What Mother Said

Emory

He woke with a woman’s hand on his forehead and the taste of a coin in his mouth.

It was not a bad waking. That was the first strange thing. There was no fear in it, only a slow warm gray sinking-upward, like coming to the surface from a long way down, with the light going from brown to amber to the pale gold of morning, and the smell of woodsmoke and butter and wet wool, and a voice saying there he is, there he is, easy now, Em, you just lie still. The hand was dry and light and smelled of dish soap. It was not his mother’s.

He opened his eyes.

The ceiling of the kitchen. The long crack above the stove, the one he had meant to plaster in September and had not, because she’d liked the shape of it. A wedge of blue sky in the window. A fire going in the range. He was lying on the floor with his cheek on a folded oilskin, under two blankets, one of which he knew and one of which he did not, and a big gray cat of a man was sitting on a kitchen chair with his cap turning in his hands, and a small round woman in a purple parka was kneeling at his shoulder.

“Mary,” he said.

“That’s right, honey.” Mary Pratt’s eyes were swimming. “That’s right. You know us. Ned, he knows us.”

“I know him, Mary. I’d know him anywhere.” Ned Pratt’s voice was thick. “Son. How do you feel?”

He took inventory. It was a habit, an EMT’s habit: the airway first, then the pulse, the pupils, the fingers and toes. His mouth was dry and tasted of metal. His head was a large soft bell, struck once and not yet quiet. His left arm ached, high up, in a small sore circle under the sleeve of his shirt. His hip was light.

He put his hand on it. Nothing. The carabiner was gone from his belt, and the eleven keys with it, and the pocket of his shirt, where the phone ought to have lain against his heart, was flat.

“Where’s —” His tongue felt too large. “Where is she?”

Mary’s hand stopped on his hair. He saw her look at her husband. It was a quick, small, married look, and the look told him a great deal before either of them spoke, as a barometer tells you before the sky does.

“Your mother called,” said Ned. He cleared his throat. “About one this morning. She rang me at home, I was just in my chair, and I’d not got my boots off, and she said — Em, I’m going to say this plain. She said Corinne’s been bleeding.”

The kitchen went very quiet.

“Started about midnight. Quite heavy, your mother said. She came and got her, and she’s taken her down to the Maine Med in Portland, to the emergency, and she said she didn’t want to put it on the radio, and she’d given you something, to sleep. You’d come in so wet and so tired, she said.” He turned his cap. “She asked would we sit with you. So we did. We came at nine. You were out like a light, right there by the stove. Mary put a pillow under your head.”

“Bleeding.”

“That’s what she said.”

He lay quite still. There was a sound in his ears like a shell held to the head, and underneath it, a long way off, a small clear voice that he knew and did not hear, and it said a hundred and seventy-one. It said I think it’s a girl. Eight weeks of a closed door and a hand on a stomach and a name in a car, and the whole of it went through him like a blade of cold air, and he thought, in the stupid absolute clarity of terror: I wasn’t there.

“Don’t get up,” Mary said. “Em. Don’t.”

“I have to go to her.”

“You can’t drive like that, honey. Look at your hands.”

He looked. They were shaking. They lay open on the blanket like two creatures that did not belong to him. He thought: I took the Mary Ellen through the gut at the Ledges with these. I held her in a trough for ten seconds. He closed them. They went on shaking.

“Cody,” he said. It came out of him from nowhere, a habit of good manners surfacing in a flood. “Is Cody —”

“Pen Bay kept him overnight. Concussion, thirty stitches in the forehead, and he’s eating Jell-O and asking for you.” Ned’s face worked. “Both of them are home safe, Emory. Both of them. I’ll not forget it as long as I live. I want you to know that. I’d no right to ask you, and you came, and you took her through that gut like your father would have done, and I stood in the stern and I thought, Desmond’s here. I did. I’d swear it before God.”

“It was the best thing I ever did,” he said.

He heard it come out of his mouth as if it had been said before, in a lit room, to someone, in a voice both his and not his. He did not know why.

He turned his head. And that was when he saw the cellar door.

* * *

It stood open twenty feet from his face, on the far side of the kitchen. He had hung that door himself in August. A heavy plank door in a pine frame, with a new brass hasp and a padlock the size of a plum. The hasp was no longer on the door. It was on the floor in the doorway, a bent yellow wing with four splintered screws still in it, and the jamb to which it had been fixed had split from the strike plate to the sill, white and raw as a bone. Beyond it the cellar stairs fell into darkness.

“Looks like somebody’s had a go at that,” Ned said, following his eyes. “Branch, I’d say. Or the wind’s got in. We’ve had a few down the lane.”

“A branch,” said Emory.

“Mary says the back door was unchained when we came. It was swinging. I put it to. Hope that’s all right.”

“Thank you.”

He had never, in his life, heard himself say two words so evenly.

He lay and looked at the door. He did not remember it. He remembered the harbor, the wind-flattened flags, a hand on the nape of his neck, a screen with two words on it; the lane; the lamp sweeping the roofs. He remembered the back step and the rain. He remembered a dish towel, folded in thirds and laid over the rail of the stove. He remembered the exact shade of it. It was blue-and-white check. And that was all, and after the dish towel, as precise as a line drawn with a ruler, there was nothing at all. Not dark. Not sleep. A place on a map where the paper had been cut away.

Midazolam, said a calm voice at the back of his head, the voice that had taught him to read a pupil. Or something of its family. Anterograde. It takes the hours after the dose. And then, a moment later, quite neutrally: She gave you something.

The word rang in him like a struck glass.

“I need to check the lamp,” he said.

“Em —”

“It ran all night on the cells. It’ll need changing. I’ll be ten minutes, Ned.” He sat up. The room swung, and settled. “I’d like to wash my face. I’d like to look at the light. And then I’ll go to Portland, if you’ll drive me. I’d — I’d be grateful.”

They looked at one another again, the old man and his wife. Mary put a hand over her mouth.

“You go on,” said Ned gently. “We’ll keep the stove in.”

* * *

The tower stood clean and wet and shining in the morning, with the wreckage of the night strewn round its feet: a drift of torn spruce boughs, a broken gutter, a glittering sheet of salt on every stone. He crossed the lawn at a walk. His legs were not entirely his. At the door he took the second key from his pocket, the brass one, the one with the scratch on the shoulder, and then stood, quite still, with his hand on the cold iron.

D.W.

It had been in a cedar box. The ring had been taken from his belt. But a man with one key has none, and there had been two, and he had given one away; and there were forty copies of every other, in a coffee can, in a drawer, under a stone in the garden, because he was a careful person and had been taught by the best.

The oil room was cold and smelled of kerosene and pencil shavings and the sea. Everything was as he had left it. The cot with its army blanket. The green-shaded lamp. The eleven black notebooks in their row on the pine shelf, with the twelfth beside them, open. On the plank desk, in a corner, four small gray screens sat dead in a row, and beside them a little black box, the size of a hardback book, with a single orange light.

The light was out.

He stood and looked at it. He thought of a man he had once read about, a locksmith in a Swedish novel, who said that the only honest thing about a lock was its keyhole. Then he went out again and round the back of the tower to the shed where he kept the generator, and started it on the third pull, and heard it catch, and settle, and run.

The monitors woke one by one. He sat down on the cot. He did not hurry. A man in a hurry makes mistakes, his father used to say; it was one of the few rules he had never needed to learn. The black box counted to ninety in its small orange language. The screens lit with the grayish light of an empty house: the kitchen, the landing, the back hall, the front door. In the kitchen a woman in a purple parka was washing a cup.

He found the files at the bottom of the directory. OCT 31. 22:40 — NOV 01. 00:44. The last one was short. It was a fraction of the size of the others. It ended, he saw, in the middle of a minute.

He put on the headphones, and pressed play.

* * *

The kitchen camera first. It was black and white and slightly bowed, as if seen through the bottom of a glass. A dark room. A table laid for two. A small red point, blinking, on the ceiling. At 12:03:41 the cellar door shook in its frame, and a crack came out of the headphones like a rifle shot, and the door burst, and a thin figure in a dark coat came through the splinters with a bar in her hand and a lamp strapped to her forehead, and stood.

She looked directly into the lens.

I’m sorry, my darling, said his mother, out of the little speaker. I think this is where I take her.

He sat very still.

The landing at 12:09. A white door with a bar across it and a tall shape standing at it with its head bowed, and a girl’s voice from behind the wood, flat and distant and cracked, telling the tall shape about the weather. It’s blowing very hard. There’s a tree down somewhere. He watched the bolt cutters go in. He watched the bar fall. He watched his mother open the door and take Corinne into her arms, and heard the sound that came out of Corinne, which he had never heard before, a short hoarse cough, nothing like weeping, and understood that it had been waiting in her for eight weeks.

He did not stop the tape. He did not blink. He heard his mother say you double-knotted them, and he heard Corinne laugh.

At 12:21 she took the folder from the kitchen table. My passport, she said. She put it in her sweater. He saw her do it. He saw her hold her mother’s photograph, a small square of glossy paper, a woman in a green coat, and put it away against her heart, and for a moment stand quite still with her hand flat on the old brown leather of the suitcase.

Goodbye, Mama. I’m sorry.

And then the back door. The wedge of light. The pale hand lifting the chain.

And then himself.

It was the strangest thing he had ever watched. He saw a tall young man in a gray shirt, wet to the bone, step in over the sill and push the door shut against the weather and take off his oilskin and hang it on a peg. He watched him roll up a sleeve. He saw his own face, grainy and white, turned toward two women across a table, and he was astonished by how kind it looked. How gentle, how tired, how entirely without malice. A boy home from a war.

You’re in your boots, said the young man. I told you to stay in. You did, mostly. Except for the boots.

Cody Pratt’s got a concussion, said the young man. I was crying like a kid the whole way in.

I know who the father is, Em, said his mother.

And it was there that he watched his own face stop. A half-second only. A flicker, of nothing, of a mouth that checked its papers. He had never seen it from outside. He had never known what it looked like. It was a very small thing, a hitch in the film, and he knew it for what it was, and he knew from where.

Where did you think he got it, said a voice in his head, quite clear, in no one’s accent.

He watched Corinne come to the edge of the frame. He watched her say it. She did not raise her voice. She said it with her chin up and her hands flat on the oak, and he leaned toward the screen as one leans toward a window in a high wind, and he heard it, every syllable, in the cold clear hiss of the headphones:

Pip’s right.

He ran it back.

Pip’s right.

He ran it back again. He sat and watched her mouth. He saw that there was no gap in it. There was nothing before the P. She had closed it. She had taken the one small door in her that he knew how to open, the half-beat, the hair’s-breadth pause in which a person could be reached, and she had shut it, and bolted it, and locked it from the inside, with a pick she had made from a wire.

He thought: She learned it from me.

It was not, he found, an angry thought. It was nearly admiration. He had given her a classroom, and a teacher, and eight weeks, and she had been, he saw, the finest student he’d ever had.

Okay, said the young man on the screen.

Say it again, said his mother.

He watched it to the end. He watched himself say I’m not going to say it. He heard his mother say I paid once, in a voice he had not known she possessed. He heard her say come here, my darling, and watched a tall boy in a wet gray shirt take one step and then another, across the boards, and put his head down on her shoulder like a child of six.

At 12:44:19, with one hand still lifted toward her back, the picture shuddered, lost the color from its edges, and went to snow.

He took off the headphones and sat holding them in his lap. The generator ran on behind the tower in the quiet. A gull went by the window. On the screen, in the empty kitchen, in a little square of gray, a woman in a purple parka dried her hands and looked about her for a place to hang the towel.

He saw it as plain as the page of a book. The UPS, he thought. A hundred and twenty-four minutes. It was a good unit. It had given a hundred and twenty-four minutes of its life to the dark, and not one more, and it had given him this, which was almost all.

He did not smash the screens. He did not throw anything. It occurred to him, with the cold clarity of an old habit, that he was holding the only copy of the only record, and that the only people who knew it existed were two women in a car, somewhere, going away. He opened a drawer. He found a clean drive, and he copied the file onto it, and wrote on a square of masking tape, in his careful capitals:

OCT 31–NOV 1. WHAT SHE SAID.

He did not erase it. He never would. His father had taught him that.

* * *

Maine Medical Center had a front desk of pale wood and a woman behind it with a lanyard and a face of unfathomable professional sympathy.

Ned drove him. Somewhere past the Pellertons’ barn, on the way out, he saw his own truck parked nose to the clapboards with the keys in the ashtray, and said nothing; and Ned, to his everlasting credit, said nothing either. He sat in the waiting room from half past one until seven, with Ned Pratt beside him for the first two hours and a paper cup of coffee that he did not drink. At four he went to the desk and gave a name, and the woman typed, and looked at the screen, and looked at him. I’m so sorry, sir. I’m not able to confirm whether a person is a patient. Are you family? He said that he was the father. He watched her face do a small, kind, bureaucratic thing. I understand. I wish I could. If she’s here, she’d have to give consent. He thanked her. He said it as he said everything: gently, and well. At seven he went home.

On Sunday he opened his mother’s front door with the key from under the geranium, and went through her house like a ghost.

It was exactly as it always was. The kettle on the stove. The pot of marigolds withering on the sill. The bed made, the shoes in their row, a half-eaten orange on a saucer in the kitchen. In the study the manila folder was gone from the bottom drawer, and in its place lay a pair of reading glasses he had known all his life, with one arm mended by a bead of solder, which he picked up and held and put down again. He found the trash. It was a habit; the trash told you what the person had been afraid of. He found a pharmacy bag with nothing in it. And at the bottom, folded into a very small square, a slip from the Casco Bay Credit Union, dated Thursday the thirtieth of October. WITHDRAWAL. SAVINGS ACCT. ENDING 4418. $40,000.00.

He stood in the cold bright kitchen with the slip in his hand and read it three times.

It was his father’s account.

He knew it without looking. The Wolcott life policy, which had paid out after the funeral and lain ever since in a quiet savings account that his mother had never been able to spend. He had seen the statement. Forty thousand and some change. She had taken it in cash, on a Thursday, two days before a storm.

A woman who is bleeding, said the calm voice, does not need forty thousand dollars in cash.

He folded the slip and put it in his pocket. He locked the door behind him. He stood on the step in the gray November light, with the wind off the bay in his face, and for the first time since he was fifteen years old, he did not know what to do with his hands.

On Monday Mrs. Dunphy brought a coffee cake. On Tuesday there were three casseroles on the porch. He took them in, one by one, and thanked each of the people who had made them. He stood at the window while Ned’s wife prayed for Corinne in the front hall in a low firm voice, with her eyes closed, and he bowed his head, and wept, quite openly, for the first time in front of anyone; and they were so moved they could hardly bear it.

He had built that town. It was the best thing he had ever made. His mother had taken it, in a night, as quietly as a girl takes a coat from a hook, and put it on.

* * *

She came on Wednesday, at dusk.

He heard the car on the gravel, and stood, and did not go to the window. He had put on a clean shirt. He had shaved. He had set the table for two, because it seemed to him that she would want something to hold, and he stood in the middle of the kitchen with his hands behind him and listened to her come up the steps: slowly, a little heavily, with the drag on the left that had come on in the summer, and that nobody had remarked on.

The door opened.

His mother stood on the threshold in her long black coat. She was thinner than on Monday week. She was gray. She was holding a plastic bag in both hands against her chest, as a woman holds a baby or a bomb, and her eyes went over him very quickly, from the hair to the shoes, as they had gone over him on the first day of school, and the first day of the funeral, for signs.

“Em,” she said.

“Mom.”

“I’m so sorry.” She came in. She shut the door. She stood with her back against it, and her mouth moved a little, and she was crying already; she hadn’t even tried not to. “I’m so sorry. I’ve been trying to get here since Sunday. Oh, my darling. She’s gone.”

He had expected something. He had played it forty times in the dark. He had thought: she’ll say it in the doorway, and she had. He had thought: she’ll cry first, because crying is the truth, and then the rest will come on the back of it, and it did.

“Gone,” he said.

“Saturday. About six in the morning. On Route 1, near Wiscasset, in the car.” She was holding the bag so hard that the plastic creaked. “It started in the night, you know that, Ned will have told you. I thought it might pass. I thought — Em. I’ve done this ten thousand times. I knew by Waldoboro. I drove as fast as I could and she held my hand, and it was no use. It was quick. It was — the doctors said it was chromosomal. There was nothing to be done. Nothing anyone did. It’s nobody’s fault.”

One, he thought.

It was there. It was exactly the size of a grain of sand. A hair’s breadth between Saturday and about six, in which she had looked, for the thousandth part of a second, at some place beyond his left shoulder. He had never in his life been so grateful for his eyes.

“I took her to Maine Med,” his mother said. “She was in till Sunday. They did what they do. And on Sunday morning she signed herself out, against advice, and asked me — begged me — not to say where she was going. She’s with a friend, Em. In Boston. She said —” Her voice caught, and righted itself. “She said she was so sorry. She said she couldn’t bear to see you. Not yet. She said maybe not ever.”

Two. A gap before Boston.

“I see,” said Emory.

It was the gentlest voice he had. He put it round her like a shawl.

And he stood and let her lie to him. It was the oddest sensation, he thought: not dreadful, not even painful, but strangely quiet, like watching a pianist he loved play a piece he knew by heart, and wrong. She was very good. She had always been good. She did it all with her hands, with the creaking bag, with her wet eyes and the fine tremor in her chin, and there was almost no sound in it that was not true. She gave him the Wiscasset gas station and the nurse with the kind eyes and the box of tissues. She told him about the paper bracelet. She told him about the way Corinne had looked, afterward, out of the car window, at the passing trees. It was a masterpiece. Four times in the first two minutes she paused before the word that mattered, a tiny, delicate, almost imperceptible stop, and each time it went into him like a pin into a map.

Three. Four.

Nobody else would have heard it. He wasn’t sure that she had.

“Em,” she said. “Say something. Please.”

“I’m all right.”

“You’re not. You’re —” She laughed, damply. “You’re not all right at all. Come here.”

He went. She put the bag on the table and took him in her arms, and he bent his head into her shoulder, into the smell of her soap and her wool and her cold bright hair, and the tears came. He had not known they would. They came down quietly, without a sound, in a long warm stream, and soaked into the shoulder of her coat; and she held the back of his head in her left hand, in the way she had held it on a kitchen floor, and said I know, I know, I know.

He didn’t know what they were for.

That was the truth of it. He stood in his mother’s arms, in the lamp-lit kitchen of the house he had bought for a woman, and he wept, and he could not have said whether it was for a child he did not believe was dead, or for a woman who had said Pip’s right with no gap in her voice, or for a boy of six on a quay who had been told by his father to get off the water. Perhaps it was all of them. He thought it might be only that he was so tired, and that she was the only person who had ever held him like this, and had just lied to his face, and was still holding on.

“I’ve something for you,” she said, at last, into his hair. “I took them. On Friday. I’m sorry, I should never have. I was afraid you’d hurt yourself.”

She emptied the bag onto the table. His phone. The steel ring with its eleven keys.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Em, I —”

“It’s all right, Mom.” He picked up the carabiner. He weighed it in his palm. He clipped it to his belt, where it hung, as it always had, at his left hip, with its familiar small cold comfort. “I understand. You were frightened. You gave me something to sleep, didn’t you? On Friday night.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for that, too.”

“Em —”

“I’d like to see the room, if I may.” He said it softly, as one asks at a church door. “Hers. I haven’t been in since. I thought I’d rather not go alone.”

* * *

They went up together, his mother first, one hand on the rail.

The fourth stair spoke under her. The landing was dim and smelled of cold lamp oil. The beam lay where it had fallen, along the boards, with the padlock hanging from the hasp and cut clean through the shackle. He stepped over it. The door of the room stood open on the bay, and the dusk, and a bed with a white quilt thrown back.

He went in. He walked the room. He did not touch anything. He stood, as he’d stood a hundred times, on the boards that she had paced, eleven strides by fourteen, and the shutter was closed, and the small blue curtain was gone from it. It smelled of her. It would smell of her for another week.

On the inside of the door, below the knob, the brass of the lock was scratched. He knelt and looked at it. The scratches were fine, bright, almost tender: a dozen tiny silver hair-lines in the keyway, the marks of something thin, and patient, and not a key.

“What is it?” his mother said from the door.

“Nothing.” He ran his thumb over the brass. “She picked it.”

She didn’t answer.

“From the inside. She did the bolt herself. It’s very good work. It must have taken her an hour.” He rose, brushing off his knee. “I’d no idea she could do that.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said his mother, after a very small pause.

Five.

He looked at her, across the room, in the failing light. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame, and her face under the dusk was gray and drawn and old, and much too thin, and there was in it such weariness, such love, such unguarded fear, that he thought his heart would stop. He felt it go to her, entire. He felt it reach out. It was not a trick. That was the thing he would never be able to explain to anyone: that he loved her still, entirely, in the same instant, as he stood there quietly counting her lies.

“She was wonderful,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Will you show me where you came in?”

She took him down. They went through the kitchen and the broken door, and he stopped at the top of the cellar stairs and looked down at the long cold dark. The beam lay at the foot of the stone steps, split along its length, with a great raw bite in it where the bar had been. The outside doors stood open on a square of evening. Cold air came up from the sea.

“You used Dad’s key,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I always wondered if you’d kept it.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

She stood on the top step with her coat drawn round her. For the first time that night she looked at him, directly, without a pause.

“Because I didn’t know what else to keep,” said his mother.

It was true. He heard that it was true. It rang in the cellar like a bell, and he turned his face aside, and went down two steps, and put his hand on the cold wet granite.

“Will you stay?” he said. “For a few days. Please. I’d like it if you were here.”

He heard her breath catch above him.

“Of course I will,” said Pip. “As long as you want.”

“Thank you.”

“Em.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Say something else.” She was smiling, unsteadily, with her hand pressed to her mouth. “Say anything but thank you. Say a thing you want.”

He thought about it, on the cellar stairs, in the dark, with the wind coming up through the open doors. He thought about it as honestly as he could. He had been taught that the things one wanted were not to be asked for, but arranged. He had a rule in a notebook. It was written on the front page of the fourth. He could have recited it in his sleep.

“Okay,” said Emory.

He heard her flinch. It was a very small sound, the sound of a woman who has had her hand slapped. He did not turn around.

* * *

That night he lay on the cot in the oil room with the lamp turning overhead, and his mother asleep in the spare room across the hall from an empty bed, and the generator silent at last, and the wind gone down to a sigh.

He took down a new notebook.

It was black, with a stitched spine, from a second box that he had bought in Portland in the spring, against need. The thirteenth. He did not like the number. He turned it over and looked at the blank cover for a time, and then he opened it, and laid it on his knee, and took up the pencil.

FIND.

He wrote it at the top of the first page, in capitals, small and square, in the hand he had practiced since he was fifteen. He looked at it. He underlined it once.

Then he wrote the list.

1. SHE HAS HER PASSPORT. I SAW HER TAKE IT.
2. SHE HAS $40,000, CASH. MOM’S. DAD’S.
3. SHE HAS NO PHONE. NO CARDS. SHE WILL NOT USE HER NAME.
4. SHE IS NOT BLEEDING. SHE WAS WALKING. SHE WAS UPRIGHT AND SHE WAS FINE.
5. SHE IS STILL PREGNANT. SHE IS NOT IN BOSTON.
6. SHE IS NOT IN THE COUNTRY.

He stopped. He sat with the pencil above the page. Outside the window the stars were out, thick and clear, and the lens went over them in its slow pale circle, and somewhere below him in the house, through two floors and a hundred and ten feet of stone, a woman he loved turned over in her sleep.

Don’t hunt, he wrote. Hunting is for people who are afraid of losing the animal. WAIT. Let the room change shape. Be what they expect. Be WELL. He looked at the last word. Be visibly well.

Under it he wrote the rule from the fourth notebook, though he had no need to, in the same square hand that had written it the first time:

DO NOT ASK FOR WHAT YOU WANT. ARRANGE FOR IT TO ARRIVE.

He read it over. It was a good rule. It had never failed him. It had only ever failed the people who stood too near it.

For a long time he sat without writing. Then he turned back to the top of the page, to the single word, and he thought of his mother in the kitchen with her hand pressed to her mouth, and of the way she had flinched; and under FIND, very small, in a hand so gentle that no one who read it would ever be frightened, he wrote:

Okay.