, even though music was her life.
Because music was her life. It wasn’t my life, but I understood the danger of it.
In general—how crucial it was, how connected to our humanity and our emotions, something a person felt whether they even understood the words or not, just like we felt “El Cascabel.” But specifically, too.
How music was so present in our time together, from that first moment I saw you at the houseboat.
It was punishment, probably, for letting you leave my mind, but it was longing, too. Oh, it was so cruel, how that longing would never ever be met.
I played it. “Keep Me in Your Heart.” That tender, crushing ballad.
I bent in half. Racked with sobs, wrecked.
The tiny people on the tiny planet were also doing this, mourning losses so loud, they were powerful, violent storms. Blazes, impossible and forever.
God, I was so clueless. I’d never even realized it.
How had I not? I was in love, and I heard it as a beautiful romantic song about a loved person on your mind.
But it was a song about death. Our song was.
Did you know that?
Could you hear me playing it now? Could you feel my loss and my longing? We knew how far light traveled, but we had no idea how far love did.