“I’m scared,” her message said. She’d been to see an oncologist. She had cancer and would be needing surgery. She wanted me to accompany her to her doctor’s appointments.
That simple declarative sentence, “I’m scared,” gave me a small chill at the nape of my neck. I’m not the kind of person who easily turns away from somebody in pain, from somebody who’s afraid. But I didn’t feel anything when I listened to her message, other than the chill, and I didn’t call her back.
My mother and I hadn’t seen each other since June 2019, and we hadn’t spoken since October 2020. At first, there was nothing intentional about our falling out of touch, but over time, I realized I preferred it that way, and her increasingly infrequent attempts to contact me went unanswered.
Under these circumstances, though, I didn’t think I had a choice. Still, I put off calling her. There’s a difference between having no feelings about something and not being able to feel, and I worried that if I spoke to her again, she would manage to find, with the expertise of a surgeon wielding an exquisitely sharp scalpel, the one nerve only she could expose.
I had been in graduate school the last time I had given her the chance.
It was the end of my last year at the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University. I was in my late thirties, Avary was four, and my class was preparing for our fourth-year skits, which always started with a slideshow. If we wanted to be included, we had to submit pictures of ourselves as a baby or a kid in elementary or middle school, plus one of our own children and spouses, if we had them.
I didn’t have any old pictures of myself, so I asked my mother if she could find some for me. I was very specific: no professional or studio portraits; no dresses or skirts; nobody else in the picture with me; and, if possible, I wanted to be doing something I liked, like playing sports or driving a boat.
My mother agreed to look. When she called to tell me she’d found a few photographs that might work, she offered to meet on campus and hand-deliver them.
It was one of those stunning late spring days in New York, and I waited outside the building for her. When she pulled up, I walked over to the car and she passed me a manila envelope through the passenger-side window.
I thanked her and waved as she drove away. I sat on one of the benches by the entrance and sorted through what she had brought me.
The first was a studio portrait of me with my brother. I must’ve been fourteen, because my hair was feathered and I wore a cross around my neck. I was wearing a peach turtleneck and a rust-colored blazer and looked like an idiot.
The next was another professional photograph that had been taken in Ohio. Fritz and I sat on a split-rail fence, a pasture in the background. Picture after picture showed me posed sitting next to my brother, in a formal setting, in a dress, or otherwise looking completely unlike myself.
There were two smaller pictures at the bottom of the envelope. In the first, I was walking down the street, wearing jeans and a red jacket and carrying a tennis racket. I must have been about eight and I was on my way to the basketball courts a few blocks from the Highlander, just off 164th Street. I was pretty far away from whoever was taking the picture, and my hair, long and windblown, was covering most of my face.
When I turned over the second, I froze. In it, I was sitting at the round table near the kitchen still wearing my school uniform. It looked like I was doing my homework. I was holding a pen. My left elbow was on the table and my head rested in my hand. I seemed tired and my hair was uncombed. I looked, unsmiling, at the camera. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would take the picture, let alone keep it. I couldn’t imagine what my mother was thinking when she put it in the manila envelope.
A semester earlier, I had taught a course on trauma and discussed with my students the case of Hedda Nussbaum, who had been brutally and repeatedly beaten by Joel Steinberg over the course of several years. Steinberg had murdered their adopted daughter, Lisa, whom he had also horribly abused. In the course of my research, I came across the last picture that had ever been taken of Lisa as she sat in her first-grade classroom on Halloween. She’s unkempt, her hair in knots, and she looks beyond hope. In the first split second I saw that photograph, I thought it was me, even though she and my six-year-old self looked very little alike.
I felt like somebody had punched me in the solar plexus. My eyes stung with tears, and I thought, She literally can’t help but hurt me.
I’d never let her hurt me again.