They held their wedding in the park, ducklings now ducks, and 0 invited whoever wanted to come. The wedding album looks like a town fair. My
mother reminds me of a dove, her skirts lifting and 4?
rustling off the page, a bow-shaped smile on her face. The hospital looms in the background, shimmering blue as an upright pond on a bright sunlit summer afternoon.
That first year my father got sick, my parents told me over dinner that we weren’t taking a vacation that year. We’d had a plan to go down a river in a boat.
Your father is uncomfortable leaving his doctors, my mother explained, twisting the end of her napkin into a spear.
But the doctors say nothing, I said.
My mother pointed her paper spear at me and jabbed at the air with it. True, she said.
Well I don’t care, I said immediately. I looked over to my father for approval, but he wasn’t looking at me; he was looking out the window at something else. After cleaning up, I went into my bedroom and took out my homework, and when I heard them walk into other rooms and settle down, I thought: well, the truth is, vacations are pointless anyway, because you always have to come back, so you might as well just save time, skip the middle step, and stay put in the first place.
My mother sat in the living room, alone. I heard her shift the books around, sighing a bit. She didn’t know yet that from now on, we would be roping ourselves in by the borders of the town because my father worried he might die out in the open somewhere.
I would like to die on my own soil, he told my mother after the fifth year of making no plans to leave, even for an afternoon.
Oh, you’re not going to die, she’d answered, flat. And besides, she said. This isn’t even your own soil.
When my father spoke, his voice was gentle.
If you want, Judy, my father said, you can go by yourself. You can bring a camera and show me photos.
She’d seemed unmoved throughout the conversation but that’s when I heard her voice crack in half.
But I want to go with you, she said.
It was the youngest I ever heard her sound.
That first night of not leaving, my mother called to me from her post in the living room. I was nestled in my bedroom, math textbook open in my lap, cross-legged on the bed. Mona, she called out, pick a page! What do you mean? I garbled, chewing on the side of a yellow pencil. Just pick, she said. I looked down at the page I was on: Dividing Fractions. I pulled the pencil from my teeth. Page 68, I called out. She made a paper flipping sound and then I heard her laugh. Kentucky, she announced, pick another. I made 68 into a fraction: 6/8 and slimmed it down: 3/4. 34, I called out.
34! Flip flip flip. Chile! she said. What are you doing? I asked, and she said: More pages, give me more! I checked my sheet of answers and picked out numbers. 33. ‘!7? 27! Oh, she said, such good choices, she said. Would you rather see Paris or Hawaii?
Paris! I yelled back. Paris! No wait, I said, Hawaii! Dark blue ocean and volcanoes. Hawaii! I hollered. Page 100, I suggested.
There were more page-flipping sounds. Oooh, my mother said, oooh.
What? I asked, emerging from my room. My mother was curled up on the formerly burgundy sofa and had, in her lap, the huge hard backed brown atlas we’d bought for a buck at the Finch’s garage sale. She held up the map to me, page 100. Corsica, she said. Now that must be incredible. Orange blossoms and sharp cliffs and lasagna too.
I tucked myself up on the sofa next to my mother. Show me,” I said.
She outlined the borders of the island. The Tyrrhenian Sea, she said, doesn’t that sound great? TyT-The-ni-an. She released the word slowly, letting the back of her hand glide over my hair, knuckles combing my scalp. Let’s go tomorrow, she said.
I pulled closer. Where’s Japan? I asked.
We’ll make it a world tour, my mother said. First, Tokyo. Then Nepal. Uruguay. How about Morocco? She Ripped the pages fast and countries blurred by in calm pastels. She pointed out Casablanca.
My father wandered past the couch, saw the book open, walked out.
We’re just pretending, I told him.
My mother was taking her finger on a tour of Italy. I just know I would love Italy, she was saying.
Where are we? I asked. Daddy, I called again, we’re finding us now.
He was in their bedroom. That’s good, he said, voice small through the hallway.
My mother thumbed to the table of contents. Page 45, she said, opening up. She skated her index finger down the gloss of the page, gliding past town names, a riverbed far away, searching, skiing until her nail rested, clear, over a nest of pink and green lines and a black dot. Here, she said.
I peered down. There, I said. We’re in that dot, I said.
We both bent close to the page, heads touching. I see you, I told her.
I’m winking, she said. Look closer. She even tilted her head to the ceiling and winked at it and I laughed, breathing in the smell of her shoulder-dish soap and almond moisturizer.
We looked up my aunt’s home state, Colorado, and we looked up India and
imagined all the people there. Millions, I said, finger on Calcutta, there are millions of people inside this dot. We looked at Kenya and pictured giraffes, sleeping. We looked at New Zealand and imagined sheep, chewing. After Peru, my mother closed the book.
I’m tired now, she said. Enough of that.
She handed the atlas over and I held it close; it was so big and broad I could barely get my arms around the whole thing. Maybe, I said, if I shake it She looked at me, standing, ready to go away. Good night Mona Blue, she said, leaving her palm on my head for one second.
I pushed up against it. If I shake it just right, I said, maybe we’ll fall to the next page.
She smiled, kind of sadly. Shake hard, she told me.
Removing her hand, she left the room and went to bed. I rattled the atlas like it was a bottle of juice, separated into water and pulp; I integrated that atlas. I shook hard, counted to ten, and opened to 45. Then turned the page to 46. Which put us in Australia.
Just like that! I said, out loud, to the quiet house. I put my finger smack in the middle of the continent, pinning it down.
Rople only notice if you leave; they don’t notice if you stay.
It’s like hearing a buzz only after it’s been turned off. My family spent every minute of every day in town and my father turned daylight on constellations of itchy red dots and his face was the color of wet worms and we told no one that anything was wrong. No one asked, either. I had instructions if they did.
About a month or so after the first sick scare, my parents had specifically sat me down and asked me to please keep this between us.
I’d said: Keep what? What is this? What do you mean when you say
THIS?
But my father had just coughed. My mother thumbed through a magazine. There was no name to say. The dictionary was not helpful The encyclopedia was useless. Under gray in the thesaurus, all it said was drab. Under gray in the doctor’s reference book, all it said was Gray’s Anatomy, excellent resource text. Under gray in the phone book, all it said was us.
I went to my room and thought their plan of privacy was absurd and would never work but I found out fast that I was wrong. No one ever asked my father if anything was the matter. No one asked about his foggy pallor and no one came over with a casserole. No one took me under their wing to say, Mona are you okay? or talk about me in nice sad voices behind my back. Our fake — out was to tally convincing.
Welcome back to school. My summer vacation was fine. Which is why, when Lisa ran out of my classroom that Friday with the big IV. crown on her head, before I went to recess duty, I had to go stand in a bathroom stall by myself. I stood, trembling inside the four small walls, because Lisa was so proud with the truth, she was a billboard and a megaphone, she’d made jewelry of saline and plastic, and I was thickly, fiercely, jealous.