Marian Palaia - Given World

At the bus station, he was in that old carriage of Mick’s and yours your father had dug out of the attic. Cleaned it up and rolled it into your bedroom one morning while you were still asleep. I don’t know where he found that ribbon, or that bow (!). I really don’t know what he was thinking at all. The baby was still in the hospital, and you were spending most of your time in bed, or lying out in the wheat fields, still as death, staring up at the sky. Maybe he thought you’d stay, be a mom, get married to that boy. Or some local boy if we could find one that would have you. I knew better. You were never going to be that much like me.

Did you ever do the math, Riley? I’m sure you have. It’s not so hard to calculate. At twenty-five, you will be the same age I was when you were born. Your brother was (is? what a tempting word “is” is) eight years older than you. So what were the odds? I know a lot of girls have babies at seventeen and eighteen, some even on purpose, but (this is so hard to say) that was not meant to be my life. Did you know I got all A’ s in high school? Heck, I got an A in calculus. I probably never said, because it didn’t really matter anymore, but I was going to go to college, among other things. I wanted to be an astronomer. Remember looking at the constellations? You can still see them here. I wonder if there are any stars at all where you are, in that big city. All that ambient light.

I don’t know how you feel about it now, but I’m glad you didn’t stay. I’m glad you didn’t stop your life here. Is that a terrible thing? Maybe you wish now you still had him, that somehow he could hold you steady, that you hadn’t let him go. I don’t know. We’ve never had those conversations, and I don’t know how to start, or if I should, or how it would end. I’m afraid it would be with me losing another piece of you. And lost as you already are these days, or as I think you must be, you still probably understand, maybe better than most, that kids don’t necessarily hold you steady. Even if they do, somehow, hold you in place.

I wonder where you keep him. Is there some secret place inside you, like the one where I keep Mick? A mother’s place, even if “mother” is a word you can’t quite make apply. I imagine you rolling your eyes. And biting your lip. Like you do. Did.

The thing is I never really got used to the idea of being a mother. With you, maybe, more than with Mick, but then it was almost like you were his and not mine, and it was for such a short time before, like I said, we both went missing. With Mick it was just like having a little brother. I was so young, and I’d always wanted a brother. I used to bother my mom about it endlessly, but she always said if I wanted one, I’d have to go out and get my own. A strange thing to tell your kid, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean it that way. I think if I’ve realized anything in this life, it’s that no one teaches you how to be a parent. You just do it, and it works out like it works out. She was just trying, like every other mom in the world, to do what she thought was best, or what would get her and her family through another day without blowing a gasket.

But what I was saying, what I keep trying to say, is I don’t think I ever felt like a MOTHER, like an “M is for the many things you—” Ha. I don’t even know how it goes. But isn’t that what nine months (or seven) of carrying them around is all about? Making sure you get that? I don’t know. It’s all so very blurry. Our options then were the same as yours. Foster home. Adoption. Keep him and get married, to someone, somehow, or stay single and let the whole town talk. Or leave town, but go where? I didn’t even know a place I wanted to go. Florida sounded nice. I liked the idea of the ocean. (We have that in common, you and me. But you went and found it.) And the coat hanger option. Actual coat hangers. I knew a girl in Chinook — her team used to play basketball against ours — who tried that and died at sixteen, or maybe she was seventeen by then (it doesn’t really matter, does it? Or maybe it does to someone, like her mother). In some back room, alone except for that limp rag of a little one sliding out of her on a river of blood. So they said. So I remember. There were other stories too. More than you might think, although you surely heard some too. And the memory of them still, after all this time, makes me want to tear my own head off. I didn’t want that to be me, even more than I didn’t want to marry a man I barely knew. My dad said he was a good one, though, who would take care of us. A widower. A neighbor. His wife died in the car overnight one winter, coming back from town in a blizzard. Slid off the road and ran out of gas. She was still warm when they found her. He told me that on our wedding night, and he cried. I had always thought men never cried. I thought they couldn’t. I slept on a cot in the nursery for months, but gradually we became a team, learned how to love each other in a kind of precarious way. Dad was right. Your father is pure good. I never was in love with him, but now I know that’s not always for keeps either, and what we have has survived a lot. And I do love him. And I had to realize early I wasn’t what he wanted either. Buck up and get on with my life. Mick made that possible. And necessary.

I believe you knew. I have to think Mick would have told you. Or maybe you figured it out for yourself. There was nothing about the two of them that was the same. Nothing. But it worked. It was beautiful. I love them both for that. It could have gone so wrong. It could have been so much harder than it was. I was pretty lucky, after all, in my little unluckiness.

Mick’s real father? He was nobody, really, by which I don’t mean he wasn’t somebody in his own right (we all are at least that, aren’t we?). But besides that, he was just a boy who worked on a neighbor’s ranch one summer. He was from Fargo, and I think he was some kind of Scandinavian, like they are out there. He had the bluest eyes and the softest blond hair. He looked like James Dean. Of course I had to dig that out of my memory later on. Mick was sleeping in the backseat, and you weren’t even walking yet, and we were at the drive-in to see Giant . I nearly died. But your father was there. Of course I didn’t say anything. It was crazy, with Mick there right behind us and all. Just crazy. I felt like I was sitting on the electric fence, or like all my nerves were on the outside of my skin. It took me days to get over it, over wanting to feel like that again. If he’d showed up at the door, I would have taken him out to the barn. No question. Even now, maybe, though it’s probably impolite of me to say it. I can’t imagine you minding.

I told Mick when he was twelve or thirteen. He asked me because one of the kids at school — the son of one of my high school friends — called him a bastard. I was so angry, and I wanted to lie, but I didn’t. Mick was so smart you couldn’t lie to him (and I’ve always been a lousy liar anyway), and he wasn’t really even upset. He just wanted to know.

What is it I’m even trying to explain to you? I hate to think I’m making excuses for not being altogether present all the time, for not always (ever?) being entirely there even before Mick went off and disappeared. The thing was, I knew. And sometimes I could drag myself back, from wishing to be somewhere else, someone else. I remember I used to practice, actually in the mirror, how to talk to you the way I imagined I was supposed to. I’d say, “Riley, let me see your homework.” “Mick, does that girl’s mother know she’s riding on that motorcycle with you?” Sometimes I’d make myself laugh. Other times it would just open a hole in me. Because I didn’t know how . I was making it up. And even though now I recognize that’s what all parents do, when you’re in it, and everything you see or hear says you’re supposed to know, it just makes you feel wrong. Add to that how young I was, and how much I really did want to be, or at least be able to go, somewhere else, wanted Mick to really be my little brother, and for you to be his so I could escape, go off and be what I was meant to be. Glamorous and smart and educated and alone. Like Jackie Kennedy. If only for a little while. Then I could come back, knowing something different and exotic, and settle down. Be satisfied.