Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

“I was never indifferent. That was just how you chose to see it.”

“I know, although it’s a bit too late for that now, isn’t it? I only understood this part about you later. You run and hide when anything dangerous comes too close. You seek comfort wherever and however you can, regardless of the consequences. I didn’t even mind that much that we fought after you grabbed me. At least now every once in a while I could tell what you were really feeling. I think maybe it was because you knew I never slept with Andrew or anyone else again. We were unhappy, but at least we weren’t strangers, and of course, I still loved you and was convinced that we could make this relationship work.”

Angela put the music box down and took me by the hand and led me outside. I didn’t have to tell her that I was having trouble breathing. Once we were on the street, she kept close hold of me. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes neither of us said anything, except once, when someone pulled their car over and asked us if we knew where the nearest beach was. We both laughed as we told them no. We had almost reached the motel when Angela picked up the conversation from where we had left off.

“I feel like we’ve come really far in these past couple of weeks. I’ve been happier with us than I have been in a long time, but it’s not real, is it?”

“I don’t know,” I told her, and at that moment, I thought that was the best I could come up with.

“You don’t have to worry. It’s fine, Jonas. Tell me. This isn’t going to last like this, is it?”

“No,” I told her. “It’s not.”

“Okay, then. That’s all I needed to know.”

That night we went to bed early. We were going to take a five a.m. train back to the city so both of us could make it to work on time. The Angela and Jonas we had both grown used to would have gone to sleep quietly after reading side by side, first one light and then the second clicking off ten to fifteen minutes later. Those two would have maybe exchanged a quick kiss in the dark and a wish for a good night’s sleep, and then backs would have been turned and neither one would have felt comfortable closing their eyes first. An hour or more would have passed in the dark like that until eventually one of them fell asleep, and the other resented them for it. The couple who went to bed this night, however, had nothing to read. They lay next to each other and talked at length about purely trivial matters, from the paintings hanging on the wall to the exceptional water pressure in the shower. They kissed affectionately on the lips and even risked a slightly awkward but not perfunctory “I love you.” They left one light on until the woman fell asleep with her head on her husband’s chest, a position she held until early the next morning, even though in her normal life she was a restless sleeper, prone to getting up in the middle of the night and turning constantly throughout.

What happens next between my mother and father is best told in her words. It was the last conversation that we had in the state-subsidized housing complex where she was living, two hours outside of Boston. It was also lacking a decent view, but she claimed that was fine because no one there bothered her. After I finally left Angela, that was where I eventually landed, although at the time I wasn’t exactly sure where I was heading. It had taken us five months to completely pull apart. Much of that time had been spent sleeping on the spare couches of mutual friends, including Bill and Nasreen, who had let me stay with them for six weeks and had treated me almost like a son.

“This is what happens when you don’t have children,” Bill had joked. “You end up taking in any old stray.”

Rather than immediately settle into a new apartment that would have once again involved the long-term company of strangers, I packed one suitcase worth of clothes and rented a car from an airport in New Jersey. At the time I had thought only of driving along the coastline. It seemed important that I see the ocean, and as much of it as possible. It wasn’t until I was an hour or so away from the apartment where I thought my mother was still living that I realized I had been headed there all along and would finally have to accept that. It had been more than three years since I last saw her and so it took the better part of a slightly overcast spring afternoon before I found the building. When I rang what had once been her apartment’s buzzer, a heavily accented voice completely different from my mother’s asked me what I wanted. I told the voice I was looking for Mariam Woldemariam, who I knew of course must no longer live there; my mother was never one for strangers.

“She’s moved,” the voice said, and that was all I would ever get out of it. I spent the next several hours waiting outside the building for a familiar or at least friendly face, one that might have known my mother when she lived there. Eventually a middle-aged black man who had occupied the same floor as her pulled up. As he made his way to the entrance, I approached him slowly from the side so he could clearly see me coming and know that, unless I was armed, I posed no threat to a man his size.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “I wanted to know if you knew where Mariam Woldemariam lives now. I’m her son. I visited her several years back and remember that you lived on the same floor.”

It took him a moment to respond, and I’m sure in that time he must have wondered what kind of son I was to have had to ask a stranger where my mother lived.

“She don’t live here,” he told me.

“I know that.”

“Why don’t you call her?”

“The last phone number I had was for the apartment here.”

“Try her cell phone.”

“I don’t think she has one, or if she does, then I don’t know the number.”

“Maybe, then, she doesn’t want to see you.”

“That was never it,” I said.

He reached into his memory and found a conversation he had once had with my mother about me.

“She didn’t show me a picture,” he said, “but I remember she said she had one son. What did you say your name was?”

“Jonas.”

“That’s right. I remember that. Jonah and the whale.”

“Yes,” I said. “Almost exactly like that.”

The man asked me to wait downstairs while he checked to see if he had an address in his apartment. I wanted to be nostalgic for a time when someone like him, skeptical but generally good-natured, would have invited me to his apartment and offered me a drink while I waited, but I had no such memories like that of my own and had a hard time believing that anyone did. Ten minutes later, from an open second-story window, the man shouted down an address to me.

“It’ll take you at least an hour to get there,” he said. “There’s construction all along the way.” He disappeared into his window frame; I doubt he heard me say I appreciated his help.

Sometimes the world blesses you with small gifts such as traffic precisely when you need it most. I had less than forty miles to travel, but the roads were worse than what the man had said. Four lanes reduced to two going in opposite directions meant that everyone moved at an inelegant but synchronized crawl. I enjoyed it immensely and never once thought about what I wanted to say to my mother when I finally saw her.

When I arrived at her apartment almost two hours later, she seemed hardly surprised to hear my voice on the other end of the intercom. All she said was, “It’s the third floor. Take the stairs because the elevator doesn’t work.” In form and content the building was almost exactly the same as the last — squat, built out of ugly dark-colored bricks, with tiled hallways and bright fluorescent lights that were likely put in place to keep the cockroaches out of sight. I wondered if my mother hadn’t moved here simply just to move because it was in her blood, but now she no longer had the energy to cross even a county line. I never did know all the places she lived in after she left my father. For years we had only stayed in touch through sporadic phone calls and occasional e-mails.