“I know you have this thing about the Sunday Times, but there are easier ways to get the news and practice your reading.”
“Tell me you’re not saying People magazine is news.”
“I’m just saying. You could be done reading this today,” she says, turning the page for emphasis.
She doesn’t get it. It’s not about reading simply anything or taking the easy way out. It’s about reading what I normally read. Reading the Sunday Times is about getting my life back.
“You won’t know anything about Angelina Jolie after reading all that,” says my mother, smirking.
“Somehow, I’ll survive,” I say.
Still smiling from her little joke, my mother opens a clear plastic pillbox, pours a handful of white and yellow pills into her palm, and swallows each one with a separate sip of tea.
“What are those for?” I ask.
“These?” she asks, shaking her pillbox. “These are my Vitamins.”
I wait for further explanation.
“They’re my happy pills. My antidepressant medication.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not me without them.”
In all this time, it never occurred to me that she could be clinically depressed. My father and I would tell each other and anyone who asked about her that she was still grieving or having a hard time or not feeling well today, but we never used the word depressed. I thought her lack of interest in what was left of her family, in me, was her choice. For the first time, I consider the possibility of a different story.
“When did you start taking them?”
“About three years ago.”
“Why didn’t you go to a doctor sooner?” I ask, assuming that she needed them long before then.
“Your dad and I never thought of it. Our generation didn’t go to the doctor for feelings. You went for broken bones or surgery or to have babies. We didn’t believe in depression. We both thought I just needed some time to mourn, and then I’d be able to put a smile on my face and carry on.”
“That didn’t happen.”
“No, it didn’t.”
In all my limited experience with my mother, our conversations have always skimmed the surface and gone nowhere. It’s such a small thing, to hear my mother admit what has never been in dispute, that she wasn’t happy and never carried on, but her candid confession encourages me to continue the conversation, to dive into our big and murky water. I take a deep breath, not knowing how far down the bottom might be, or what I might bump into along the way.
“Did you notice a difference when you started taking the pills?”
“Oh, right away. Well, within about a month or so. It was like I’d been existing inside a dark, polluted cloud, and it finally lifted and floated away. I wanted to do things again. I started to garden again. And read. I joined a book club and the Red Hat ladies and started going for walks on the beach every morning. I wanted to wake up every morning and do something.”
Three years ago. Charlie was four, and Lucy was two. Bob was still passionate and dreamy about his start-up, and I was still working at Berkley—writing reports, flying to China, ensuring the success and longevity of a multimillion-dollar company. And my mother was gardening again. I remember her vegetable garden. And she was reading and beachcombing. But she wasn’t trying to reconnect with her only daughter.
“Before I started taking the medication, I didn’t want to wake up in the morning. I was paralyzed with What-Ifs. What if I’d paid closer attention to Nate in the pool? He’d still be here. I was his mother, and I didn’t protect him. What if something happened to you? I didn’t deserve to be your mother. I didn’t deserve to live. I’d been asking God to let me die in my sleep every night for almost thirty years.”
“It was an accident. It wasn’t your fault,” I say.
“Sometimes I think your accident was my fault, too,” she says.
I stare at her, not comprehending what she could possibly mean by this.
“I used to pray to God for a reason to be in your life, for a way to know you again.”
“Mom, please, God didn’t conk me on the head and take away the left side of everything so you could be in my life.”
“But I am in your life because you got conked on the head and lost the left side of everything.”
God has a plan.
“You know, you could’ve simply called me.”
And not involved God and a debilitating brain injury.
“I wanted to. I tried, but every time I picked up the phone, I froze before I could finish dialing. I couldn’t imagine what I’d say that would be enough. I was afraid you must hate me, that it was too late.”
“I don’t hate you.”
These words slip from my mouth without conscious consideration, as if I were responding with a pat reply, like saying Good after someone asks How are you? But in the next quiet moments, I realize that these words are true and not simply polite lip service. In my complex web of not-so-admirable feelings about my mother, not one strand is woven from hatred. I study my mother and notice a palpable change in her energy, as if her baseline level of nervous vibration dials down. Not off, but considerably down.
“I’m so sorry I failed you, Sarah. I live with so much regret. Not watching Nate more closely, not getting to him before it was too late, losing all those years with you, not getting on antidepressants sooner. I wish these pharmaceutical companies would make an anti-regret pill.”
I take in this sincere wish and study my mother’s face— the worry lines, which are really more like worry trenches, dug between her eyebrows and along her forehead, the sorrow in her eyes, regret etched into every feature. Some future FDA-approved, prescription medication isn’t the cure for her pain. My mother doesn’t need another pill in her pillbox. She needs forgiveness. She needs my forgiveness. And although I don’t hate you and It wasn’t your fault came as ready, honest offerings, I know they’re only palliative at best. “She’s not ugly” isn’t the same as “she’s beautiful,” and “he’s not stupid” isn’t the same as “he’s smart.” My mother’s cure for a lifetime of regret lies within the words I forgive you, spoken only by me. I intuitively know this, but some part of me, old and wounded and needing a miracle cure of its own, resists this generosity and won’t allow the words to leave my head. And even then, before they can be spoken, they’d have to make the long journey from my head to my heart if they’re to earn the sincerity they’d need to be effective.
“I feel regret, too,” I say instead, knowing that the weight of a young sister’s remorse must feel infinitesimal compared to a mother’s, a speck of dust resting on my shoulders compared to an entire planet on hers. “I still miss him.”
“I do, too. Every day. And I’m still sad. But the sadness doesn’t swallow me whole like it used to. And there’s joy now. I see a little of Nate from when he was a toddler in Linus, and I see lots of him in you and Charlie. It heals my soul to witness pieces of him still alive.”
I watch Linus pulling a dozen trains linked together around the edge of the coffee table. I was only three when Nate was Linus’s age, and I don’t remember enough about him, either physically or in personality, to see a resemblance in this moment. I wonder what it is that my mother sees. I look out the window and see Charlie playing off in the distance, building a mountain out of snow. I remember Nate’s sense of grand adventure, his determination, his imagination. Charlie has all of those traits. And so do I.
“What about Lucy? Do you see any of Nate in her?”
Lucy is still playing close to the house. Her mittens are on the ground, and she’s sprinkling glitter onto several nests assembled out of twigs and rocks and pinecones, presumably homes for the woodland fairies she believes in.
“Nope. That adorable little nut is a one-of-a-kind.”
We both laugh. I like the sound of my mother’s laugh. I wish she’d found these pills when I was a kid, that I wasn’t learning the sound of my mother’s laughter at the age of thirty-seven an
d at the price of a traumatic brain injury. I look over at her pillbox. It suddenly occurs to me that she took many more pills than should be prescribed solely for depression. What else could she be taking medication for? I wonder.
CHAPTER 26
It’s Thursday, and everyone’s been having a great vacation week. I did spend the first couple of days granny caning on eggshells after realizing that we forgot to bring the Wii up with us from Welmont, assuming this oversight was going to precipitate a monumental disaster involving tears and tantrums and a possible overnight FedEx shipment from Bob, but the kids haven’t even asked for it. Charlie and Lucy have either been outside or content to play “olden day” games inside with my mother and me, games that don’t require a left side, like I’m-Going-on-a-Picnic, I’m-Thinking-of-an-Animal, and Rock-Paper-Scissors (even the kids always beat me). My mother also bought a twelve-pack of Play-Doh, and we’ve all enjoyed hours of rolling, sculpting, and pretending (and Linus has enjoyed some unauthorized tasting).
I did remember to bring the mug of marbles, but we haven’t needed that either. With all the time they’re spending outdoors, the kids are exhausted at the end of the day, and I’ve been happy to give them an hour of Nick Jr. before bed, free of charge. And Charlie’s attention has seemed normal all week. This could be attributed to his Concerta, but my mother and I think he noticeably benefits from so much unstructured time outside, from not being confined by walls or fences or a seat in a classroom, from so much physical activity, and from days that aren’t spent rushing from one thing to the next.
And to be honest, I think I’ve been benefiting from being unplugged and unscheduled as well. The only TV I’ve seen all week is Ellen. I haven’t checked the CNN crawl or watched any news, and I don’t miss it. Of course, I miss work, but I don’t miss that jumpy feeling that comes with having to react all day at any given second to the next urgent phone call, to the thirty unexpected emails that come in while I’m in a meeting, or to whatever unforeseen crisis is undoubtedly heading my way before 6:00. Sure, it’s exciting, but so is watching the family of deer who stop to notice us while they’re crossing the field in the backyard.
My mother took Charlie and Lucy to the mountain this morning for their lessons and brought Linus along for the ride. After a lot of sincere begging, I granted Charlie his wish to switch from skis to a snowboard. He had his first lesson yesterday and absolutely loved it. Snowboarding is the coolest, and I was pronounced the coolest mom ever for letting him become a wicked cool snowboarder.
This morning over breakfast, he argued, quite skillfully, for permission to skip the lesson today and go off on his own, but I told him no. Bob and I don’t know how to snowboard, so we won’t be able to offer him any help on the slopes (assuming I get back on the slopes). He needs to learn the basic skills properly, and I have to believe that takes more than a day. He claims he’s got it down, and that today’s lesson will be BORING, but Charlie always possesses more confidence than skill, and even more impatience, and I don’t want him breaking his neck. He then tried sulking, but I didn’t budge. Then he tried roping Lucy into his cause, hoping to gang up on me and wear me down, but Lucy likes her lessons. She’s cautious and social and prefers to be under the watchful eyes and enthusiastic encouragement of the instructors. When he finally realized it was the lesson or nothing, he gave up, but he took away my “coolest mom ever” status. At least I had it for a day.
I’m sitting at the kitchen table painting a picture of the backyard, using the oils from the beautiful artist’s kit that my mother gave to me for Christmas. The kit is a smooth, plain wooden briefcase on the outside, but inside it contains rows of oil paints, pastels, acrylics, charcoal pencils, and brushes— a feast of color and creative possibility. I’ve squeezed gooey puddles of lamp black, titanium white, cadmium yellow, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, raw umber, alizarin crimson, and phthalo green onto my glass palette, and I’ve mixed as many combinations together with my stainless steel palette knife. Some of my mixtures turned to mud, but some swirled as if by divine magic into new colors that sing and pop and live.
Our backyard landscape already looks like an oil painting, so it’s easy inspiration—the snow-covered field guarded in the distance by maple and pine trees, the rolling hills behind them, the cloudy blue sky above, our shed painted bright barn red, the aged copper green rooster weathervane nested on its roof. It’s been years since I’ve held a paintbrush, but it comes effortlessly back to me, like riding a bike (although I’m sure riding a bike probably isn’t the best example of this for me now). Painting is all about seeing. It’s about focusing past the quick and dirty assumptions normally made by the eyes and mind and seeing what is actually there. It’s about spending leisure time in every detail. I see the sky, which isn’t simply blue but many blues and whites and grays, whitest where it touches the hills and bluest where it kisses the heavens. I see the three different tones of red on the shed produced by sunlight and shade, and the shadows of clouds dancing like sooty black ghosts along the hills.
I study my canvas and smile, satisfied with what I’ve created. I drop my brush into the glass pickle jar holding the other brushes I’ve already used and push the canvas to the side to let it dry. I sip my coffee, which is now stone cold, and rest my eyes on the view. After a few minutes, I grow tired of the yard and want something else to do. My mother should be home soon. She told me not to go wandering around the house while she’s out, and even though I’d really like to go lie down on the couch, I’ve learned my lesson from the time I “wandered” over to the refrigerator. I decide to limit my next activity to something that can be done from where I’m sitting.
My Sunday New York Times is on the table and within easy reach. I drag it over to me and begin removing sections, looking for the Week in Review. Mixed in with the folded pages, I find my mother’s People magazine. I pick it up and study the cover. Pre-accident me can’t even believe that I’m considering this. Oh what the heck. Let’s see what Angelina Jolie is up to.
I push the newspaper aside and flip open the magazine, casually taking in photographs of stars and the small snippets describing who’s seen with whom. I’m a few pages in when my mother bursts into the living room, huffing and puffing, toting Linus on her hip.
“You okay?” I ask.
“He’s getting so heavy,” says my mother.
He is heavy, similar in size and shape to a Thanksgiving turkey, but he’s actually slimmed down some since learning to walk. My mother places Linus on the floor, pulls off his boots, and unzips his coat. She then lets out a loud, cleansing exhale and looks over at me. Her face lights up.
“Aha!” she says, catching me red-handed.
“I know, I know.”
“Isn’t it great?”
“Great is a little much.”
“Oh come on, it’s fun. Call it a guilty pleasure. There’s nothing wrong with a little reading for pleasure.”
“The Sunday Times gives me pleasure.”
“Oh please! The look on your face while you’re reading that thing is more pained than Charlie’s on his worst homework day.”
“Really?”
“Yes, you look like you’re getting dental work done.”
Huh.
“But I can’t replace the New York Times with People. I still need to get the news.”
“That’s fine, but this can be good practice for you, too. Like, okay, name all the people on this page,” she says, standing over my shoulder.
“Renée Zellweger, Ben Affleck, I don’t know who that woman is, and Brad Pitt.”
“Katie Holmes, married to Tom Cruise. Anyone else?”
I look the page over again.
“No.”
“Anyone next to Brad Pitt?” she asks in a flirty voice, so I know it’s not a yes or a no, but a who answer.
Without trying to find out who is there, I go with the odds and take a guess.
“Angelina.”
“Nope,” she says, urging me in her tone to try
again.
Huh. I don’t see anyone. Okay. Look left, scan left, go left. I imagine searching for my red bookmark even though I don’t have it here. Oh my God. Look at that. There he is.
“George Clooney.”
I wouldn’t think that even a traumatic brain injury could keep me from noticing him.
“Yeah, this will be good practice for me,” I say, enjoying George’s mischievous, smiling eyes.
“Good, I’m proud of you,” says my mother.
She’s never said that she was proud of me before. Not for graduating from college, not for going to Harvard Business School, not for my impressive job or my not-nearly-as-impressive-but-still-adequate parenting skills. The first time she ever tells me that she’s proud of me, it’s for reading People magazine. That might be the strangest thing a parent has ever been proud of.
“Sarah, this is beautiful,” says my mother, her attention shifting to my painting.
“Thanks.”
“Truly, you’re talented. Where did you learn to do this?”
“I took a couple of classes in college.”
“You’re really good.”
“Thanks,” I say again, watching her face enjoy what I’ve painted.
“I even like how the left sides of things are missing or fade off.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
Look left, scan left, go left. I find the left edge of the canvas with my right hand and then move my attention across the picture from left to right. The first thing I notice is the sky—completely untouched white canvas at the left border, gradually turning a cloudy gray, becoming almost clear day blue by the time I hit the right edge. It looks almost as if a foggy morning were burning off from right to left across the horizon. The maple trees have no branches on the left, the pine trees only half their green needles. And although the conservation land extends many acres beyond what the eye can see in either direction, the forest in my painting grows only on the right. The left side of each rolling hill rolls flat, and the left side of the shed sort of dissolves into nothingness. I forgot to paint the entire rooster weathervane. It stands on the left half of the shed’s roof.