A commercial came on, and I downed the rest of my Scotch. I left the television talking to itself and wandered out onto the balcony. My father’s house was perched on the edge of a hill, and the balcony offered a panoramic view of Los Angeles, a carpet of twinkling lights, freeway interchanges glittering like distant mandalas, neons flashing, streetlights, houselights, headlights. I stood at the railing, looking down at the city and thinking about my mother. In a moment of sudden dizziness, I closed my eyes.
I opened them to darkness and silence. No lights, except for the pale crescent moon that hung low over the dark valley. No freeways, no houses, no neon. The cool breeze that fanned my face carried the scent of distant campfire smoke. I could hear an owl hooting in the distance and the rapid beating of my own heart.
I clutched the railing with both hands, fighting a wave of vertigo. Panic came over me: I feared I would tumble over the railing and fall into the black void beyond the balcony, plummeting forever in endless darkness. I closed my eyes against the vision and when I opened them I saw the lights of Los Angeles, distant and cold, but infinitely reassuring.
I quit drinking. I did not sleep, but I quit drinking. And in the small hours before dawn, I decided to find my mother. The need to find her seemed linked to my drunken vision of falling and to the restlessness that had plagued me even before my father’s death.
I shifted uneasily in my seat, listening to the reassuring hum of the jet’s engines. I tried to imagine my mother’s face, building it out of the darkness. A thin face, dominated by restless blue eyes. Short and unruly hair, brown with streaks of gray, the color of an English sheepdog. A slight woman whose clothes were too large for her, whose hands were always moving, whose eyes were bright and curious. The picture of my mother that formed in my mind was static, frozen, but I remembered my mother as being constantly in motion: walking, cleaning, cooking.
When I was a child, I had daydreamed about my mother constantly. I dreamed that she would come home. How and why she came changed with each dream. She drove up in a jeep to take me away to an archaeological dig. She roared up on a motorcycle and took me to live with her in Berkeley. She rode into town on a black horse and we galloped away into the sunset. Details changed: she wore khaki, jeans, Mexican costume, ordinary dress. But always the dreams were bright and clear, and always the ending was happy. Fifteen years ago I stopped dreaming.
It was Christmastime. The air had been scented with burning pine; the wine had sparkled in my mother’s glass. I was fifteen years old, and 1 sat on the carpet by the fireplace. Robert, my father, sat in an easy chair beside me.
My mother sat alone on the love seat, an ugly antique with carved wooden arms and upholstery of heavy tapestry cloth. She had flung her left arm carelessly across the back of the love seat and the sleeve of her shirt, a baggy shirt that was a little too large for her, had fallen back to show the white scars that marked her wrist. Her skin was tanned around the scars.
Robert and my mother were talking politely. ‘Are you staying in town?’ Robert asked.
‘At the Biltmore,’ she said. ‘I’ll be heading back to Berkeley tomorrow. I’ve been in Guatemala for two months now, and I have much too much to do.’
At the time, I wondered what my mother could possibly have to do. She seemed out of place in my father’s house, but I could not imagine where she would be in place. She seemed a little nervous, glanced at the clock on the mantel often.
‘Where were you in Guatemala?’ I asked.
‘Near Lake Izabal,’ my mother said. ‘Excavating a small site. A trading center. We found some pottery from Teotihuacán, up by Mexico City, some from farther north.’ She shrugged. ‘We’ll be arguing for months about how to interpret our findings.’ She grinned at me – a brilliant, open smile very unlike the polite smile with which she had greeted Robert. ‘After all, archaeologists need to do something in the winter.’
‘Would you like some more wine?’ Robert asked, cutting off my next question. He moved quickly to refill her glass.
He changed the subject then, talking about the house, his business, my schoolwork. When my mother finished the glass of wine, we exchanged presents. Her package for me was wrapped in brown paper, and she apologized for the wrappings. ‘The Guatemalan market offers a limited choice in wrapping paper,’ she said in a dry tone that seemed to imply that I had been to Guatemala and knew the market quite well.
I unwrapped a shirt made of a heavy cloth woven of burgundy and black thread. On the pockets and back, a stylized bird surrounded by an intricate border was woven into the cloth. ‘You can watch the women weaving these shirts in the market,’ my mother said. ‘That’s a quetzal bird, the symbol of Guatemala. It’s called a quetzal shirt.’
I pulled the shirt on over my T-shirt. It was loose on my shoulders, but I pulled it tight around me. ‘It’s great,’ I said. ‘Just great.’
‘It’s a little large,’ Robert said from his seat by the fire.
‘I’ll grow into it,’ I said, without looking at him. ‘I’m sure I will.’
There was more polite conversation – I couldn’t remember it all. I remember Robert congratulating her for her second book – just out and getting good reviews. My father said good-bye at the door. I walked my mother to the car. It had rained that day and the streets were still wet. A car passed, its tires hissing on the pavement. The Christmas lights that my father had strung along the front porch blinked on and off: red and blue and green and gold.
I stood beside my mother’s car. When she opened the front door, the interior light came on and I caught a glimpse of the clutter on the backseat: two more packages wrapped in brown paper and tied with ribbon, a dirty canvas duffel bag adorned with baggage tags, a straw hat with a snakeskin band that held three brilliant blue feathers. My mother sat in the front seat and closed the door.
‘Where are you going to spend Christmas?’ I asked her.
‘I’ll spend Christmas day with friends,’ she said. ‘I’ll be driving back to Berkeley the day after.’ I heard the click of metal on metal as she slipped the key into the ignition.
‘Can I come?’ I asked quickly. ‘I won’t be any trouble. I thought maybe…’ I stopped, caught in a tangle of words.
The colored lights flashed on her face: red, blue, green, gold, red, blue. I have a clear memory of her face, frozen like a snapshot. The air around us seemed cold.
‘Come with me? But your father…’ She stopped. ‘You’ll be spending Christmas with your father.’
‘I want to go with you,’ I said quietly. ‘I need to.’
I watched her face in the changing light. She was no longer frozen: her eyes narrowed and her mouth turned down, weary, unhappy, maybe frightened. Her hand clenched the steering wheel and the lights flashed red, blue, green. ‘I’ll be leaving soon,’ she said. ‘Another dig. I can’t…’
The dream had gone wrong. I stepped back from the car. ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Forget it. Just forget it.’
‘Here,’ she said. She reached in the backseat and pulled a blue feather from the band in the straw hat. ‘This is a quetzal feather. They bring good luck.’
I stood in the driveway, holding the blue feather as she backed the car away from the house. The colored lights reflected from the wet pavement, and her tires hissed as she drove away. I threw the feather down on the pavement. When I looked for it in the morning, the wind had blown it away.
I woke to the scratchy sound of a stewardess’s voice over the loudspeakers. ‘Please fasten your seat belts and return your seats to their upright position. We are now landing at the Mérida airport. We hope you have a pleasant stay in Mérida, and thank you for flying Mexicana.’ The voice repeated the message in rapid Spanish. I understood a few phrases in the flow of words, vocabulary from the high school Spanish I had taken long ago.