The Glass Ocean(106)
My mother says, Leo, I’m bored.
She is still here, now, by the fire.
Leo, I’m bored. Leo, it’s staring at me. Can’t you make it stop?
He says, Carlotta.
I go to my father, stand behind him, watch him draw. I stand so close I can see the fine, curling hairs at the back of his neck, the red whorl of his ear, his cheek brightened with the heat of the fire.
• • •
My mother has packed her trunk. I have seen it, seen the folded clothes, the money in the purse, the open passage to London on the steam packet Emerald Isle.
I could tell my father this, but I don’t.
What a secretive creature I have become! I stand by my father and watch the drawing appear, Eolis landsburgii, the delicate tentacles, the feathery fronds along the double line of the back, the fine details that my father will later fill in with color: delicate amethyst shading to red, transparent violet shading to white, light yellow, orange . . . intimations of a life barely seen, lived in the margins, in the tide pools, in cracks and crevices and sandy bottoms, under rocks green with algae fine as mermaid’s hair, hidden places. I have a kinship with this and with all creatures who hide.
I will not tell him.
Later, I’ll wonder why I didn’t do it when I could have. Didn’t intervene. Didn’t try to stop her from leaving, when I could feel, already, the exquisite pain of her anticipated departure like a sharp stone wedged behind my sternum. When already I knew that once she left, the tether binding me to her would stretch and stretch, would fray unbearably, but would never break, leaving me bound, always, to a loss, to her loss, to the loss of her.
• • •
I see my mother as already on board the Emerald Isle, in her blue shawl and her muff, with her golden hair bound up for travel, her breath white on the cold ocean air. Her trunk is already stowed in the hold. The gangway has been withdrawn, she is there, on the deck, among a crowd of others, all waving their good-byes as the Emerald Isle slips its tether and backs slowly away from the wharf. Only my mother is not waving as the Emerald Isle backs away, as it maneuvers, slowly, through a harbor crowded with fishing boats and steamers, whalers and merchant ships heavy with paper and coal. She has already turned away from us, she has turned her back on her point of departure and faces only the future, a future that lies somewhere on a map barely glimpsed from over her shoulder, a map, divided up, like fruit, into wedges of longitude and latitude for her to devour selfishly, alone. It is her intention to devour those distances, those strange places that remain beyond the reach even of my imagination. My mother is already gone.
Maybe it is the strange doubledness of her, the sense that she is simultaneously here, by the fire, and there, on board the Emerald Isle, that prevents me from speaking.
She has become an uncanny thing. A thing of two faces, and none.
And me? How many faces have I got?
• • •
My mother. Saying, Leo, I’m bored. Leo, can’t you make it stop staring at me?
While outside the window there is wind, hail. Hip, somewhere. Inside, the fire. The smell of Harry Owen’s cigar. The scratch of my father’s pencil.
But these things are temporary, illusory, a scrim through which may be discerned the shadow of her other life, the place where she really lives, the place she’d really rather be.
She doesn’t live here with us anymore. Even I know that.
She is a ghost.
She inhabits insubstantiality, makes ghosts of us all. My father is not real, the warmth of his body where I press against his back is an illusion, the curling hairs at the back of his neck are an illusion, the pencil he sketches with, the paper he sketches on, none of this is real; nor is Harry Owen, tapping his cigar and saying, enigmatically, Onychia platyptera, strange words that my father recognizes, nodding—not real.