Then she started talking to me more. She always talked about you. She was so worried about you. She said she had destroyed her family. She said she was a terrible mother. She looked at herself in family photos, that one on the wall in the dining room from that trip to … wherever … Paris or what have you … and she couldn’t recognize herself. She’d sit there and stare at it for hours trying to find herself in it. Then one day she told me about what had happened in Albania.
We’re still on the ground, for Pete’s sake … are you warm? Are you okay, sweetheart? Do you want the rest of my bran muffin? … So … I remember that day very clearly. The sun was on her hair, on the side of her face. We were sitting at my little kitchen table, which was unusual. Normally we’d sit at the dining room table or in the living room. She was always standing up and pacing, pacing. But this time she sat still at my kitchen table, with the sun on her face … She looked beautiful, she looked lit up from the inside. You know that fire inside, Swiv? It was still there. It was burning. I waited for her to talk. We sat looking at each other … Then she said, Mom, I did a horrible thing … she was so serious … I asked her what she’d done and she said she’d had an affair with somebody from the film … not the director … someone else, I don’t know who … but when she said this … I couldn’t help it, but I laughed! I said, Honey, an affair? That’s not a horrible thing … Swiv, sweetheart, you have to understand, the relationship between your mom and your dad was … And I wanted to laugh so hard … from relief or I don’t know what … but your mom was crying then … and I didn’t laugh any more. She said she had destroyed her family, she had destroyed you. I held her. I held on to her for so long … Well, in my opinion but what do I know … it’s not a big deal. It happens! It’s life! But here’s the thing! Swiv, here’s the thing! I don’t think this was that kind of affair, the kind you have when there’s trouble brewing at home. She loved your dad. It was something else. And enna-way the affair was just a by-product. But she didn’t see that then. She just felt so guilty … she kept saying over and over that she had destroyed everything she loved.
And then she told me this … I’ll summarize but … you know, your mom’s letters home didn’t really tell what was happening in Albania … You know your mom … the letters were funny, she was making light of everything … but I went back over them later, after that day in the kitchen, and I could see what she had been alluding to. She told everything as a funny story in her letters … she knew what details to use to make things funny and what details to leave out so I wouldn’t worry … or maybe she wasn’t even worried, consciously, herself … at that time. But … when I went back and reread the letters I saw she felt ashamed … I saw that she was embarrassed she’d gone to do this movie in the first place … The director had asked her over and over, begged her, to be in the movie, and she kept saying no … at first. Then at some point, she said okay … and she was so embarrassed about that. That she’d let him convince her. That she’d let desperation and vanity and selfishness and grief take over … that’s how she talked the day she told me the story in my kitchen … She said that she shouldn’t have left you and your dad to do this movie … she was acutely ashamed for having gone … so that was part of the reason why she couldn’t accept what was happening … and why she couldn’t change her mind and get out of there, just come home … She was saving face … and she was minimizing it all in her mind … and in her letters … and when she just wasn’t able to keep minimizing it … that’s when she stopped writing.
Hoooooooooooo … hooooooooooo …
I’ll be brief or else I’ll have to use my nitro! … It’s what? It’s in your backpack, I know … keep it nearby! So your mom just talked and talked that day … it was very unusual … She had found a tiny window of light in her brain … a tiny light, a bit of clarity … she’d been looking and looking for that light … she was killing herself to find that light … she was hunting it down … and that day she found it! She just talked and talked. And she told me that she’d been afraid, very afraid, on that film set in Albania. She had thought about leaving, about walking away down the road to Tirana, or somewhere, some town that was still hours away … but she couldn’t walk there … so she thought about maybe hitching a ride from someone to Tirana, to the airport … getting on a plane … But the director had taken her passport when she’d arrived … he’d needed it for some reason … he had picked her up at that rinky-dink airport … they were, oh I don’t know, hours away from anywhere … the crew were living in two old abandoned lighthouses near the coast … really, there was nothing, nuscht … they had to drive for hours from the airport …