We play Scrabble; sometimes the three of us, sometimes just us two. Mom goes in and out: lucid some days but often drifty, flirting intermittently with pure loopy, or gone. She always leaves on foot, can’t get too far walking, and seems generally to be a happier version of herself when she gets back, so Dad and I leave it to the neighbors to decide how they feel about it. They don’t tell us. Typically.
I am amazed at how easily those two words — Mom and Dad — have again become a part of my vocabulary. For so many years now, they have been Rose and Henry to me, as if removing the familial tags would make it all right to stay away. On the loose, out on my own recognizance — that has been my MO. I had my reasons. Who knows if they were good ones? Who the hell even knows what they were? Other than us, there are only two, maybe three other people on the planet who could possibly care.
Mom adds her letters to an existing word, making “funhouse” for thirty-four points. She’s kicking our asses. She’s always been good at this game.
“Nice one, Rosie,” Dad says. Her expression softens as she looks up at him. I wonder when he started calling her Rosie, and not just plain Rose. I wonder if it was when she started going away. Or maybe he always called her that when me and Mick weren’t around. Maybe it was part of a dialect they spoke only with each other. I feel an intense and alien longing, somewhere in the vicinity of my stutter-stepping heart, and it takes me completely by surprise. I know I once had, at least with that long-haired boy out at Cherry Gulch, the slightest taste of a similar, if less evolved, kind of love. I have been invited in but had no idea what to do about it, save for leave it in the rearview as quickly as possible. Do I regret that? Something fierce I do.
I watch them when I think they won’t notice. Signs of age — the usual — overlay faces that were once a full half of my entire solar system, two of the three planets that would always be visible in the night sky. Then, of course, I thought it would be that way forever, and even if the third planet’s orbit sometimes kept him out of sight a bit too long for my liking, he would still keep coming around. That’s what planets are supposed to do. They are not supposed to jump the track, fly off into an alternate universe, leave a gaping black hole in space. We don’t talk about my flight path. Not here we don’t. Except to say I think I was not meant to be that fourth planet necessarily. I think I was meant to be a moon, or a satellite. Gravity was meant to be my friend. I don’t know how any of this happened.
Dad’s thick, dark hair is only now beginning to turn gray. Absently, he runs his fingers through it, clutches it in his bony fist, as if making certain he is really still here. The backs of his hands, and his forearms, are darkly bruised. Sarcomas. A constellation of blazing black stars. I ask if they are painful.
“Only to look at,” he says, tugging the sleeves of his flannel shirt down as far as they will go. He smiles. I see exactly now what they mean when they say “ruefully.”
I have the letters to spell most of it, hunt down an opening and spell “rufely.” To make my mother laugh. She cuts her eyes at me, sly.
“What did you study out there, Riley?”
“Boys,” I say. I don’t mention the other things I studied, or my frequent sightings of nothingness. Though I know the evidence is visible, and not only to me.
She turns her head, tilts her chin down, and looks into my eyes. “Books?” she says, and I nod. She knows. There is no point in pretending, about train wrecks, holding patterns, or reconstruction. My mother is no dummy, even when the synapses misfire, and throw sparks.
A few minutes later: “Remember that time I fell off the roof?”
“Roof?” my mother says. “What?” Meaning, I suspect, Don’t be an idiot, Riley. Of course I do. Or could it be that she really doesn’t remember? I don’t believe it. How effortless, though, for me to be clueless and seven, nine, ten again. As if I could take us all back to that picture-perfect existence. And by “all,” I do mean all four of us. This is a trick I have been working on since I was a teenager, a poster child for the seventies. It’s amazing I remember anything. But I did, goddamn it, have a brother. He was not one of my frequent hallucinations or one of the flashbacks I was promised. And, no, I don’t have those anymore. They too have passed their expiration date.
My feet reach for Cash under the table, but of course he is not here. I feel an imprint though. An outline. Some residual dog warmth. “Roof roof,” I say. My parents look at me. My mother nods. I see the corners of her mouth think about smiling. Dad just goes ahead and does it. Rufely.
Mom’s hair is straight and long and pure white. It is lovely, as she is. She bites the ends sometimes; it is a signal that she is flighty, as in liable to fly. I see just the smallest, moon-sliver curve of ear peeking out. I reach over slowly and touch it. I can’t help it. She stays perfectly still, a bit taken aback, frightened even, at having been snuck up on like that; then relieved, or released, when I pull my hand away.
They have already restarted my father’s heart once, brought him back to the land of the living, so he can play Scrabble with us in the kitchen. One night after a game he pulls letters from the board, and on the red-faded-to-pink Formica table spells, “D-o n-o-t r-e-s-u-” and then hesitates, his long, battered fingers spidering between an s and a c. Mom helps him finish it, and with letters of her own, and a few she steals from Dad, spells “gone so gone.” I try not to wonder what it means, and do not enter into this braille-like conversation, as I have clearly not been invited in. It is almost as if I am not here.
I recognize that they are trying to make a place for me, for my actual body, but there will be times it will not seem worth the effort, and my role will be to witness. Whatever comes next. I do realize I’ve had my chances.
If I had been listening, and reading her letters more carefully, I might have at least sensed something coming. One letter told about waves crashing against the front door. In another, she was trying out names for all the itinerant ground squirrels and gophers, voles, mice, and wood rats: Smokey, Clarence, Ophelia, Sparky (Smokey’s evil twin), George. And on the phone, when the conversation faltered, or strayed into dangerous territory (disappearing acts, family), she would tell me who was at the bird feeder, or in the horse trough turned birdbath.
“Magpie,” she would say. “Drowning feathers.” “Baptismal finch.” Lone geese worry her, up there honking like sonar, waiting for that twin sound, that echo in another’s voice, to return to them. They worry me too. I remember daily the source of my echo, in every cell. And I remember, as if I had actually been there, Leonard on a wild-goose rescue, going through the river ice. The current grabbing his boots and pulling him in, where he skimmed the undersurface like a shadow. Like a big sturgeon, Darrell said, even though he had never seen one of those.
I asked him, not right away, but later: a recalcitrant challenge. I was like that then.
“How do you know?” I demanded.
“I can imagine,” he said, not wanting to argue, obviously, but knowing I did. I often wonder what he could have loved about me, or wonder if maybe, after all, he only wanted to take care of me, a mission I would not have wished on anyone at the time. I wonder how we would find each other now. If our boy has been given a real name. I really ought to know. No one needs to tell me that.