“I miss you.”
“I don’t want to talk about how much you miss me anymore,” my husband tells me, and I tuck my cell phone tighter under my chin, hold myself still. Breathe, to settle the vague but constant gnawing that won’t let me sleep. The lamp that came with my mother’s new condo glows beside me on the side table. Outside the venetian blinds, the dark woods are green and gauzy in the lights off nearby roofs.
“Even when you’re here, you miss me,” he says.
I laugh for some reason, breathe too closely into the phone.
“Don’t you always complain?”
My mother is downstairs, shuffling through the kitchen with shiny, new appliances not meant to last long. She grunts as she puts the dishes away in the upper cabinets, and I cup my hand around my mouth. “It’s not easy unpacking my mother.”
“Come home then.”
“I can’t come home.”
“Why not?”
Dishes clatter in the sink, and then there is silence. I imagine my mother looking past the kitchen out the window to the woods, perhaps thinking of her old home, half an hour away, up Shawangunk Mountain.
“Your brother isn’t doing anything. Why don’t we talk about that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You call, but then you don’t want to talk about anything. All right,” he says, a shrug in his voice. From inside our living room, I hear an actress with a valley-girl accent, some TV series my husband and son watch about a rich family stuck in a podunk town. The young actress is dazzling; she has such a delicate, angular face you can’t help staring, trying to get a handle on it. My son calls my husband off the phone, but I can’t bring myself to hang up; in this new bedroom with undecorated walls, my childhood home gone, my thoughts might drift anywhere, to a place I cannot crawl out from.
The truth is, over the last few days, helping my mother unpack—the dishes, the books, the boxes of photos—I have thought, in moments, that if I could blink my eyes and exist in a future without my husband, I would do it. Twenty years would be like ash, and I might go forth, begin again at forty-eight. I would be resolute, guarding against a certain fate — my mother’s loneliness which, even in this new bedroom, seeps in through the clean corners and walls.
“A week is long,” my husband suddenly says. “We want you back. Tell her.” And then my son says it too: Come back, in his robot’s voice.
“Soon,” I tell my son. I brace myself, and then we do hang up. Except for what is stuffed away in the closet, the upstairs room contains nothing of my mother’s old home. The room seems borrowed; the walls are beige, the windows brand new, not like the old storm windows we jacked in and out of frames for forty-five years. Behind me, though, are my mother’s old pillows, soft and full. She always liked a comfortable bed, made each day, even if no one was there to see it.
“Make your bed,” she would tell me when I visited my childhood room. “It will make you feel better.”
And I would steam with rage at being told what to do, at being told I needed improvement.
“You’re always angry,” my mother would say. “Why are you always so angry at me?”
“Who’s angry?” I would say in my father’s tone. And then I would walk somewhere else. Maybe outside to the two birch trees that had always been there, leaning to the side.
In her new kitchen, my mother has finished putting away her dishes, and she shuffles toward her bedroom. Her legs are giving out. It’s the nerves, she says. For fifteen years after my father left, she was under water; she was always home when I called. She ran through her savings, and now she is here. The houses all look the same, but there are neighbors close by, mostly her age, whose gardens are lovely too. She can still drive into town, and nearby, there are deeper woods, with magical clearings, just beyond the gauzy light.
“I always loved the woods as a girl,” my mother said this morning, smoothing her fingers over the worn covers of her old books. “I used to walk for hours alone, especially when it snowed. And I was never afraid.”
“Not even of bears?”
“Just blow a whistle.” She puffed out her cheeks.
There is nothing to be so angry at her about, of course.
Her TV sounds close by, as if Rachel Maddow is talking to me too.
“Come watch with me,” my mother calls up the stairs. “It’s only nine o’clock. And I miss you.”