Dad and I bushwhacked a north facing slope along Northern California’s Smith River in a swath of forest we hoped contained culinary mushrooms. Pink rhododendrons blossomed in an understory of redwood, cedar and fir. We were hunting for chanterelles, yellow feet or hedgehogs. The mushroom buyer didn’t pay much per pound, but I desperately needed the money to pay for my half of an abortion.
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“Mama, when are we going home?” my son whispers, his eyes glued to the car window.
I grip the steering wheel and glance behind me. His flip-flops and beach towel are strewn across the back seat. His goggles, around his neck. Pinkish popsicle stains skip across his white camp t-shirt. All signs of a good summer, or so I would have thought.
I wish I knew how to answer him. I’m not sure I want to go home.
“You miss being home?” I ask.
“Yes.”
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My personal rules in the girls’ locker room: no talking, listening, or looking. Change clothes very quickly. At the end, dress under the towel.
I wear my cut-off full slip, as I have every school day for a month or more. I’ve left it long enough to tuck into a skirt and into my gym shorts. The only shape to my chest comes from my bony ribs, but that’s not what concerns me. I wear the thing so I don’t have to expose myself completely during P.E. as The One Girl Without a Bra.
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I scrape off the half-peeled remnants of a glittery purple manicure, even though it’s my last tangible reminder of my days with my daughter Ellie. Three weeks after dropping her off at college two states away, I’m still fighting tears. Maybe I’ll keep these ugly jagged edges for a little longer, I think as I stare at my hands. With her bedroom cleaned and sterile, the door perpetually open like a mouth that has forgotten to close, I don’t have many other traces of my daughter’s presence in our home. Except for the reality that my phone lights up with her text messages all day long.
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“I hate you,” I say with a vitriol that I don’t really feel and never will. My dad’s face is turning red from choking back his chortles. The neon green paper full of words has now fallen to the floor, and I pray that the parakeet hopping along the carpet finds his way to it and tears it to pieces like he has the edges of my books.
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I’m sorry I can’t be in the classroom today. I’m grateful you’re here. I teach three 100 minute blocks of 8th Grade English. I’m available any time for a text or phone call at 503-xxx-xxxx. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you are struggling with a student, or need clarification on anything.
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I laughed when they called to schedule it, when I put it in my calendar over the faint traces of where you’d been. I’m not surprised. This much I’ve learned about grief—that it’s cruel in how it compounds, strata over strata of reddened rock.
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Of all the memories that I have of my great great grandmother from the first thirteen years of my life, the one that I remember most of all occurred in the tiny kitchen of her small home, tucked away in the orchards of Live Oak. I was in sixth grade, and she was teaching me how to sweep the right way, a skillset that my mother had still yet to properly impart upon me; she was too busy smoking weed and sleeping with her latest boyfriend.
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I was in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner when I heard the glass shatter. I simultaneously took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and waited for the inevitable outburst.
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I was deceived by the feel of her supple cheek that day after she died. She was like a green limb reaching for the sun, severed at the whim of the wind, the tree’s canopy of little protection. When illicit Oxy’s calming wind blew into her veins did she suddenly realize what she consumed was coated in fentanyl poison? Was it like being in the eye of the hurricane where there is calm for a moment before chaos takes over or was it like floating away on her favorite pair of Nike Airs™?
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The phone rings. I see the vet clinic’s number and my throat goes dry. I feel a jolt of anxiety. Although there can be no more bad news, I don’t want to talk to them. I just want all this to go away, to be one of my nightmares. “Mosi’s ashes are ready for pickup,” says the receptionist softly.
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I thought about writing this story as fiction: two women, a later-in-life, larger-than-life friendship that changes both of them, a sudden fatal illness. Fiction can fix the broken, prevent the disaster, turn around the inevitable. The child can be saved. The bad guys can be caught. The terminal patient can beat all odds. By choosing fiction, I could change the ending of our story, Diana’s and mine. I could keep her alive. But no. If I did that, it wouldn’t be our story anymore.
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A policeman stepped from a side street and raised his hand for us to stop.
One hand rested on the pistol jutting out of its holster. Silver handcuffs nuzzled the gun, black-lens sunglasses hid his eyes. An odor of underarm deodorant hung in the air.
He stopped us because Eunice was Black and I was white. It wasn’t illegal for the two of us to be together on the street, but in Apartheid South Africa it may as well have been. The proximity of our bodies alerted this white policeman to something being wrong.
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It’s late June 2022, pandemic still a slow burn.
I’m at my parents’ house, on the highest hill in Carlsbad, CA. Nightly, my dad draws dark curtains against the Pacific sunset. I’ve come alone, my sons back home in Chicago with my husband. This is by design.
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I can’t remember what horrible thing I said to her the night before, so take your pick. Maybe it was after I got a third degree burn getting her dinner out of the toaster oven when I said: “Shirley I’d put a feeding tube in your stomach if I never had to cook another fucking tray of chicken nuggets.”
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I don’t suffer from FOMO. Leave me alone. Leave me out. I relish the kind of quiet the breeze by the lake makes when it moves between the windchimes, a pleasing cacophony. The chimes hang from a branch on a mossy oak that stands between me and the lake. I see at lake’s edge a hammock someone left out. All winter it’s twisted back and forth on its ends of frayed rope.
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We’re sitting in a sterile room. Cold air is streaming from above and ruffling a stapled medical resources page tacked to the wall. It’s filled with tiny, almost illegible print and endless lines of phone numbers. Its intention is to let the occupants of this claustrophobic room know that ‘help is available,’ but even with this never-ending list, I feel completely overwhelmed. Like no amount of resources can help me.
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It was the way he shut down when he entered the room.
He’d turned his key in a lock. He’d opened a door. His voice had risen once more in our dwelling, risen once more in me.
“Hello.”
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In my married life in Palo Alto, in our new condo, with congenial neighbors and other friends who were all interested in the usual Boomer preoccupations—ethnic foods, excellent but cheap wines, places to travel to, movies--I kept pressing down cryptic feelings I couldn’t name or understand, was afraid to acknowledge but couldn’t ignore
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