A name. Of course, that was all it was. Someone else’s name. I moved my cursor up to the X that would close out the page. But before I could click it, another message came through.
I’m sorry, Tess.
I pressed down on the mouse. And in an instant, all of it was gone.
12
The next week disappeared out from under me like one of those tablecloths a magician yanks clean. It was there one moment. Then it wasn’t. I can only remember a few things to prove the days went by at all. First, there was the fallout from Forever Friends. Apparently, Elaine had feared the worst when I didn’t turn up for evening fellowship, and within minutes, she sent people out to comb the fields to make sure I wasn’t lying dead in the organic kale. This was according to my father who received an earful via voice mail.
The next day, he got a second dose once Elaine reached my mother in India. I heard him arguing with Mom for an hour, adopting the same exasperated and defeated tone I remembered from their fights in the run-up to the divorce, when suddenly he seemed never to know anything.
“How should I know?” was his catch phrase back then,and it made its glorious return that morning. “How should I know why she came here? Why don’t you ask her?” Then: “How should I know why she’s dropping out of school? Do you think she tells me anything?”
Eventually he called me down to talk to her. I hadn’t spoken to my mom in weeks. In the time since the divorce, she had become almost as odd and walled-off as my father, but in more socially acceptable ways.
Instead of obsessing over death, she chose life! Well, life-affirming exercise anyway. She’d always been a jogger, but once she was husband-free, she started running six miles every morning with her aggressively positive boyfriend, Lars.
Yoga came next. Everyone in her Park Slope neighborhood wore Yoga pants at all times anyway (just in case the need for Downward Dog should arise?) so it was only a matter of time before Mom caught on. Then it was love at first Cobra Pose. And these days she always seemed to be off somewhere without an Internet connection, seeking enlightenment while getting a herbal tea colonic. Or something.
I still remembered a version of her that was twenty pounds heavier and loved eating kettle corn with me on Sunday nights, laughing at bad Rom-Coms. Where had that woman gone?
“I’m in the Panchagiri Hills outside Bangalore!” sheyelled now. “Why are you choosing this moment to ruin your life?”
I had been numbly sitting in front of the TV for the last ten hours or so, and I wasn’t really ready for human contact.
“Do you know Dad is burying animals now?” I asked.
I heard her sigh.
“Tessie,” she said. “Please, will you tell me what you are doing?”
I imagined her in a sari, bare at the midriff, trying to pretend she wasn’t from Minnesota. Did she have a bindi on her forehead? She had always been pretty. Probably the whole ashram was in love with her.
“Taking a personal health break,” I told her. “I’m practicingself-careby not moving or speaking all day.”
“What I should have done is bring you to India,” she said. “What’s wrong with your health?”
“Mostly it’s my pesky brain,” I said.
“Your brain?”
“It is filled with darkness.”
More than anything, she hated when I was glib, but I refused to speak her language of enlightenment.
“You have to go back,” she said. “Go back to school and see that counselor. I’ve been talking to her. You can still salvage the term.”
“Not happening.”
“Go back!” she said, as if repetition might be the key. “Go back! Go back! Go back! It’s a mistake to stay with your father right now. He’s not going to help you move forward. You couldn’t set the bar any lower if you tried.”
I didn’t speak.
“I’m worried,” she said in a near-whisper.
“But not worried enough to come home,” I said.
“Tess,” she said.
