Page 42 of Upstate

I’ve always resented that March snowstorm for concealing my mother’s body. Now I picture that snowfall as a blanket, comforting my mother as she slept. It’s exactly the kind of imaginative leap I was incapable of making while trying to write about her death.

The proposal I wrote for Mom’s Missing was told from the perspective of a bereaved child. Although my editor liked it well enough to offer me a contract, he urged me to raise the stakes by including re-created scenes from the mother’s point of view. I objected that I didn’t know enough to write about what she experienced. Do the research, he said. Dutifully, I sent away to the police department in Kenosha for a copy of the death investigation report. The manila envelope that arrived at our Manhattan apartment remained unopened until my deadline became impossible to meet. I have it still, that envelope, in one of the boxes I brought with me from the city. I wasn’t able to open it then. I don’t have the will to open it now. Instead, I wonder if fiction might take me where facts refused to go.

I make a cup of chamomile tea, go up to bed, and begin writing in my journal. For the first time in my life, I allow myself to put into words the childhood fantasy I once indulged in. I describe a cross-country skier shushing through icy dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan. Snow is falling fast, white flakes dotting the body curled up on the ground just off the trail. In my story, Mom’s winter coat is bright red instead of stone gray. The splash of color catches the eye of the skier, who spots my mother before she’s hidden beneath the drifts. The skier sits her up and checks her pulse, then shushes off on strong legs to call for help. Gloria Beacon is brought to the hospital in time to pump her stomach clean. Dad and I are by her side when she wakes the next morning—still sad, yes, it’s not a fairy tale, but with the chance, now, to rewrite her ending.

That’s as far as I get, but it’s the biggest breakthrough I’ve had since I first proposed writing my mom’s story. Emotionally spent, I set the journal on my nightstand, sip some tea, and switch off the light. Sleep comes fast and deep.

Why am I dreaming of crying babies? My eyes blink open. It’s dawn, sunrise pinkening my papered walls. Crying babies must be significant, I think, remembering Sandra’s suggestion to record my dreams. I reach for pen and paper, the babies’ plaintive bleats still echoing in my ears.

Except it isn’t in my ears. The sound is coming from outside. I stumble over to the open window. Looking out, I’m confounded by what I see. There’s a trailer hitched to nothing in my driveway, its slatted sides and raised gate squeezing together six frenzied sheep.

Chapter 21

April 3, 2015

Schuywich, New York

My darling Evelyn,

This morning, while I was helping you get dressed after your shower, you looked at your bare feet and said, “Billy tiled the bathroom floor, didn’t he?”

“Yes, and he did a good job, too.” I held out your slacks. You put a hand on my shoulder and stepped into them.

“Why doesn’t Billy visit me anymore?”

“We haven’t seen him in a long time.” I buttoned up your shirt and tugged the collar into place. There are mornings I’m tempted to leave you in your pajamas, but you always have a better day if you start out with a hot shower.

“Is he still in Vietnam?” You took the comb and swooped back your thinning hair.

“I suppose so.” It’s 2015 now, not 1968, but it upsets you to be corrected when your memories of the past leak into the present.

“Billy’s doing good work over there, isn’t he?”

“He is, yes, thanks to you. You were the one who encouraged him to join the International Voluntary Services.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“Mother and Daddy were terrified of him going to a war zone, but you understood how badly he wanted to do something positive, and peaceful, for the country.” I tucked an errant lock behind your ear. “You look very handsome today, baby.”

You placed your hand on my cheek and said, “You get more beautiful every day, Hazel.”

I looked into your eyes, so loving and warm, and tried to smile. The moments when you see me, really see me, come and go lately like the sun on a cloudy day. Whenever a bright ray shoots through the mist, I’m caught between gratitude for its light and sorrow for its fleeting.

“Why are you crying? Did I say something wrong?”

“You said the exact right thing, Evelyn.” I forced my smile wider. “Some dust got in my eye is all.”

We’d all been grateful when Billy was recruited to Cornell on a track and field scholarship. It was 1963, years before the dreaded lottery, but thousands of American troops were already fighting in Vietnam. As long as he was in college, troop escalations and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and Operation Rolling Thunder were all things for other people to worry about. We knew Billy was taking extra credits as well as summer classes, but it surprised us when he graduated a whole year early. Mother and Daddy and I drove to Ithaca in May 1966, to see Billy get his diploma. You wanted to come, but tickets were only given to family members, so you stayed home with the sheep.

Each of us had an idea about Billy’s future. Mother expected him to come home for a while. Daddy thought Billy might take an executive position at the bottling plant. I brought an application to graduate school for him to fill out. Billy’s diploma was mere minutes old when he told us he’d already joined the International Voluntary Services and would be leaving right away to start his training in the Philippines before being posted to Saigon. Mother was frightened. Daddy was furious. I was shocked. You, it turned out, already knew.

Billy may have been a noncombatant, but for the next two years, we were all anxious about his safety. Daddy became so obsessed with the nightly reports from Vietnam that he bought one of the first color television sets in Schuywich, even though it made him sweat and shake to watch Vietcong soldiers run through green jungles. Mother got so nervous she had to lie down in a dark room with a wet rag on her head whenever the news came on.

You were the only one of us who never wasted time worrying. Instead of wringing your hands, you wrote words, posting a letter every week like clockwork. The scores of letters Billy sent you in return—first from the Philippines, then from Vietnam—have been in a shoebox on a shelf in your study, tied shut with twine, for almost fifty years. I don’t have the heart to open it. You’ve forgotten it exists.

The war wasn’t all we thought about during the time Billy was away. While my brother was organizing orphanages outside of Saigon, we were busy starting up the bookshop. You hired Joey Sprague to help clear out the barn, set up shelves, and haul boxes of books. At sixteen, he was a burly boy who parroted his father’s political views. How the two of you argued! He used to get such a rise out of you by chanting Richard Nixon’s campaign slogan, do you remember? We were crushed when Humphrey lost the election, but the next time Joey showed up for work, you shook his hand to symbolize the peaceful transition of power.

After years of resenting the rapport between you and my brother, my turn to feel special came when Billy met Mai. Instead of his usual blue airmail letter to you, a fat envelope arrived for me stickered with stamps of flowers and temples and flying birds. I tore it open and out spilled photographs of Billy holding the hand of a beautiful woman with thoughtful eyes and the sweetest smile. There was a letter, too, in which Billy wrote glowingly about the idealistic social worker he’d met while working with the Committee of Responsibility to send a war-injured child to the United States for treatment. They spoke to each other in Vietnamese, he wrote, since Mai was still learning English, but she was fluent in French, having been educated in the language. As soon as I read that, I dusted off my college Dictionnaire Anglais-Français to help me find the perfect words of welcome for my new chère amie.