And lastly, there was a long undated letter that started with the words Happy Birthday, Mom! so it had to’ve been written in April sometime because that’s when my mother’s birthday is:
Happy birthday, Mom!
Tong Nai Pam is a large bay surrounded by dense jungle mountains. Two long white coral beaches separated by a tuft of peninsula and more mountain. A small path up the mountain and through the forest connects the two facing beaches.
The route takes about 15 minutes of walking time as it wangles its way here and there around large boulders, hanging vines, and crisp oval leaves, dried and layered on the jungle floor. It is quiet and peaceful here. An occasional rustle of lizard, the silent holes of some invisible unknown predator. I wonder what lives in those arm-sized holes, and whether they are sleeping or thinking about me thumping through their peaceful ageless gardens.
It is always a life and death walk for me. I have made it maybe 10 times now, each time alone, and each time knowing that if I am bitten by a King Cobra, I will end up fertilizer for some wayward palm before anyone either hears my fuzzy pleas for help or I crawl, poisoned, to my imminent demise.
A 15 minute death walk on a daily basis gets the blood flowing, pops the eyes open and wide. Feeling every root and vine with all my being, but just for the briefest of moments, before shifting to the next form, breathlessly anticipating movement. I have never seen a King Cobra on this path, but I swear I can hear them dreaming.
“Did you read this letter?” I ask.
“Of course, I read it. I read all her letters. There weren’t that many, you know.”
“What’d you think, Mom?”
“I thought she wrote very well. For someone who never went to college.”
“ ‘Shifting to the next form’? What does that mean?”
“She probably meant ‘shifting to the next foot’ She’s walking through a forest, you know. Feeling every root and vine underfoot.”
“Shifting to the next form,” I say again, repeating the words as if this will help me understand them.
“A slip of the pen,” my mother says.
“Mm.”
“Why? What do you think, Professor? She’s Dracula changing into a bat?”
“Cobras dreaming,” I say. “She heard cobras dreaming.”
“That was simile,” she says, and shrugs.
I look at her.
“You know what simile is, don’t you, Professor?”
“Sure. It’s the same thing as metaphor.”
I point my finger at her like a pistol, pull the imaginary trigger.
“Gotcha,” I say.
Mama doesn’t even smile.
I slip the rubber band from my wrist and onto the envelopes again. I am thinking it is such a slender body of correspondence for so many mighty journeys. I hand the bundle back to her. Mama places it on her lap, sighs at it, as if it has let her down somehow.
“Maybe we should call that woman, after all,” she says.
For a moment, I’m not sure who she means.
“Woman?” I say.
“The shrink you saw last week.”
“Oh.”
“Whatever her name was. Was she any good, Andrew?”
“Lang. Yes, she seemed okay.”
“Only okay?”
“She seemed fine, Mom.”
“Did Annie mention what they talked about?”
“I was there, Mom. I know what they talked about.”
“What do you mean, you were there? You mean in the room with them?”
“Yes, Mom. Annie wanted me to come in.”
“And she let you? The shrink?”
“Her name is Lang, Mom, Dr. Lang. She’s a respected psychiatrist at Mount...”
“And she let you hear what a patient was saying?”
“I told you, Annie wanted me to come in.”
“That’s highly unusual, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know if it’s unusual or not.”
“Well, it seems highly unusual to me.”
“So be it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, so be it?”
“It means if you think it was unusual, then you think it was unusual. Apparently, Dr. Lang didn’t think it was so unusual because she permitted it.”
My mother nods.
Her nods mean either “You are a jackass, son,” or “There’s no use even talking to you.” In this instance, her nod probably means both.
“So what’d your sister tell her?”
“She said she was molested when she was a kid.”
“Nonsense.”
“When she was eleven years old.”
“No.”
“She said Mr. Alvarez put his hand under her skirt...”
“Who on earth is Mr... Oh. The super? When we were living on Seventy-second Street? Annie never said any such thing! You’re making this up.”
“Stuck his finger in her, she says. She wet her pants. She peed on his hand.”
“Really, Andrew.”
“Mother, it’s what she told Dr. Lang.”
“Dr. Lang!” she says.
“She also said she heard Mr. Alvarez’s voice coming from the television set.”
“Well,” my mother says. “Everyone hears voices.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m sure Annie didn’t mean actually hearing his voice coming from the television. Or maybe she was just listening to thoughts inside her head. Everyone has internal thoughts, Andrew. You teach English, haven’t you ever heard of interior monologues?”
“Yes, Mother, I...”
“Ulysses, remember, Professor? Finnegans Wake?”
“I’m merely repeating what Annie...”
“Or didn’t you ever study James Joyce?”
Her sarcasm is biting. I am suddenly five years old again. My father is gone. He never answered my letter, I have no father. I keep crying all the time. My mother keeps telling me to stop crying all the time, I can’t seem to stop crying. Aaron rabbit-punches me every time he passes me in the apartment. The apartment seems so huge with my father gone. Whenever I start crying, Annie begins crying, too. We are a gang, my sister and I.
My mother is pacing now.
“What else did Annie tell this Lang woman?” she asks.
This Lang Woman. Some sort of devious mid-Victorian figure with high hair and a corseted waist and a plumed hat, stalking drawing rooms and salons where she smiles secretly and eavesdrops on the confidences of young Tantric initiates. With those three words, my mother washes down the drain four years of college and four years of medical school and four years of psychiatric residency, leaving “This Lang Woman” standing exposed for the charlatan and quack she most certainly is.
“She told her all about Sicily.”
“All about Sicily?”
“Well, almost everything, Mother.”
“Told her what that doctor...”
“Said they all thought she was crazy, yes.”
She whirls on me suddenly. Her eyes are blazing the way they had that night long ago, when she called my sister a little pisspants. I expect another bowl of mashed potatoes on my head. I almost cower from her.
“And you let her say all this?”
“Mom, it was her nickel.”
“Her nickel? My nickel, you mean, don’t you?”
“Annie was there to talk. What good would it have done if...”
“What were you thinking?” she yells. “Did you suddenly lose your...?”
She cuts herself short. I suspect she was about to suggest that perhaps I’d suddenly lost my mind, too, but of course this observation would have been at odds with what she believes, or disbelieves, to be the truth about Annie. She begins pacing again, stalking the room like a lynx, all green-eyed and auburn-haired with a little help from a rinse bottled by my brother’s firm. I cannot tell whether she is furious or merely desperate.