My mother’s products were mostly mementos from hotels. From our trips to Italy, all of them, from her honeymoon with my father, which was the first time she saw Rome and Venice and even Florence, though she grew up in a town less than a hundred miles away.
She had multiple shower caps, from La Lumiere in Rome and a beach hotel in San Benedetto. She had old yellow lotions from a hot-springs hotel in Castrocaro Terme and conditioner from a little albergo in Como. There was a room fragrance from a cliffside inn in Sorrento, probably the poshest of the hotels she’d ever been to, and from that same place, a satchel of lavender bath salts contained in a small terry pillow. It was this satchel that she dropped into the ugly tub of our Poconos bathroom, and it was the high, bright smell of lavender that brought me away from the She-Ra cartoon I’d been watching and up that carpeted, narrow stairwell to find my mother naked and vacant in the steamy room.
Her breasts were above the water, huge and white, and the rest of her—slim, tan, European—was below.
Many of my boxes now, the ones I have moved around and never opened, the ones that were piled on the ground floor of my Topanga home, are filled with her shower caps, with her lotions and sample sizes of perfumes. They have all gone bad, but I have still saved every single one. None of them, however, contain that bath salt satchel from Sorrento. There was only one of those, and she used it on that last night.
—Mommy, I said. I was wearing my Rainbow Brite pajamas. I don’t think my mother ever saw me as a child.
—Please, she said. I knew what she meant: Go away, leave me be.
I began to cry. It was my only recourse. The steam rose around me. How I wanted to be inside that smell, inside her arms in the water, inside her stomach again, where she couldn’t push me from her.
On the Formica sides of the sink, which were so small that things were always slipping off, were the two Q-tips I’d used that morning. My father had taken them out of the trash. He was a doctor and he thought nothing of spending money on lobster dinners and trips to the Amalfi coast, but he recycled my Q-tips. He thought I used them too indulgently. My mother didn’t care; I don’t think she used Q-tips or, for that matter, ever had ear wax or mucus in her nose. I don’t remember her having a cold in all of the ten years I knew her.
I heard my father light a cigarette downstairs. I heard the screen door open and then I heard it close.
—Mommy, please, I cried, tell me what’s wrong.
She shook her head and looked past me. I knelt down on the humid tiles. The shower curtain was the color of processed cheese.
I fished into the hot water, found her hands, and took them in mine. I brought them to my face. Even after soaking in lavender, they still smelled cooked by cigarettes. My whole childhood is contained in that scent. The mothballs, too. I wanted to take care of her and I wanted her to take care of me. She was the only thing in the world I wanted.
—Mommy! I shrieked, but my voice didn’t seem to reach her. My need was so primal, so simple, and her interior was so complex. Like the mantle of the earth, with layers upon layers of nicotine staining the cracks.
31
WHEN I WOKE, I WAS still bleeding and there was also a remarkable pain. Eleanor was home and she came into my bedroom and asked me if I was okay. I ignored her and walked into the bathroom. I locked the door and stayed inside for a long time. Eventually I told Eleanor to please go out, to take my car and get as many rags as she could.
—Rags? she said. Why?
—Because I’m losing the baby.
I heard her gasp.
—Just go.
Because it had been vital for me to be practical, I decided it was all for the best. I reminded myself of the time I’d seen a picture on Big Sky’s wife’s Instagram, during one of my morbid nights. I was doing cocaine in my apartment off of a Jimmy Buffett CD. I was scrolling through her feed, which was rarely updated and sparsely populated, but this night there was a new image. It was of a bathroom in what was surely the Montana lake house. Their youngest son, just about a year old at the time, in a Japanese soaking tub. The walls surrounding him were made of smooth knobby stones. It was early evening and there was a fantastic light coming in and you could see the sun out the window firing up the trees, those sensational Ponderosa pines that Big Sky was always saying he hated chopping down. It made him feel like a murderer. So why do you do it? I asked. Because, he said, a family needs a fire.
This child in the bath had no idea how lucky he was. The wife taking the picture had no idea who I was. What child could I bring into the world? You would only have had shower curtains with mold on the hems. We could only have stayed in damp motels, eating heather-colored burgers and greasy potato chips as we counted our last dollars on the filthy carpet. I’d eaten too much caviar and I hadn’t saved for your future. I’d eaten too much caviar with men who didn’t marry me. It was better like this, I thought as the blood rained out. Then a new contraction came, the worst one yet. I screamed so loud the sound might have colored the air, and then this thing, this palpable thing, released itself from under me. I caught it in my hand.
It didn’t look like an alien but very definitively like a human child. The shape of it and the feeling of it. The eyes nearly sewn shut; I could see the dark balls beneath beautiful, tight lids. It was blue and red with organs and its own pumping blood, close to the surface of its glossy flesh. The nose was the most exquisite I had ever seen.
It fit in my palm and yet it was larger than the length of it; I don’t remember, I only kept thinking it was large enough to live, I believed this with my whole being. You will have days when you think God is cruel, or what God is there at all? You may believe there is nothing. I believed and then I did not. Whichever I felt on a given day, the only thing I was certain of was that I must have been wrong. That day I figured it must be a female God to give you gifts like these that cannot or should not be kept. A female God would know who could be trusted with a child. And she would also know who might need a moment’s reprieve from the darkness. And then she would take the child back and place it into a real mother’s womb and let it grow there.
It had perfect hands and I tell you this not to be sensational but because it was perhaps the only pure feeling my heart had felt in nearly thirty years. One of its hands curled itself around my index finger, wrapped itself nearly all the way around it. My finger was so concretely, so shockingly, held. I’d been held enough by my father in the short time I had him, but I had always pined after my mother’s arms, her hands. I always wanted them to make a cap over my skull, to grasp me and suck me into her. But now to have my child, its little fingers, webbed still and yet delicately discrete, to have them press into me, to hold me, it was enough love to keep me for another thirty years. It recognized I was meant to care for it as long as it lived. I don’t know why I keep saying it. Because I knew very well, it was obvious, the child was a boy.
I don’t know how long he kept breathing in my hand like that. His ribs, ivory etchings beneath the gel of his skin, moved up and down in elegant puffs. With a finger from my other hand I stroked his forehead. My baby, I said quietly. I felt peace and happiness. I knew it wouldn’t last but I allowed myself to feel it for as long as it did.
When it was over, it wasn’t sudden or dramatic. The breaths simply stopped. A small chill came over his body. My next emotion was rage. It was more well defined than the happiness because I was better acquainted with rage. At what? Everything. Everyone. I wanted to kill the world. I knew that at the very least I would kill someone. It was more than a premonition. It was a promise I could control. The rage was so great it needed to go somewhere. But for once I did not have rage at myself. For once I didn’t hate myself. I loved myself as my child had. I saw myself as something greater than I thought I could be, and though certainly the feeling would fade, it still shone radiantly in that moment.