means ‘tree of heaven.’ I read about it as a little girl. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
“Can I climb it?”
“No.”
“Why not?” He stamps his feet, raising his voice in bitter objection. “Please, please. I want to climb the tree of heaven.”
Now Pinky’s voice is back, saying, “He’ll fucking go to jail—do not pass go.”
But Matthew can’t figure out why he would possibly go to jail for climbing the tree of heaven. Maybe it’s like the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but even Adam and Eve didn’t go to jail; they were just sent out of the garden, and Matthew has just left the garden with his mother. The bark is smooth and she has to boost Matthew up to the first branch so he can climb to the yawning Y of the next branch. The leaves are smooth and tear-shaped, tapering out in the end to a fine point. He can see the tops of cars passing by. His mother looks small, girlish, standing below, her face tight with worry. The canopy is fuller above him and he wants so badly to climb where the leaves are thickest; beyond is heaven after all. I can fly, he thinks. All the way to heaven.
“Don’t go any farther,” his mother calls.
“One more branch.”
“No. Come down right now.”
Matthew moves to climb higher up the tree when his foot slips against the smooth bark and he tumbles to the ground below, hitting his head on the recoil.
“Oh my God. Are you all right?” his mother screams. She places her hands under his head and kisses him on the forehead.
“I’m fine,” Matthew says, more embarrassed than hurt. He’s taken worse in the schoolyard. He is a big boy, after all, and he has climbed the tree of heaven.
“Are you sure? Do you need to go to the hospital?”
“I wanna go home.”
“You know I love you and wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Okay. Let’s don’t tell your father about this. It will be our little secret. Deal?” And she extends her trembling hand to shake.
Matthew knows it is a mistake to shake her hand, to betray his father, but he reaches out and takes her hand in his. “Deal.”
STONE’S HEAD THUMPED and the air smelled of vomit. Somebody was in the room with him, but his eyes, still unfocused, couldn’t make out the figure sitting in a chair at the end of his mattress.
“Matthew, I was so worried about you.”
That voice, that voice was so familiar yet so alien at the same time. It was the same voice he had just heard in his dream, the same voice that had comforted him and nurtured him as a small child before it had disappeared from his life. He ached all over and his clothing stuck to his body. Stone reached behind his mattress for the pill bottle but his blind hand found nothing except street grit tracked onto the floor.
“If you’re looking for the pills, you’re not going to find them,” the voice said. “I flushed them down the toilet. They are all gone.”
Stone was unsure whether he was still in the grips of delirium. How could his mother possibly be here, now, after almost fourteen years? How could she even find him? And why would she come now after staying away through crisis after crisis in which he had no one to turn to? He sat up on the mattress, the room rotating around him. Was this really her, and not a figment of his imagination? Was this the woman who brought him into the world, the woman who ran away? He didn’t even know what to call her after all this time: Mom? Abi? Bitch? Coward?
“The pills are gone, you’re not getting any more.”
He looked at his mother’s face and saw no warmth, nothing—it was too late for that. She had missed too much of his life. Her face had hardened with the years. But though her skin was tanned and worn, she was still pretty. It was still the same face he had known as a child.
“What are you doing here?”
“You need help,” she said. “You look terrible.”
“But what are you doing here? How did you know where to find me?”
“Matthew, I’m here. That’s what’s important,” Abi said. “You need a mother right now. Someone to take care of you.”
Stone regarded her for a moment, unsure how to respond. This was not motherly love, this was remorse speaking, and Stone had no intention of helping to alleviate her guilt. She was dressed in black and muted grays in the Banana Republic style, with its timeless lines, its clean cut eschewing fads and trends. She looked like the consummate New Yorker—urbane, cynical, confident—and it struck Stone that perhaps she had never even left New York but had been living across the river all this time, painting her pictures while he struggled to keep himself together.
“I wish it was you who died instead of him.”
“I don’t blame you for hating me,” she said, staring down into her lap. “But I’m here now, and I want to help you. I just want you to know you are not alone.” His mother raised her eyes, but they were black pools, showing nothing. “Will you forgive me?”
This was the most power Stone had held in years: the power to destroy his mother was hanging on those four meager words. He noticed she had stray gray strands in her shoulder-length hair that had once been as black as sticky summer tar. “I just want you to understand I always loved you, and I hurt every day I didn’t see you. I’m your mother, Matthew, and you are my only son. How do you think it feels?”
There was a bucket of vomit beside the mattress, and Stone leaned over and retched into it. He knew there were disgusting strings of saliva hanging from his chin, but he didn’t care. “So you’re some kind of martyr now. I’m not going to feel sorry for you.”
“I don’t want you to. I just want to explain. Maybe we can find a way to start all over again.”
“Why now?”
“You know what kind of man he was.”
“So you’re here to dance on his grave. Is that it?”
“He was a very willful man, very powerful. He had strong ideas about how the world was supposed to be, and I crossed him.”
“So now you come crawling back to me.”
“It was the hardest thing I ever had to do. Leaving you.”
“Then why did you do it?”
Stone would not dare admit out loud that for years he had expected her to walk through the door and hold him in her arms. He had been safe with her, comforted, and then without any explanation, she was gone. She had disappeared from Stone’s home, his life, but not from life, the life out there. He read about her periodically in the Arts section of the Times, touted as one of the most important American figurative painters of the second half of the twentieth century. She had last appeared in the paper three years earlier, when the National Gallery in Washington had purchased her work for its permanent collection.
