you (as always) to Christy Fletcher for really listening to my voice. To Ron and Bradi Ross for the necessary lyrics. To Samantha Ruckman, Beya Stewart, and Whitney Lee for pointing out the sour notes, and to Julia Pastore for fixing them. To my family, my best audience. And to Patrick, my breath.
Things break. I’ve come to terms with that in my own strange way. I realize that there are things that will hurt us and things that will keep us safe; that sometimes it’s hard to discover the line between them, and that sometimes they are the same thing.
—Kevin Wilson
from “A World of Glass,” Oxford American,
September/October 1999
She was always at the edge of leaving.
Cattails stand guard along the banks of the Pond. I am six years old, and I cannot swim. The cattails keep me safe. The air is so thick with summer it’s hard to swallow; it’s even hard to breathe tonight. I lift my hair off my neck, twist it into a knot, and pray for a breeze. But the air is still, and I am alone, waiting for my mother to come back. I can hear the sucking sound of her bare feet in the mud as she circles the water’s edge, but I can barely see her in the waning light of the moon. Besides, she is moving too quickly to hold on to for very long.
I try not to think of Daddy maybe waking. Maybe standing in his gray slippers on the back porch, peering out into the starless night, wondering where she has gone. It makes me sad, the way he stands with his hands in his pockets, staring after her, whenever she leaves. His face turns the color of gravel even if she is only going to the grocery store. He might not see the note she left, perched between two bananas in the fruit bowl, saying that we were only going to look for the moon. He might think that this is the last time. That this time it’s for good.
There is supposed to be a lunar eclipse tonight, and my mother explains it the way she explains shadows and thunder—without science or words too big for me to repeat or understand. It will just disappear, she says. Slowly. Like pulling a dark dress over its pale face.
I look up at the sky and watch as this happens: I’m struggling to hold on to the vague outline that is my mother as she wades deeper into the water. Panic is thicker than heat. I look for her, thinking of Daddy’s pockets, as she and the sliver of moon both disappear. I know she will come out again, wet and slippery and shivering. Like last time, like every other time, but there is always this terrible moment when I am unsure, when everything bad is possible.
And even after she finds me waiting for her and we start walking quietly back to the house, I am still afraid. Because strangely, on this still night, what scares me almost as much as my mother’s ability to disappear is the absence of light. And I wonder, without my mother, who would undress the moon.
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
A Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions
When you know you are dying, things begin to make sense. In the surprising bright light moment of one more day (stolen or granted, you don’t know which), there is suddenly coherence where chaos used to reside, clarity where there once was confusion. When you lift your arms, amazed that they still work, and see your familiar face reflected—remarkably—in your bathroom mirror, coincidence promptly becomes destiny. And when you open your mouth and your own voice comes out, still here, every chance meeting and every decision you’ve ever made now seem serendipitous. Because everything you’ve ever done or said has led you to this moment. Right here.
That is why I am not surprised that on the very day I decide to stop my chemotherapy, a letter arrives from my mother. It is fitting. Serendipity.
My best friend, Becca, who has been sleeping on my couch lately, looks forward to the mail’s arrival. This isn’t even her house, but when she hears the mail truck pull up every afternoon, she rushes first to the window and then down my steps to meet the mailman. She knows him by his first name, and today I watch them talking on the sidewalk. She takes the small bundle of mail directly from him before he has a chance to stuff it into my mailbox, and then I hear her skipping up the steps two at a time.
“Phone bill, gas bill, Spiegel flyer, and another letter from your mum.” She lays each piece of mail on my kitchen table like a Tarot card, resting the letter from my mother across the phone bill. With her long red hair wrapped up in a precarious knot, she could be a carnival fortune-teller.
“Will you read this one?” she asks.
I wrap my robe and my arms around my waist and shake my head.
This is the twelfth letter I have received from my mother in the last three years, since I found out I was sick: one for each season. I keep them in the back of my closet, in a shoe box that used to hold a pair of shoes I don’t even own anymore. All the envelopes are the same size, though her handwriting varies depending on the season. In springtime, it is thin like bare branches. In winter, the ink is heavy and thick, my name and address a blanket of words. In summertime, she uses colored ink, each return address the color of somewhere else’s summer. Impermanent. Wandering. It is autumn now, and today her words are only veins running through the middle of a fallen leaf. Sometimes the envelopes are as thin as a single sheet of paper; other times they are thick with whatever is inside.
“I wish you’d at least open it,” Becca says, sitting down at the table where she has put a pile of her students’ papers. “It couldn’t hurt to open it.”
I look at Becca as she thumbs through the stack of essays, absently licking her thumb when the pages stick.
“Not today,” I say.
But I keep thinking about the letter that night after Becca goes back to school for parent-teacher conferences. I even leave it lying on the table the way she arranged it with her gypsy hands, thinking now that it likely would reveal more about my past than my future. And later, after the streetlights come on outside and after I have fixed Bog’s dinner, I sit with my feet curled under me on the couch and hold the letter to the light, wondering what would happen if I didn’t put this one away, thinking about how my life might change.
I haven’t seen my mother since I was fourteen years old. And after she left my world fell apart. Everything that happened from the moment I knew she was gone until this moment, until now, has made me who I am. And who I am now is a thirty-year-old girl, body ravaged by a woman’s disease. But somehow everything about this is logical. It makes sense. Dying can be a comforting thing to someone accustomed to chaos.
Finally, I carefully tear the end of the envelope open and spill its contents onto my lap.
I should have known there wouldn’t be a letter inside. No words, only slivers—that was always her way. With tentative fingers, I reach down and carefully pick up the scarlet piece of glass.
If summer here were made of colored glass, this is the way the light would shine through the summer I turned fourteen: new leaves the green of dreams, fat June bugs’ metallic wings, and the color of breeze. Not spring. By early June, the mud of the dirt road leading from our house to the lake had dried up, leaving a path of quartz and mica under bare feet, shiny enough to make you imagine
