The Ex-Husband in My Basement

By Stephanie Rosenfeld

“You would have hated me if you’d known me back then,” my husband would say, telling me stories of his drug-using days, and I’d agree: You’re lucky I didn’t meet that guy—I wouldn’t have looked at him twice.

But that wasn’t the guy I’d met. Luciano’s past was behind him: He was five years clean and proud of his sobriety. Like many former drug users, he was working in the field of substance-use and addiction, using his experiences to help people. He was magnetic and funny and interesting and full of life. We fell in love, became a couple, then a family. We’d sit at the dinner table, planning our future together. We’d both suffered setbacks in our pasts and failed to jump onto conventional paths, but together, we were going to create something good. We were counting on being late-bloomers.

Over time, though, our marriage began to fray, as Luciano’s undiagnosed, then misdiagnosed bi-polar disorder got worse, exacerbated by the international travel that had become a bigger part of his job. Our life together became a cycle of stressful overseas phone calls, resentful homecomings, deferred fixes. Still, at the end of every day, we’d sit down over dinner and talk about art, and writing, and drug policy, and sexual politics, and stupid things people did that pissed us off, and our cats, and TV shows, and a hundred other things. Even on the worst days, we could make our way back to each other this way.

Finally, though, things reached the breaking point, and we decided: Our marriage was important to us and we needed to find a way to save it. We made a plan to figure out how we were going to do that, as soon as he came home from an extended work trip to Thailand.

When he returned, though, something wasn’t right. One day, sitting across from him at the dinner table, I noticed that his tongue was twisting upside down in his mouth when he talked. Also, his mood was strangely amped up, but without the usual underlay of good spirits. There’d been other signs, too: While he was in Thailand, I’d started to notice that his emails were being sent at odd times of day—three-thirty, four, five in the morning, his time. On the phone, small things would trigger a full-blown rage—he’d end up bellowing and ranting, hanging up, calling back, hanging up again. And when he did return, the jet lag this time seemed intractable; after a week home, he was still sleeping till three or four in the afternoon.

A dedicated observer of my husband’s micro-moods, I suspected it had something to do with substances—he was relying increasingly on a mix of prescribed sleep aids, anti-anxiety medication, and anti-depressants to cobble himself together, especially when he traveled. I questioned him about his dosages, asked if he’d taken anything over the counter, maybe done something recreationally—some weird street drug—in Thailand. My inquiries were met with a blast-furnace rage and an unprecedented physical assault—he threw a portable hard-drive across the room at me, hitting me in the head. Later, I rooted through his briefcase and found a meth pipe and a lighter—arrogantly just there, not even hidden—in the open inside pocket.

When I confronted him, he told me it was no big deal: He was only using meth occasionally. And besides, the danger of meth was over-hyped by the media. It was basically no different than Adderall—which he had a prescription for. He liked meth—it helped him work, made him focused, and gave him energy. Besides, his history had proven than he could kick any drug, so addiction wouldn’t be a problem.

I argued with him. It really didn’t seem like a good idea to me.

He argued back, then abruptly changed tacks. He’d stop doing it, if it really upset me so much. I was so relieved, I almost forgot to think about the fact that the decision to do such a risky thing, and to lie about it, was completely and bafflingly outside the bounds of the way we conducted our marriage. The old Luciano might have done that but not the guy I’d chosen to be with.

Still uneasy, I looked in his bag again the next day. I found a lighter in the same pocket I’d cleaned out the day before. I took it. The next day, there was another one. I confronted Luciano again. Why was he carrying around lighters if he wasn’t using meth? He erupted in rage. How dare I go through his bag?

I mounted a bigger search, found bags of meth in his bathroom, in coat pockets, in the little space in the wall next to the basement crawl space.

We played this cat-and-mouse game for about a month. My heart would break every time I found another stash. Each time I’d confront him, he’d alternately admit, deny, or downplay the problem.

“Yes, Stephanie! I’m addicted!” he’d roar one day; “No, I’m not addicted!” the next. “My only ‘problem’ with meth is that you don’t want me to do it!” he screamed at me, one day. Every day was going to be his last day using.

•••

I lived these days in a state of constant, adrenalized emergency. I spent my work hours poring over online articles and forums and videos about methamphetamine, researching rehabs and treatment models, trying to figure out at what point I was going to have to kick him out, looking at ads for one-bedroom rentals in our area, making up budgets for how we’d support two households till we got him through this emergency and he could move back home.

The friends who knew what was going on didn’t understand why I didn’t kick him out. But I didn’t experience the decision as simple. A hallmark of Luciano’s bipolar illness was that life for him was a constant string of emergencies, and I was acclimated to the dysfunction. Reacting to and compensating for Luciano’s emergencies had become like an endurance sport for me. Though I was furious at him, and terrified, in this crisis as in all the others, I’d be the strong, sane one, the one who’d hold things together until we figured out what to do.

The other reason I didn’t kick him out was, simply, that he lied. He lied long and hard and deep, and up one side and down the other, and every which way from Sunday; and it took me too long to understand that I didn’t have the right information and was making bad decisions because of that.

•••

I went to a few Al Anon meetings, but I didn’t like their one-size-fits-all message about “detaching.” I didn’t feel it applied to me; I wasn’t ready to give up on Luciano. We’d only just started down this road. We might possibly still turn back without too much damage.

I started going to Crystal Meth Anonymous meetings, instead. The people were nice to me there, thanked me for coming. They told me it was good to be reminded—in the form of my presence—of the cost of their actions, the collateral damage. Everyone told me how sorry they were—which alarmed me. One guy took me aside and said, “However bad it is now, six months from now, you’ll be looking back, thinking these were the good old days.” Uniformly, people said that going to jail was the only thing that forced them to stop using.

A month later, Luciano moved out so that he could do meth full-time, unharassed by me. By “moved out” I mean: One day, in the middle of a rage, he sprang from his yelling-chair, as I had named it, thundered down to his room and threw some clothes in a bag, grabbed his computer, and slammed out the door. Six hours later, he called to tell me he wasn’t coming home. When I asked where he was, he said he was staying at “a cheap motel in the neighborhood.” I actually spent hours, that night, walking the streets of our residential neighborhood in the dark, panicking and in tears, looking for a cheap motel or rooming house that I knew wasn’t there. The memory of that’s a little scary.

•••

The next year and a half unfolded just the way you hear about. Luciano lived across town in a seedy hotel—I didn’t know where. He stopped paying our joint bills and the mortgage, defaulted on his credit cards, ruined his eighty-five-year-old father’s credit, lost his health insurance, life insurance, car, job. He spent his retirement funds on meth. Ashamed, he stopped talking to our daughter. When I found out about the infidelity, boggling in scope—lots of sex with strangers, exchanged for money and drugs—it was just another item to put on the list.

•••

I have a blank spot in my brain where the “higher power” thing is supposed to go. Consciousness is my only god. I used to believe that by being strong and present and brave, using communication and the power of my own brain as my only tools, I could hold the people I love close to me, figure out how to fix anything; protect my family and make it last. Having a bi-polar mate definitely gave that belief a workout. The awesome force of a meth addiction did it in completely.

•••

Eventually, with the assurance to myself that I had done everything I could, everything I was willing to, I accepted the fact that I had no power to make things turn out differently, and I began to let go.

I spent eight hundred days alone, grieving, writing a new book. I took comfort in the company of my dog. I wondered if you could actually die from crying. I’d wake up every morning and go to the mirror to see if my hair had turned gray overnight.

The part that killed me the most was the empty space across from me at the dinner table each night. I’d cry as I ate, sometimes, feeling the magnitude of my loss, thinking I would never heal.

•••

When people who I haven’t seen in a while ask how I’m doing, I say, “It’s been a hard couple of years.” I tell them about my new book, what my daughter’s been up to. “We lost Luciano to meth use, unfortunately,” I say, to those who don’t know. If they look alarmed, I add, “He’s still alive. Just, not with us anymore.” To the people I can’t lie to, I say, “Actually, he’s living in my basement.”

In a culmination of his run of terrible decision-making, Luciano moved to Cambodia, where he finally reached the end: He was living on the streets, out of money; he’d pawned his phone and computer; lost everything but his passport and the clothes he was wearing. One of his few remaining friends bought him a ticket back to the States, where he landed penniless and homeless in Berkeley—scarier than the streets of Phnom Penh, he said—and decided he wanted to live. His father bought him a train ticket to New Jersey.

He asked if he could come home for a few days on the way. Just to see me.

Not home anymore, I told him. But I said yes.

It had been a year and a half since we’d seen each other. Among other things, meth had ended our marriage without discussion. My story of what had happened was this: He’d become a meth addict, and meth had destroyed our life together, and that was tragic and stupid. If he had any different way of telling it, I wanted to know.

When he arrived, it quickly became evident that he was completely out of his mind—ranting, raving, paranoid, psychotic. He wasn’t using meth, anymore, but it hardly mattered. He was in a hole so deep it was hard to imagine how he could possibly climb out. I listened to his delusional plan to live with his parents, stay clean, find work in the City—nothing under seventy-thousand, an executive directorship, he was thinking. I watched as he rummaged through the storage room for Plan B—his tent and sleeping bag—and I changed the terms of my offer. I told him he could stay in my basement for a month, two if he needed, that he could share my food, and—if it was what he wanted—I’d help him not to die.

He’s been here for over a year. I laid down conditions, helped him think through some steps. He reconnected with a generous ex-colleague who got him access to good free mental health care at the drug treatment center where Luciano used to send his clients. After many months of looking, he finally got a job: low-paying, part-time—he was ecstatic. With his first paycheck, he bought me an enormous TV to show his gratitude, carried it home on the bus—then carried it back when I told him maybe he wasn’t thinking completely clearly, yet.

Properly diagnosed and medicated for his bi-polar disease for the first time in his life, and under the care of two good mental healthcare practitioners, he’s a different person. Or else he’s himself—he says he’s not sure. It’s hard for both of us to think about the ways so many things might have been different, if he, if we, had figured it out sooner. With his brain recovering from the damage meth did to it, he can finally think clearly again. He hasn’t raged in over half a year. He is full of regret, and he admits that doing meth was a terrible decision; that meth is a terrible drug and that the damage he did to our family was devastating and real.

And probably lasting. We’re not what we once were, to each other. We’re not a couple, anymore—though we think we’re probably some kind of family.

One night, a few weeks after he came back, we cautiously sat down at the dinner table together again. It was hard at first, but it’s gotten easier, as we’ve worked through some of the most painful pieces. Sometimes, we even laugh. But without a future to plan for, the conversations aren’t like they used to be.

He says I saved his life, and it’s probably true. Crisis averted, it’s probably time, now, to save my own.

•••

STEPHANIE ROSENFELD lives in Salt Lake City, where she writes fiction and works as a non-profit grant writer. She is the author of a collection of short stories, What About the Love Part? and a novel, Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu. Stories of hers have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, Bellingham Review, Northwest Review, Cream City Review, and Other Voices. She recently finished a young adult novel, and is currently at work on a graphic memoir, written in collaboration with her ex-husband, about the effect of his methamphetamine addiction on their family. You can read an excerpt on it here and more here.

Ambivalence About Having Kids Has Pushed Me Down an Existential Rabbit Hole

cat and woman — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Joelle Renstrom

“When are you going to have kids?” my younger sister asks at our family holiday dinner after her third glass of wine. Her drunk voice has a resonant timbre no one at the table can ignore. My aunt, uncle, cousin, niece, mom, and brother all look at me.

“I don’t plan on having kids,” I say. Maybe it would be easier if I got a tee-shirt announcing this, or if I tattooed it on my forehead. A face tattoo is what I’ve always likened to having kids, anyway—you better be sure you want it because it’ll be front and center your whole life.

“That’s so sad,” she says. “I want more nieces.”

That’s when my oldest niece, who’s currently a sophomore in college and identifies as a feminist, jumps in. “It’s not about you,” she says. “And it’s not sad.”

I let the two of them go at it, grateful that my niece has the energy to take up this conversation. I’ve had some version of it with friends, my boyfriend, and myself, more times than I can count.

But I understand where my sister is coming from. Our family is shrinking. My dad died a few years ago, and my aunt died shortly after Christmas; my other aunt and uncle are over eighty. My brother’s kids are fifteen and eighteen. During the holidays, there’s a distinct lack of youthful energy—no one’s too excited to sleep on Christmas Eve, no one believes in Santa, no squeals echo through the house. I’d love to have some kids running around—I just don’t know that I want them to be mine.

As my sister and niece squabble about cultural expectations, my cousin turns to me and says, “That’s one of the upsides of getting older. People eventually stop asking.” She’s fifty and childless, in part for health reasons. I secretly envy that having a baby has always been a nonstarter for her.

I, on the other hand, make a habit of lying awake at night wondering whether I’ll wake up one day in my fifties and regret not having kids. Wondering what not wanting to have a baby means about me.

As much as I want to be present for this family dinner, I descend into the place in my brain reserved for my baby ambivalence—the place that has perfected various ways to beat myself up for my indecision.

•••

On paper, the arguments against having kids are straightforward and compelling.

No more travelling—at least, not the way I like to do it, backpacking for weeks with half-formed plans doing things that would terrify my mother if she knew. I stay in hostels and show up at bus stations ready to decide where I might go next based on departure times, ticket costs, or the sound of a destination name. This freedom changes me by pushing me into a new paradigm—in my home life, I’m not nearly so flexible, and traveling reminds me of my own soundness and strength.

A kid could eventually travel with me, albeit with some logistical alterations. My wanderlust was born during a family Christmas in London when I was twelve. I walked around agape, never noticing the drizzle, not even caring about the walking cast on my right foot. My dad, who socked away money in his desk drawer for family vacations, got as much pleasure from watching me respond to the trip as he did from taking in the sights himself. The travel bug is one of the greatest gifts he ever gave me, and I can imagine how fulfilling it would be to pass it on. But that experience exists only in a parallel universe somewhere, light-years away from here.

It’s the freedom I fear I can’t live without. No more spur-of-the-moment drinks after work, no more eleven at night electronica shows on a Tuesday, no more spontaneous thirty-mile bike rides. No more locking myself away writing all day—at least, not for a long time and probably not without guilt. Even though the absence of these possibilities might be relatively temporary, and even though I might start making other choices even if I don’t have kids, being stripped of the freedom would likely send me spiraling. I don’t do well when I feel trapped, even if the situation is of my own making.

But sometimes I ask myself, even when I’m gathered around a table on a Friday night with friends, whether this is what my life will be like forever. What would be wrong with that? The question itself implies there’s something in undesirable about that scenario. Sameness scares me—what if, despite my freedom, I get bored? Or what if I forget how to use that freedom, or get too old to take advantage of it? One aspect of having kids that both appeals to me and terrifies me is the structure that they impart on the foreseeable future, the parental phases that parallel the phases of their kids. Nothing about life stays the same—that’s one of the few guarantees with kids, for better or for worse. There’s almost always an answer to the question “what’s next?” But if there’s always a relatively proscribed next step, then we’re back to that lack of freedom problem again.

The freedom conundrum is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s the money (or lack thereof), my fear of being pregnant and giving birth, my chronically tenuous job situation, and my anxiety about what raising a child and will do to me and to my relationship with my boyfriend. In the bigger picture, my worries about the possibility of a future technological dystopia make me question how I could help a kid navigate the future and whether I even want to do that to a child. (I teach a seminar on artificial intelligence, so I find myself going down that path fairly frequently). Aside from technology, there’s overpopulation and resource depletion. Even though my mom says I’m the type of person who “should” reproduce—a somewhat troubling concept in itself—the world doesn’t need more people, even if they’re mine.

While these reasons are all obvious and legitimate, the ones revolving around the future of the planet are the only ones that aren’t inherently selfish. As serious as dwindling resources might be, or as terrifying as it is to think about raising a child in an Orwellian world, my recitation of those reasons ultimately becomes selfish too, since I’m using them to support such a personal decision. If I’m so concerned about those factors, shouldn’t I just built a yurt and go off the grid? It sometimes feels like a cop out to recruit big-picture justifications for not reproducing.

Perhaps the Pope is right that not having kids is selfish. Every parent makes sacrifices, including mine. Every childless adult does too, to some extent, yet I can’t—or don’t want to—imagine my life without all the pleasurable activities and adventures I’d have to give up if I had kids. But isn’t the experience of having a child arguably the grandest adventure there is? I want to try everything, so how can I leave this life without having a child? The truth is that I’m more interested in continuing to what I want to do than I am in the adventure of parenthood, which makes me feel like a shallow hedonist. My boyfriend, who has a nine-year-old son, says the selfish thing would be to have a child if I don’t really want one.

My boyfriend is ambivalent about our having kids too, but it’s different for him. He already has a kid, which certainly takes the edge off, and he’s male. I wish gender didn’t matter so much, but it does. If I could be a father rather than a mother, I’d be more likely to have kids. Such a statement is rife with cultural expectations I’d like to ignore or buck, but the role of a father is much more appealing to me. My own relationship with my dad contributes to this view, as does physiology—I’d rather my partner get pregnant, give birth, breast feed, etc. Regardless of how illogical or fraught with gender norms and nostalgia my vision is, if I had to be a parent, I’d want to be a father to a little girl. That’s not particularly helpful when it comes to making my decision.

Most of my current circle of friends used to belong to the “not going to have kids” club. It was liberating to express this preference in like company. In staking our claim to all the good times of untethered adults, we sealed an implicit pact not to succumb to cultural expectations and norms and to chart a course free of diapers, feedings, puberty, and all the rest. Most of my other friends were far more adamant than I in their unwavering desire to remain childless. It’s kind of like the difference between being agnostic and being an atheist—the latter suggests a certainty I don’t have. But I admire those who are more outspoken and certain than I am, especially if they’re women. I feel relieved and legitimized—either nothing’s wrong with me after all, or whatever’s wrong with me is also wrong with them, which at least puts me in good company. People I respect, and people I don’t regard as selfish are making the decision I’m making. Or at least, they were.

Most of these friends, no matter how resolute they once were, have either recently had kids or are about to. What changed? They shrug, as though sheepish that all those people over the years who said, “Trust me, you’ll change your mind,” were right after all. I envy their change of heart because it frees them of ambivalence. I envy their new sense of purpose, which suddenly feels far bigger than scouting airline ticket prices and deciding whether bungee jumping or paragliding will be the next big adventure.

My closest friends apologized when they told me they were pregnant, as though they had violated our friendship. They assured me it wasn’t planned, as though that mattered, and tried too hard to explain how shocked they were and why this ultimately was a good thing. One of them said something about not living the rest of their lives “like overgrown teenagers.” Is that what I’m doing, I wondered? I work, I pay my bills, I participate in the grown-up world, even though I also drink like a fish, stay up too late and can’t refuse a dare. What’s wrong with living like an overgrown teenager? And if there is something wrong with it, why is having a kid the remedy?

I envy people who unexpectedly get pregnant and are suddenly thrust out of indecision. At many points in my life, I’ve said, “I’ll let the universe decide what happens next,” accepting my lack of control and acknowledging that generally, life plays out as it should. But the universe may not decide this for me, and if I wait too long, I will have made a default decision anyway—perhaps ambivalence is a timid no. I can remain uncertain for the rest of my child-bearing years, but if the associated anguish compares to what I’ve felt for the past couple years, that could be the worst outcome. Since I have no plans to get my tubes tied, it seems the only remedy for my ambivalence is to take the plunge. But just as a coin flip can reveal one’s true feelings, this line of reasoning gives me the cold sweats.

My sister’s comment irritates me in the same way I’m annoyed by all the people who assure me I’ll eventually have kids. They suggest this is something I should want, that not wanting to have kids would be unnatural. I’m thirty-seven. Tick tock, they say. The whole concept of a biological clock bothers me, more because of its cultural implications than anything else. Yes, there’s a physiological timeline when it comes to pregnancy (though that window has gotten bigger and bigger), but the idea that a woman should be possessed by this urge and get pregnant—probably after finding a husband—bothers me, as though she’s not a real woman if she doesn’t have this desire. Maybe I could get away with it if I was a movie star. When I was twenty-five and living in New York City, I felt disconcerted about rounding the corner on thirty, but also overjoyed that I still had a decade before I had to decide about kids. That decade was supposed to bring the realization that I wanted them. I’m still waiting.

Here’s the rub: I want to be someone who wants kids. I can’t seem to get past that. If I could take a pill to induce the desire to reproduce, I would.

•••

After we got home from dinner, my mom and I went back to her house, the house where I grew up. Later, I sat on the back deck and watched the effortless way that stars light up the Midwestern sky. I could see the light in the kitchen—the same light I saw flick on at five in the morning on the first truly epic night of my life when the boy I’d been in love with all summer finally kissed me while we sat at the picnic table.

Back when I was growing up, I never really thought about whether I wanted kids. Like everything else about adulthood, it felt too far off to warrant consideration. Yet it’s in the house where I spent my childhood that I am most challenged by the reality that I may never want or have kids. When I come back to visit, I stay in the room that was mine as a kid. My dad built the dresser and the shelves. The bulletin board on the wall has relics tacked to it—a picture of me meeting Hillary Clinton in high school, awards, hockey ticket stubs, a flag from the golf course my dad took me to for an unbeatable view of a meteor shower.

After I went to college, he used my room as an office, adding his stuff to mine. Our keepsakes belong together. I think about how satisfying it must have been to see me grow into a person who enjoyed so many of the same things he did, how much fun it would be to watch your child’s brain develop. I remember the first time my niece followed multi-step directions. She wanted a puzzle, which my brother told her was on the second shelf of the closet in his office. She listened with her eyes closed, visualizing what she needed to do to get the puzzle, and then she did it. I saw the gears turn—perhaps the only more exciting moment for me was when she learned to rhyme.

In the bottom dresser drawer I recently found a little book I made in 1989, when I was eleven years old. It’s called “My Life in 2014,” and it illustrates what I imagined my life would look like in twenty-five years. I envisioned myself as a marine biologist who worked closely with dolphins and whales (a recent trip to Sea World had made quite an impression). The book doesn’t mention a husband or kids. I have no memories from childhood of wanting children, and if I could go back to that state now, I would. I liked dolls for a short time (I grew up in the Cabbage Patch Kid era), but never pretended they were my babies. I had a thing for animals, and still do—my cat appeals to me far more than a kid does. I dote on her and worry about her, but she doesn’t mind too much when I travel or go to the bar after work—after all, she poops in a plastic container.

Over Christmas, I found in the closet a shoebox full of sentimental bits from Dad’s childhood—rocks he’d collected, buttons, a little picture of a deer he’d made from hammered tin. I had seen all of these keepsakes before, but this time was different. I imagined my dad as a boy, his little fingers picking up rocks and depositing them in his pocket. Him working with a mini hammer, making something as innocent as a deer. He was a little kid once, which isn’t a revelation, but picturing him as a kid, as the creature I don’t think I want, stops me short. I wouldn’t be here if not for that little kid and who he became. The photos of my dad as a baby have new resonance; I’m glad his parents weren’t ambivalent.

When my dad was dying, there was one particularly horrific night in the hospital during which the cancer in his lungs made it difficult for him to breathe. Every forty-five minutes or so he’d struggle so much that he’d induce a panic attack, which made it even harder to get his breath. He’d grasp at the sheets and look around frantically, gasping. My brother, sister and I held his hands as the attacks came on. We locked eyes with him and we breathed with him, long and slow until his breath returned and his heart rate slowed to normal. Sitting there with him, it occurred to me that this is the point of having kids. To be able to look at someone and think, I helped make you. I helped bring you into the world, and you’re helping me leave.

When my dad died, I realized how much of my identity revolved around being his daughter. My brother has a different biological father, though he never had another dad; my sister is adopted. I’m the only one with my dad’s blood, the only one with his genetic legacy. If the Renstrom blood line is to continue, I have to have kids. This isn’t a good enough reason by itself to justify having children, but I return to this thought again and again. I’m a big part of what my dad—my hero—made in the world. What if I could make someone who would be a hero to someone else? What if I could make someone who found meaning in holding my hand when I die?

I have no answer to those questions. I don’t know what it would feel like to have an answer, and I don’t know what it would feel like to accept that I’ll never know. All I do know is that the only person I want to talk to about this is my dad. I want him to tell me I don’t need to have kids to be a legacy he’s proud of leaving. I want him to look at me the way he did when I was twelve years old and hobbling across the London Bridge—like the world was my oyster, that I should see as much of it as possible. Yet at the same time, as I look through my dad’s old photos and keepsakes, I think about how no one had any idea about me back then. No one knew that every piece of art, every rock collected, every baseball card filed away, was bringing him one tiny step closer to me. And I wonder who will look through my shoebox, my photos, and my keepsakes and think the same?

•••

JOELLE RENSTROM’s essay collection, Closing the Book: Travels in Life, Loss, and Literature, explores the intersection of life and literature. She also maintains an award-winning blog, Could This Happen?, which examines the relationship between science and science fiction. Joelle teaches writing and research with a focus on space, artificial intelligence, and science fiction at Boston University. Links to her work and book can be found at www.joellerenstrom.com/

Careful Intimacies

pin heart — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Sarah M. Wells

I wear my tall brown boots and short white dress and walk with you like we haven’t been married over a decade and don’t have three children. They are at your parents’ house, baking ginger cookies and picking daffodils and dandelions, for me, because they’re sweet.

We will not talk about the kids tonight, not because we do not love them, but precisely because we love them.

“Just imagine, in four years,” you say, “we could tell Lydia we’ll be back in a few hours and just… leave.” I try to imagine it and can’t.

We talk about anything except upcoming coach-pitch practice, Cub Scouts, and gymnastics. We order two sides and a couple of drinks at The Lockview. It’s our kind of crowd, our kind of bar, hipster, and you secretly love hipster-ish things.

“I can’t pull off hipster,” you say.

“Yeah, skinny jeans don’t work for you,” I say.

“No way, but if big-ass-baggy-short-white-guy jeans were popular, I’d be in.”

“We could market that,” I say, “It has a nice ring to it.” We drink and people-watch. That guy diagonal from us, he could be my grandpa’s cousin. “Maybe he is my grandpa’s cousin,” I say.

Grandpa’s been dead for over seven years. Our middle son, Elvis, was four months old when I sat alone next to Grandpa’s hospice bed and prayed for him to give up his spirit while Mom and Grandma rested, my skin prickling as he sighed one last time and I half-spoke and whispered, “Brandon? I think he’s gone.” You came in quick with Elvis in your arms, our tiny cranky infant who nearly died just four months earlier because he couldn’t breathe as he exited my interior, capillaries sticky and stubborn.

But we’re not talking about them now, because the sun is shining and it’s just us this evening, just us and your Old Fashioned, my Lemon Ice martini. I am determined to take as many selfies with you as you do with the guys when you’re on the road for work. I tag it on Facebook, “Bold and the Beautiful?” and you say, “You mean baold and the beautiful,” because it’s been almost twelve years since we married and you feel bald and old, though you are neither. It doesn’t matter because you feel it, my Mr. Smooth who walks slow sometimes, suave through his back pain, knee pain, elbow pain. Mr. Smooth’s hairline is receding but come on, husband, I don’t notice. You grew out your goatee again, and I love you with a goatee, its bristles against my chin when we kiss.

This is the second time we’re seeing Lyle Lovett and the third for John Hiatt. You raise your drink and toast, “Happy Valentine’s Day!” these tickets a gift from me to you. One Valentine’s Day, we saw a Christian rock group and the next we spent in the hospital for a follow-up miscarriage procedure. It’s April 26 and the second time we’ve been out together this month, with so many road trips and conferences, gymnastics and softball practices.

I have my hand on your thigh and your hand covers mine. Our knees are touching in orchestra row J, seats three and four, and we are keeping time to the beat with our touching knees. John Hiatt finishes singing, “Marlene, Marlene, my love for you’s obscene,” and Lyle Lovett says something to John Hiatt about his songwriting, how he knows Mrs. Hiatt and Mrs. Hiatt’s name isn’t Marlene. Hiatt has been married twenty-nine years, and I squeeze Brandon’s hand. I try to imagine life in another seventeen years.

The guy in front of us is passed out and hasn’t moved for at least an hour. You lean in close and whisper-yell how that happened to you once at a Merle Haggard concert, back when you were dating Devin, maybe? We call that “BS,” before Sarah. The guy in front of us will have a crick in his neck when he wakes up. He still isn’t waking up, even as Lyle Lovett sings, “Some things, my baby don’t tolerate from me.”

•••

Twenty-four hours ago, you asked, “Do you mind if I go play golf with Jerry?”

I stuffed one sock inside the other as I folded laundry and said, “No problem. Do you know when you’ll be back?”

You smiled with your golf gear in your arms and said, “I don’t know.” I grabbed a shirt and folded it the way my mom taught me.

“Well, are you going to play nine holes or eighteen, are you going to eat dinner together? Do you think you’ll go to sing karaoke after?” I replied, the way my mom never replied, and you laughed, “I just don’t know, okay?”

I dropped a pair of Henry’s underwear into the stack of minion-printed briefs, the way you prefer because it’s stupid to fold boys’ underwear. It’s underwear, you say.

“Well,” I said, “I think it’s only fair to give some clue as to when you will be home—it’s not that I care, I don’t,” I lied, trying to negotiate the same space as usual, quality time and childcare and your priorities and my neediness. “I just want to know so I know whether to be excited you’ll be home soon at eight or to settle into an evening of reading, knowing you’ll be back after I’m in bed. Either way is fine. I just want to know.”

“I don’t like these kinds of restraints,” you said, and I started to say, “Then maybe you shouldn’t have gotten married.”

As the words fell out, I remembered our confessions just a week earlier, my blubbering, “Why can’t you just say you think I’m pretty?” at the most intimate moment, when things weren’t working in harmony, in that fragile space. You rolled off of me and sobbed, “You make me feel like such a failure!” How we held each other, how we apologized, how we touched each other’s faces and whispered all our truths into old wounds.

I remember this as the words drip, maybe you shouldn’t have gotten married.

When we hit an impasse, you angry and calling off your golfing, me angry and finishing folding laundry, I carried our daughter’s clothes back to her bedroom to find her with her friend tucked behind the door. “What are you doing?” I asked, reading their guilt.

“Nothing,” they said, “You can leave those on my bed, I’ll put them away,” Lydia said and left. I wondered what she overheard, what she was listening for in between our living room remarks. I thought back to my own ear against the door eavesdropping on my parents as my dad yelled his frustration in the dark of night. “You never…” he said, my ears too young to hear or know what she never did but old enough to know my mom was crying and lying in bed, my dad standing somewhere in the dark bedroom. I wondered if they might divorce, maybe even cried into my pillow and prayed before drifting off to sleep.

“She said they weren’t listening to us,” you told me when I returned to the living room, “‘We didn’t hear one word you said,’ she said.” We rolled our eyes and smiled thin lines. You went out to the front of the house and I went out to the back of the house. Later, we would lean close into each other in our bedroom and forget, but until then, you shot hoops and I cut shrubs all afternoon, one of each of our children by our sides, separate.

•••

But we’re not talking about them now, or that. Like love keeps no record of wrongs, it took me a long time to remember exactly what it was Lydia and her friend might have overheard, and now that I have I’ve remembered, too, a long list of other wrongs dealt and received. I flinch a little because now John Hiatt is singing, “I’ve been loving you for such a long time, girl, expecting nothing in return, just for you to have a little faith in me,” and your fingers are interlaced with mine. This is the song you burned onto that CD you made me a month after we met, along with a dozen others I remember.

I remember it all again in a moment, it’s all here, Grandpa and my parents and your parents and our exes, our vices, our joys, John Hiatt singing, “Have a little faith in me,” all of it is here between us now, held in between our interlaced fingers.

Okay, so our love keeps record of wrongs, but also mercies. After all, we are here. We hold our wrongs and mercies together in careful intimacy. I run my fingernails across the grooves in your big-ass-baggy-short-white-guy jeans and you put your hand on my knee, just below my dress’s white hemline.

At any moment, I think John Hiatt’s voice might splinter and that’ll be it, but he just keeps hanging on to those notes, he just keeps singing, Won’t you have a little bit a, a little bit a, please! Please! Please, now baby! Ohh, won’t you have a little faith in me? By the time the concert is over, the drunk man in front of us is up and clapping. It’s only 9:16—you guessed 9:15 and I guessed 9:30, so you win. We want them to play more, longer, but they are finished.

We slip out the side exit, your fingers grazing the small of my back as we walk through the sheep-shuffle concertgoers. “Want to get a drink and a bite in the Valley?” you ask, even though it’s Sunday and I have to get up for work tomorrow, you have to take our children to school. We are not tired, and our children might not even be asleep yet.

Let’s stay away a little while longer, darling.

•••

SARAH M. WELLS is the author of a nonfiction e-book, The Valley of Achor, a collection of poems, Pruning Burning Bushes, and a chapbook of poems, Acquiesce. Her essays have been listed as Notable Essays in The Best American Essays 2012, 2013, and 2014. She recently completed a memoir-in-essay collection about love and attention, marriage, parenting, and desire titled American Honey. Sarah serves as the Managing Editor for the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University and as Associate Editor for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.

The Toll Bridge

By Bonnie S. Hirst

It should be simple, purchasing a toll bridge pass. I cry when I consider it. My daughter lives on the other side of that toll bridge. In prison.

Several times I have attempted to purchase a pass online. I searched the Department of Transportation website, selected the toll bridge, but I couldn’t convince myself to click the purchase button. Buying a pass for future trips across that bridge would mean I had given up hope that she might win one of her appeals and be released.

My husband and I could have depleted four toll bridge passes by now. That would equate to twenty-four visits. Instead, we pull into the toll plaza each time and idle our SUV in the long line of brake lights. Vehicles with pre-purchased passes whiz by us, their toll fare deducted from their account by remote sensors.

In our rural county, on the opposite side of the state, we have no toll bridges. No need for multi-passes.

To visit our thirty-nine-year-old daughter, we drive six hundred miles round-trip. Those kind of distance and time constraints limit our visits to every few months. In the wintertime, our visits are further apart, with two mountain passes and treacherous snowy roads at higher elevations.

She has been there four years. Even with better weather, our visits are becoming less frequent. Visits are a double-edged sword: a reminder each time we pass through the clanging of the metal gates with the razor wire curled the length of the fencing, that this is now our daughter’s life. Visiting her in prison has become a part of our life.

My silent prayers prior to her conviction were, Dear Lord, may the highest good come from this situation. Please touch her heart with your loving goodness and keep her safe.

When she was arrested, and during the eighteen months she was out on bail, my faith in God’s goodness never wavered. I believed he would watch over her. I believed he would answer my prayers.

My belief in His goodness was answered when my daughter purchased a soft-bound red leather Bible. I was overjoyed when she showed it to me. From the amount of scriptures highlighted in yellow and bookmarked with torn scraps of paper, I could see she had been on her own journey to accept Him.

When she was convicted and sent to prison, I felt God had betrayed her and me. I questioned how I could continue to believe in his goodness when he had not answered my prayers for her safety. How could this be the highest good? I wondered if our daughter would be in prison if I had shared my beliefs vocally. If she had accepted Christ earlier, as I had as a child, would we be in this predicament now?

After receiving her sentence, she worried that our visits would lapse, and our letters would dwindle. I promised her that we wouldn’t forget her. I told her we’d visit often. I told her to not give up hope. I told her God would hear my prayers. I told her He would hear her prayers. During the past four years, I have doubted if he listened.

Time has eroded my faith in His powers. Hope is all I have left.

Visiting a few days after Christmas, my husband and I and our daughter’s daughter were waiting inside the prison lobby to check in. Behind us, a buxom Italian woman in a white peasant blouse chatted and extended kind words with everyone in her vicinity. I admire women like her who aren’t afraid to reach out to other people. Her dark hair tumbled in soft, bouncy waves to her shoulders, and her perfectly applied crimson lipstick enhanced her vibrant smile.

I used to have that type of enthusiasm for life. Since our daughter’s incarceration, I have become more and more emotionally closed in. More doubtful. More protective of my space. I prefer to observe quietly and stay under the radar when in public. I smiled at something the Italian woman said, but kept my body turned away from the conversation.

Our fourteen-year-old granddaughter stepped in front of my husband, and the top of her long brown ponytail grazed his salt and pepper beard. He tugged gently on the dangling portion and was rewarded with a smirk barely wide enough to see her braces. I placed my hand on his muscled arm as we stood in line.

When it was our turn to step up to the desk and present our IDs, I felt my usual trepidation. Would something appear on my clean record that would preclude me from visiting? Or would there be a new guard who wouldn’t recognize me? The picture on my driver’s license was three years old and barely resembled the tired sixty-year-old I was that day. My gray roots showed, and my brunette hair was chin-length and wavy instead of short and neatly wedged like when I renewed my license so long ago.

It seems a lifetime has passed since my daughter was sent to prison. I yearn for the days before her arrest, when I never questioned my faith in God’s steadfast love.

The normal guard with the kind smile was behind the desk.

The Italian woman’s presence had changed the atmosphere in the lobby; even I felt a lightness. She radiated kindness and warmth and brought smiles to the large group of holiday visitors. The lobby had the feel of friends reuniting after a long absence instead of a docile line of strangers.

We were assigned a table number for our visit and a key to a locker to leave our belongings in. We proceeded to the next station to remove our shoes and pass through the metal detector. When cleared, our hands were stamped with invisible ink, and we joined other visitors waiting at the third barricade. The guards released us, and we traversed outside to the next blockade.

Between buildings, a gentle mist of rain fell on our group as we gathered at the steel gate. It buzzed open. We moved like cattle into the next enclosure. The gate we passed through must clang shut before we were allowed passage to the next station. Shiny razor wire coiled in ringlets on the ground and double coiled on top of the fence that surrounded us.

The razor wire overwhelmed me. It’s as if my mind pretended my daughter was away at college. The razor wire jolted me back to reality.

The next double set of doors brought us closer to the visiting area. It had no razor wire. We wedged into the tight enclosure, the guards in their raised station behind tinted glass waited as the exit door behind us closed. In front of us a heavy steel door slid mechanically open. We formed another line and gave the guard our inmate’s name. Our assigned table had the number carved deeply into the top of the table, similar to the old-time school desks with the deep groove for pencils.

Our daughter is in CCU (Closed Custody Unit), the politically correct term for Maximum Security. Her unit is often the last of the groups of inmates to arrive at the visiting room. We watched as other visitors reunited with their daughters, wives, mothers, and grandmothers.

The Italian woman was assigned the table next to ours. When she saw her daughter, she stood and bounced with joy on her toes anxiously awaiting her daughter to clear the guard station. She rushed towards her excitedly and enveloped her with motherly hugs and happy tears.

Our daughter appeared and gave us a slight wave of greeting before she checked in with the guards. We nodded and smiled and waited. Her five-foot-four frame appeared thinner than the last time we visited. When she joined us, our quiet hugs seemed feeble compared to the Italian woman’s. I wondered if the other visitors felt the same.

Our visits follow the same routine. My husband and I sit on the opposite side of the four person table so our daughter can sit next to her daughter or her almost-adult son when he comes with us.

We asked about her new roommate. She asked, “What’s new at home?” We tried to remember something new to tell her. Our conversation felt stilted compared to the laughter and reminiscing that transpired at the Italian woman’s table.

Some days, our scheduled three-hour visits fly by. Other days, we play Yahtzee to pass the time and keep the conversation light. This was a Yahtzee day. Visits near the holidays are emotionally difficult. At home, I have tried to keep our daughter’s traditions alive; like baking and decorating Christmas sugar cookies with her daughter or preparing her kids favorite foods for their birthdays.

Her two children live with us. We celebrate milestones in their lives without her.

The guard at the raised station announced that visiting was over. We took turns hugging our daughter and joined other visitors in the exit line. Our daughter sat with the other inmates, all matching in their gray shirts and sweatpants. They would be searched before they returned to their units.

The heavy steel door opened slowly. We crowded into the tight enclosure. The Italian woman stood next to me and shared with everyone how good it was to see her daughter; that she hadn’t seen her for seven months. She dissolved into gasping sobs and tears streaked down her face.

I uncharacteristically wrapped my arm around her shoulder and leaned my head into hers and said “It’s difficult, the leaving, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “She doesn’t get out for another two years. Does it get any easier?”

I told her, “Some days are better than others.”

She smiled and with a trembling voice said, “I miss her so much.”

I tightened my hug, then released her. I prayed our conversation was over. I didn’t want her to ask the inevitable next question. Our conversation was not over.

She asked, “How long is your daughter in for?”

The agony of the answer contorted my face, and I began to cry. “Life,” I said.

Speechless, the Italian woman, wrapped me into her full bosom. The door buzzed open. She released me. Side by side, we walked towards the enclosure with the razor wire. Our group was silent as we passed through each buzzing, clanging gate. When we arrived at the original lobby, we swept our stamped hands under the black light. The invisible stamp magically appeared. We were cleared to leave.

I entered the single restroom and locked the door behind me. I splashed water on my haggard face to clear my smudged mascara. I lingered. I prayed the Italian woman had left. During previous visits, I had observed an unspoken code of ethics; no one asked about other inmate’s convictions. I was grateful it was taboo. I certainly didn’t want to talk about that, either.

My husband, our granddaughter, and I were in the parking lot walking towards our car when the Italian woman, from several cars away, waved and called out to me, “What’s your first name?”

I was stunned by her question. I preferred anonymity, but she asked with such urgency.

“Bonnie,” I yelled back and watched as my granddaughter disappeared into our car. I wanted to do the same.

The woman bellowed back, “Bonnie, I will pray for you and your daughter. I will have my prayer chain pray for you too. Never give up hope!”

Her kindness buoyed me. “Thank you.” I managed to squeak through the emotion that constricted my throat.

Maybe I have been wrong in doubting God. Maybe He had heard my prayers. Maybe the Italian woman was a sign from Him to keep my faith strong. Maybe I won’t be needing that toll bridge pass.

•••

BONNIE S. HIRST is currently working on a book-length memoir. After a thirty-five year hiatus from writing (being a mom and grandma), she is enjoying connecting with other writers. She loves feel-good movies and stories with happy endings. When life tries to shorten her stride, she prays, cries, reads self-help books, and writes. She can often be found kayaking on a calm mountain lake. Connect with her: https://www.facebook.com/BonnieSHirst and https://www.icantquotescripture.com.

Burden of Love

lifelovehope — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Maggie Thach

It was 2:12 a.m. I woke up to what sounded like a stick being ripped across a wooden fence over and over again. My muscles tensed but soon settled when the familiar sound sunk in. I looked over at Mike sleeping next to me. My brother’s croaking hadn’t woken him yet.

Ghandy was wide awake, and the cacophony emanating from him proved it: his open palm driving his bottom row of teeth to collide with the top, his teeth clicking in rapid succession, his knee slamming against the hollow wood floor. All these tics had the paradoxical quality of making him feel comfortable in a new setting.

My mom and brother slept on an air mattress in the living room ten feet away from our bedroom. My dad was on the couch. In my hundred-year-old apartment with no proper doors to separate the two rooms, a typical scene played out between my parents. Since Ghandy was born with brain damage twenty-seven years ago, they have always argued about how to take care of him.

“Don’t force him to go back to sleep,” my mom said. “Just leave him alone.”

“He was too hot,” my dad said. “You should have taken off his long-sleeve shirt before he went to sleep.”

“He’s awake because he had a wet diaper. You gave him too much water before bed.”

“Godammit.”

My family was in town visiting. And like a good Vietnamese daughter, I invited them to stay at the apartment I shared with my boyfriend.

The noises didn’t bother me. I had learned to sleep through them a long time ago. But a pulsating feeling filled my stomach, like my heart had slid out of its proper place to a spot right behind my belly button. Even though I was in my bed in my own home, I had the feeling that my family and I were being stared at and judged. Ghandy waking up in the middle of the night was nothing new for my family, but having Mike there caused a tension that I didn’t know how to quell. When it comes to Ghandy, my parents’ attitude is that Ghandy comes first, and everyone else can adjust. I felt like my family had just become a huge imposition on not only Mike, but our upstairs neighbor, who I was convinced could hear all the commotion as well as we could.

This made me feel like a helpless little girl again. When people used to ask me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, I replied with what I thought they wanted to hear. “I want to be a doctor or a lawyer.” But what I really wanted to say was, “I want to be normal.” Growing up, my family was different. We were the only immigrant family on our street. We were also the family with the retarded brother. People looked at Ghandy like he was an animal.

Ghandy’s noises grew louder. Mike was now awake. He wrapped a pillow around his head, though it was useless.

“What’s wrong with your brother, Maggie? Can we do anything?”

“He just woke up. I don’t think he’s going back to sleep.”

“I didn’t realize how loud he could be.”

“I know.”

“I just feel bad for our neighbor upstairs.”

I didn’t reply, just turned my back to him and pulled my knees up to my chest. In that moment, what I had feared for the entirety of my adult life was impossible to ignore. My parents will pass away one day, and Ghandy will need someone to take care of him. As the oldest, I knew this responsibility would most likely be my inheritance. I had promised my parents that Ghandy would never end up in an institution or a home. But it was scary to think about what this responsibility would hold me back from. Would it keep me from traveling? From having my own family? Would Mike be willing to take on this burden with me? Would anyone?

•••

My brother was named after Mahatma Gandhi. Just like mine and my sister’s before him, Ghandy’s namesake was a world leader whom my father admired. I was named after Margaret Thatcher and my sister after Golda Meir. Ghandy is a name that my brother has never been able to say himself, a name that holds significance he will never understand. Throughout my childhood, my parents referred to Ghandy as sick. I only came to the term “cerebral palsy” after accompanying my parents to numerous doctor appointments.

As the oldest sibling, my instinct to protect Ghandy was especially strong. My dad took us to the doctor once, and records showed that Ghandy and I needed some vaccinations. I wanted to be brave and go first. Still, I was scared. I had the urge to pull up my legs, which hung lifelessly a foot above the ground, and make myself into a tight ball. The nurse lowered the needle to the taut flesh pinched between her fingers. My breathing quickened, and I had to look away as the needle punctured my skin.

“See, that wasn’t so bad.”

“That kinda hurt,” I said. “I think my brother’s gonna cry a lot.”

I looked at Ghandy, took his hand and caressed it. He had the cutest hands—soft skin, portly fingers, chubby palms; the only blemish was a wart by the knuckle above his left-hand middle finger. The wart bothered me. I picked at it, hoping it would fall off. Ghandy reacted as he usually did, looking around the room like voices from different directions were calling his name. I stopped obsessing about the wart and started to sing his favorite Vietnamese nursery rhyme. He smiled and laughed.

“There. All done,” the nurse said.

“All done?”

I learned something in that moment. What worries me doesn’t matter to Ghandy. The beautiful thing about him is that he doesn’t know fear. He only knows what it is to be loved. Since he was born, he has been the center of my family. It is an unspoken truth that my brother will always be taken care of.

This truth has been too heavy to bear at times. It feels like an impending sentence, ominously lurking somewhere in my future. I never know when it will happen, only that it will. To soothe this anxiety, the only remedy that I’ve come up with is to avoid what is inevitable. But as I get older, I know I can’t keep putting off this reality. Ultimately, this is the thing I’m scared to face: that when I become Ghandy’s sole caretaker, his life will eclipse mine, and whatever I have done or accomplished in my life will mean nothing.

I want to be a wife. I want to be a mother. I want to be a writer. I want my own life. Having a brother like mine, does wanting these things make me selfish?

This was the question that circled my brain since Ghandy woke up. As morning approached, Ghandy’s croaking turned into cooing. Still, it was enough to keep Mike up. Around five a.m., Mike got out of bed, put on some headphones, and did some work. I didn’t know if he was mad or not. I was afraid to ask.

My brother was able to sleep well for the rest of the trip, although that first night had planted a seed of dread that grew for the remainder of my family’s visit. After they left, I knew I had to talk to Mike.

“Mike, can I tell you something?”

“Yeah. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but I know I’m probably going to have to take care of Ghandy one day. I’m really scared because I don’t know if I can do it alone.”

My eyes fell to the ground. There was a possibility Mike would give me the look that said, This is a big responsibility. This is asking a lot. I wanted to avoid that look if possible. I didn’t expect the next thing to come out of his mouth.

“Maggie, you’re not going to have to do it alone. Me, you, your sister, and her husband—between the four of us, we’ll figure it out.”

After all that time wondering what would happen if Ghandy were to hijack my life, this was all Mike needed to say to make me feel that this fear was conquerable, that he would help me find a way to make it work. That I wouldn’t be alone.

•••

On a typical Wednesday morning, Mike and I woke up the way we always did. I was barely cognizant of his alarm going off. He threaded his arms through mine and buried his face into my neck. We always say how this is our favorite time of the day. We’re not watching TV, or eating, or doing something else. We’re just together. I told him everything that had been on my mind that I was too exhausted to tell him the night before.

“There was this article I read yesterday about how little women know about their fertility,” I said, half-awake. “At thirty, your fertility is affected. At thirty-two, it goes down significantly and then at forty, it can be pretty hard to get pregnant. I mean, I have a couple years, but it’s just a lot of pressure.”

“Then let’s get married soon.”

“Okay. Sounds good.”

“No, really. Will you marry me?”

“Yeah, of course,” I reflexively mumbled. I forced my eyes open when I realized what he was actually asking. I turned around to look at him. “Wait, seriously. Are you proposing to me right now?”

“Yeah. I don’t have a ring or anything, but, yes, will you marry me?”

“Yes. I would marry you a thousand times.”

After we kissed, I pressed my face into his chest and took a deep breath. I was overwhelmed. He rested his chin on my head and held me while I cried.

Since then, some people have asked me about his proposal, anticipating some kind of get-down-on-one-knee, ring-hidden-in-a-fancy-meal story. Sometimes I feel bad that I can’t deliver the story they want. When you get engaged, you feel there are certain expectations you need to meet. I’ve learned things don’t always go as expected, though. The life I will eventually have won’t be what I envisioned when I was younger, but acknowledging all the obstacles that might lie ahead makes them easier to face.

When I go home, I am in awe of how my aging parents take care of Ghandy. They change his diapers, apply lotion on his face, feed him every meal. And yet they never complain. My dad hauls Ghandy in and out of the shower and shaves the small patch of hair on the left side of his chin. My mom pats Ghandy’s back before he goes to sleep and gets him ready for school in the morning. This is the easy stuff.

What’s harder for me to deal with are the stares that Ghandy attracts in public. The same protective instinct that drummed through me as a little girl is still as strong today. This sets off a perpetual preoccupied state of mind. I get angry, I get defensive, I feel shame. And then I just want to disappear. I can’t be in the moment because these feelings are cycling through my head. But Mike often reminds me that this is family, and you can’t change your family; you can only accept it.

I know taking care of Ghandy will feel like a burden at times. I might revert to that self-pitying mindset that engulfed me when I was younger: looking at people who I think have perfect lives and wondering why I was given the heavy load. But just as my parents have had each other to lean on in caring for my brother, I, too, will have someone to help carry the load when it seems insurmountable. Mike has lifted that looming dread that has afflicted me for so long. In its place has come acceptance and the reassuring knowledge that Mike will be there to help me, no matter what our future holds.

•••

MAGGIE THACH is a writing and literature teacher living in San Diego. Before she received an MFA in creative nonfiction from the low-residency program at UC Riverside Palm Desert, she was an award-winning sports journalist at The Salt Lake Tribune. She was recently selected as a 2015 Peace Writer for the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice. In this position, she will be paired with a female human rights advocate from around the world and document the advocate’s story of living in conflict and building peace in her community and nation.

Swimming Pools of the Rich and Famous

By Laurence Dumortier

1. When I was a child, my family lived in the south of France, in the town of Aix-en-Provence. My father had been transferred there for his job. He worked for Shell Oil and had not yet learned to hate it. Later, when my brother and I were old enough to think seriously about what kinds of jobs we might have, he warned us away from working for anyone; he felt he had wasted much of his life in servitude to bland corporate life. He urged both of us to be our own bosses!, to not get stuck in what he considered the unimaginative hell of middle management.

The advice was mostly lost on me, but that came later anyway. This period in the south of France was before my father’s disillusionment. He was still a young exec in the early seventies and Aix was not an expensive city then. My parents found a second-floor apartment for rent that, while not large, was palatial in its high ceilings, tiled floors, elaborate moldings, and the most extravagant wallpaper in the living room. In photographs, though discolored with time, it is still stunning: a deep green background with bronze vines in vertical lines.

None of this was of much interest to me at the time, though. Instead, for my brother and me, the appeal of the place lay in the gigantic terrace. It still amazes me to think that this was where I learned to ride a bike. It was sized like a mini-mall parking lot. Except it was beautiful and sunny, with geraniums growing out of old planters and a wrought-iron barrier to keep us from tumbling into the street below.

Across from our building was a gated property. Though the house was not visible from the terrace, the garden was, and it had a pool. I heard it said that Alain Delon lived there. The name meant nothing to me then, except I realized it must belong to someone important or famous, because of the thrill I discerned half-suppressed in its saying. It was clear that to have a pool like this, you had to be important or famous or at least rich.

The pool was shaped like an old-fashioned mirror, straight on the sides, and curving in and out at each end. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone swimming in it. It was just there, turquoise and sparkling, inviting but inaccessible.

Amazingly, my father put up a huge blow-up pool on our terrace, big enough for my brother and me to swim in. Now that I’m an adult, I can’t imagine doing such a crazy thing. The terrace was not built to hold the weight of that many thousands of gallons and might have collapsed. Or, if the pool had burst suddenly, I can only imagine the awesome spectacle of all that water gushing out and flooding our apartment and the one below. But neither of these things happened, and my brother and I splashed and shrieked and swam all summer long. It was nothing like the beautiful and stately pool across the street but it was still heaven to us.

Plugging the building’s address into Google maps, I am a little stunned to have a satellite view of the terrace, and, across the street, Alain Delon’s former garden with its cypress trees and Mediterranean pines, and its pool gorgeously intact. It is surprising somehow to see my childhood memories so unambiguously confirmed. We moved away from Aix when I was five so there is much about our life there that I don’t remember clearly. The terrace and the pool and the wallpaper, among a handful of other things, remained vivid to me but it seemed the vividness of a dream.

The convergence of dream and reality in this one memory sends a chill down my spine. Time has passed and so many things have changed, but this thing has remained the same.

2. Fast forward fifteen years. After my French schooling, I went to college in the U.S. My college boyfriend, though majoring in history, was a musician, almost famous at a couple of east coast colleges, including Dartmouth where his band played a couple of times a year and where Michael Eisner’s son went to school. The young Eisner had ambitions to start a record label or a management company—I can’t exactly remember now—and he wanted my boyfriend to be his first client. The summer after we graduated, he arranged for my boyfriend to play a showcase gig at The Viper Room. The club was legendary to me, because only a few months earlier River Phoenix had OD’ed on the sidewalk outside, which broke my heart for his family and friends, and for all that wasted talent and beauty.

I was living in San Francisco right after college, though I felt utterly adrift, struggling to find a job and a place to live. My mother had arranged for me to stay for a few weeks with a friend from her own college days. Instead of being grateful for this generosity, I resented having another parental figure and labored to hide my sullenness. By the time my boyfriend called to tell me that he was being flown out to L.A. by Eisner’s son and did I want to spend a few days with him in a hotel there, I felt desperate to escape the claustrophobia of my own fumblings and failure to get a toehold on adulthood. Yes, I wanted to go! I was too broke to fly and didn’t know how to drive so I bought myself a bus ticket to L.A.

This was by far the longest bus ride I had ever taken. It left at five a.m. from San Francisco and took almost twelve hours, through the Central Valley. No one actually wanted to be on the bus, but it was a fifth the price of a plane ticket, and we all had places to go. We stopped in Modesto, Merced, Fresno, Visalia, Delano, Bakersfield—towns with names that were intriguing and mysterious to me. I was new to California, and the Central Valley presented such a strange contrast to the foggy, winsome beauty of San Francisco. I was gobsmacked by this demonstration of how gigantic California was. In France, a trip that long would mean you had crossed into another country, but here mile after mile after mile under the beating, hard sun and still there was more road between the bus and L.A. With each stop the bus filled more until every seat was taken. Many of the passengers were older, and some were infirm. One or two looked like they might have just been released from prison. One woman spoke loudly to herself the entire bus ride.

When we stopped at the Greyhound depot in downtown L.A., I was relieved and euphoric to see A. waiting for me with a borrowed car. My lust for him woke me up from the grogginess of the journey. We hadn’t seen each other since I’d decided to move to San Francisco, and he had decided to pursue his luck in New York. While not exactly broken up, the distance between us had seemed to contain a resounding finality. And now we were here. Together. In L.A.

It was late afternoon but still very warm. As we drove, I noted that I liked L.A.’s wide streets. I didn’t mind that the traffic moved slowly since I had no particular agenda. I was happy sitting next to A., and I was interested in everything moving past my window—billboards, palm trees, convertible cars with their tops down. I felt calmed by the gentle weight of A.’s hand on my leg. I didn’t know what was going to happen to us in the long run, but here we were together now.

In another half hour, A. and I were in Michael Eisner’s pool. I imagined the dust of the trip washed off by this pure and cool water and was pleased at this image. In the back of my mind I was a little horrified at how rag-tag I must have seemed to the Eisners, sweaty and rumpled and dazed from so many hours of sitting in one place. But this was only in the back of my mind because in the front of my mind was A. We stood in the shallow end of the pool, facing each other, skimming the surface with our fingertips. I didn’t trust myself to touch him, but I could feel the water conducting the electricity between us. How perfect it would have been to fuck in this perfect pool. But the whole Eisner family was inside, and in another half-hour we were going to sit down to dinner, and however bold I wanted to imagine myself, I wasn’t bold enough to do that.

I don’t remember much about the dinner, except it was lovely and generous of them to host me and A. Michael talked to his son, giving him advice about dealing with the music bigwigs who were coming that night. I had no idea how to interact with anyone in this particular situation so I was quiet. All I could think about was going back into the pool with A. and having the whole place to ourselves. It no longer seemed incongruous for us to be there. I didn’t consider us out of place. If anything, everyone else seemed out of place, superfluous. Such a beautiful pool only needed two people, in love with each other.

3. A few years later, I moved to L.A. Despite our best efforts, A. and I broke up, and I made new friends to distract myself. One of them, Jason, was a production assistant on Ted Danson’s short-lived TV show Ink. Jason had become friendly with Danson and his wife Mary Steenburgen, and they’d entrusted him with their house and pets while they went out of town for a few weeks. Jason found a way to insert “Ted and Mary” into his every other sentence, which I liked because I would have done the same thing.

One evening Jason invited me to swim at Ted and Mary’s with a couple of other people. When we got there Jason led us through the back gate to the pool area. He went inside the house to get towels, saying, “You guys stay here.” We hadn’t particularly been planning to go inside, but at his admonition, we teased him by coming up to the French doors. We found he’d locked them behind him. We were faintly outraged at his having done this and teased him—“Jason, we’re coming in!” we shrieked softly, rattling the doorknobs for effect.

I glanced at the interior, which looked cozy in an English-countryhouse-via-Beverly-Hills kind of way. This was a popular decorating style for a certain Hollywood crowd, I guessed, but when I thought of England I didn’t think swimming pool. It was thinking of the south of France, and of Aix, and the mirror of water across the street, that put me in the mind of pools.

Soon enough we were bored of pestering Jason and instead we jumped into the luminous water. At night, pools are mysterious and alluring. With the lights turned on they have an eerie, glowing beauty. The deep shadowy places where the light doesn’t reach makes them a little bit frightening too. Movement at the water’s surface is magnified. Light breaks apart and comes together again. Planar geometry makes its own strange kind of sense in the refraction of moving light. Bodies glow in a way they never otherwise do.

The setting was so beautiful, it seemed to call for some flirtation and it seemed wasteful to pass up this opportunity. I began to banter with a boy in our group.

A few years later, I would marry him, but I didn’t know it yet and just then such a thought would have seemed ludicrous. At that moment we were simply making jokes and observing each other from this new vantage point. We were buoyed by the water and by the sense of having stepped out of our ordinary lives. A few steps away there was a cozy interior but the doors were locked and we were out here in the eerie luminescence.

4. In Santa Monica, right off the Pacific Coast Highway is the pool that Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst built for their beach getaway. Now it exists as the Annenberg Beach House, and it’s open to the public in summer. On Sundays I often go with my guy and our kids around five o’clock. The air is still warm then and the pool is heated to a decadent eighty degrees. What a crazy luxury to swim in the late afternoon in clear water that is almost bathtub-warm, with the scent of the Pacific around us and the entire sky overhead. The pool is spectacularly beautiful, its perimeter tiled in a Greek key pattern and its bottom encircled with mosaics of ocean life. Speckled green and blue and yellow fish swim among the octopi and the billowing seaweed.

The main house, designed by Julia Morgan, was torn down in 1956 but I can imagine, floating in the dreamy water, that it is still there and that Hollywood intrigues are just out of earshot. I think of Marion Davies who is so often reduced in popular imagination to her caricature as Charles Foster Kane’s untalented, complaining mistress in Citizen Kane. Watching the real Davies act, in The Patsy for instance, she deploys her charm and her comedic chops with a dazzling ease. She gives side-eye like a boss, she pouts adorably, and she transforms herself in quick-witted imitations of her contemporaries.

It is easier, though, I suppose, to see Davies as the “mistress.” An untalented hack, in other words, for whom a smitten Hearst bankrolled pictures. It is easier somehow to reduce her to that narrow role, than to take in a whole person and her complex relationships to others. Hearst was older than she was. He was by far the richer of the two. We believe we understand what this means. “Oh, it’s like that. Of course it is.”

As I rise and break the surface of the water, I think of the trajectory of my own life, of my early childhood in the South of France, of the life I’ve made in Southern California, of how, if I were rich or famous of the object of any curiosity, it might be read in this way or that, to make more sense, or at least to make easier sense. My choices so far have been rather conventional, but even so each one was made for its own particular reasons, generated by circumstances and emotions that take root in the mix between the personal, the cultural, and the societal. My life is not scrutinized, but I loathe that famous women’s choices so often are, and then reduced to categories of convenience.

Plunging underwater again, the sound of my own blood throbbing in my ears, my mind wanders. I think of Alain Delon, who said recently about his love affair with the beloved Franco-German actress Romy Schneider, that while he still grieved her death at only forty-three, it had at least preserved her beauty: “It’s difficult to admit, but I wouldn’t have wanted to see her at 70. It’s better she went this way.” I turned forty-three this year, and while far from possessing Schneider’s beauty, the thought that in any universe it would be “better” to die at forty-three rather than to age—as we all must if we are to live, as Alain Delon himself has—strikes me as obnoxious in the extreme. Can there be a starker example of reducing a multi-faceted person to a mere surface? If Delon loved her, how could he not take in that she was more than just her physical beauty? That Schneider had depth beneath her surface loveliness, that she was more complicated, more flawed and more profound, should not be so very difficult to understand.

5. If I ever figure out how to have a pool of my own, it will be like a David Hockney painting. Sparkling and rippling in the sun, a nude figure emerging from its cool clearness.

When my children are teenagers and have their friends over, I will leave them to their youthful splashing. They will be surprised, and a little annoyed perhaps, at how much skinny-dipping there is when my friends are over, though. They will hardly be able to believe how comfortable we are in our middle-aged bodies. At least that is how I picture it all when I daydream my pool into existence.

I think of growing older with M. How impossible this was to envision when I was a young adult—a lifetime spent by another’s side. How easily I picture it now—now that we have almost two decades together under the bridge.

I think of our children growing up and the pools into which they will dip their own toes. The choices they will make, the paths their lives will take, and the nostalgias they will carry with them. I think of us swimming together in Marion Davies’s old pool. I think of the long summers of their childhood and try to picture where they will choose to make their lives. I imagine the possibility of some far-off day holding grandchildren as I wade with them into welcoming waters somewhere—perhaps even in my own backyard. I am wistful contemplating the adventures my children will undertake, and the unguessed ones still ahead for me, for M., for all of us.

•••

LAURENCE DUMORTIER writes essays and fiction. She is finishing her PhD in English, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. You can find her online at twitter.com/ElleDeeTweets

Violets, Boxes, and Stars

By Sara Bir

The sight of demure violets and shaggy dandelions against the deep green of recently mowed grass has always delighted you. Normally you don’t like the combination of yellow and purple or yellow and green, because you hate team sports and those eye-searing pairings are often team colors, spotted on high school basketball jerseys or the itchy polyester cling of cheerleading uniforms. But in the context of spring, you love it, those three colors coming together for a few short weeks, radiant under the still-shocking intensity of midday sunlight. It calls to mind a suburban idyll, those violets and dandelions asserting themselves against an herbicide-drenched carpet of lawn.

But it is night now and you are looking at your phone, even though you’ve vowed to spend less time looking at your phone, and one of the feeds of text on it alerts you that a cookbook writer you admire just made violet syrup. It excites you, the very sound of it. Violet syrup. You imagine the violet syrup in a dainty pressed-glass jar, illuminated like an isolated shard of sacred stained glass in the path of an afternoon sunbeam, high on the shelf of a shabby-chic hutch. It calls to mind tea parties and Anne of Green Gables, harkening back to an age before phones that offer tiny visual enticements of violet syrup in the first place.

In your house there are all sorts of things to do, things that get pushed aside because of your job, which is to arrange little black symbols in lines against glowing white screen. It is called editing. The things you edit are lists about food, and you correct the mistakes in these lists because you’ve had enough jobs cooking food to spot misinformation quickly. You know what food does, even though your editing job consumes enough of your time that you now resort to serving boxes of bunny-shaped macaroni and cheese for dinner more often than you are comfortable with.

You do this editing from home, because that’s where the screen is, and your daughter often sees you scowling intently at it, and the magnetic power it holds over you infuriates her. You try very hard to limit her own exposure to glowing screens, both large and small, and yet there you are all day, tapping away at buttons as she implores you to draw with her or listen to her rambling preschooler stories. You want to give yourself fully to those stories, but the lingering demands of unresolved symbol-arranging pulls you away. Her job is to go to daycare, where she can play with other kids her age and build up her social skills so you can be at peace with your screen and your keys.

Sometimes you need a break from editing, so you switch to a different screen for a bit and click on little boxes and stars under photos of babies and dogs. You didn’t click on the star under the violet syrup on your phone. Is this worth a star? What does one do with violet syrup?

You try to shove the violet syrup to the back of your brain, but the violets do not give up on you. They appear all over, suddenly, in low-lying mobs: in the green strip of medians, along the path in the woods where you walk the dog. They grow in clusters, making pinpricks of color at the base of stop signs and between the cracks in the sidewalk. They soothe and disrupt you, because they are just another thing that you won’t get to. If you don’t pick the violets and make them into syrup, you’ll forget about how the purple and the green of violets make you feel.

You go with your daughter to a park without your phone so you can be somewhere and not really think about stars and boxes, and she runs off and then returns, bearing a fistful of white violets collected indelicately in her small hands. “For you, Mama,” she says. White violets? Was that one of Elizabeth Taylor’s perfumes?

The white violets do it. After a whole week confronting their quiet menace, you surrender. It’s Friday and you have deadlines. You are alone at home, busy editing inside and it’s glorious outside and you evict yourself from your dining room-cum-office. You close up the screen and grab a mixing bowl and go to your front yard, which, despite its minimal lawn, is infested with violets. You squat down, and you pick.

And you pick. One violet, two violets, three violets. You need a murder of violets build up in the bowl. You think of saffron, collected from the stamens of tiny crocuses, and consider how ill-suited you would be for the life of a saffron harvester, since after five minutes you are ready to quit this violet-picking business. You cannot give up. You do not give up.

The violet syrup recipe on your phone says to gather three handfuls of violets. You succeed, and you take a close-up picture of the bowl of violets with your phone, and you think about sharing this picture so other people—friends, kind-of friends, vaporous friends—can click on a box or star to agree with you about how great your life is, this life of carefree front-yard foraging. But you look at the real violets and then the violets on your phone, and you notice that they look nothing alike. Your phone violets are blue-ish and stiff and cool, and your real violets are a vibrant violet-purple, and the shiny metal bowl is warm from sitting on your lap. You delete the photo.

You retreat inside, to the kitchen, to separate the tender petals from their green bases that hold them together (a part of their anatomy called, adorably, the pip). So many small flowers, so many pips to maneuver around. Hundreds. Steeping the pips with the petals would make the resulting syrup bitter and to skip it would be to negate the already frivolous work you’ve invested so far. This is exactly the sort of thing you’d love to recruit your daughter for, but pulling petals away from pips requires more finesse than her unruly five-year-old fingers can muster. And so you do it by yourself, outsourcing the supervision of your daughter so you can blow off work and pluck itty-bitty flowers apart for making an essentially useless condiment.

It occurs to you that you should probably taste a violet before you go through with this. For all of the wildflower’s loveliness, its fragrance and flavor is that of the most bland lettuce ever, and you don’t imagine exposure to heat doing it any favors, but by now you’ve decided that making violet syrup will fill some hole in your life that needs to be filled. Even if you are just filling it with lettuce-flavored simple syrup.

Building up a critical mass of violet petals feels Sisyphean, absurd, impossible. Many times in your life, you have repeated insignificant tasks. You pumped the handle of the hopper and squirted a blob of Bavarian cream inside the donut. You stripped away the stranger’s slept-on sheets and unfurled a fresh sheet for a new stranger to sleep on. You took the rectangle of plastic from the customer, slid it through the reader, and made small talk as they paid for their pig-shaped corncob holders or glittery pink silicone spatula.

Do you receive our catalog?

Would you like a bag for this?

Enjoy your day!

You took the rectangle of plastic from someone else and slid it through the reader, and then another rectangle from another person, and then another.

A good place to eat around here? What do you like?

That meat grinder’s aluminum, so I don’t recommend putting it in the dishwasher.

Caribbean is my favorite Le Creuset color, too.

Your favorite Le Creuset color is actually Flame. The violets are tedious, still. Twenty minutes in, you have a pint of pip-free petals, not nearly the quart you need for the syrup. Screw it. You instead opt to make violet sugar, which requires only one handful of petals and one cup of granulated sugar.

It’s the big dirty secret of foraging that, with enough refined sugar, all things are possible. Only a few centuries ago, it was an expensive luxury. Crews of African slaves labored around the clock on Caribbean plantations to placate white people’s hunger for the laser-like precision of white sugar sweetness. On those islands that inspired a Le Creuset marketing expert to name a soothing shade of turquoise blue after their waters, there was a constant need for boatloads of new slaves, because they died before they got around to having children. Some fell into the boiling vats of cane juice, and some bled to death after getting their limbs caught in the rollers that pressed the cane, but most were simply worked to the point where they collapsed and never got up again.

Sugar is commonplace now, unavoidable. It infiltrates the snacks your daughter eats at daycare, the Nutri-Grain Bars and Fruit Roll-Ups. Now, the ability to afford eschewing sugar is a sign of membership in the upper class. Your white sugar, though, will not be white. After this, it will be violet.

A few blitzes in the food processor and that’s it. It tastes like regular sugar and looks like wet purple sand. To give it a boost, you add a grating of Meyer lemon zest, but it’s still not punchy enough.

You look at the windowsill over your kitchen sink and spy a vanilla bean pod. Of course you always air-dry the hulls of scraped-out beans after the majority of their flavor has been sucked into custards and compotes. They cost about a hundred dollars a pound and are actually the cured seed pods of a specific orchid, one that’s pollinated by hand a hemisphere away. The producers of these seed pods sometimes use a needle to prick a unique brand on them, just as a cattle rancher would, so the beans can be traced back should a vanilla seed pod rustler come to plunder the crop. Sometimes, before eviscerating them with a paring knife, you examine vanilla beans and you spy the tattoos, looking like leathery runes from another age, and you imagine having to prick thousands of still-green seed pods on orchid vines.

You realize you now have a small stockpile of dried vanilla bean hulls, and you grind them to several tablespoons of fine brown dust in your spice grinder, and you add a fat pinch of this dust to your violet sugar, and it does the trick. They’re kindred spirits, these two esoteric floral essences.

You retrieve your child from daycare, and you both return home to a big bowl of intact violet blossoms, ones that were not massacred into sugar, and you give this bowl to your daughter and send her to the yard and say, “Do you want to play with these?” She sprinkles the violets on the sidewalk and scatters decapitated dandelions and mangled clumps of grass among them, announcing, “I made a store!” and you approve.

The violet sugar is in a jar on the counter. It is subdued in color and soothing to look at, nothing at all like the cartoonish hues of purchased decorating sugar that you sprinkle on cutout cookies, and you just leave it there, even though you have no immediate plans to bake anything. Maybe you will divide it among smaller jars and give it to a few of your friends, the ones who appreciate things like the glancing presence of violets. The violet sugar means you are not entirely a useless and shallow person. You think about it and think about it and then sit and tap on keys and sort those feelings out, and then there it is, Violets, Boxes, and Stars, a few teasing lines on the screen of a phone, and you tap on them, and see this.

•••

SARA BIR is a regular contributor to Full Grown People. She lives in Ohio.

Read more FGP essays by Sara Bir.

Transportation

planes — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Wendy Wisner

We’re driving to my cousin’s wedding in Atlantic City. We’re on a tight schedule. We spin past the bare-branched sycamores. The ground is dotted with patches of snow. The wind lashes against our rickety Honda.

Ben says he’s too hot in his coat. Peter says he’s too cold. “Just wait. We’ll be there soon.” We’re getting closer. I begin to smell the waves of the bay.

Then Peter throws up.

We pull over, strip him down. He cries, his bare legs shaking in the cold. We toss his dirty clothes in a plastic grocery bag, find some clean clothes, mop up the vomit with baby wipes.

“Okay,” I say to my husband. “We’ll get there right when the ceremony starts. You’ll drop me off. I’ll change into my dress. I won’t miss it.”

We keep driving. Now the ocean is clearer, on the edge of the parkway. I inhale it. I, who hate to travel, inhale the ocean and its expanse, its freedom.

Finally, we arrive at the hotel. Bright lights, gold fountains, Roman god pseudo-sculpture. I was naïve; I expected a simple hotel. It’s like we’ve entered an amusement park.

Dizzy circles through the parking garage. My stomach in my throat. My mother texts me: “It’s okay. She won’t notice if you miss the ceremony.”

A parking spot, finally. I toss all our “fancy” clothes in a garbage bag to change into along the way.

We enter Caesar’s Atlantic City. Immediately the smell of cigarette smoke and misery. The blinking lights of the slot machines. The room begins to spin.

I say to my husband, “Here, watch the children.” I take out my dress and tights, my good bra. I hand him the garbage bag with the children’s clothes, and run inside the ladies room.

I change inside a stall, my bare feet on the cold bathroom floor. I tie up my messy hair, smear on some lipstick.

My husband has changed Peter into his button-down shirt and necktie. He hands me the garbage bag and Peter, then wanders off with Ben to change.

This. This is when I begin to fall apart.

Peter wants nothing more than to climb on all the slot machines. Peter will not stay in my arms. He twists away with all his two-year-old might. I try to carry him, the garbage bag of clothes, and my winter coat. And I cannot. I cannot do it.

My cellphone is low on charge. I have no idea which direction my husband has gone. I am completely lost, alone, with a screaming toddler who is half-covered in vomit.

I can’t hold onto all of it anymore. I can’t stop the panic from boiling over, from my belly, to my throat, to my eyes.

And then I’m not in my life anymore. It is 1983, and I am alone with my mother in the airport. The stench of cigarette smoke in our hair. Is it from the airport, or from the cigarettes my father has been smoking?

My father is gone. He left just as the snow began to fall in life-size, enormous chunks. Just as the baby started to blossom in my mother. Winter and spring colliding.

We are utterly alone in that airport. We do not know where he is, only that we are following him. The airport tilts as the planes rise up into the sky.

•••

The airport was the room between the worlds. But not a room. A cavern. A chamber. An expanse of white that stretched beyond where I could see. There were no exits, no escapes, no way home.

The only way to out was to get on a plane.

We watched the planes through the window—a giant wall of glass. The planes were larger than life. They were dinosaurs: standing still, then suddenly running, lifting their clobbering tails up into the air.

The airport smelled of gasoline, cigarettes, and diaper cream.

It was 1984, and my sister was a newborn, snuggled against my mother. But her presence was slight, muted. She was young enough to sleep quietly in my mother’s arms. She closed her eyes and ignored it all.

My mother and I walked up and down the corridors. We were marbles being rolled up and down and around the tunnels, gates, entrances. We were being rolled by the great hand of my father. He reached for us across the continent. He didn’t want us with him, but he beckoned us nonetheless.

He made us want to find him. He made us look for him in each man’s face we saw streaming past.

Had he shaved his mustache yet? Was it just growing in?

I looked for my father, though I knew he wasn’t there.

I wanted to leave. I didn’t want to go with my mother. I wanted to run away.

I stood at the top of the escalator, and my mother stood below. “Take me home,” I said.

My mother had no words. And now I see my sister for sure, my mother holding her, running up the escalator as it’s moving. There is no way to stop it from moving. My sister, the suitcase, the tickets—everything in her arms but me. It is clear that she can’t carry me as well, that I must will myself up the escalator.

And I do. I follow her. I get on the plane. I begin the endless journey of looking for my father.

•••

I have been trying to piece it together, the origins of my anxiety—why my mind so easily jumps to the worst-case scenario.

I have had to untrain myself from assuming that any time my children get sick that they are going to die. I have to shut out the thought that any time I don’t hear from my husband for a few hours that he’s in grave danger. It is their lives—the ones whom I hold most dearly—that are at stake.

I have some theories. The loss of my father is one. But I didn’t completely lose him. He didn’t die. He just left. As a child, it was a loss that felt like death, but I still saw him often enough over the years. I could still find him, wrap him up in a bear hug.

I think the feeling of doom runs deeper, back to my ancestors, back through my DNA.

The dead babies, the boat, the planes, the entrances, the exits. Portals into the world, and out.

•••

My grandmother slid the box out from under her bed. It was a beautiful brown box, old, faded around the edges, but nicely preserved. Maybe she was going to show me one of her hats, or try to give me another of her soft patent-leather shoes. (We had the same tiny feet, size 5).

She opened it up to reveal a small dress. Light pink, with a lacy, embroidered neckline. It was flattened and neatly laid, like something you would see on display at a museum. Small enough to lie flat in the box—a dress for a very young girl. You could almost see her lying quietly there.

I thought it was perhaps one of my mother’s childhood dresses, or one of my grandmother’s from when she was a girl.

“This is the dress of the girl who died,” my grandmother said. She drew out the word “died.” She had this way of being completely serious, but with an airy, dramatic flair.

Then she told the story. I only heard it that one time and was too scared to ask about again.

Her parents and their daughter were immigrating to America from Kiev, Russia. The boat was dirty, disgusting, people piled on top of one another, nowhere to sleep, living in squalor. There was very little food. Everyone ate rice, she said.

The little girl never made it to America.

My grandmother didn’t know how she died. And I was too shocked to ask.

“They named me Nachama, which means comfort, because I was her replacement,” she said.

But no one ever called her that. Her name was Emma.

She was Emma, my grandmother. But now I knew she was born after trauma, after the deepest loss imaginable. It would haunt her, and me, for the rest of our lives.

•••

We moved thirteen times by the time I was thirteen years old. We were chasing my father up and down the west coast. But there was also a restlessness on my mother’s part that propelled us from house to house—a search for the key to happiness.

I never felt that I had a home. Home was intangible, something reserved for daydreams.

And real dreams, too. I have always dreamt about the houses. I dream that I can go back to a home of mine, one that we left, and is still there, preserved as it was.

I dream of the apartment with the walk-in closet that I turned into a room for myself. I’d make stacks of toy money and play bank, or I’d take in all the books in our house and play library. I remember playing with my charm necklace, hiding the parts behind the coats. I think I tried to sleep in there, curl up into a little ball behind my mother’s boots. But I couldn’t relax. I couldn’t rest.

I dream of the apartment where I did have my own room. The twin windows that faced the mint tree. I’d crack the window open and inhale. My room with the full size bed in the center, the faded pink blanket, boom box on the bureau. When the earthquake began, first the windows rattled, then the radio switched itself off, then the lights. I walked out of my room as my mom and sister were coming out of the kitchen. We watched the chandelier sway, slowly, calmly, as though nothing momentous and devastating was happening.

And last night, I dreamt about the apartment I lived in longest. I knew it would enter my dreams soon enough—the apartment we left last summer. Both of my children were born there. I became a mother in those narrow rooms. Last night, in the dream, I stood in the living room, its soft brown carpet under my bare feet. The carpet felt wet, like soil that had been newly watered. A breeze was coming in. Ben’s stamp collection was lying open on the floor. The couch was gone, but the piano was there—the keyboard open, the keys whiter and brighter than I remember them.

I couldn’t say goodbye to that apartment. The last time we went, to get an ice cream sandwich my older son had left in the freezer (I kid you not), I didn’t want to go in. Because I hate endings. I hate last times. Especially when it comes to houses.

If I never have to move again, I will be eternally grateful. But I know we will move again someday. We rent our new home, and I have a deep desire to own a house someday.

If I own a house, it’s like I will never have to leave. I can grow old there. I can die there. I can sink into it. Get comfortable. A small square of earth that is entirely my own.

•••

Then there was the story my grandmother never told me: the story of the other baby, her baby, the first one. I don’t think they ever named him.

In those days, you didn’t talk about stillbirth. The doctor told them to grieve briefly, then try right away for another baby.

That’s one of the few details I know. That, and the cord wrapped around his neck.

In my mind, the cord is blue, the room is blue, the baby blue. Gray and blue swirling together, enveloping the room in a dense fog.

I wonder if they ever saw him.

Did they hold him? Could they bear it?

Their second son, Raphael, the angel, was born a year later, as the doctor recommended.

But where did the grief go?

You never saw my grandmother in grief, only in fear. Her sister gone, this baby, too. Life so fragile, so temporary.

My grandmother used to read the obituaries every day. She’d sit in the rocking chair next to the aqua-blue telephone.

Did he die as he entered the world, as he journeyed out of her body? Or did he die inside her?

My son Ben was born that way, with the cord around his neck. The midwife told me to stop pushing for second; then she deftly hooked her finger under the cord, and slipped it off him. He came crashing out of me, alive and screaming.

I don’t know what happened with my grandmother’s baby, but sometimes I imagine that I could save him—unloop that cord, set him free, stamp out the panic that passed from my grandmother’s body, into my mother’s, into me.

•••

I started walking when I was eighteen. I was coming out of one of the toughest times of my life: the first time I’d experienced a period of panic attacks.

It started the summer I turned sixteen.

I used to spend the summer with my father in California. That summer was brutal. I missed my boyfriend (who would later become my husband), and I was starting to assert myself in new ways—typical of the teenage years. I began to criticize my father and my stepmom. Harshly. I wasn’t pulling any punches. It got nasty, fast. They couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t handle me. I couldn’t handle them. And I felt trapped.

After that summer, I developed an intense fear of flying (obvious connection there—flying meant visiting my father). And, devastated by my abandonment, my father cut off all communication with me for a year. In that year, my phobias increased. Things I’d never been afraid of before became tinged with the most incredible, raw terror I’d ever felt.

I was afraid of all modes of transportation, really. Cars, taxis, the school bus. There had been a shooting on the Long Island Railroad, and I was sure it would happen again, to me. I was deathly afraid of mass shootings. I’d get nervous in crowded places. The diner. The mall. Thank God school shootings weren’t rampant at the time—I’m sure I would have been too scared to go to school.

I gained a lot of weight. I’d always been a normal weight—curvy as I became pubescent, but always in a normal range. I gained at least twenty pounds then. I ate to cushion my frightened body. I ate to silence my racing heart.

Somehow—I’m not really sure how—I started to come out of the panic. I decided to see a therapist. She wasn’t great, but just the act of going was good for me. And I started walking, both to lose the weight, and also because I found it amazingly freeing. It seemed to wash the anxiety out of my body. And I liked being out of my house. I liked the fresh air. I liked the endorphins. I liked being able, at last, to think clearly. I liked slicing through the world at my own pace. I liked looking at the perfect houses, with the perfect families inside (or so I imagined).

All these years later, I still walk almost every day. Sometimes with a baby strapped to my chest, or a toddler in a stroller. And on weekends, entirely alone.

Since this past summer, I have added some running to my routine. I’m not sure why. I had been having dreams about running. It seemed absurd to me at first. But the dreams were like magic, like I was gliding through space.

•••

When we moved to the new house last summer, we noticed several white beings swooping across the trees out in the distance, over the pond.

Later, we realized: egrets.

And then the four of us—even the baby—would wait until night came (it came late then, in summer) and wait for them at the window. It was magic. Pure and simple. These great, graceful birds, with wings that were quiet, long breaths.

As the earth cooled, the egrets retreated. Where did they go? No one asked. We moved deeper into the everyday. School started. The days got shorter and darker.

But I have thought over the months, where did they go? You always hear that birds go south. But really—where? Or do some die? I guess that’s what I really want to know.

I am obsessed with beings—people—coming and going. The way they wander in and out of lives. And how they get there.

My grandmother would always ask: How did you get here? By foot? Car? Train? She was interested in modes of transportation—fixated on the travel routes of the ones she loved. She wanted to make sure you would arrive at your destination in one piece. “Call when you get there,” she’d say.

The formation of birds as they migrate—of course it takes our breath away. The unspoken communication, the way their bodies seem to magnetize to each other. Don’t we all just want to know where to go? And with whom to travel? What comfort there. What grace.

Ben wants to get a new camera with a zoom lens so that we can photograph the egrets this summer to preserve the magic. We know it’s temporary. We want to capture it.

Just a week ago, the pond was covered in snow, and under the snow—ice. Now it’s melted, and the ducks swim smoothly through it. On the way home from a walk today, Peter and I heard them quacking.

Yes, spring. Which leads to summer. And all the birds opening their wings, returning home.

•••

We missed the ceremony.

After we were all dressed, we rushed through the hotel, past restaurants and gift shops, up escalators, around corners—everything sharply glittering. We found signs for the reception (there were many) and took the final elevator up to the very top of the building.

The elevator opened onto the wedding. The reception was in full swing. I saw the bride first, my cousin, towering over me in heels, her burnt-red hair, endlessly flowing shimmer-white dress trailing behind her. She was rosy-cheeked, in a just-married daze, and thrilled that we made it.

No guilt. No worries. No fear. We made it.

An enormous picture window overlooked the ocean. It was twilight, and the grays and blues from outside drifted into the wedding hall, bathing everyone in a warm, ethereal light.

I began to breathe.

I scanned the room for my family. There they were, my mother and sister, sitting on a leather loveseat together, plates of hors d’oeurves balanced on their laps. My mother and sister—strange and beautiful to see them here, in this otherworldly place, a place none of us had ever been before, and would probably never return.

For a while I just watched them, and time seemed to melt away. Then I looked at my two sons, who had quickly situated themselves in front of the window, cheek to cheek, watching seagulls sweep across the sea.

My husband appeared beside me, put his arms around my shoulders, asked me if I was feeling better, and walked me down the aisle toward the ones I loved.

•••

WENDY WISNER is the author of two books of poems. Her essays and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Washington Post, Literary Mama, The Spoon River Review, Brain, Child magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. She is a board certified lactation consultant (IBCLC) and lives with her family in New York. For more, visit her website www.wendywisner.com. Connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.

Manning the Tollbooth

By Jon Magidsohn

It’s a cement and gray-brick structure, unnaturally square, six stories of uniformly tinted windows, compartmentalized and looming large over the winding driveway. Wide, sliding glass doors open onto a pale foyer large enough to park several ambulances. On the right, busy administrators in matching navy-blue jackets sit behind a registration desk; on the left, a café with odors staler than the bodily smells upstairs in the wards. An unused staircase hugs the wall as visitors and faceless figures in teal-green pyjamas crowd the elevators. Blue and silver signs point toward mysteriously withdrawing wings named after equally mysterious benefactors. The ceiling is speckled with plate-sized pot-lights casting a ghostly glow that leaves no shadow along the grey corridors.

It could be any hospital anywhere in the world. A monument to Marie Curie. But this one is in Bangalore, India—where my family and I have lived for the last year and a half—squeezed into a parcel of land between a shopping mall, a community college, and a housing estate all served by a dusty four-lane highway that connects the airport to the center of town. Outside, the road is lined with crumbling pavement and idling auto-rickshaws; inside, it’s eerily absent of indistinguishable announcements or “Code-Reds,” and everybody seems unusually comfortable being there. Both inside and out, like on any Indian street, there are people everywhere.

Never has a hospital seemed so frighteningly familiar yet shaded with a disquieting foreignness. Not the most comforting scenario in which to bring my unwell son.

He’s scheduled for an endoscopy, admittedly not the most intrusive of procedures but not without concern considering the involvement of general anaesthesia. The source of his debilitating stomach aches needs to be found, now several years—and three hospitals in as many countries—after the pains first surfaced.

A few weeks earlier, the scan and blood tests all came back normal. Six months prior, we’d eliminated gluten from his diet, before that dairy. Four years ago, we ruled out IBS and Crohn’s. The endoscopy should show us, once and for all, what we are dealing with.

How many possible conclusions could be left, I wonder?

•••

Like many people, I have a natural inclination to find blame whenever the opportunity presents itself. If I can’t (or won’t) admit responsibility, then I can at least outsource it. The soup shouldn’t have been so hot; poorly-poured cement caused me to stumble on the sidewalk; the teacher withheld vital information—that’s why I failed the exam. Surely someone is to blame.

What about my empty bank account? Gimpy knee? Lack of a publishing contract? Most days I can spin it so that these gray areas tilt more definitively toward the black or the white. Not my fault.

Got cancer? It must be because of the polluted drinking water, unsavory lifestyle, or bad habits. But what if the disease should find random homes in healthy, rural-dwelling, non-smoking, teetotal vegetarians? Or children? Who do I blame then?

Some people insist everything happens for a reason. Others believe that we are all at the mercy of fate. All I know is that when you’ve been as close to cancer as I have, you stop looking for the smoking gun.

If my son, Myles, were to climb the two branches of his family tree, he’d discover signs of cancer before he reached the first bifurcation. From my side, he inherits the genes that betrayed my father and my aunt. On the other side, the woman that brought him into this world was taken by cancer before Myles was old enough to know who she was.

If my son gets cancer, I need look for blame no further than to the disease itself.

When Myles was still just a grainy, faceless pre-human on an ultrasound scan, he was exposed to a cocktail of drugs aimed at reducing the accelerating tumor in his mother’s left breast. With the information available to the team of specialists at the time, they determined that the mild course of chemotherapy would keep the cancer at bay until the baby was born, after which the treatment would be amplified. By all accounts, the placenta did its job well, filtering out all the invasive chemicals designed to target fast-growing cells. Our unborn baby was all fast-growing cells.

Myles was born healthy and strong and has remained so for the past twelve years. So healthy and strong, in fact, that I’ve often wondered if perhaps the anti-cancer chemicals zapped him with invulnerability to a Marvel Comics degree. As a baby, he’d crawl over gravel without scratching his knees; carrying him through the house, I’d clumsily knock his head against a doorframe without so much as waking him up.

But his superhuman tolerance of injury hasn’t pre-empted any of my fears for his long-term wellbeing. When, at thirteen months, he got his first cold, I thought it must be a symptom of something greater. Headaches, allergic reactions, and bruises must certainly be symptomatic of some malevolent intruder. When he complained of stomach aches, I envisioned the tumor burrowing into his abdominal organs. There could only have been one explanation.

Like most parents, I’d peek into Myles’ crib at night to make sure I heard the comforting whispers of his breath during his sound sleep. Now that he’s nearly a teenager, he still sleeps as soundly and I’m still responsible for waking him up in the morning. But after I unceremoniously swipe the covers off him and open his curtains, what if he doesn’t wake up? What if that malicious interloper has taken him from me during the night?

Farfetched, maybe. But to those of us who have witnessed it, cancer is always there, sitting just over everyone’s shoulder in various personae like those imaginary little angels and devils. But nobody is quite sure which one to listen to.

The word itself looms large in the lexicon of our unconscious as one that dare not be spoken. It is at once sacrosanct and taboo, as if saying the word might somehow curse the person who has it or pass it on to someone within earshot. When people do actually speak the word it is uttered quietly, almost politely so as not to aggravate the temperamental God of Terminal Illnesses. It is inherently self-editing, the harsh sound of the first ‘c’ muted by the disapproving sibilance of the second one. “Comeheregoaway,” it says in a radio-static whisper.

When Myles’ mother died, the cancer remained. It floated around me like steam from a boiling kettle. It nosed its way between the pages of my book and under my pillow. It hid between the floorboards or behind my cereal bowl. Sometimes it hung from the wall like a giant tapestry and sometimes it sat lazily in the teaspoon jar. It never taunted or pointed its ugly finger. It didn’t have to.

Through it all I manned the tollbooth at the edge of the cancer highway. Everything had to get through me first: the flowers in a beautiful garden were muted, grayer as seen through my eyes; the conversation that made me laugh was not quite as funny after I hung up the phone; good news was soured, bad news inconsequential. The world was cancer-coloured.

Time has healed the grief, but cancer lingers like dirt under my fingernails. It makes me wonder who the real cancer victim is.

•••

“Dad, I’m nervous,” Myles says after changing into the unflattering hospital gown.

“There’s nothing to be nervous about, Superman.” I try to take heed of my own advice. Until the final results of the endoscopy are in, nervousness is the least of my worries. Besides, I can’t let my son know that there is any risk or discomfort involved in Dr. Dinesh sliding a camera down his throat. Myles will be asleep the entire time.

“But they’ll have to give me a needle,” he says, sitting patiently with his bare toes curled against the freezing floor tiles. “That’s gonna hurt.” I long for the days when the thing I feared most was a prickly jab in my hand.

I wait in the under-stocked, over-priced hospital café, nursing a cup of tea and clinging to my son’s glasses while he’s put to sleep and his insides are probed by the latest inhuman instruments offered by medical technology. I wonder if Dr. Dinesh is looking at the rapidly-growing tumor in my son’s stomach, trying to determine the best course of action before breaking the news to the patient’s father. I plan ahead, ensuring I’m aware of all nearby doorknobs and railings lest I require something to break my fall as I faint after hearing the doctor’s report.

Within an hour I am at Myles’ bedside in the recovery room, holding his hand and counting the blips on the heart monitor. I recall the day of his birth, two weeks earlier than we’d expected, when I sat by the incubator for three hours with the same pings and peeps providing the soundtrack to the Cinemascopic vision that was my new son. Six months later, another hospital where his mother lay dying attached to another monitor. The only benefit of Myles being so young at the time was that I didn’t have to explain to him what flat-lining meant. The sensation never withers, especially when I’m forced to revisit the scenario.

The smoking gun.

•••

Let’s assume that there is no such thing as randomness; that we are forced to bear things like disease and anguish because our predestined fortunes have demanded it of us. If this were so, I might welcome my fate while condemning it at the same time. I might still find blame in circumstance or poor choices while gladly laying guilt with God or the Devil. Someone must be at fault.

But life doesn’t work that way. At least mine doesn’t. No god I’d be inclined to pray to would allow the kind of physical or emotional suffering I’ve seen some people endure. Why would any benevolent source allow itself to be culpable for something that unwittingly assaults people from the inside and lingers immortally in the minds of those who have witnessed it? There is nobody and nothing to which I can point the finger.

Randomness is all around me. From the car that turns the corner as I’m trying to cross the street to running into an old friend at a movie theatre to the pulled muscle in my back. From there, anything can happen; it’s the Sliding Doors syndrome. I choose to believe that we can only prepare for so much; that considering all of the careful choices we make, we are not in as much control of our lives as we might think. Sometimes life just happens to us.

I worry because I am a father; because I am human. I worry because I anticipate the hissing tongue of cancer to taunt me again without warning. I hope for the best and anticipate the worst. I keep my eye on the roulette wheel’s persistent silver ball lest it fall arbitrarily on my number.

When someone I love exercises their hyperbolic prerogative to illustrate a point, I am often short-fused.

“It’s so hot … I’m dying.”

“You’re not dying.”

“No, but … I mean …”

“You’re not dying.”

I don’t cut people much slack. It’s a figure of speech—I get that. Besides, we’re all going to die some day. But I’ve become a hypochondriac by proxy, convinced that all my loved ones will die around me while I remain here to live without them.

•••

Five interminable days after the endoscopy, the results, including tissue biopsies, return normal. No ulcers. No abnormalities. No cancer. The only imaginable explanation for the stomach aches, according to Dr. Dinesh, is a minor hiatal hernia, which many people tolerate without ever suffering from any pain, and slightly raised stomach acid. Eventually, he suggests, Myles will outgrow the excruciating interludes completely.

It’s the good news we’d hoped for. We’ve dodged the bullet. Just a stomach ache. My irrational fears have been soothed once more, and I will myself to be patient until the day we say goodbye to these episodes altogether. Hopefully this is the last time we see the inside of an Indian hospital. Or any hospital.

I don’t consider how bad the outcome could have been until the next morning when I pull the blankets off my son’s sleeping body and wait for him to stir. Short-lived relief bolsters me for another day.

•••

JON MAGIDSOHN, originally from Toronto, Canada, has been featured in The Guardian, The Bangalore Mirror, Brevity, Hippocampus, Full Grown People, Chicago Literati, and currently publishes three blogs. He’s also written about fatherhood for dadzclub.com, The Good Men Project and Today’s Parent magazine. He has an MA in Creative Nonfiction from City University, London. Jon’s memoir, Immortal Highway: Songs From the Healing Tour, is currently crowdfunding toward publishing in September, 2015. Rewards include a copy of Full Grown People: Greatest Hits, Volume One. www.jonmagidsohn.com

Ordinary Artifacts

By Samantha Vincenty

My gym bag’s zipper is broken. The crinkled fabric’s worn through at the bottom and it’s time to throw it in the trash, but I can’t. Not yet.

My boyfriend finds me in a daze on our bedroom floor, my hands on the empty bag in my lap like I’m clinging to a dead pet.

“You don’t have to throw it away,” he says, crouching down to look at me. He knows what it means, why I hold the receptacle for my sweaty socks in such high regard.

My mother died four years ago, but I’d cleaned out her apartment a few years before that when it became dangerous for her to keep living alone—she was one more forgotten stovetop fire away from harming herself and the other tenants in her building. I’d held on to the bag, among other things, ever since.

The bag is bright fire-engine red, not auburn red like the hair I was born with and the hair my mother dyed to match mine. Mom bought it at New York & Company, that bastion of career separates, as uncool as (or marginally cooler than) Ann Taylor. The zipper pulls resemble MTA subway tokens with an identical “NYC” cutout logo and the words “The NYC Style Authority” wrapping around the circle. I wonder if these details are why she wanted the bag. Maybe the faux tokens reminded her of riding the IRT by her childhood home in the Bronx, or commuting to her nursing job at Columbia Presbyterian before she gave birth to me and we moved to the suburbs that made her so restless.

The New York City subway stopped accepting tokens in 2003. My mother’s early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis came into full, horrific bloom that same year. I quit my job to become her part-time caregiver, using subway tokens to ride from Brooklyn to Grand Central. Three times a week I’d take a commuter train to Yonkers so I could take her on walks, clean up all of the nonsensical piles and mysterious stains she’d made around the apartment, and cook us steaks on her George Foreman grill. The oven was now officially off limits, and it was important to stay on-message: Never ever turn it on.

In 2003 my mother, an artist for most of her life, cried because she could no longer sketch or paint realistic likenesses. She forgot to love some of her favorite things (Pet Shop Boys lyrics, romance novels, tweezing her immaculate eyebrows), but I liked how she also forgot to refuse things that she’d previously sworn off (cream soda, sushi, a ludicrous soap opera called Passions). I was twenty-four and envious of the career pursuits my friends described over syrupy-sweet cocktails at happy hour. I drank more than I needed. I drank quickly, too, to forget how exhausting it all was but also to make sure I was having the fun I thought I so richly deserved. In those days my mother would call me constantly to ask when I’d be back, sometimes just hours after I’d been there. Her thoughts were getting foggier by the day, and she hated being alone with them. She still remembered who I was.

By 2004, subway tokens were out of circulation, and I used a Metrocard to get to Grand Central. Mom didn’t want to move into a nursing home, but at twenty-five I had burned through my savings and needed to find a job. Worry, about my future and hers, stole hours of sleep from me at night. My mother needed full-time supervision—in addition to the stove fires and sink floods, she had started wandering the streets alone, forgetting where she lived. So I returned to Yonkers to sort my mother’s things into three piles: Discard, donate, or keep. I kept the red bag because I wanted something she’d used in her normal, pre-illness life. It served me well for a very long time, but now the bag’s demise feels like another ending.

I know I’m not alone. A colleague who lost his father two years ago recently told me that he rummages through his parents’ drawers just to touch his dad’s folded clothes. “I like, lay on his side of the bed and try to smell the pillow and shit, even though I know it’s been washed.”

We’ve talked about that connection we all yearn for, between a lost one’s tangible things and their memory. We need the artifacts. No, I don’t want my small New York apartment to be a Dead Mom Museum. But should I let go of something if it feels like a fresh burial?

I’m still not sure. So the bright red bag remains on the floor, unused and un-useful, while I figure out what feels right. I may turn one of the subway-token zipper pulls into a keychain, as a functional monument to a time that fundamentally shaped me as a person.

There are two zipper pulls, actually, and I’m keeping them both: One for me and one for the woman I remember.

•••

SAMANTHA VINCENTY is a freelance writer and editor living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in The Hairpin, Fuse.tv and BUST, and she is currently at work on a memoir. She tweets about music, pop culture, and weird stuff she finds on the street as @shermanther.