Facebook Ghosts

The news came in a public place.

"Let me just make one quick call," I told my daughter, Laura. Leaning our heads together over the small table at Panera, we'd been laughing over something funny, the particulars lost to me now, one last day together before she flew back to her separate life in California. She left the table for a minute, for a napkin, some ice? I don't remember now. I made the call, and Laura found me, head in hands, mascara pooling on my fingers. The familiar settings of Panera-- the upholstered booths, the rectangular tables, the people with cups in hand--all blurred and faded from my field of vision.

"Mom? What's wrong?" she asked, dipping her face in front of my bowed head. Poor girl--I'm sure she thought the worst about one of our family members, so undone was I.

It took a while for her to understand. A friend was dead, not because cancer had eaten her from within or because a car took flight. This friend chose her end.

We'd known each other for 30 years, two women in an original band of friends long dissolved by betrayal and divorce. Somehow, we'd stayed connected, rising and falling in and out of each other's lives over the years. We took different paths, me to marriage and four children--her to seeking love in all the wrong places, a quest by a dangerous and willful beauty.

The stories I've heard about my friend's death must surely be incorrect, I think. I want to ask Elaine: did you hear what they're saying about you? I want to tell them: there's no way that the glorious woman who once told me, when I was in a rough spot, "you know, Jill, God cares for you. He holds you in His hand. Don't you ever despair" is the same woman who cut the tendons in her right wrist one week and hanged herself the next.

Still, she seems to be gone. In the weeks after her death, I typed her name into the "search for people, places and things" bar on Facebook, just in case. I clicked through her albums, running my mouse over her image like a caress. In some photos, her head is thrown back in gleeful laughter, sun bouncing off of her blonde hair. In others, she looks straight at the camera--a "take me as I am" glint in her eyes.

One day, a curious post appeared in the midst of the "I will always remember you"s and the "I know I'll see you again"s. This one read: "I know you are all right now. Thank you for that." Oh, how I wanted the story behind that post. I thought about "liking" it and adding a comment: "Please message me and tell me how you know she is all right!" Somehow writing about her, around her, through her on her own now lifeless page seemed wrong, so I moved my finger away from the Enter key. I'll probably check again.

The Earthquake Kit Revisited

There is no magic-- black or white,

no good juju, no incantations, no sacrifice
of bloodless, headless chickens—but I stay silent, working a charm of protection, just in case.

                                                        The Earthquake Kit 
(previously published in Connotations Press)                                                                                                                   

     When my youngest daughter Rachel was little, she worried a lot about the weather. The worrying part she got from me, the weather-watching part from her father. We were a beach vacation family in those days, and some of her earliest memories must surely involve late-night deck sitting, where we witnessed red lightning cracking above the smudged line of black water. One year we drove into Corolla, North Carolina on the windy heels of Hurricane Bertha, stopping once or twice to drag away tree branches blocking the single lane roads which led to Atlantic Avenue, just off of Highway 12.

     A random assortment of pine needles, bark, and murky sand covered the driveway of the house we’d rented that year, a certain sign of things to come. Nature had been vigorously shaken, and we were in the midst of the fall out. Trekking back from the beach, covered with a fine grit of sand, we stopped en masse at the outdoor shower.  We were a family who never used the inside showers, even the little ones preferring the sweet kiss of warm air on their skin, but this time, we backed out-- a formidable wall of Sundays—scurrying away from the aggressive encampment of big-headed, spindly-legged spiders.  Later that week, we were treated to a gathering of tree frogs, leaf emerald in their greenness, their sticky pads sucked tight to our glass door. Coming for the insects that had been drawn to our inside lights, the frogs’ tongues spun out, darting so rapidly that the insects seemed unaware of their fate. We watched transfixed, spellbound by this little life and death drama played out before us on a vacation house storm door.

     Later that week, we were all awakened by our oldest boy’s shouts. We’d had rain all day; the fury that had been Bertha was long gone, but another hurricane was pushing up the coast. We’d tucked our two youngest in, whispering reassurances  against the pounding rain on the cupola skylight, but now a steady torrent of water forced itself around, under, and through the skylight seal, pouring into the open center of the house, pooling on the first floor where the Godzilla marathon the boys had been watching still flickered on the screen.

     Rachel learned about the ugliness of nature during this and other beach trips, slapping her hands at fat black sand flies, shielding her eyes from the piercing sting of wind-borne sand, overturning turtle shells all but scraped clean of red meat, watching the glassy green sea whip itself into angry gray froth.  On our way south, we often drove through wild storms, once caught in tornado on the beltway around D.C., once driving into West Palm just minutes after a tornado touched down, sideways pelting rain having unnerved us all.

     “Maybe we shouldn’t stay,” Rachel repeated in a kind of litany, rolling her worry between her fingers like beads.

     We looked at the broad palm leaves sheared in ragged segments lying around the pool. “It’s over, honey. We’ll be fine.”

                                                                                                                                                                                      

     That trip marked the beginning of Rachel’s sojourn with the Weather Channel. While the tornado was indeed over, unfortunately the remainder of our vacation week was fraught with the kind of hazy heat and pressure that were often followed by ominous thunder storms. Rachel sat rigidly in front of the television several times a day listening for the word tornado on the Weather Channel. Any mention of impending rain heightened her panic.

     “I’ve got to see the Local on the Eights,” she’d say as we rounded up our children for application of sunscreen.

     “Come on, Rach. If we don’t get to the beach soon, the clouds will start building. Let’s go get some sun.”

     “Do you think it’s going to storm today? Maybe we shouldn’t go to the beach today. I want to go home! Can we please go home now?”

     And so it went, her tone becoming more insistent after we’d run up the beach walkway seeking shelter from the inevitable storm. I wonder if the confident young woman she is now remembers the hot tears she cried that week, her blue eyes wide with the fear of waiting for the worst to happen.

     Another summer, we hurried the short distance home from the community fair, after hearing a tornado warning broadcast over the loud speakers. “Don’t worry, kids,” I said to my four and two young friends. “Tornados don’t usually come to Pittsburgh. They are just being careful, that’s all.”

     We sat playing games in my family room until a strangely orange sky shone through the front windows. The glow was unnatural, eerie, and even I was a bit undone.

     “Let’s go guys--time to play in the basement.”

     Smiling while I boosted them up into the crawl space, I joked about me being a crazy worrywart, thinking all the while that the six children in my care would certainly replay this experience in their nightmares.  I held my breath while I sat guard on the cellar steps, waiting for the ghostly sound of the rushing locomotive.  When we emerged, our local news reported downed electric lines, fallen trees, and lifted rooftops just a few miles away.

     Rachel is mostly grown now, a leggy blonde with a wild sense of humor and a no-nonsense attitude.  A fierce “what of it” glint rises easily in her eyes if push comes to shove. Seven months ago she moved 2,577 road miles away from home to Moraga, California. When we packed up her suitcases in August, I checked St. Mary’s “Things to Bring List.” Reading it aloud, a part of my brain eliminated the Earthquake Emergency Kit, perhaps pretending that she wasn’t going quite so far, that she wasn’t my youngest, that I hadn’t quite reached this stage of my life. What bag of tricks could possibly help during an earthquake, anyway? What could I possibly buy to keep my girl safe?   

                                                                                                                                                                               

      Earlier this week, I noticed a link on Rachel’s Facebook page: Sign of California Quake to Come? Below was Rachel’s comment: “Just in case, I love you all.”

     Yesterday, the phone calls and texts began in earnest. “Have you heard anything about the earthquake that’s supposed to hit here tomorrow?” Laura’s message read.  “Call me. Call Rach.”    

     I tried the explanations out in my mind…the geologist doesn’t know what he’s talking about…it’s just dead fish and a low-hanging moon…earthquakes don’t happen where you are…I promise you will be safe, but all of them felt like so much dust on my tongue.

     When I talked to Rachel, after my husband tried to distract her with humor, I asked her “Are you nervous?”

     “Promise me you will get a memorial tattoo of me if I die in the earthquake. Use the picture of me standing on the bridge with Heinz Field in the background. I’ll tell you where it is.”

     I have a mental picture of a large black, intricately-inked tattoo stretching across my 55- year-old back. “I sure hope I don’t have to do that, Rach.”

     “Promise me.”

     “Okay. Sure. I promise, but you are going to be fine. You aren’t right on the fault line, and no tsunami could reach you because you are too far away and too high up on the hill.”

     “Just in case, I’m sending a goodbye text to everyone I know tonight.”

     “Rach, you know that anyone of us could die at any time from a lot of different causes, and we don’t send goodbye texts every night. You will be fine.”

     The truth, though, is that things don’t always work out for the best, and, even in the sweetness of her youth, Rachel understands. She’s seen the footage from Japan and Haiti. She’s walked into my mother’s hospital room to find the rigid contour of a lifeless face against the pillow. She’s heard the crystal splintering, sharp glass shards glinting on the leaf-patterned cloth. She’s picked up her phone to find really bad news emanating from the earpiece, news that she hadn’t invited, dreamed of, or wished for at all.

   The real truth is that Rachel comes from a legacy of sadness, just a breath away from shoddily hidden grief-- from someone who knows quite well that a ringing phone can’t be trusted, from a mother who has so desperately wanted to create a pocket of safety for her children, but who is sometimes irrevocably lost to the day when her brother died from a bullet to the brain.

     Rachel made herself an earthquake survival kit, just in case. She filled her black and yellow Vera Bradley backpack with snacks, Sarris chocolate, bottled water, a flashlight, and her Tide-To-Go pen.   

                                                                                                                                                                               

      I have an earthquake kit too, but Rachel probably doesn’t know that I started mine many years ago, long before she left me, perhaps on the day I stood in the funeral home, feeling the wax slug filling the ragged entrance wound near my brother’s right ear.

     Sometimes the kit does work. I wish I could share its logic with her and my other children, providing them with a checklist for survival, a nicely printed list of circles to fill in with a sharp number two pencil, but part of the process is that each of us must confront impending disaster alone, gathering chicken bones and feathers to ward off that which might harm those we love.  My kit is a ragtag collection, including, but not inclusive of, spastic hopes, lopsided prayers, and improbable deals made in the dead of night. Yesterday, I added my promise to Rachel, praying that my vow will be enough to keep her safe, that I’ll never have to lie under the buzzing tattoo needle, feeling her “I love you all” worked black drop by black drop deeply into my skin.

    

         

    

    

     

Pool Days

The sky darkened above me as I pushed open the door to the pizza shop where my youngest daughter's working for the summer, a late afternoon storm promising to break the humidity we've felt for a string of ninety-degree days. I sat in the shop a bit, swirling a straw in my styrofoam cup of Diet Coke, the square clear ice moving with the current. The door opened once, twice, and again admitting young families...mothers wearing sundresses over bathing suits, boys in swim trunks and tank tops, pony-tailed girls whose curled toes held tight to neon flip flops.

 Four kids and a mom climbed into the counter seats facing the window, each waiting for a slice of pizza straight from the oven. My heart constricted a bit with the memory of my own four on days like these, when we sought shelter from the rain.

My oldest daughter calls me nearly every day from California, as she walks the 20 minutes to her local pool. I'm happy to imagine her passing through the gates, a colorful bag in one hand and her thermos in the other. I can see her there, lying stomach to grass, reading until the sun chases her into the water. My youngest daughter is lucky to have a group of friends with pools; sometimes she is happy to work the evening shift in exchange for an afternoon with her girls. She comes home with tales of unbelievable floating chairs, the last one feeling just like a couch as she lay on her side.

We used to go together, spending most summer days from 11 to 4 or even 5 at the YMCA pool.
Certainly I'm romanticizing the experience, forgetting about the packing up before hand: suntan lotion, combs, towels, toys, snacks, books, magazines, money, and pool passes. I've forgotten the crankiness of children who are tired from the sun and hungry RIGHT NOW. I don't miss watching a baby who might, at any minute, slip under water. I've almost erased the angry woman who guarded four lounge chairs in the same spot every day, whether her friends joined her or not. My memory blurs the ride home, the 15 car minutes far too long, with a frazzled young mother threatening to "stop the car, if I have to," coming home with a mess of wet clothes and a dinner yet to prepare.

Oh, but the smell of chlorine in freshly-combed hair, the sight of wet suits on the line, the touch of a small damp hand on my shoulder...those I do remember. I feel cheated, as if we didn't have long enough at the pool.

It did rain today, needles of rain exploding against the hot pavement. When I left the pizza shop, the temperature had cooled, a slight moist breeze trilling across my skin. I hope the families had enough time to go back to the pool, taking another dip, before things changed again.

Mother Love

Yesterday I ran into an old friend in the copy room. We'd known each other long before we started teaching at the same university, chatting with each other at open houses and baseball games. I put my arm around his shoulder, feeling his age through the crisply-pressed blue dress shirt. He kissed my cheek, leaving a soft, dry impression against my skin.

"I'm so sorry," I whispered into his ear. "How are you doing?"

"Not so good. It got worse once I started home." His eyes never left the copier key pad.

"It's hard to lose a parent," I offered. "Mothers are the hardest. No matter how old we are, losing a mother untethers us."

Looking up then, his eyes glossy, he crumpled his mouth into a sort of smile. I could see he knew what I meant. He had been set adrift, too.

I've been lost since my mother died, her passing sending chaos into the order I thought I'd imposed on my life. Such a smarty pants, I'd been. This was my new truth: my roots had been yanked. The ink on the map disappeared. I'd lost the paddle, and my boat had sprung a pretty big leak.

Years ago, if you'd have told me that I defined myself through my mother, I'd have laughed, telling you high tales of my independence, offering storied examples of how different my life had become, how separate from hers, how my road was less traveled. Yet, here I am, my outline muddled, the sharpness of my features smudged, lost in the woods. With my mother's tired body went part of my history, an awareness of me before I was.

The night of my mother's funeral, I drank too much while I sat on my sister's porch. We told tales late into the night, cold glasses in our hands, a small candle burning on the table. My husband and sons brought me home gently, strong arms supporting me. Home again, I went straight to bed, taking the stairs slowly, grief and gin seeping through me. My daughters sat on the couch, having long since shed their funeral clothes, leaning against each other for comfort.

"How could you?" one asked me the next day, misunderstanding the past night's events.

Indeed, my dear child. Indeed.

New Beginnings

I woke up early today, though I thought I'd sleep longer, later, deeper, and started the morning by reaching for my book--to tuck in another chapter before I punctured the haze of sleep, before reality claimed me. Early morning reading used to be a habit of mine back in graduate school. During the semester, I'd finish whatever I'd abandoned  bleary-eyed the night before, whether it was literary criticism for a class I was taking or an essay for the class I was teaching. Over vacations, this habit turned into a delicious luxury as I reached for the novel on top of the stack of the many waiting for me. After I became a wife and a mother, other voices called me from my sleep, and I've only revived this custom since my children no longer sleep under my roof.

It's one of those hazy, end-of-summer days, the humidity frosting the outside of my windows. My husband just stopped his mowing to take refuge in our air-conditioned kitchen, wiping his face with his shirt, though it's just 9:30 a.m. I'll have to water the plants early, even though we watered them late yesterday, while farm market eggplant roasted in the oven for our dinner.

Despite the heat and my flowers overflowing from their containers on my deck, all of them tumbling in a freefall fight with each other for attention, I feel the pull of fall. Classes began this week for me, a sure marker. As I drove the long stretch of 79 to work, I  warily eyed the "Bridge May Freeze Before Road" signs. I'll drive those roads as the leaves change, then drop, white-knuckling the early snowfalls. Soon the next few months will soon become a jumbled clump of days filled with classes, assignments, conferences, and grades, my students and I emerging changed people.

I've always loved the newness fall brings. As a child, I stood in front of the small school supply section in the local drugstore, touching the pens and pencils with anticipation. I still buy notebooks every semester, delighted in the ever-expanding selection of covers. This year my daughter and I walked through the many aisles of Target devoted to back-to-school shoppers. We weighed the color choices carefully, ending up with simple bright blue, green, and pink composition books.

"Do you need pens?" she asked me, in a strange reversal of roles.

Perhaps it's that strange reversal of roles that kept me in bed this morning, that had me reaching for fiction about Sullivan's Island instead of beginning my day. Fall brings something new for all of us, and my children leave my home for other lives, for growth that doesn't include me. The first to go this year was my oldest; rightly so, I guess. He left our vacation a day early, driving 11 hours straight to arrive in Morgantown for an editorial meeting the day before classes began. A little over a week later, my youngest left for San Francisco, struggling to pack all she'd need for four months into suitcases that didn't weigh over 50 pounds and a carry-on that would fit in the overhead compartment. My oldest daughter left on Wednesday, stopping to visit her boyfriend in Florida before she reached her destination in Sacramento. She's lived away for so long that it takes nearly the entire visit home for her to shed her hard armor, becoming the girl I knew just a day or so before she has to leave again. My second son's living only a half hour away, and while he and his girlfriend come back every Sunday for dinner, he's still not here where we all began.

The house misses my children. Sometimes we'll hear doors slamming and drawers closing abruptly. Andy nicknamed this phenomenon "The Energy," blaming the noises on the residual energy left behind by his frenetic sister Laura, but I think the house is perplexed. Where are the feet that pounded up and down its steps, bounding then down the hallway? Where are the hands that threw open the doors, softly closed the doors with a click, sometimes slammed the doors? Where are the voices that called out to each other, to me? The house bristles against the silence, calling the children back with its empty noises.

This morning was a reading-in-bed morning until my husband brought me a tall coffee, steaming hot. Last night we went to the farmer's market, loading our bag with eggplants, tomatoes, scallions, and cilantro. A yellow and orange bunch of zinnias, cosmos, and sunflowers nested in the crook of my arm as we debated over the box of soft chocolate cookies with raspberry filling. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder in line at the cheese truck, lucky, as the cheeseman told us, to get the last piece of Pennsylvania white cheddar. Breaking off a chunk, we shared a bite marveling at our good fortune, and then headed home together to prepare our garden feast.

Corolla

The cool blue shimmer
calls me by name with
rolling syllables, tumbling,
frothing, finally trickling over
my feet. My soul settles,
my heart eases, sliding down
from the sore spot in my throat,
slowing to sync with the pulse
of the waves. Once. you leaned
against the dune's high shelf,
shifting sand into a sunflower,
for our daughters, the petals
just brushing my skin.

Writing in Segovia

Tonight, while the spaghetti sauce simmered on the stove and I waited for the men in my life to finish their work and make their way to the table, I sat down with a glass of iced tea and the latest copy of Poets & Writers. Lately I've been dreaming of attending writers' workshops, residencies on some leafy mountain tops or in cottages by the sea. I read every word of the advertisments in Poets & Writers, throwing myself into a dream state. I see myself rising from a single bed that's been made with crisp white sheets; a stack of books are piled high on the rough hewn floor. I throw a colorful handspun shawl around my shoulders and take my heavy pottery mug of coffee out to the deck. My head rests on my hand as I look out over the lake, ocean, mountains. I press the blinking circle on the side of my laptop, and words rise from me like clear glass bells.

The majority of the ads in Poets & Writers are for MFA programs: chances to work with Billy Collins, Susan Cheever, Phillip Lopate, Sue Miller, Robert Root. On some alternative plane, I'm striding across the respective campuses, blue-jeaned legs carrying me from thought to thought, my arms cradling my notebook, iPad, laptop. Scattered in between the MFA listings are ads for conferences. I could travel east for the Gettysburg Review's Conference for Writers or south to the Writer's Institute in Miami. A flight west could drop me in Minnesota for the Split Rock Arts Program or take me all the way to the coast for the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma. The Bread Loaf Workshop is taking up residence in Italy! Maybe I could find a wealthy nobleman to be my patron, and I could spend my summer moving between cabins and cottages, spinning tales like the intricate web of a very productive spider.

Then, I saw an ad tied to me in time and thought. There it was on page 63.

Brown University
Writing in Segovia
Writer's Workshop: Travel Writing and Memoir
July 3-12, 2011

I'd lived in Spain when I was 20, and I'd walked the streets of Segovia one weekend, breathing the crisp winter air, making footprints in drifts of clean white snow piled high before the Roman aqueducts. If I hold my breath, I can almost get myself there again in some weird form of time travel. Was I my most authentic self then, so very centered in Jill? I don't think I'd recognize that girl now, long-haired, defiant, standing on the brink of her life.

I came home early from that semester abroad because my father lay in a hospital bed, coughing and struggling to take one full breath. I flew across the Atlantic in a sonambulent state. Did my life in the states still exist? I'd lost my sense of direction.

After my father died, I tossed and turned at night, often waking from the same dream. I was back in Spain for just one night. I'd appear in the Atomium Discoteca, the train station, the Plaza Mayor like a ghost watching the life that had continued on without me.

Would I go back this week to write? My heart and mind yearns so hard toward this idea that if will were flight, the girl I left there would be sitting in a cafe in the plaza, her head on her hand, words rising from her clear as glass bells.