April 08, 2012 05:20:19 PM
:

Carol

:

the gifts

~one~

on their last trip together to the beach, her mother was unfathomably cheerful the whole week, bringing home bits of flotsam from her morning walks along the shore.

one day she fished an odd chunk of stuff out of her bucket: a little gadget with two screws and one moving part, waterlogged, streaked with algae, a small ruffle of barnacles embellishing one edge.

on the low stone wall along the patio her mother made her new treasure the centerpiece of ephemeral still-lifes with shells, feathers, sea oats, bits of colored glass. “look.” she said, toggling the piece of wood back and forth. “open, close. open, close. inhale, exhale.”

“look,” she said. “open, close. give, receive.”

as they packed their bags, her mother, wordless, eyes shining, gave it to her. another piece of junk for the junk shelf.

~two~

he gave her a heart-shaped rock: quartz, shot through with bits of schist that looked, to her, like bullet wounds.

of course she didn’t mention it, for fear of breaking their unspoken rule to be freakishly upbeat for the few hours a month they spent together.

he called her “angel”. he murmured words she yearned to hear as a girl, but now, at this late stage, they grated. when she tried to describe her collapse, he cut in with ”every breakdown is a breakthrough.” and when she was alone, again, for the holidays, he said, “you know you’re never really alone.” it all sounded too much like the trite sayings on the little paper tags of tea bags to let it in.

she needed something odd, something found, to give in return for that sad stone heart. so she brushed the dust off her mother’s funny gizmo from the sea and tossed it in her overnight bag.

he swung the little lever back and forth, remarked on the barnacles. he knew what it was, but not what it was called. “a carpenter uses it,” he said. “to make things.”

she did not want to know what it was called.

soon she found that she drifted off to sleep with the lost gift on her mind, and woke up the same. for all she knew, she dreamed of it too, but she had long lost her knack for catching dreams.

it was simply too silly to ask about. she mentioned it once, lightly, as they lay on the fake-hard hotel bed. “it’s on my dashboard,” he said.

she tried to picture his dashboard: grimy, strewn with old dead parking stubs, faded ribbons and cast-off medals from his sons’ track meets. perhaps, god forbid, one of those toxic cardboard pine trees swung from his rearview mirror.

she tried to tell him about the back and forth, the inhaling and exhaling, the strange exuberance. her mother’s impending death flitted in and out like the junco on the finial at the end of her back stairs.

“yeah,” he sighed, staring at the ceiling. “we are the stories we tell.”

she wondered if he drank peppermint tea, or chamomile.

she wanted it back.

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