I open my eyes and Rick Springfield is staring directly at me.
This can’t be happening.
I do not move my head. I shift my eyes right.
Hi, Madonna. Hi, Duran Duran.
I shift my eyes left.
My high school and college mortarboards, along with my high school cheerleading pom-poms and college sorority formal photos, hang over a mammoth cork bulletin board crammed with hundreds of pins from bands and bars that I used to wear on my jean jackets. Stacked beside that are wall shelves stuffed with framed photos from my school days along with awards and trophies as well as a pink boom box.
I scan my eyes back across the room.
There are faded squares on my too-pink walls, missing moments from my life, edited scenes that can be deleted from my bedroom but not my memory.
My neck aches. I am still too exhausted to move after a three-day drive filled with all the angst of Thelma and Louise’s getaway. I pull the covers over my head and try to shut out the world.
“Good morning!”
My mom flings open my bedroom door. She is carrying a cup of coffee, which she sets down on my little nightstand. She walks over and pulls open the curtains.
“It snowed last night!” she says. “Michigan is welcoming you home in grand style.”
The room explodes in blinding white. So blinding, in fact, I have to squint. It’s like the winter equivalent of the desert sun. My eyes try to adjust. When they do, my mother is seated next to me.
“How did you sleep?” she asks.
“I’m a fifty-year-old woman who just drove across the country after having a meltdown on TV. I’m back in my parents’ house, in my childhood bedroom, sleeping on a twin mattress that obviously has a box spring made of nails. You do the math, Mother.”
She scrunches her face as if she is counting. “So, we’re calling ourselves fifty now, are we?”
She bursts out laughing and shakes my leg under the blanket. “I’m just teasing. Here.” She reaches for my coffee and hands it to me. “Black with a touch of cream. Just the way you like it.”
“Thanks.”
I take a sip of my coffee—my mom can still make better coffee than I can—and look at my mother, really for the first time since I arrived home once again.
I was so exhausted, depressed and stressed from my cross-country drive from Palm Springs—it literally started snowing the minute I crossed the Michigan state line—that I dragged my overnight bag into my mom’s house, hugged her and fell into bed.
My mother is already in full makeup.
Let me set the record straight: my mother is quite a pretty woman. Her features are not delicate like a desert rose teacup, rather she is more Katharine Hepburn, regal and strong. She could get by with a little mascara and blush, but she still paints her face as if it is a blank canvas and she wants to reimagine the entire thing. And yet it works. My mother was ahead of the curve: she let her hair go gray long before millennials were coloring it to look cool. She wears it short, in a longer-style bob, a beautiful bang swept across her forehead.
My mom has been in full makeup her entire life. My college friends were once taking about what our earliest childhood memory was, and I told them mine was seeing my mother in her makeup. When I was just out of the womb.
In fact, her face was resplendent in the first photos she took while holding me in the maternity ward as a newborn.
Ironically, my mother is the least vain person I’ve ever known. As a nurse, and now as a part-time hospice nurse, nothing bothers her, not blood or any bodily fluid. As a nurse, she worked the floor, ER and ICU, before becoming an administrator at Cherry Capital Hospital. When my father was diagnosed with cancer, my mother gave up everything to help care for him. She stopped wearing makeup, she stopped telling jokes, she just stopped. Over the course of a few months, however, she became amazed by the care, compassion, professionalism and empathy the hospice workers provided my father every single day. Within a month of his death, she was back at work, this time for hospice.
I once asked her how she could go back to work. “How could I not?” she asked.
I look at my mom, who is staring at me adoringly.
I also once asked my mom when I was little why she always wore so much makeup.
“Maybe it’s my own superhero mask.” She winked with a big, mascaraed lash.
Maybe, I think, it’s why Sonny Dunes does, too.
My mother is already dressed in scrubs, her name tag pinned to her chest: PATTY ROSE.
We are a family that was shattered by horror and death, masking taped again by hope and faith, our broken pieces Krazy Glued together with copious amounts of love, hope and dreams before being reassembled into something that once again resembled a family. We were reassembled by the strength of my mother, though perhaps not reassembled in exactly the right emotional pattern.
We are also a mishmash of a family made up of big personalities and odd quirks.
I mean, even our names. My mother is Patty Rose, named after her mother and grandmother. My father was John. My sister, Joncee, was a mix of my dad’s name and his mother’s name, Cecilia. And me? After my mom and my aunt, Amber.
If we were a song, we’d be a mash-up on Glee. If we were dinner, we’d be goulash.
Now, only two ingredients remain.
“It’s good to have you home,” my mom says. “I missed you on Christmas Day.”
My heart pings.
“I’m sorry. I had so many loose ends to tie up. Packing, getting my house ready to rent, saying goodbye to friends, last holiday parties…”
My mom nods. She’s not a good liar, but she knows a really bad liar when she hears one, and she knows I’m lying. I haven’t done Christmas here in years. When my dad was alive, I used to grit my teeth and come back every few years, but most of the time, I made them fly to visit me to celebrate Christmas in the desert, something my parents always considered downright apocalyptic.
“Sunny and seventy-five on Christmas?” my dad used to say. “Decorated cactus? It’s not right.”
I would nod and make all their favorites, and then take them for drinks at all the places Sinatra used to go. Retro bands would play Rat Pack Christmas music, and my dad would slowly chill. But my mom? She always wanted to be in Michigan.
I just couldn’t do it, I don’t say to my mom.
“Well, I have a couple of gifts still waiting under the tree,” she says. “We can open them when I get home. I have to go to work.”
“Really, Mom? It’s New Year’s Eve. I just got home. And you’re seventy-five and still working?”
My mom shakes my leg. My mother has always shaken my leg, as if to wake me from a trance. “I know it’s not how you imagined your life might go, but, as we well know, lives—especially ours—rarely go in the way we imagined.”
“But, Mom,” I start.
“Young lady,” she says, “and I use that moniker very ironically—” she stops to laugh at herself “—I didn’t know you were coming home until a few days ago, my job still makes me feel vital and worthwhile, and I do think a dying man takes precedence over your current woes, don’t you?”
She shakes my leg again for emphasis.
That’s my mom. Cuts right to the heart of the matter and then asks you to respond directly to your own selfishness.
“Attagirl,” she says. “I’ll be home at noon.” She stands. “Be dressed. And semicoherent. I love you.”
“Love you, too, Mom.”
I hear her pad down the stairs, the garage door opening and her monster SUV starting. When it is quiet, I stand, go to the window and watch her drive away.
Her headlights briefly illuminate the dark, icy bay, a tunnel of haunting light on the spot where our dock lies in the summer.
I hold my breath until I see the lights of my mom’s car fade away, and then I shut my eyes and count to fifty. I gasp for air. I rub the lock on the windowsill ten times, walk to the light switch and turn it on and off twenty-five times and then touch every object on my dresser.
Only then do I feel safe.
Without warning, I begin to cry.
The repetitive routine I had established and worked hard to overcome with years of counseling in the desert—the one I used after Joncee died whenever my parents left the house in the winter, the one I believed would somehow keep them safe from harm—has returned like a ghost you believed was no longer around to haunt your life. I don’t know how it started or why, but it did one night when my parents went out to dinner and left me alone, and I counted, over and over again, until they returned.
I continued this obsessive pattern in college until I finally moved far enough away that I believed the ghost couldn’t find me. My therapist said the fear would never go away, but I had to learn to control it, or it would rule my life.
Keep me alone.
But this winter ghost has always been around, haven’t you? Haunting me. Driving away men I’ve dated and loved. Putting distance between me and my family. Coldly turning away from potential friends who wanted to get a bit more than surface level with me. Forcing me to sever relationships.
All because it’s easier to be alone than it is to lose someone you love. Again.
I walk to my closet and yank out a sorority hoodie from my college days. I dry my eyes with the soft sleeves and then pull it on, along with some sweats and thick socks, wash my face and begin to head downstairs with my coffee.
Before I do, I turn back and make my bed. My dad was in the army, and the first thing he did every day was make the bed. He taught us to do the same.
“If you start your day by completing one task, it sets an intention,” he always preached. “You will go on to accomplish many every day.”
I still have my father’s accomplishment-driven nature, which is why I feel like such a colossal failure right now.
I behaved like an idiot. I lost my job. I moved back home.
Yes, Dad. I’ve accomplished a lot recently.
I start to head down the stairs but stop yet again.
I turn. I can hear my pulse beat in my temples. I put my hand on the doorknob and open it.
Joncee’s room.
I rarely went into her room after… I had tried to forget everything. I click on the lights and exhale.
I had forgotten that my parents turned her bedroom into a study when I was in high school.
“We have to move on in some way,” my mom had said.
“What are you going to study in here?” I had yelled at my parents. “Episodes of Matlock?”
But I had been secretly relieved to know that her ghost did not live just down the hall from me anymore. I couldn’t bear to see photos of us on her bulletin board, or see her little soccer outfit hanging off the closet door, or the little Charlie Brown Christmas tree she left decorated on her desk all year long.
I close the door, my heart still racing, and head down the big staircase. I pause on the landing. The entire two-story wall is filled with family photos. Unlike me, my mother has not removed a single picture. There are photos of the four of us, at Christmas, Easter, the Fourth of July, birthdays. Me and Joncee building a snowman and sledding.
How can she look at these every day?
I grab the banister to steady myself and when I reach the first floor, I turn again and look up the staircase.
How many times did we race up and down these stairs?
How many memories were stolen, how many photos not taken? No descents down the stairs in prom gowns, no surprise parties, no more wedding anniversaries, no more knocking over Dad’s golf bags stacked against the bottom steps.
The downstairs is one massive room: living, dining, kitchen all rolled into one. My mother was open-concept before open-concept was a thing. For years, this space was a playground. I could ride my wheelie bike round and round in circles without ever having to go outside. I head into the kitchen.
A huge floor-to-ceiling fireplace made of Michigan lake stones of various shapes, colors and sizes fills the living room. I run my hand over the stones, cool and smooth.
And that’s when I smell it before I even see it: a huge Christmas tree stands in the corner, soaring toward heaven. It’s a Fraser fir, of course, my father’s all-time favorite. We could never have any other kind for a Christmas tree.
“The perfect Christmas tree,” my dad used to always say as we decorated. He loved its dark green needles and upturned branches, which showcased our colorful, vintage ornaments. He loved that it didn’t drop its needles and that, when lit, the tree had an almost frosty underlying glow.
But we all loved the way it smelled, a fragrance that filled that house with a perfumed outdoorsy scent that could only be described as “Christmas.”
The glass ornaments—so fragile, so pretty—are tucked into every crevice of the tree.
How long did it take her to decorate this? I think. It must’ve taken days. Who does she do this for anymore?
I crane my neck and look up.
The star!
One year, Joncee and I were playing, and we rode our little bikes directly into the tree. It fell with a mighty crash, and my mother was nearly inconsolable as my father swept up broken ornaments that had been passed down by her mother and grandmother. Joncee and I retrieved the big pieces from the trash and made a giant patchwork star. It was like a Frankenstein ornament, but my mother thought it was beautiful.
She wept when we showed it to her, and placed it atop the tree every year since.
“It’s like our hearts,” she said. “Sometimes they get shattered, and we have to piece them back together and still shine for the world to see.”
You never realized how prophetic your words would be, did you, Mom?
I stare at the star.
Did she get it up there by herself? Did she cut the tree and drag it back here, or have a neighbor kid help? How little do I know about my mom’s life? How little does she know about mine?
In the kitchen, a halved grapefruit, lightly sugared, is waiting with a note. I smile.
Didn’t want you to miss California too much. Love, Mom.
I refill my coffee mug, grab the grapefruit and sit at the long counter where we used to do our homework and watch Mom make dinner.
I pluck a segment of grapefruit free with the serrated spoon and sigh when I taste it.
Tastes like sunshine.
The snow is still falling. The large deck that sits just off the kitchen facing the woods is thick with snow. The snow continues to pile up, and the railing looks as if it’s been covered in a foot of whipped cream. I know the outdoor table and chairs are out there only because I can still, barely, make out their shapes. My mother has bird feeders hanging from shepherd’s hooks, looped around barren tree branches, off of railings—essentially anyplace she can hang one—and she has recently scattered seed on the deck. Fat birds eat, occasionally fluffing their feathers in the snow. I stand and crack the patio door, not wanting to startle them.
Cardinals sit in the branches of the pines, shocking red among the dense green. Snow buntings, which my mom calls snowflakes, with their white plumage and rusty collars, forage for all the sunflower seeds, some fluttering into the snow for a winter bath while others tunnel into its cold depths for roosting warmth.
The scene is so unfamiliar to me, so strangely beautiful, that I can’t help but pull on my mother’s coat and boots that she has stationed by the door and walk onto the deck as if in a trance.
The world is hushed. Not just quiet, but silent. As silent as being atop Murray Peak. The only noise is the hiss of the snow and the occasional rustling of the birds. Flakes gather on my lashes. I close my eyes.
Stick out your tongue, I can hear my sister say. Eat some snow, it’ll make you grow.
It’ll make you look like a snowman, I’d tease.
Perfect!
I open my eyes and stick my tongue out. Flakes float onto it and quickly melt.
There is a rustling and then a plop. A squirrel is sitting in a branch of a Fraser fir watching me, snow falling from the tree’s limbs.
I race back inside, out of the snow, away from my memories.