*
I see her in the bathroom, and it embarrasses me, not because of the tears, which I see every day, but that she is sitting on the toilet, having forgotten to have shut the door. She sees me looking, but doesn’t bother to close it, just bows even further, hiding her entire face in her arms, her arms folded on her lap, as though preparing for the crash. I run.
*
She tells me a story of her father, memory sparked by seeing the neighbor kissing his son on the cheek. Before he died, they didn’t talk much, and apparently he was never overly affectionate, rarely displaying emotion, other than the occasional outburst of fury. After he died, she and her sister spent days going through old belongings, finding a thick envelope, a mystery even to their mother. Inside were photos and ticket stubs to old games, and something that only she recognized, like a last message.
It causes me to go through my own belongings at home. You sift through boxes of childhood memories, hoping for that note fallen between the cracks. The one in his initials, handwriting. The clues that to the casual observer seem mere trivia, static. But that scream to you. I visit every nook. What do you do when it’s just not there?
*
On this day I run to the grove of Crape Myrtles across the street and by the tracks, a good distance for a 6-year-old to cover. Flattened pennies line the pallet which forms the base of a never built fort. It’s such a small place, and years later my aunt would say no grove of trees ever existed in that area I now describe, no flowery trees by the abandoned rail line, no train ever whistled, no Blue Norther dropped the November sky by 40 degrees. It’s a myth, she says.
The wind blows so hard that the peeling bark is stripped from the outer trees. I’ve dug a hole beneath the pallet, and I crawl underneath, thinking it’s a tornado. Lying on my back I can see the skies turn dark through the slats, and I hear the dusty pelting of rain drops on earth and clay heavily cracked by a dry summer. The rain disappears almost as soon as it starts, heaven very quickly over its grief, but then turns cold, as cold and silent as I’ve ever known it here, and the clouds disappear. The sky that appears has never been this blue.
*
Back at the house, she rolls tortillas out of flour, laying them directly on a soft, open flame on the gas range, turning them and tucking them in a plastic bowl, covered by an ordinary dish towel. I ask if she was thinking about my grandfather, still chilly from the Blue Norther and brief rain. She doesn’t answer, but nods quietly, and I have a sense she’s not saying everything.
On some days, I later learn, she grieves both her husband and the son she lost. I learn this as children do, by overhearing when I’m not supposed to, hiding underneath the table. My mom works as a nurse in a cancer ward, and brings home a story about a dying child who asks his mother if she’ll forget him. And my grandmother runs from the room and shuts the door this time, hiding in the grove she’s dug out of this home for herself, emerging later, cold and blue.
*
I don’t realize driving people away is unusual until much later. In looking between the crevices, searching for photos and ticket stubs, I find instead that what I have had all these years is a tiny vial of poison. I release it into the air around me, which only hurts those nearby.
“No, I wasn’t lonely at all. I was…what’s the opposite of lonely?”
“Lonely doesn’t have an opposite.”
“You know what I mean. The antonym?”
“It doesn’t have one.”
*
As the snow starts to build in the fall and winter, the air above freezes in the mountains. It tumbles, like an avalanche building speed and force. In the valley it pushes ahead, channeled through ravines and depressions, stirring the groves and wildlife. It is outside at the moment, rattling the ceramic ornaments and wooden chimes that decorate our porch. A Katabatic wind, like a thousand deadbeat dads, here like a rush, leaving us to clean up. I can’t help that I’m searching again, through the last of the boxes.
I smile before realizing that what I’ve found is, at least indirectly, from him. She bought this as a gift, a porcelain box, shaped like a swan. But he had left before the giving hour. And she gave it to me. I imagine photos and notes, and the pocket-watch all boys dream about, within. I lift the lid, but it’s empty. Sadly, the winds in the northwest don’t give way to sapphire but to alabaster. I can’t use these skies as a legend to the memories of home.
*