Matthew fell back asleep with his head bent toward me, his light brown hair falling into his eyes and his little red lips making a puff noise instead of an actual snore. Unlike me, who came into the world screaming, my brother arrived, blinked twice and smiled. Mom liked to say that I had apparently used up all the fussy and left none for him. It was true; Matthew’s soul was calm and trusting. He was a boy who assumed goodness in everyone. What three-year-old smiled while you took candy out of his hand, certain the game would end with something even better in return? I could feel Matthew’s trust in humankind when he curled his hand around my index finger and toddled in a tipsy lockstep with me, certain I wouldn’t let him fall. He followed me everywhere, plucking words out of my sentences and parroting them like my own personal backup singer. It was for those kinds of things that I loved him fiercely, even though he wasn’t much of a conversationalist. But he knew one word that bonded me to him for life. Whenever he awoke from a nap and saw me walk into his room, he’d stand and reach for me with chubby starfish hands.
“Mare-miss!” he’d shout.
I had a super fan, and his adoration gave me a profound sense of distinction.
Dad shifted gears with punching force, and I hugged my knees to my chest and rocked in the back seat, silently willing someone to speak. Mom spoke just once on the ninety-minute drive to the airport in Boston; she asked Dad to detour to Fall River so she could stop at a friend’s house to say a quick goodbye. When we finally pulled into the airport parking lot, suddenly everything was moving too fast. Doors opened and slammed. The four of us speed-walked in silence. As the glass panels of the revolving door spun around us, I felt like I was falling down a well. I didn’t understand what was happening, other than it was big, and that I wasn’t supposed to ask about it. I grabbed Mom’s hand and held on.
Dad bought our tickets and handed our suitcase to the woman behind the counter, and I watched it glide away on a conveyor belt and disappear through an opening in the wall. When we reached the gate, Dad brought me to the window and pointed out the plane we were going to take to visit Granny and Grandpa. It gleamed in the morning light, a sleek bird with upturned wings, and I felt a flutter inside, imagining myself soaring inside it. I peppered Dad with questions—how high would the plane go, how did it stay in the air, would he sit next to me? When it was time to board, Dad knelt down and squeezed me so hard that I felt him shaking.
“You be good, kiddo,” he said, forcing a smile. “Love you.”
My body suddenly turned cold. I felt something rip inside my stomach as Dad sank into an airport chair and Mom tugged me toward the door leading to the plane. This wasn’t right. Dad was supposed to come with us. Mom pulled me by the arm as I leaned in the opposite direction, unwilling to take another step without Dad.
“Come ON,” she huffed.
“What about Dad?” I demanded, digging in my heels. But she was stronger, and I was forced to hop in her direction as I struggled against her weight.
“Don’t make a scene.”
I let myself go slack. Conversation around me became muffled, like I was underwater. I fell silent, feeling myself get pulled into the breezeway, and when I looked back to find Dad, there were too many people behind me, blocking my view. My mind swirled as I let Mom steer me down the aisle and into a window seat, where I pressed my forehead to the chilly oval until I saw a tall figure with ink-black hair and plaid pants standing behind the plate glass of the terminal. Dad looked like he was in a television. I lifted my hand, but he didn’t see me. He didn’t move from his spot as the plane pushed back from the gate. I kept my eyes locked on him until he became smaller and smaller, until the plane turned away.
During the flight, Mom blew smoke at the folding tray in front of her and picked at her copper-colored nail polish with trembling hands. She seemed to be crumbling. I snuck peeks at her while pretending to draw in the coloring book the stewardess had given me. Mom still looked pretty to me, but her skin seemed grayer under the overhead light. At home, she was careful about the way she looked, and never went outside without first covering her freckles with beige cream and putting shimmery blue shadow on her eyes. I liked to watch her ritual, and all the tools that came with it. A blow-dryer to make her short curly hair stand up higher, fat brushes to put pink powder on her cheeks, and that clamper thing she squeezed on her eyelashes to curl them up. Sometimes she’d let me choose her lipstick from dozens of tubes she kept in the bathroom. The final touch was a cloud of smelly spray all around her head, to make her hair stay in place.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a little chubby, as long as you have a pretty face,” she’d say, threading gold wire hoops through her ears. She never left the house with out her movie-star sunglasses, two big brown circles as large as drink coasters.
Mom had some rolls around her middle but her legs were thin, so she covered her shape with dresses that had busy designs and loud colors. The dresses stopped above her knee, which made her look like a bouquet of flowers on two stems. I thought she was beautiful. My favorite part of watching her get dressed was when she picked out her shoes. She kept a row of heels in a perfect line on her closet floor, toes facing in, in every color of the rainbow. I wasn’t allowed to touch her things, but I admired her footwear, imagining myself perched high like a lady, strutting down the sidewalk to my grown-up job. Once she’d put on her outfit, she’d turn left and right in the mirror and ask me if she looked fat. I never thought so, but she always looked disappointed when she looked at her reflection.
At least once a month, she got dressed up to visit the Vanderbilt mansion. The towering limestone “summer cottage” had seventy rooms and looked like six houses pushed together, perched on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic. It was a five-minute drive from our apartment, and we entered through the wrought-iron gates, Mom’s dress rustling softly and Charlie perfume wafting behind her, as she pushed Matthew in the stroller past topiaries clipped to scientifically precise triangles, the pea gravel pathway crunching underfoot. We never went inside for the tour, but we had our favorite bench where Mom had a view of the top floor windows. My brother picked pebbles out for me to throw into the garden fountains as she conducted surveillance on the windows, hoping for a glimpse of one of the heirs who reportedly lived in the attic apartment.
Mom was absolutely engrossed during her mansion visits, as if familiarizing herself with opulence so that she’d be ready when prosperity came for her. She read books with Pygmalion plots about regular people being plucked from obscurity for greatness, gravitated toward movies about unearthing hidden treasure, and game shows of all kind. Mom was a dreamer without a plan, and as the years piled up without her Cinderella transformation, she felt more and more cheated out of the grandeur she was entitled to, and increasingly disappointed in my father for not providing it. She was forever waiting for life to happen to her and becoming more befuddled as to why it was not.
The plane made a little hop as it encountered some weather, and I snuck another glance Mom’s way. She appeared drowsy, her eyes open but no expression behind them. Wadded Kleenex collected in her lap, and black makeup ran down her cheeks, smudged in places where she’d tried to wipe it away so it looked like bruises. Every once in a while she gave out a long, body-slumping sigh that sounded like all the air was coming out of her. I patted her arm, and she put her hand over mine absentmindedly. I wanted to ask why Dad wasn’t coming with us, but knew I wouldn’t get an answer. Even though her body was in the chair next to mine, her mind was somewhere else. I flipped the metal cover of the ashtray embedded in the armrest—open, closed, open, closed—hoping the noise would become so irritating that she’d have to talk, to tell me to knock it off.
If only Mom would say something. I wanted her to cry, or shout, or throw something to send me a signal that things were still the same. But she was eerily quiet, and that was terrifying. At least with an outburst, I could tell what was on her mind. Silence was not her style, so that meant something serious was happening. Dread dripped in the back of my throat, an acrid taste like burned walnuts.
I tried to keep a vigil over her, but eventually the engine hum inside the cabin lulled me to sleep. I dreamed there was a small reservoir in the floor of the plane near my feet, with a long lever protruding from it. I unfastened Matthew’s seat belt and shoved him into the hole and pulled the lever. Hissing steam rose, and