In our house, up on my fire escape, my mom used to tell me bedtime stories when I was little.
A lot of the time it was this one:
My mother went to England when she was sixteen years old—her one and only trip to Europe. It was part of a youth group trip, and she was super-excited. She sat by the window on the airplane—it was her first time on a plane—and she watched the earth pull away, watched the cars, the houses, and the buildings shrink until they were dots of color, part of a giant mosaic that she would not have recognized as her own city.
“I’d seen my world close up, but never from a distance. It’s like the paintings.” She would nudge me with an elbow. “By the painter who painted the little dots that made beautiful pictures.”
“I know,” I would say.
“What’s his name?”
“Sir Ott,” I would say, because I wanted her to go on with the story.
“Georges.” She always kissed my forehead when I said that.
The mosaic of my mother’s city gave way to blue water that darkened as they flew toward night, until everything outside turned black and all she could see in the window was her own reflection. They brought food but she couldn’t eat. She was too excited. She stared at her face in the window and thought, Here is me, going to England; here is me, crossing the ocean; here is me, a dot in the sky.
“How was it?” I asked her once.
“How was what?”
“How was it to be a dot in the sky? Like a nothing.”
“I didn’t feel like a nothing. I felt—full.”
“But you just said you couldn’t eat.”
She said she felt full of whatever it was that was about to happen to her.
After a long time, she saw something else through the window. She saw lights. Not big bright lights like in Times Square, but a million tiny lights that glowed.
She would close her eyes when she told this part.
“It was as if heavy clothes, embroidered with glowing threads of gold and red, had been tossed down by a giant or a god, and were just floating there, on top of the water.”
And it was beautiful, flying over that.
But as the plane flew lower and the pressure built in her ears, she found that she did not want to land. She wanted to stay above all of it, partly because it was beautiful, and partly because she understood that all the time she had been in the air, her connection to home had been stretching like a rubber band. It had stretched very far, so far that she was afraid that when the plane touched down, the rubber band would break, and a part of her life would be over.
“Isn’t that silly?” she’d say. “Where did I get that idea?”
My mother’s bedtime stories were not like other people’s.
And that’s how it was for me that night two weeks ago, when the nurse finally came to the waiting room and said I could see Mom. Walking down the hospital hallway, matching my steps to Dad’s, I suddenly did not want to see her, to actually arrive at the door to her room, because as long as I did not get there, I was still in the part of my life when she was not sick. And that’s why I refused to go into her room, why I started crying and ran to the elevators, and why I said I would never go back. I decided to do exactly what Dad said, to pretend that she was just at work, that none of it was happening.
But obviously Mom had left on that plane, a long time before it landed in London, the same way I had left the place where Mom was not sick the very second that she fainted in our kitchen.
The last part of Mom’s plane trip was a long moment when the plane was gliding over the runway in London, just barely off the ground. The sun was up, and the world was normal-size again, but the wheels had not yet touched the earth. She suddenly knew everything would be all right. And that, she said, was a beautiful feeling.