A week passes in a blur of morning mist burned into afternoon sun, dipping to star-filled nights where I sleep tangled with Henry in my tiny twin bed. We sink into a rhythm of morning walks through the forest, the matted earth crackling beneath our feet and sending up boughs of spice and mossy wood.
Sometimes Henry reaches for my hand, sometimes I reach for his, but most of the time I can’t remember who reached first. It’s for comfort or friendship or because often I feel adrift and he’s the one I reach for to settle me.
Under two-hundred-foot-tall redwoods, in sunlight streaming in lacy stretches, we debate the fundamentals of nature, question why gravity is so much weaker than the other forces, and discuss whether chaos or order rules our universe. I point out red-bellied newts along the creek bed, the slow trudge of a banana slug over dried redwood needles, and the flickering tail of a deer as it springs into the shadows. Neither of us mentions love.
Instead, after our walks, Henry makes healthy breakfasts of oatmeal with blueberries and strawberries for my family. He sits with my mom while she rests on the couch, tucked under the same blanket while he reads to her from my favorite Star Trek novels, making her laugh with his ridiculous impressions and alien accents. While my mom naps, he works with my dad in his toolshed/workshop in my dad’s latest attempt to make a tape that is twenty times stronger than duct tape but costs half in production.
All the while, I do what Henry would do when under stress. I clean. I vacuum, I do the dishes, I dust all the bookshelves, and I ask my mom if she’d like me to deep-clean the kitchen. I never appreciated before how meditative cleaning is and how much Henry must’ve used it to have a bit of control in a chaotic world.
His family texted, his mom and sisters asking if my mom was okay. I sent back Henry’s love. Niall texted to ask about law school, and Henry texted back get a surfboard already. His brother John asked if we were all right, and I told him to get back to his honeymoon.
Slowly our lives are weaving together. When Henry and I are close, I feel something like van der Waals. It’s a shifting of electrons, an awareness, an elemental attraction I can’t resist. But it’s stronger than that. When our limbs are tangled together at night, when we’re pressed close, it feels as if we have an unbreakable connection. As if that night years ago, when we came together, our molecules broke apart and then coalesced again with a new property where we only resonate one for the other. It was there before, but I ignored it. Now I can’t ignore it.
At the kitchen table my mom slowly flips through a photo album crammed with photos of me as a kid, and full of abstracts of all my publications. I didn’t know she had those. As I wipe down the cabinets she points out photos of me at swim meets and a picture of me at my college graduation.
“Thank you for doing all this,” she says again, and I wave it off. “I’m not tall enough to dust the tops of the cabinets. It’s a big help.”
“Don’t worry about it. I like cleaning.”
She smiles. “You’re a good fit for Ducky then. She’s allergic to brooms and dusters.”
I am not.
I just have a different relationship to cleaning than Henry. It’s more like casual dating rather than marriage.
I set the dusty rag down and smile. “I don’t mind. She has her own way of organizing. It works.”
“This is why she loves you, I’m sure. You understand her.” My mom runs her hand over a photo of me dressed in my Star Trek science officer uniform.
My mom’s skin has shifted from gray to pink over the past week, and she’s able to sit up longer and move about. She’s dressed in loose cotton pants and a button-up-shirt, and her soft, wispy hair is loose. She looks so hopeful that I almost hate to deny what she said, but—
“I see the denial in your eyes, but you can’t hide things from a mother. I know my daughter and the way she looks at you . . . That’s love.”
She means the way Henry looks at me.
My mom smiles down at the photo album then says absently, “My dad died when he was fifty-one. A heart attack. The same age as me.”
“You aren’t going to die,” I say. My gut churns at the way she’s looking down at the photograph. Me at my graduation, her and my dad on either side of me.
“I think I hurt Ducky more than I realized. Moms do that.”
I shake my head, but she doesn’t look up.
“I think I frightened her. I realized that the other night. Do you mind me telling you this? I’m feeling a little . . . wobbly,” my mom says, looking up at me with pale cheeks and searching eyes.
“I don’t mind,” I say, then I walk to the Tupperware cupboard, reach into the back, and pull out the chocolate tin. When my mom lifts her eyebrows, I shrug and say, “I found it while cleaning.”
She gives a short laugh then pats my hand as I pull out a chair and sit down next to her at the old wooden table.
“We’ll share,” she says, sorting through the milk chocolate, the chocolate-covered almonds, the white chocolate, and the distinct lack of dark chocolate. The sugary chocolate scent wafts from the tin. My mom sighs. “No dark chocolate. Ducky must’ve raided my stash.”
I hide a smile.
She picks out a handful of chocolate-covered almonds—“good for the heart”—and pushes the tin toward me.
I don’t know what Henry usually eats, but I reach for the white chocolate (gross), which I guess is what he likes. When I taste it, I smile. I was right. I hate white chocolate (what’s the point of it? It’s like the appendix—totally useless), but here and now, the creamy flavor is delicious.
My mom nibbles at her almonds then says, “I’ve been thinking the past week about my life.”
As you do when you almost die.
“Understandable.”
“I’ve spent almost thirty years being a wife and a mom. Just a wife. Just a mom. And as I was strapped in that ambulance racing to the hospital, I kept thinking, ‘If I die now, will that be enough? If I die, will I regret my life?’”
My mouth goes dry and it’s impossible to swallow the chocolate. Instead it lodges at the back of my throat, a tight lump.
My mom shakes her head. “Ducky would think that I’d regret it,” she says. “I know my daughter. She’s always been a bit disappointed in me. A bit ashamed. I never quite lived up to her expectations. I remember when she was eleven and she won first prize in the county science fair. All the parents came for the awards ceremony. The other kids, their parents were doctors or professors or engineers. One of them, this mom, a chemist, asked me what I did. I said, ‘I’m a stay-at-home mom.’ ‘Yes,’ the woman said, ‘but what do you do?’ I joked, ‘Well, I bake cookies all day and fold laundry—what else?’ Then I happened to look at Ducky, and she . . . Her cheeks were red and she wouldn’t look at me.” My mom flips through the album, the pages turning quickly, until she stops on a page near the front. She points to a picture of me holding a trophy nearly as big as I am. My dad has his hand on my shoulder and my mom stands a bit off to the side, her hair neat, her eyes worried. “Here it is. She never looked at me the same after that night.”
I stare at the picture. I don’t remember that being the night I stopped wanting to be like my mom. For me it was a more gradual fade rather than a red line slashed through a specific date.
“I’m sorry,” my mom says. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” She closes the album and then pushes away the tin of chocolates.
Outside a pop like a muffler backfiring sounds, then I hear my dad’s shout. I’m not concerned. The noise of small chemical explosions was a common sound during my childhood. I’m sure both my dad and Henry are wearing safety gear.
“Don’t worry,” my mom says, glancing out the window toward the toolshed, “it happens all the time.”
I nod. “You don’t have to be embarrassed,” I tell her. “People say I’m easy to talk to.”
“That must be it,” she says, giving me a grateful smile.
Outside, my dad throws open a window on the workshop and a thin stream of smoke slips out.
“I think,” my mom says, “having a heart attack made all the emotions I’ve been keeping in . . . well, it made them all seep out. Sort of like cracking an egg. It’s a mess.”
“Don’t worry.” I reach into the tin and pull out a handful of chocolate-covered almonds, setting them in front of her.
She smiles in thanks and picks at one, peeling away the soft chocolate shell with her nail. “I suppose all I wanted to say was, I don’t regret my choices. I’d do it all the same. I was born to love Matt, and I was made to be Ducky’s mom. That’s what I meant about loving and having no choice. It’s like my daughter. I’ve always been so proud of her. She knows what she wants. She was born to be a scientist. Just like her dad.”
My mom smiles as another muffler-backfire-popping noise sounds.
“I worry about her though. So I’m glad you’re here. I realized earlier this week that I might have frightened her off commitment. Going on about giving up acting for marriage and motherhood.”
“You don’t regret it?”
“No. Never. But I misspoke the other day. I had a choice. We all have a choice. It felt inevitable, but that’s because I wanted it so much. I was always proud to be Matt’s wife and Ducky’s mom. That made me more proud, more happy, than acting ever could. But everyone has a choice. It’s just, when you’re in love, the choice is easy. You choose love.”
“But you didn’t have to give up your dreams.”
She pats my hand. “You sound like Ducky. I made new dreams.”
I follow the line of my mom’s jaw, the smile that looks so much like mine, and the tired wrinkles at the edges of her eyes. There isn’t anything in her expression that looks like regret or sorrow, just happiness at a life well-lived.
“You have at least forty more years ahead of you,” I tell her, urging her silently to be healthy, to stay alive. “Maybe you can have more dreams in the coming decades.”
She nods. “What I’d like is to see Ducky as happy as I’ve been. She loves her job. But . . . you know . . . when you’re waking up in the hospital, maybe dying, maybe not, your job isn’t there holding your hand. That award you won or that article you published or those colleagues you impressed, they aren’t there holding your hand. If I’m gone, if Matt’s gone, and all Ducky has is her job? Who will hold her? That’s what I worry about. I don’t want her to change or to give up her career or become like me. I just want to know that she’ll have someone to hold her when she needs it. When I’m gone.”
My mom looks at me, tsks at the look on my face, and pats my hand. “Moms think about things like this. I’m sure your mom is the same.”
I nod. Finally manage to swallow the lump in my throat. “She is. She’s just the same.”
“Good.” My mom stands then, her chair scraping on the wood. “I’m glad you and Ducky found each other. When she was little, she always asked if people paired up like electrons and protons, and I told her yes, that she’d find her match someday. I’m glad it’s you.”
I stand then too, and before my mom can leave the room, I wrap her in a quick hug. “Thank you.”
She pats my back in surprise and peers up at me, nearly a foot taller than her. “Well. I’m going to take a nap. You might want to check on Matt and Ducky. There’s been a few too many booms this afternoon.”
I smile and step back. As my mom leaves the kitchen, I say, “Wait. Ducky . . . she . . .”
My mom pauses in the kitchen doorway, her hand resting on the wood molding.
I close my eyes, my throat thick. I need to tell my mom this, even if it’s coming from Henry. “When Ducky told me about you, she said you were the best mom she could have ever hoped for. She’s sorry she doesn’t visit more or call more. She misses you and thinks about you. And even though you are as different as a mother and daughter can be, she said she’s grateful you’re her mom. She loves you. Very much.”
My mom doesn’t turn, she just stands still in the doorway, the afternoon light from the kitchen window falling over her. After a quiet moment with only the hum of the refrigerator and the creaking of the wind over the shingle roof, she lowers her hand from the doorway, nods, and walks away.
Her bedroom door creaks shut. I collapse back into the chair, drop my head into my hands, and then, after a moment, I get up and search the cupboards.
For tea.