Her mother. A woman who had collapsed in on herself when her husband died, and was never the same happy, self-assured person again. Except. Except: She had provided for them. She just hadn’t cared for either of them.
The woman had not seen her mother for five years, and at first she thought she saw a ghost, a figure that blurred the more she focused on it. Wearing a white dress with a gray shawl, her mother sat in half profile, her thin white hands like twin bundles of twigs in her lap. Smoke rose from her scalp: white wisps of hair surrounding her head. The bones of her face looked as delicate as blown glass.
The daughter could see all of this because she was not actually in that room in the past, but in another room altogether, and as she typed she could see her own reflection in the green glass of the window to her left, since she had always been the mirror of her mother, and now looked much as her mother had looked, sitting in a chair, watching the river tumble past her window.
The daughter stood there, staring at her mother, clearly visible, and her mother did not see her …
Dread trickled down the woman’s spine like sweat. Was she truly dead, then? Had she succeeded and all else been a bright-dull afterlife dream? Perhaps she still lay on the floor of her bathroom, a silly grinning mask hiding her face and a bright red ribbon tied to her right wrist.
She shuddered, took a step forward, and the simple touch of the wooden door frame against her palm saved her. She was alive, and her mother sat in front of her, with delicate crow’s-feet at the corners of her wise pale blue eyes—the mother she had known her whole life, who had tended to her ills, made her meals, put up with youthful mistakes, helped her with her homework, given her advice about boys and men. Somehow, the sudden normalcy of that revelation struck her as unreal, as from a land more distant than Morrow or the underground of Ambergris.
The woman dropped to her knees, facing her mother, saw that flat glaze flicker from the river to her and back again.
“Mother?” she said. “Mother?” She placed her hands on her mother’s shoulders and stared at her. As if a thaw to spring, as if a mind brought back from contemplation of time and distance, her mother’s eyes blinked back into focus, a slight smile visited her lips, her hands stirred, and she wrapped her arms around her daughter. Her light breath misted my cold ear.
“Janice. My daughter. My only daughter.”
At my mother’s words, a great weight dropped from me. A madness melted out of me. I was myself again as much as I ever could be. I hugged her and began to sob, my body shuddering as surely as the River Moth shuddered and fought the ice outside the window.
(What is it about distance—physical distance—that allows us to create such false portraits, such disguises, for those we love, that we can so easily discard them in memory, make for them a mask that allows us to keep them at a distance even when so close?)
* * *
It would be nice to report that my mother and I understood each other with perfect clarity after that first moment of affection, but it wasn’t like that at all. The first moment proved the best and most intimate.
We talked many times over the next two weeks, as she led me up and down the rotting staircases in search of this or that memory, now antique, in the form of a faded photograph, a tarnished jewelry case, a brooch made from an oliphaunt tusk. But while some words brought us closer, other words betrayed us and drew us apart. Some sentences stretched and contracted our solitude simultaneously, so that at the end of a conversation, we would stand there, staring at each other, unsure of whether we had actually spoken.
I fell into rituals I thought I had abandoned years before, arcs of conversations in which I chided her for not pursuing a career—she had rooms full of manuscripts and paintings, but had never tried to sell them. For me, to whom creativity came so hard—each painting, each sculpture, each essay a struggle, a forced march—the easy way in which our mother created and then discarded what she created seemed like a waste. (Which begs the question, Janice: why didn’t you sell her paintings in your gallery? It wasn’t just because she didn’t want you to have them; they also weren’t very good.) She, meanwhile—and who could blame her?—chastised me for my lifestyle, for abusing my body. She had not missed the blue mottlings on my neck and palms that indicated mushroom addiction, although I had inadvertently kicked the habit in the aftermath of my attempt.
And so I slowly worked my way toward talking about the suicide attempt, through a morass of words that could not be controlled, could not be stifled, that meant, for the most part, nothing, and stood for nothing.
One day, as we watched the River Moth fight the blocks of ice that threatened to slow it to grimy sludge, we talked about the weather. About the snow. She had seen snow in the far south before, but not for many years. She sang a lullaby for the snow in the form of a soliloquy. At that moment, it would not have mattered if I were five hundred miles away, knocking on the doors of Zamilon. Her gaze had focused on some point out in the snow, where the river thrashed against the ice. The ice began to form around my neck again. I could not breathe. I had to break free.
“I tried to kill myself,” I told her. “I took out a knife and cut my wrist.” I was shaking.
“I know,” she said, as casually as she had commented about the weather. Her gaze did not waver from the winter landscape. “I saw the marks. It is unmistakable. You try to hide it, but I knew immediately. Because I tried it once myself.”
“What?”
She turned to stare at me. “After your father died, about six months after. You and Duncan were at school. I was standing in the kitchen chopping onions and crying. Suddenly I realized I wasn’t crying from the onions. I stared at the knife for a few minutes, and then I did it. I slid down to the floor and watched the blood. Susan, our neighbor—you may remember her?—found me. I was in the hospital for three days. You both stayed with a friend for a week. You were told it was to give me some rest. When I came back, I wore long-sleeved shirts and blouses until the marks had faded into scars. Then I wore bracelets to cover the scars.”
I was shocked. My mother had been mad—mad like me. (Neither of you were mad—you were both sad, sad, sad, like me. I didn’t know Mom tried to take her own life, but thinking back, it doesn’t surprise me. It just makes me weary, somehow.)
“Anyway,” she said, “it isn’t really that important. One day you feel like dying. The next day you want to live. It was someone else who wanted to die, someone you don’t know very well and you don’t ever want to see again.”
She stood, patted me on the shoulder. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ll be fine.” And left the room.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both.
Did I believe her? Was it true that you could leave your old self behind so easily? There was an unease building in me that said it wasn’t true, that I would have to be on my guard against it, as much as Duncan was on guard against the underground. (You misunderstand me—I embraced the underground. It fascinated me. There was no dread, only situational dread—the fear that came over me when I clearly did not fit in underground, when I thought the gray caps might no longer suffer my presence.)
* * *
After that, we avoided the subject. I never discussed my suicide attempt with my mother again. But we did continue to talk—mostly about Duncan. Duncan’s books. Duncan’s adventures. Duncan’s early attempts at writing history papers.