like a fallen leaf. Her skin was brown and weathered. She wore leather pants and scratchy sweaters. She hired him to bartend, even though he didn’t know the difference between vermouth and vodka. When he gave up looking for my mother at the side of the road, he looked for her in the shadows, in places she would never have gone. He must have thought she was only hiding. And strangely, looking for my mother, he found work, something none of us expected. But he also found Roxanne. Autumn, and everything was falling.
I knew Roxanne, because her son, Jake, was in my English class. He was a football player. I sat behind him and stared at the bristly hairs of his military cut, the only marker of where his head ended and his neck began. When there were football games after school, Becca insisted that I sit with her on the rickety bleachers instead of going to Boo’s. She promised that football, cold autumn sunshine, and hot chocolate in Styrofoam cups were somehow critical to our survival at Quimby High. But more often than not we wound up sitting with the football players’ mothers, a high-strung and husky-voiced lot who patrolled the bleachers like angry bees. The Quimby girls circled the track on the periphery of the football field, their movements as choreographed as the players. Becca and I had not yet learned this dance, so we sat with the football moms.
Roxanne was the queen bee. Her hair was the swirled colors of vanilla and caramel ice cream, but she smelled like booze and cigarettes. She kept a flask inside her bright blue parka vest, sipping at it seductively between drags. She winked at me once; I never trusted her. Her eyes were set far apart, and her face looked like an old glove. Jake had the same wide-set eyes, giving him the look of an overgrown infant, or an alien. In English class, I studied the back of his neck. Flaky patches of dandruff made snow on his shoulders. He wore sweaters without T-shirts underneath, and their ribbed collars were stretched taut, synthetic fibers threatening to tear or to strangle. I felt sorry for him then. He didn’t know his mother was sleeping with my father.
If autumn here were made of colored glass, this is the way the light would shine through the autumn when my father met Roxanne: neon red turned upside down inside the green glass of a beer bottle. Sunlight catching dust, making triangles in the air and on the wooden dance floor of the Lodge, where Roxanne got drunk while Daddy poured liquid sunlight into chipped pint glasses. And later, dawn through ruffled curtains hanging over her bed, when he realized he’d forgotten to come home again.
At night, when it was just me and Quinn, we watched TV, eating from cardboard boxes he brought home from the Shop-N-Save’s deli. I can still taste the pasty dough of batter-dipped chicken swimming in bright pink duck sauce. Potato salad with too much mayonnaise. Later, he would disappear into his room and shut the door. I don’t know what he did in there, but he did it in silence. Not even the sound of the radio escaped. He came out to use the bathroom and then to get a snack, rubbing his knuckles gently across the top of my head on his way to the kitchen, where he would pour a glass of milk and take three Fig Newtons from the package on top of the fridge. “Night, Piper,” he’d say, and disappear again.
I could have been alone in the house on the nights when Daddy didn’t come home. But I’d pretend I’d been sent to my room to study, and would stay up staring at my open textbooks until the air turned cold and almost blue, then fall asleep with the light on.
One Friday night in late autumn when the trees were already bare and the windows were covered with frost, Roxanne came home with Daddy. Through my bedroom window I could see the outline of her sharp shoulders and pointed profile. She’d given him a ride. I figured his truck must have died in town; it was probably sitting in the dirt parking lot outside the Lodge. I stayed in my room when Daddy opened the door and ushered her inside. I feigned sleep when he called out my name.
I pretended that her raspy voice was only the sound of rotten leaves covering the road. Ice in their glasses became the sound of bells, their breathing only wind. But her laughter inevitably exploded into the rumble of a smoker’s cough, her insides rattling, and I listened to the unmistakable sound of Daddy cooing at her. To the sound of her fingers touching Daddy’s collar, chest, beard. I strained to hear their bare feet move down the hall into my mother’s room. But then I heard the front door creak open and the sounds of leaving.
Tears welled up in my eyes, hot and certain, at her departure. I should have known that Daddy couldn’t replace my mother just like that. I should have trusted that he would always love her. He would send Roxanne back to where he had found her.
In the morning, I woke up tangled in my sheets. Outside the sun was bright and cold. Winter was only moments away. I pulled on the brown sweater I’d most recently brought home from Boo’s, my thumb getting stuck in a mothhole near the cuff. I pushed harder, until it ripped, until my thumb was sticking all the way through. I left my jammie bottoms on and pulled on a pair of wool socks.
Quinn was at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal, making a fist around his spoon. I sat down across from him, listening for the sounds of Daddy’s shower.
“You workin’ today?” I asked.
Quinn looked up from his cereal and shook his head.
“Feels like snow.” I nodded. Quinn was on the ski team at school. He was always happiest in winter.
“He left with her, you know,” he said.
“What?” I asked, picking up the cereal box, staring at the nutrition label on the side, looking for an explanation that might appear there. Sugar, calcium, saturated fat. But I already knew.
Daddy and Roxanne were both gone, along with all of Daddy’s clothes I had washed and folded and set on top of the dryer. Along with his razor and toothbrush and his deodorant. Along with his winter boots, even though there wasn’t any snow on the ground yet.
Hope. This is my mother’s true and cruel legacy. When I was a child, I hoped she would come back. At thirty, I only hope that I will live. And live and live. This is my inheritance. My endowment, my trust. A handful of sand and broken glass.
When the doctors confirmed what I already knew, I hoped. I listened to their statistics in their cold waiting rooms as my nipples hardened against the rough blue paper dresses. I looked at the charts and diagrams and grim smiles and hoped. We scheduled the surgery and, later, my treatments. I bought beautiful scarves, drank liquid vegetables and fruits. I vomited and imagined cancer nothing more than stomach bile, acidic and expendable. And I hoped.
Even though I’ve stopped going to the hospital for treatments, Becca still brings home articles she prints off the Internet about experimental procedures, about women who have prevailed despite the illness that has battered them. Each story of success and the accompanying picture of the face that belongs to the body inspires a strange desire. Hope is really just desire disguised, just desperation, aching, dressed up like a prayer. But while hope is elusive, desire is something I can understand. I have wanted and wanted and wanted. I can’t even count all of the things I have wanted. To have. To do. To be. It’s like the familiar longing for a lover; it resides in my heart and in my body. I want to be well again.
Hope has become the same as sunlight. Some days it is warm on my shoulders and back. Some days it’s just gone. It doesn’t worry me, it’s just missing. I know you can no easier lose hope than you can lose sunlight. There is never any doubt hope will return. But I am waiting. There have been too many cloudy days lately.
I’ve started misplacing things and finding them later. Small surprises. Yesterday, I found a pair of scissors in the refrigerator. This morning I found a pincushion under my pillow. It’s making work difficult. I work at home, sewing wedding dresses and prom dresses, making costumes and mending holes. At least the sewing machine is too heavy for me to absentmindedly pick up and move.
I am making a wedding dress for a twenty-nine-year-old widow. Her first husband died of meningitis three weeks after their wedding. It came on suddenly: a fever, then blindness, and then she was alone in a brand-new house with a pile of wedding gifts waiting to be unwrapped. I didn’t ask, but she offered this story to me, almost as if she were sorry. As if she had to explain falling in love again.
She wants a dress that makes her look like Juliet. I went to Boston and bought ten yards of silk chiffon, embroidered with golden thread.