She’s sidelying on the floor, propped on an elbow, with one leg looped over the dog. She strokes the silk behind his ear as he nudges his greying chin under the crook in her armpit. It seems like just yesterday she was half his size, and the day before yesterday he was half her size… and they both have been aging at a pace that makes me want to blink more slowly.
“Where’s Dad?” she asks, more from habit than genuine interest.
“Bad guy,” I reply, rubbing the dog’s chest with my foot. “He said he’d be late tonight.” Again, I think but don’t say.
“Hmmm. Ok,” she says, disinterested. She is quite used to this, and the irony makes me laugh. If the dog were going to be out all night, she’d be an anxious wreck. But her dad… no worries. He’ll be fine.
For some reason, I elaborate. Probably because her legs seem so long that I think perhaps her intellect has stretched as well. I want to test her comprehension… her maturity at fifteen… her perspective on complex issues that we rarely speak about as a family. It must be the dog’s salt and pepper snout that makes me think she’s ready for it. I dive in…
“Yeah they’re looking for a really bad dude. The guy killed a bunch of people. Very violent. Probably armed.” I am decidedly even in my delivery. No drama. No theater.
Nothing seems to register. The dog rolls onto his back and she pushes herself up into sitting. She cradles his head in her lap and I swear if she had a bunch of grapes, she’d dangle them over his mouth and let him nibble them off one by one.
“These situations are really getting more dangerous. Everybody has a gun. The tensions are high. The media is swarming. The politicians are polarizing. I am not only worried about him, I am in fear for him.” I never say that. Out loud. Ever. I bite my lip and wait for it.
She throws her head back. “Mom, you worry about everything! You make a big deal out of everything! Dad’s fine. Would you just…?” Eye roll. Belly rub. Eskimo kiss.
This is usually the hard stop… the laugh-off shoulder shrug. Instead I have myself a little dark moment right there in the middle of all that serenity. I find none of it funny anymore.
“No kid, he is not fine.” Deadpan.
She swings her hair out of her face and shifts the dog off of her lap. He trots off to retrieve his pink blanket- remnants of a puffy, fleece robe that once belonged to my mother. He drags it back to her like a blue ribbon carcass and plops down on it after spinning in exactly two and a half concentric circles. She pulls her knees to her chest and sighs, so entirely bored with me. Although she doesn’t have the words to describe her conflicting, colliding, chaotic opinions, they are at least unsettling enough that the dog has temporarily orbited out of her universe.
“Mom, he is fine. Stop.” Something in her voice sounds, I don’t know, younger.
We’re both stuck in the same foreboding thought loop. I realize I am finally ready to give into it, to surrender the give-a-damn to the what-the-fuck and just rip the thing wide open. She, however, is not.
She’s not ready for this. Her social network feed is full of police-hating vitriol. She quietly accepts responsibility for what he represents. She dutifully blames her own heritage for the sadness in the world, her privilege a cross she must bear. She is swayed by media gusts of misinformation and half-truths, most of it whisking away whatever settled confidence she has ever had in her own belief system like a feather duster in an old church, only to set more lies aloft.
“Maria, it could all be gone in an instant.” Judging by the way her eyebrows arch, I can tell her stomach just dropped. She just shakes her head, annoyed.
She can’t see the ribbons of footage in my head, our life reeling in rewind, sputtering and flickering the closer we get to the end of the film… the moment his luck runs out.
That moment almost came about six months ago. It wasn’t the first moment, but it was probably the closest moment, or it’s the one that would make the end of his life story the most pitiful and cliché. It’s the first moment in a string of many moments that crushed my capacity, made me a fool for stoicism. And it was the first moment in nearly thirty years that we cried about it, or he cried for me, and I cried for him, and we both cried for our friend because… well… shit….his ears are still ringing from the bang.
We’ve always gotten by just fine without the words. Our language is in the doing, which is why this time the words fell out as tears, and the tears bespoke the futility of all of it.
She doesn’t see the tears, and she really doesn’t know what fine feels like to me. She can’t feel the splinters in my feet, or the shards of glass in my heart. She can’t feel the electric hum through my veins, the frayed nerve endings sparking just beneath my skin that, at random moments, blast bolts of terror into my bones. She may hear me sigh from time to time as I try to clear the lump from my gut. But for the most part, I am grounded by the vacuum inside this tornado. It’s what keeps my hands still.
I can’t reconcile this for her. She wants what is fair. She wants what is just. She wants acceptance and social connections that don’t choose sides. She doesn’t want the responsibility of the 360-view from where she stands in the center of this ring of fire. She wants the simple, bipolar lens of right and wrong… good and evil… fine and not fine.
This is why I let her do the easy thing… ignore the risk… pursue whatever joy she can find. This is why I let her swim parallel to the shore instead of fighting a current that only takes her further out to sea. She can see me frantically pacing along the water line, helplessly aware of all we stand to lose, and she both loves and hates me for it.
This is why I drop to the floor to big-spoon the dog, and bury my silly, melodramatic-mom nose into the soothing space behind his ear. This is why words are far less powerful than simple gestures and acts of love given in the moment, in the flesh. This is why, every time, she cannot resist the urge to scoot closer, curl herself around our heads, and squeeze us until our reality feels fine again.
