Our mother wasn’t there for dinner that night, and when our father appeared, Maeve asked him where she’d gone. He wrapped her up in his arms and kissed her neck. Such things still happened in those days. He told Maeve her mother had gone to Philadelphia to visit old friends.
“Without saying goodbye?”
“She said goodbye to me,” our father said. “She got up very early.”
“I was up early.”
“Well, she was up even before you, and she told me to tell you she’d see you in a day or two. Everybody needs a vacation.”
“From what?” Maeve asked, when what she meant was, From me? From us?
“From the house.” He took her hand and walked her in to dinner. “This place is a big responsibility.”
How big of a responsibility could it have been when Jocelyn and Sandy and Fluffy did so much of the work, when the gardeners came to take care of the lawn and rake the leaves and shovel the snow, when Maeve would have done anything in the world to be helpful?
Our mother wasn’t there when Maeve woke up the next morning, and again Fluffy drove her to school and picked her up. But when they came back to the house on that second day, our mother was sitting in the kitchen drinking tea with Sandy and Jocelyn. I was playing on the floor, taking the lids off all the pots.
“She looked so tired,” Maeve told me. “She looked like she hadn’t been to sleep the whole time she’d been gone.”
Our mother put down her cup and pulled Maeve into her lap. “There’s my darling,” she said, and kissed her forehead and kissed the part of her hair. “There’s my true love.”
Maeve put her arms around our mother’s neck and rested her head against our mother’s chest and breathed her in while our mother stroked her hair. “Who gets a girl like this?” she asked Sandy and Jocelyn. “Who gets such a beautiful girl who’s kind and smart? What did I ever do to deserve a girl like this?”
Some variation of this story happened three more times.
Over the course of the next two months, our mother was gone for two nights, then four nights, and then a week. Maeve started getting up in the middle of the night to check our parents’ room and make sure she was still there. Sometimes our mother was awake, and she would see Maeve at the door and lift up the covers and Maeve would float across the room to the bed without making a sound and slip into the warm curve of her body. She would fall asleep without thinking, her mother’s arms around her, her mother’s heartbeat and breath behind her. No other moment in life could match this.
“Why don’t you say goodbye to me before you leave?” Maeve would ask her, and our mother would just shake her head.
“I could never do that. Never in a million years could I say goodbye to you.”
Was our mother sick? Was she getting worse?
Maeve nodded. “She was turning into a ghost. One week she was thinner, then she was paler, everything deteriorated so fast. We were all folding up. Mommy would come home and cry for days. I would go and sit with her in her bed after school. Sometimes you’d be in the bed with her, playing. Whenever Dad was home he always looked like he was trying to catch her, like he might as well have been walking around with his hands out. Sandy and Jocelyn and Fluffy, they were all nervous as cats by then, but no one talked about it. When she was gone it was unbearable and when she was home it was unbearable in a different way because we knew that she was going to leave again.”
When finally she did leave again, Maeve asked our father when she was coming back. He looked at her for a very long time. He didn’t know what part of the truth he was supposed to tell a ten-year-old, and what he decided on was the whole thing. He told Maeve our mother wasn’t coming back. She had gone to India and she wasn’t coming back.
Maeve could never make up her mind what part of this story was the worst: that her mother was gone or that India was on the other side of the planet. “No one goes to India!”
“Maeve,” he said.
“Maybe she hasn’t left yet!” She didn’t believe him, not for a minute, but if the story had been started it needed to be stopped.
Our father shook his head but he didn’t reach for her. Somehow that might have been the strangest part of all.
This was the story of our mother leaving, and this was the point at which the story stopped. There should have been questions, explanations. If she was in India our father should have gone to find her and bring her back, but none of this happened because Maeve stopped getting up in the morning. She wouldn’t go to school. Sandy would bring her Cream of Wheat on a tray and sit on the edge of her bed, trying to talk her into taking a couple of bites, but she said Maeve was rarely persuaded. Everyone saw it as the understandable sickness of a girl longing for her mother. They were all suffering from some related version, and so they let the child sink down into it, never really thinking about the fact that she would still drink her orange juice, and drink her glass of water, and drink the entire pot of chamomile tea. She’d take her cup into the bathroom and fill it over and over again, until finally she stuck her head in the sink and drank from the running tap. Fluffy would bring me into Maeve’s room and put me in her bed and Maeve would read me a story before falling back to sleep. Then one afternoon, less than a week after our mother left for good, Maeve didn’t wake up. Fluffy shook her and shook her and then scooped Maeve up in her arms and ran down the stairs and out to the car.
Where was everyone then? Where had our father and Sandy and Jocelyn gone? Where was I? Sandy said she couldn’t remember. “Such a terrible time,” she said, shaking her head. What she knew was that Fluffy drove Maeve to the hospital and carried her into the lobby where some nurses took the sleeping child from her arms. She stayed in the hospital for two weeks. The doctors said the diabetes could have been brought on by trauma, or it could have been a virus. The body had all sorts of means to deal with what it couldn’t understand. In the hospital, Maeve swam in and out of consciousness while they worked to stabilize her blood sugar. Everything that happened to her was part of a dream. She told herself her mother wasn’t allowed to visit, a punishment meted out to both of them for something she had done and couldn’t quite remember. The Sisters of Mercy, all friends of our mother’s, came to see her. Two girls from Sacred Heart presented her with a card signed by the entire class, but they weren’t allowed to stay. Our father would come in the evenings, though he said very little. He would hold Maeve’s foot through the white cotton blanket and tell her that she needed to get better now, no one was up for this. Jocelyn and Sandy and Fluffy took turns staying with her in the room. “One of us for you, one for your brother, and one for your father,” Sandy would say. “Everyone’s covered.” Sandy said that when she needed to cry she would wait until Maeve was asleep, then she would go out to the hall.
After Maeve came home from the hospital things got worse. Logic said our mother’s absence had made her sick, and so logic concluded that further talk of our mother could kill her. The Dutch House grew quiet. Sandy and Jocelyn and Fluffy devoted themselves to my sister, the needles, the insulin. They were terrified of the way every injection changed her. Our father would have nothing to do with it. Fluffy, who in those weeks slept in the bed with Maeve, ended up taking her back to the hospital in the middle of the night. Again, they worked to stabilize her, again they sent her home. Maeve would cry and cry until my father would come into her room and tell her to stop. They had all become characters in the worst part of a fairy tale. He was now a hundred years old. “Stop,” he would say, as if he could barely make the words. “You have to stop.”