Kingfishers

I saw my therapist today, before the show. I haven’t seen her since before Mom died. I keep having dreams about that time I dropped Mom’s jewelry box when I was eight. Last week, when I dropped the box it turned into five silver fish that wriggled around on the floor. Two nights ago, I wasn’t myself holding the jewelry box, I was Mom, and she ran into the room and found herself crying in the pieces. I woke up from that dream and texted Amanda, the therapist. I’ve never shared my dreams with her before. Somehow, they felt too private, too mine, to share. Today we talk about the jewelry box incident, the dream versions and the real one, too.

I’m eight again, sobbing on the floor.

“Ara, I will not tell you this again. You do not touch my stuff.” Mom is yanking rings off my fingers with each word and she is a tower and I feel like a piece of dust on the carpet.

“Momma I just wanted to look, it wasn’t on purpose I’m sorry!” She picks me up, and a bead of blood from my knee drips a perfect circle onto the floor.

“This is what you get for messing with my shit,” she spits. She grabs a tissue from the bathroom and a Band-Aid and sends me to my room. I want her to hold me, to forgive me. I just want to feel close to her. I wipe my eyes and my cheek catches on metal. I am still wearing one of her rings.

“And when you think about this now, how do you feel?” Amanda is asking me.

“So confused. I remember her as just this paragon of kindness, and the longer she’s gone the more I think about her this way. Like perfect. Even though she obviously wasn’t. I honestly wish I had more memories of her meanness, coldness, so I wouldn’t just be missing her all the time.”

“Of course,” Amanda’s nodding. “It’s so much easier to push away people when we’re angry with them. But something inside of you is bringing you back to this memory, that’s clear from your dreams. Let’s stay with it for a minute.”

****

Later, I meet Jay outside the theatre. She’s all in blue, with a silk scarf around her hair. She’s done her make-up differently; small yellow jewels evenly dot her eyelids and shadow shimmers on the bridge of her nose.

I take her hand and pull her into me. “You look nice,” I breathe in her smell and warmth. She kisses me and laughs and pulls me toward the line at the box office, which stretches out the door and down the sidewalk. She looks me up and down.

“You look good, too.” I’m wearing Mom’s old linen suit, tailored to her figure and somehow, also to mine. I am of her and now resemble her, with my hair up like this and these cloth lines draping my body. I went to Mom’s house today after therapy, for the first time since last year, the day of the funeral. I went into her closet. Seeing the suit, Jay understands this.

“How was it, going in there?”

“Hard. Good. Right.” We’re quiet. The line moves forward and we move with it.

“I found this ring.” Looking at my finger, I’m eight all over again.

“Was it hers?” She asks. The truth gets stuck at the base of my throat. Somehow, I can’t tell her the whole story, not yet. I know Jay’s never really forgiven my mom, and I don’t want to give her another reason to dislike her. So I make something up.

“Ara, what happened?” Momma is dropping to her knees in the shards, pulling me into her arms.

“Momma I just wanted to look, it wasn’t on purpose I’m sorry!” She picks me up, and that circle of blood drips onto the floor.

“It’s okay, Bunny. Everybody gets curious sometimes. I need you to ask before you touch my things, but it’s okay.” She gets me a tissue from the bathroom and a Band-Aid and we lie in her and Daddy’s big bed and snuggle. After a little while, she leaves to go cook dinner. I sit up and wipe my eyes, realize I still have on one of her rings.

It is rose quartz, the pink of clouds right before sunset, inlaid in gold. I sleep with it under my pillow and wear it when Mom is out of the house. She doesn’t ask me about it and I justify in my child mind that if she really liked it, she would have realized it was gone. I forget about it in middle school and find it in a desk drawer as I’m packing up for college. The week before I leave, I tiptoe into her closet and drop the ring back into the now superglued jewelry box.

That part is true. Jay nods when I’m done, stays quiet. We wait in the line and I tuck my chin into the neck of the suit and breathe in deep. When I was younger, I would sneak into Mom’s closet and curl my toes into the blue carpet, bury my face in her sweaters. They smelled like stage make-up and olive oil. I never touched her costumes, even when she wasn’t home. Onstage, she was not my Momma, so the costumes didn’t belong to me in the same way that she and her normal clothes did. On the day of her funeral, her closet was cold. I flicked the light switch and nothing happened. The death in that space choked me; I should have expected it, brought Dad in with me. Instead he was in the kitchen setting up sandwich plates for our extended family. That day, I dragged shape after shape off the hanger, jeans and cloaks and sequined gowns making the same shush sound as they fell to the floor. The clothes laid so passively, like shadows, or ghosts; Mom curled up in the bed like that, during her last few weeks. All she wanted then was to be held, so Dad and I took turns wrapping our bodies around her, chanting lullabies into her ears. The memory of this filled my stomach with a big round stone and it took all my concentration to lift it so I could escape that cold, choking space.

“You ladies ready?” The usher is waiting for us. Jay takes my arm, holds me close. We step together, through the doors and into the warm red lobby.

****

The show we’ve come to see is a retelling of Ovid’s myths, told through the perspective of three washer-women cleaning by a stream. With each cloth they dunk into the current, they spin another story from their mouths, color the air around them with the light and sound of it. I sink in my chair and watch the life circling on stage, feel my peripheral vision empty. I have been coming to this theatre since I was a child, have felt the power of stories wash over and through me since before I had any words at all. The first show I saw was RENT, with Momma as Joanne. She sat me in the wing with two cookies and a warning hush, but I needed no incentive to be quiet. I sat in the folding chair and swung my legs to the music, a new passion yawning awake within me. Until I left for college, I attended every single performance my mom acted in. It’s been two years since I’ve been in a theatre – since her last show – and I feel like I’m home. Does the theatre sense me, sense her in me?

Last night I dreamed myself into my childhood bed, and Mom was beside me, squished like she used to be when she would tuck me in. My comforter was blue and yellow, and she stroked her hand over the quilted squares while she told me a story. Her voice felt like a cooling cloth across my forehead, and I fell asleep and woke up alone in my own grey sheets. I only remember a few of her words: there was an ocean, and two circling birds. I’m used to analyzing my dreams with Jay – if she’s not in bed with me I call her as soon as I wake up. She laughs at the sleep that coats my voice, but quiets quickly to listen. We pull out our books, marvel at the possible meanings of lost teeth and waterslides. I don’t call Jay when I dream about Mom. I lie in my humid sheets and feel myself without her, wonder if my chest cavity will now always be a little bit hollow. Sometimes I pad down the hall and perch on the edge of Dad’s bed; he listens with a different kind of reverence. We don’t analyze these dreams. We just circle around them in the morning silence, two barn owls with tired eyes. Understanding that I don’t have the words for these feelings stills the aching wheelhouse of my mind.

I do not wish that I lived in a dream, even if Mom was there with me. I am glad to be myself, to stand with my heels planted, to love Jay with sweetness and know she loves me, too. I am, for the most part, glad that Dad has moved in with me, has been cooking me Mom’s favorite meals. But Momma, I really wish you were here with me at this play. You would be shaking your head in delight; you would lace your hand through mine as we leave the theatre, ask me what beauty I’d felt in that sacred space. I miss you so much, and the pain isn’t so heavy in my belly as it was last year, but this shit still hurts.

****

A year ago today, we drove back to the house from the service and I pulled over on the side of the road to throw up. Nothing came out but spit and tears and so I slumped against the passenger door and let the asphalt burn my thighs. Mom always said this outfit was too butch, Why can’t you wear something normal? and I wore it to the service as a private fuck-you to her dress code. I walked into the hall and instinctively scanned the room for her, for her smile and squinty eyes. I waited the whole service for her to come up to me and chastise me for my clothing choice. She stayed quiet. Dad rubbed my back as I sobbed on the pavement. We have each other still, Bunny, he said into my shoulder. Jay stood on the sidewalk behind Dad, her hands gripping each other and turning her fingers white. I didn’t want Dad to call me Bunny.

Today in therapy, I went quiet when Amanda asked me to stay with my memory. I took some deep breaths, letting myself sink. Beneath all the sweet and tender and holding, I felt the coldness, too. Mom and me laying together on the couch, and I’m drifting to sleep and she jolts up to take a phone call and slams the bathroom door and I’m small and alone and confused. Mom backstage at her shows, yelling at me to shut up, I’m rehearsing as I play pretend with her props. When she would forget to pick me up from school. When she made it clear she was not okay with me dating Jay, That’s just not the way we do things in our family, and only came around after six months and just as many screaming matches. I forgave her, but Jay never really did. I’ve been forgetting the coldness in favor of the kindness. Amanda asked me, How can you hold both? I think I’m holding Mom too tightly. It’s weird that I haven’t been thinking about the bad stuff, seeing as I’ve been trying to remember every little thing about her.

I told all this to Amanda, who nodded like she knew exactly what I was talking about, which maybe she did. The session was at time, so I took some more deep breaths and Amanda gave me a homework assignment to tell a story that holds Mom in her wholeness, both the closeness and the cold. So I’m doing just that, telling you these stories as I walk downtown with my feet, I’m now realizing, carrying me toward Mom’s old house, and I have the key on my key ring and it still fits and I push open the heavy wooden door and in I go.

Momma who is gone, Momma who held me and is now gone – I’ve never been so frantic as the day we put her into the earth. I ran through her house from room to room. Dad called after me from the kitchen but his words were whispers against the drumbeat in my skull. I devoured the air inside those walls, desperate to breathe in her smell while it still lingered, before it fell to the floor where my heavy heels would imprint her into the carpet. I lined my body up with the door frame, rubbed my back against it like a dog on a dead thing at the beach. I sucked on the arm of her favorite sweater, pulled all the clothes from her hangers. I collapsed into her bed, folding the comforter around me until I was too warm and my breath pooled around my face like tear gas. My breath smelled like her. I held her inside me. I finally stopped moving, felt my heart throb in my throat. Memories wound through my hair and danced themselves behind my eyes, timing themselves with the drum inside my ears. I’m eleven, crawling into her blanket cave to tell her I’ve gotten my period. I am five, and I wake up crying from a nap. I had dreamed a black sheep was biting my foot, and as I blink myself from that world into this one, there she is, my momma, her body strong and warm around me. She holds me until my sobbing stops. What happened, Bunny? I tell her my story, how real it was, how fast I ran away from the sheep but the sheep ran faster still. As I tell her, I jump up from her arms and run around her bed, tripping over the comforter and falling with a giggle onto her mattress. I show her how I sprinted; I jump off the bed onto the white carpet. The sheep sniffed me, and I sniff the carpet to show her. She jumps up, too, and we run around the room, sniffing and laughing together. When we collapse again onto the bed, she turns to face me and grabs my left arm, hard. Ara, she says. You are my ray of sunshine. You are so sensitive, and kind. Sheep will bite you. It is inevitable. You have to know how to bite back. She signed me up for martial arts that year, and self-defense classes a few years later. I started crying again then, because the fear in her eyes scared me and she was hurting my arm. I wonder now, who hurt her?

Now she has been gone for a year and I am 25, and my feet have walked me to her house before my date with Jay and I am lying here, again, in this ancient aching bed. She is not with me, in dreams or wakefulness; she is somewhere far away. I drop into sleep. Let a sheep try to fucking bite me now.

I wake in darkness. I’m gonna be late to meet Jay – I don’t have time to go home and change, so I walk to Mom’s closet, take a deep breath. I flick the light switch, forget it’s dead, pull out my phone. The floor is still littered with the wrinkles of her beloved clothes – nobody has come in here since the day of her funeral. The shapes look so lonely without her body to hold them. I lift each item and loop it back onto its hanger, place it gently on the rack. I pick up her brown linen suit, the one she wore to my college graduation. I pull it on and it fits and I rub my eyes and feel her all around me. She is rocking me gently, shushing me, or I am rocking myself and she is so much a part of me, my momma. And the panic that clutched at my throat and skin when I entered this house last year and even today, that filtered through my restless sleep in her warm bed, relaxes its fist. I feel her now, in all her glory: the ways she was hurting and hurt, the ways she held me close. I hear her, singing the song of her soul on an illuminated stage. Her jewelry box sits on a far shelf, pieces superglued together like stained glass, and I wipe off the dust, open it carefully. The quartz has not dulled and the gold has not faded; I slip the ring out and put it on.