“Are you okay?” I break the silence.
“I’m okay,” is all my mom says. “Don’t worry, sweetie. I’ll be fine.”
We’re silent again for several seconds until Rose suddenly says, “Did I ever tell you that I had a creek cat?”
The question is so absurd, I momentarily forget where we are and why we’re here. “What on God’s green earth is a ‘creek cat’?”
Mom laughs, gripping the steering wheel a little too tight, the perpetually nervous driver. “It’s just a cat I found in a creek when I was a teen.”
Outside the window, the sandy road is gradually hardening, turning solid. I try to process what my mom is saying and why she has decided to bring it up now.
“What were you doing in a creek?”
“I was down at Hither Creek in Madaket. With Tommy,” she says simply, eyes still on the road. “When I first found him, he was tiny. Smaller than the kittens you see up for adoption. He was this scrawny, coal-black, helpless little thing. Hardly distinguishable from the mud and plants caked around him.”
I have a hard time picturing this, too. This is not the mom I know. The woman I know hates outdoor activities like hiking or camping. She played pickleball with jewelry on the other day and didn’t break a sweat. The Rose I know wears uniform outfits of matching sweaters and tailored jackets. Even her pajamas are silk sets that never look rumpled or worn. She is a therapist, a professional people go to in times of crisis. Rose Gardner is not a woman you can easily imagine wading in a creek, searching for stray cats.
“I thought you hated cats? And creeks for that matter.”
“I never said I hated cats, Lily,” corrects Mom. “They usually hate me.”
It’s true that cats are not a particular friend to her. One Christmas at my grandfather’s house, I witnessed as their family cat, Mrs. Clay, launched itself from the top of the staircase and landed—paws first—on the front of my mom’s new sweater. It seemed nothing short of a targeted act of aggression, a declaration of war.
I know a long-lost cat might seem a small thing, but it unnerves me. This confession, while relatively small and innocuous, seems incongruous with absolutely everything I know to be true about my mom.
“Did you really have a cat?” I ask again. “And why did you mention it now?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Seeing Tommy reminded me of him.”
“Tommy also had a cat?”
“Tommy’s sister, Rachel, adopted the cat after we nursed it back to health. I wanted him to go to a good home.” Rose pauses. “I should’ve asked her about him. I never heard when he died.”
For a moment, I wonder if the cat might still be alive, over thirty years later. The entire story seems so illogical as to make anything possible.
“I can’t believe you never told me this,” I say.
Mom looks at me across the car. Another vehicle is passing at that moment, and the high beams cast a strange glow over her face. “It’s really not a big deal.”
“How can I know you for twenty-five years and you’ve never mentioned you had a cat?”
She shrugs. “We only kept him for a few weeks. Lottie was allergic.”
I think about why this secret is so hurtful. The first word I ever spoke was “Dada.” Mom likes to tease me about this, but I once read that babies are more likely to say their fathers’ names first because for the first few months of life, our mothers are indistinguishable from ourselves. We do not cry out to them, because we do not think them separate beings.
Maybe that’s the problem. I can’t imagine a version of Rose that I don’t have access to.
The rest of the ride home, I try to imagine this younger version of Rose. I picture her with muddy hands, her hair loose and untamed, scooping that cat from the water. I imagine her before she became the tidy, self-contained woman I know, before motherhood and the pressures of adulthood and societal expectations bent her into her final form.
I like thinking of Rose like that: free, unencumbered, as wild as the island surrounding her.
“Do you think we’d be friends if we met at the same age?” I ask her when we pull into the driveway. The garden is aglow with the solar lights Lottie planted around the edges of the fence.
“What do you mean? I’d be lucky to have a friend like you,” is all she says.
For some reason, the answer doesn’t satisfy.
There are questions I wish I could ask: what she and Thomas talked about, how she really feels about the situation. But that would mean admitting that I talked to Thomas first. And I’m not sure howRose might react if she uncovered the ways I’ve been interfering in her love life. When I asked Thomas to agree to this plan tonight, I assumed I knew what was best for her, but what if I don’t?
