The twins threw themselves onto the living room floor—Andy on his butt, Matty on his face—when Mira walked in the door. It was a part of the routine.
She came back from her teaching and her office in the afternoons, and they wept and screamed for a solid hour while Clark stomped around the apartment. When she asked him if they’d been fussy during the day, he shook his head with his lips sealed tightly, letting her know that this behavior had to do with her, and was, therefore, her problem.
But what, she wondered, did it mean? Were the boys weeping with excitement because she was back, or crying with their just-realized grief that she’d been gone? Mira’s terrible suspicion was that they’d longed to cry all day, but because their father seemed either so unsympathetic in his weariness or so close himself to cracking, they’d suppressed it until she came home.
She pulled off her shoes and sat down on the floor, and gathered them to her. Matty opened his mouth and sucked onto her kneecap, sobbing. Andy grabbed a fistful of her hair, stuffed it into his mouth, and wept into her neck. “Clark?” Mira called to him over their sobbing. She needed a glass of water but couldn’t risk standing up yet, having to disengage the twins.
He didn’t answer.
“Clark?”
Mira had grown up in a traditional family. Her father sold insurance all day while her mother slammed doors and screamed at the kids. Mira had little idea what her mother did with those precious hours when they were at school. Early on she’d imagined her lying on her bed staring at the ceiling, hands crossed over her chest until she heard the school bus pull up to the curb at 3:45.
Later Mira considered other possibilities: A secret life of some sort. Not a lover, surely, but maybe a group of friends to whom her mother confided, over neighborly cups of tea, the disappointments of her marriage, her difficulty with her children. Or maybe she read romance novels, bodice-rippers she kept hidden around the house. Maybe she pursued some passion Mira hadn’t considered: bird watching, poetry-writing.
But no sooner had Mira turned twenty, the age at which she might actually have gotten to know this stranger who’d raised her, than her mother died, and the only genuinely revealing scene of her childhood she could remember with clarity was an afternoon when she’d had to stay home from school, suffering as she was from such debilitating menstrual cramps that even her mother, who had no patience at all for female-related troubles, had to admit that Mira looked green, and let her stay in bed.
That afternoon, Mira was fourteen. She’d gone straight back to bed after breakfast and slept until noon, and then she’d woken up to a silent house, and tiptoed into the hallway.
Why had she tiptoed? Had she expected to find her mother doing something she wouldn’t want her daughter to witness?
Whatever the reason for it, Mira could still remember her sense of being on a furtive mission—the way she’d stepped gingerly over the floorboard that creaked, and then how she’d slid, rather than stepped, down the hallway in her socks.
Their house was small. There were only three bedrooms, one of which her brothers had to share (an endless source of conflict: Why does she get her own room?) She moved from the hallway’s bare floorboards to the living room’s orange shag with only the vaguest of whispered footsteps, and then peered around the corner, to the living room.
Her mother wasn’t there.
She’d held her breath as she passed under the low arched doorway of the dining room, separated from the kitchen by a swinging door (one side of which would no longer swing, since either Bill or Frank—neither of whom would admit to it—had pulled it off the door frame by hanging from it, and because their father, who had no carpentry skills, also refused to hire anyone to do any work around the house.) If her mother was behind that door, she was standing too still to be detected.
Mira pushed open the side that still opened, and stepped into the kitchen.
Nothing.
Only her mother’s half-empty coffee cup on the counter, with a bright red imprint of her lips on the rim.
Mira touched the cup. It was cold.
There were only two other places in the house her mother could be, Mira knew: the half-finished basement (except that Mira didn’t hear the washer or dryer) or the walk-in pantry. They had only one car, and her father would have taken it to work, so unless her mother had walked into town (unthinkable, as she didn’t even own a pair of real walking shoes, and it had rained that morning, so there would be puddles, and what would she do in their small town anyway?), she had to be in the house.
Perhaps, Mira thought, her mother was alphabetizing soup cans in the pantry or checking expiration dates. There was one bare bulb in the pantry, and the space was large enough, even crammed as it was with cans and jars and boxes of pasta and Pop Tarts and Frosted Flakes, that her mother might comfortably stand inside it or even sit on a chair if she wanted to, looking around, making lists.
Mira walked to the door and put her hand on the warm solidity of the fake brass knob, and had the sure sense of something beyond the door. But what? Not her mother, exactly, but some suppressed energy, some barely perceptible movement, some silent intense activity, like cell growth or furtive sex. It crossed Mira’s mind that there might be someone behind that door who was not her mother at all—or that her mother might be in there with someone.
She hesitated, and then pulled the door open so quickly she felt a rush of wind on her face and neck, and the bright overhead light nearly blinded her after the darkness of the hallway, and she gasped when her mother turned around, seeming less bathed in that light than emitting it, standing as she was in the center of the pantry, directly under the one bare bulb, wearing what looked to Mira at first like some kind of white choir robe made of feathers, or giant wings wrapped around her body, eyes closed but lips and cheeks vividly, garishly, painted red (although in real life Mira’s mother wore makeup only on Sundays, for church, or on the rare weekend nights Mira’s father took her out to dinner). Her skin looked wet, coated with dew or sweat, and Mira got a quick but definite impression that her mother had just hatched or was in the process of hatching, or being born, or being reanimated after death.
Mira froze in the doorway, hand flat against her chest, heart pounding into her palm. Her mother slowly opened her eyes and said, “Mira?” in a voice a hundred times softer and more full of patience and motherly affection than Mira had ever heard it.
“Mama?”
“Yes?”
“Are you—?”
“What, sweetheart?”
Mira took a step backward, and her mother simply pulled the door closed again between them, and Mira hesitated for only a second or two before returning quickly to her room and getting back into her bed where she belonged.
As the years passed, like so many other incidents from childhood and adolescence, that moment became a confused vision in her memory, and often Mira would think she’d simply dreamed the whole thing, or hallucinated it. (Was it possible the Tylenol she’d taken that morning had codeine in it? Could she have had, in addition to her period, a fever?) But she also never lost the sense that she’d stumbled upon a deep secret that day, a secret in the pantry as well as in her mother, and the distant, irrational suspicion that her mother spent her days in the pantry regenerating, reanimating, shedding cells and making new ones, would make its way into Mira’s dreams for years, until it eventually entered her conscious life, permanently, when her mother succumbed to the breast cancer she must surely have known she had that day in the pantry—must have known she’d had for years. (The physicians who were eventually rounded up to treat her expressed shock and horror that an illness that might have been successfully addressed had been ignored, or concealed, or borne in silence for so long.)
At the funeral parlor on a cool April afternoon, Mira looked down at her mother in the white coffin and remembered that glimpse of her in the pantry in the flush on her mother’s cheeks, the ghoulishly painted red lips, the cool, waxy film of her skin, and the smell of the embalming fluid.
By then, it would seem like a century since that day in the pantry and the diagnosis that had followed a few months later. The breast cancer went on for what seemed like another lifetime, straight through Mira’s high school prom, and then through her graduation (which no one had expected her mother to live to see), and then through her first and second years of college—during which there were four or five exhausting Greyhound bus rides home, because it seemed her mother was in her last days—until, in her sophomore year, just before final exams, Mira’s father called to say that they again expected her mother to die within a few days and that she shouldn’t rush home, but . . .
So, as it happened, her mother died while Mira was scrawling a response to question number eight: “In Jung’s consideration of synchronicity, he establishes that tertium comparationis is meaning. Explain.”
As her mother left this world, Mira was sitting hunched in an auditorium trying to describe the way an outer event and an inner event might bear equal significance, and the example she’d used was of a woman being reminded one day, by a song on the radio, of a boy she used to love but hadn’t seen or thought of in many years, and then coming across his obituary in a newspaper she did not ordinarily read.
The next week, looking down at her mother in her coffin bathed in funeral home light, it would all come together—the memory and the precognition, the symbolism and the folklore, inherent in that day years earlier when Mira, in her own delirium and bleeding, had come upon her mother in the pantry, and had seen not only her mother’s death in it but also, in a flash, the trajectory of her own career.
Within a few weeks of her mother’s funeral, Mira had read The American Way of Death, and then, of course, eventually, she’d read every book ever written on the traditions and rites and superstitions related to the decomposition and reanimation of the body, until she finally ran out of books to read, and began to write one herself.
With his Nikes in his hands, Clark stood above Mira and said, “Maybe you could take care of their dinner tonight? I’ve had it. I’m going for a run.”
“Clark,” she said, looking up at him—that body, which, one lazy Saturday long ago, after a hot bubble bath, she’d licked the sinewy length of from the tip of the big toe to the crown of the head—and tried not to let her gaze linger on the belly, which was both slack and bulging. (How was it that Clark had recently taken on the physical attributes of a person who had given birth to twins when there was no longer a shred of evidence of it on Mira herself?) She tried to hold his eyes and to keep a steady tone of unexcited objectivity in her voice, even as Matty sank his incredibly sharp new teeth into the flesh of her thigh, as she said, “I have an Honors College thesis committee meeting tonight, Clark. I have to leave in an hour. I told you that this morning.”
He turned from her then, and before she even realized he’d thrown them, the running shoes had sailed across the living room and knocked over their only nice lamp, which Mira could hear shattering even before it hit the coffee table, and the twins began to shriek with what seemed to be all of the hysterical energy of human history channeling itself through their lungs.