Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

She didn’t like driving on the highway in the dark, she should have left earlier, but the children hadn’t let her. Her mother was staying at the beach house alone for one night, to deal with the ghost. Cars passed her, men alone at the wheel turning their heads slightly to glance at her; did they expect her to wink at them maybe, in the dark, a quickie in the emergency lane? The intrigues in the ER, the intrigues at the hospital, the shy internist. Her children were sleeping. Michela was twelve years old. A teenager, and so you could count on her being argumentative for at least another seven or eight years. How she’d changed: she moved in a different way, as if dancing on pointe, and she was very pretty. Fewer hysterical scenes, though they were perhaps more dramatic. That strange game they’d been playing on the beach. Not as free after Mattia’s problem. Forced to act more like an adult. And then, her period. Checking her jeans every now and then, afraid the pad might have shifted. But at the beach she’d become a child again, running around with the others.

Hard to go back to that beach; memories populated a place, and Luca always seemed to be missing. Not always, not in all places — their home, for example, had forgotten him; it was as if Luca had never lived there, the children’s clutter covered up the absence of his very orderly things. But the first day, when it was time to leave the beach, she’d had the impression that they all turned toward the sea, that they were about to ask, “Where did Daddy go?” Not just Luca, not just him. “Where did the fathers go?” Two fathers gone within three years. What a shame. She slapped the steering wheel in irritation. She couldn’t stand it anymore, the biting sarcasm that still ran under the surface and occasionally emerged.

“Why did you slap the steering wheel?” Michela asked, awake.

“The lights in my eyes bother me.”

“They bother me, too,” Mattia said, awake.

Both of them awake, she hadn’t noticed. And now she had to entertain them.

Michela said, “I fell asleep, we’re already at San Pietro,” and then she repeated it to Mattia, who didn’t say anything because he couldn’t remember where San Pietro was and how far it was from home. “We slept for more than an hour!” And again, shrilly: “I didn’t realize we were already at San Pietro.”

“How much farther?” Mattia asked, not realizing that he was sealing his fate.

“We’re almost there!” Michela exclaimed. “Don’t you know where San Pietro is?”

When they were younger, she used to sing to them, on car trips without Luca, to make them fall asleep. Sluggish, buckled into their car seats, bothered by car sickness or by the seat belts, the children hardly ever joined in. They stared out the window, and rarely cried. What was wrong with letting them look out the window, with being quiet? She couldn’t help it. She had to know what they were thinking, occupy their minds, put them to sleep. She would sing songs from cartoons or songs they were learning in kindergarten. She never abandoned them.

“Let’s play a game: tell me your three best memories from the past few days.”

Silence.

“Mine are: when we fed the seagull on the pier and the evening we walked to town with Grandma and your aunt, when we put on our shawls.”

She was lying: her favorite memories were the first morning at the beach when the children came running back to her every now and then, and Saturday night when she browsed through the notebooks with Silvia.

“That’s only two,” Mattia said.

“Tell me yours and I’ll tell you my third.”

She lied out of habit: she imagined that the memory of the seagull might be one of Mattia’s favorites (fascinated by their feathers, he’d pull his hair back, flattening it over his head to imitate their sleekness) and that the memory of the walk might be one of Michela’s favorites (proud to walk by herself a few steps ahead with her aunt and seem older). She was used to suggesting. Like she did with patients: “Do you also feel a heavy sensation? Does the pain go away after eating?” And the brief satisfaction of confirmation when they replied: “Yes, it goes away after eating.” Except for the doubt, later, that she may have influenced them, the doubt that they’d said yes to make her happy.

Michela said, “My favorite memories are: first, how cold the water was, because I really didn’t expect it, and second, the walk.”

“That’s only two,” Mattia said.

“And then the scent of pitch pine, which I’d never smelled before.”

“Now you have to tell us yours,” Cecilia said to Mattia, “come on, don’t make us beg.”

“The seagull,” Mattia said.

“That’s only one…”

“The head, wings, and orange legs,” Cecilia spoke for him.

“No fair helping!” Michela said.

No fair helping, no fair suggesting, no fair knowing other peoples’ memories, reading minds. Now tell me your three favorite memories from when there were four of us, the questions she would never ask, and now tell me your most awful memories, tell me all of them .

* * *

She might wake up at two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock. But the worst was waking up at five, no hope of losing consciousness again, too late for a pill, too late for a whole chocolate-coconut bar, or two fruit yogurts, or a package of vanilla wafers. “So much the worse for you.” To wake up, in the early morning hours, the bed full of scratchy thoughts like cookie crumbs. The dreaded morning hours. From the other side of the house she heard the second bathroom door slap lightly against the jamb every two or three minutes. A faint draft, she had to remember to close the door before going to bed. She didn’t feel like getting up right now. The house seemed to be breathing softly.

At the beginning of their separation, three years earlier, she would wake up furious in those dreaded morning hours. Before waking up she’d already be dreaming about being angry with him, and as soon as she opened her eyes she wanted to clobber him. She’d sit cross-legged on the bed and look at him. She had a rolling pin, which wasn’t a club and wasn’t a mallet and wasn’t just a piece of wood. It was a rolling pin, and with that utensil used for rolling out dough, inherited from her grandmother, which her children sometimes used to flatten clay, she wanted to bash him not in the groin, but on the mouth. Whack him on the mouth for what he said when he was awake, but most of all because often, in his sleep, he’d be smiling. Punish him as if he’d done it on purpose, she who couldn’t even yell at the children without feeling guilty.

She was pregnant and she was furious. It wasn’t planned and it wasn’t welcome and she couldn’t afford to be and she had no desire to be and she had two children she loved dearly, they were enough for her, and she had made it through the hardest part. Mattia was in first grade and she had no intention of starting over again with another one. Mattia was a problem child in any case and she wanted to devote herself to him without any distractions, she didn’t want to give him a new reason to be jealous and cause problems for him. She’d had the girl when she was twenty-three, even before she got her medical degree, but she’d stayed on track and had soon begun her internship. At twenty-six she was pregnant again, but she hadn’t taken more than a two-month leave and had continued on without missing a year. She’d completed her residency with a daughter who was already in school and a three-year-old son who didn’t talk much but made you love him. At thirty-two she was working in the ER, it was what she wanted to do and she was doing it. She needed stability, not another child.

After living through nine years like the past nine years. Having gone through her father’s illness and death — she’d been the one who diagnosed his tumor. Her father had died two months earlier. Did she really need an unwanted pregnancy to balance the loss? It was what life had handed her, the doctor responsible for her father ’s diagnosis. Forced to stop and think about what she wanted from life, forced to realize that there was something wrong and sense that it was something quite serious and being tremendously afraid to face it. So instead you become furious.