“My name is Charlene,” she told all of us flatly. “Don’t call me Charlie anymore.”
Roxy nodded off by the pool one afternoon, and her lips and fingertips turned blue. No one could rouse her. Our father called 911 and rode away with her in the ambulance. Left behind in the death house, we crumpled onto our beds and keened for our mother. She alone could protect us from these abominations. We now understood that she had done it all our lives.
* * *
And then, in the span of a year, we grew up—or maybe we’d grown up already and perceived it only then, without our mother to care for us. We turned sixteen and seventeen the year she was in Brazil, and found that we were capable in combination—more so than our grief-riven father and our broken sisters. We had each other, and in each other we had our mother. We felt her calm logic guiding us as we swept Charlene’s lustrous hair into a bag and sent it to a wig maker for cancer patients. We drove Roxy to recovery meetings after school. Over our father’s objections, we hired a vaunted family therapist to come to the house. Dr. Kray turned out to be a giggly, profane man with wings of Bozo-the-clown hair and a collection of sock puppets he wanted us to use to talk to one another. The debacle of our one session with Dr. Kray provoked the first genuine laugh we’d heard from our father since Rolph’s death. He laughed until tears ran down his face. And with that laugh, a scrabble of new life began to assert itself.
* * *
Our mother’s first and only real letter arrived seven months after her departure, on a thin membrane of airmail stationery. She’d written it over weeks, perhaps months, in tiny script in black ballpoint pen that had withstood water stains and all manner of organic smearing. She relayed no direct information; rather, each sentence contained an impression or a thought:
The forest is like a sentient creature drawing breath around me.
The moon’s brightness has a sound. It rings in the sky.
I’ve had a fever, which has been hard, but it has left my mind clearer than before.
There’s another way of seeing the world, like looking through the bottom of a glass.
We read the letter beside our father’s swimming pool. Sunlight was key to deciphering our mother’s cramped script, which also must have been written in sunlight. We alternated reading passages aloud, and when we finished, we both sat quietly, listening to the waterfall trickling over the Portuguese tiles. Then we looked at each other and said, She found them.
* * *
Our mother’s return took place in stages: first her long-distance voice on the phone from Rio, then a gravitational shift as we timed the progress of her flight to Los Angeles. Though we’d thirsted for her, we felt unexpected reluctance to have her back. Some of it was petty; who wants to return to an apartment full of highway noise after hearing the ocean at night? Who wants to give up midnight swims? And our father had finally begun to flourish. He swam his morning laps again. He listened to music again—was selling music again. After school, we drove to his office, where our role had evolved from trying to animate a grief-gutted husk to real collaboration. Listen to this; what do you think? They’re playing tonight; shall we go have a listen? What do you think? Good bet? Bad bet? Worth the risk?
* * *
Unlike rock stars, who emerged before other passengers from airplanes we’d gone to meet with our father, our mother was the last to disembark. Holding our pink helium balloons and “Welcome Home!” sign, we grew increasingly bereft.
She looked small, older than we remembered. Her entire person appeared to be a single hazel-olive tone: clothes, skin, hair, eyes—all registered on that same narrow spectrum. She smelled faintly of charred wood. How could this small monochromatic woman be our mother?
Then she gathered us into her arms and we held her, feeling the heat from under her skin, and we were the three-headed monster again, with its three yearning hearts. We held our mother as long as we could, and then longer, until she started to laugh.