A Ticket to Ride Read Free

was ten, a doctor we’d driven all the way to Los Angeles to see said I didn’t have asthma at all, that the spells were psychosomatic. Although this was unfathomable to me—the heaviness, the pressure, the breathlessness all felt so real, so absolutely convincing—I began to think Berna had always suspected it.
    “It’s perfectly natural,” she tried to reassure me on the way home from the doctor’s office. “You’ve been through a lot.”
    What she was referring to indirectly—the only way we everreally talked about it—was my mother’s running off when I was a baby. I didn’t have a father that anyone knew or would tell me about. I only had my grandparents and my uncle Raymond, who’d come around once a year or so, bringing wan-looking and misshapen stuffed animals he’d purchased at truck stops. Apparently, I now also had my not-quite-right-in-the-head head. Psychosomatic or not, I still had the spells and had no intention of letting my inhaler go. Thinking about losing it, in fact, was a sure way to bring a spell on.
    Nelson, a pragmatist who believed you were only as sick as you let yourself be, said, “You just need to lighten up a little, Jamie.”
    But how could I be light when the world was heavy? You only had to watch the news for two minutes to know that bad things happened to good people every ticking second of the day. Floods and famines and pestilence—and then the everyday disasters: people hurting other people, lying, cheating, turning on a dime and walking fast the other way. I myself was proof of this. I hadn’t seen my mother since I was a baby and had no memories of her at all. What I knew of her—Suzette—I knew from Berna and from photographs. She had dark brown hair, much smoother and finer than my sandy blond disaster, and dark eyes sitting wide in a heart-shaped face. She was more petite than I was, with small square shoulders and delicately shaped hands—but all of this information was flat and factual. I couldn’t say what my mother’s hair smelled like wet or how she walked or what her voice did when she was angry or sad.
    According to Berna, Suzette had come back to the farm with Raymond, unannounced and uninvited, for my fourth birthday. They had brought a copy of Chitty Chitty, Bang Bang and a stuffed turtle that was electrically purple, with a green-feathered hat and startled-looking oval plastic eyes. I remembered receiving these gifts and even the attendant flush of happiness, butmy mother remained unavailable to me, a dodgy blank space, a bobbing, swerving lack that made my eyes throb when I tried to think it into some kind of clarity.
    When your mother comes back was a phrase that popped up occasionally in my early years with Berna and Nelson. Sometimes it was a warning, as in, “When your mother comes back, she’s not going to like that haircut you gave yourself.” Sometimes a weak promise: “When your mother comes back, she’ll buy it for you.” The “it” was usually something extraordinary, like the baby carriage with real rubber wheels and a folding pink bonnet that opened and closed like a paper fan. Or the white goat I had seen at a county fair. It had long white eyelashes and could do a cartwheel. Cupcake was its name, and my heart fell as I watched it balance on one side of a wooden teeter-totter, because I knew the goat would never be mine.
    I didn’t think Suzette was ever coming back, and I didn’t believe Berna thought so either. It was something she said because she thought it made me feel better, I suppose. But mostly it made me feel worse. Against my own good sense, I’d find myself spinning a fantasy that my mother was someplace fabulous—Key West, New York, Alaska—and dreaming hard about me, the kind of dreaming that made magic things happen in stories: blue roses and mermaid-laced sea foam and straw turning into gold. But even before the princess tinge of these fantasies had faded, I would feel sick and sorry. Thinking about or even