A Ticket to Ride Read Free Page A

wishing for Suzette’s mythical return inevitably brought with it the darker thinking of why she had left in the first place. What was so terrible about being a mother? About being my mother? Did I cry too much as a baby, want too much? Maybe I kept Suzette awake at night. But these were things all babies did. Whatever made my mother leave must have been specific to me, then, to some unbearable thing about myself. Letting my mother fully into my thoughts, my dream life, was like hand-feeding the elephant that would come to crush the breath out of me, and yet I couldn’t stop myself, either, any more than I could stop myself from watching the evening news that invariably gave me nightmares.
    The years passed with no Suzette, no sign of things changing, and eventually Berna stopped mentioning her name, stopped talking about her altogether. I began to feel relieved. If she really was gone for good, then maybe the worst thing that could happen to me had already happened. And I had survived it—was surviving it even then.
    Then Berna got sick.
    It was just a few weeks before my fifteenth birthday when I heard the noise, a single loud whump , as I was brushing my teeth for bed. It sounded like a cement bag coming off a truck bed, which was unlikely in the living room on a Sunday night in the middle of Columbo. So I stood at the top of the stairs, toothbrush in hand, my mouth full of too-sweet peppermint foam, and waited to hear Berna set the house right by swearing lightly at Nelson or the dog or whatever chair or ottoman or screen door had caused the commotion. But she didn’t call, and neither did Nelson. The house was eerily mute. And I’ll confess that what I most wanted at that moment was to ignore the noise and the silence and the dropped-cement-bag feeling in my stomach and disappear down the hall to my room. But I knew things had to go another way, knew it the way we always know when something bad has happened, and that we have to walk toward that bad thing as toward a half-open door in a dream.
    Moving downstairs in my cotton nightgown, I thought I might gag, the unswallowable toothpaste like egg cream at the base of my throat. In the living room, Berna and Nelson’s chairs were empty and a low light was on near the television where Peter Falk scratched his head in the “one more thing” scene. For twenty or thirty seconds, I let myself believe I was wrongabout the wrongness. Maybe all was fine and the same. Maybe I would turn the corner to find Berna and Nelson holding splayed fans of playing cards, the blandness of their faces releasing me to bed where I could listen to KERA on my transistor radio, pressing it to my ear like a seashell.
    But in the kitchen, Berna lay slumped in the middle of the braided rag rug by the sink. Her head was on the hardwood floor, neck tilted back slightly, as if she needed to see something over her shoulder. Nelson was looking into Berna’s face and his gaze seemed numb, arctic.
    “Nelson. Nelson! ” I had to shout to startle him and even then he stayed crouched on the floor beside Berna. His silhouette, with shoulders stooped and shuddering, looked oddly childlike.
    I called the police and fetched a thick stack of cotton dish towels to prop Berna’s head, and sat next to her, rubbing her papery hand. Berna was unconscious, her eyes rolled deeply back. Was she dying? Was this what death looked like? I tried to stay focused on what was available, the snarls of string fringe on the striped dish towels, light swinging in a cone over the Formica table, the linoleum square that bore a crosshatched scar, like the number symbol on a typewriter. As a little girl, I had a habit of picking at the scar with my fingernails. Berna would swat my hands and redirect me, but before long I’d find my way back— pick pick pick —finding something pleasurable in the slight snapping back of the linoleum, its rubbery give. If I crawled over to it right then, I wondered, could I be five years old