“Charley?”
What I remember most, hiding on that back porch, is how fast my breath left me. One second I had been at the refrigerator, dragging through the motions, the next second my heart was racing so fast I thought no amount of oxygen could sustain it. I was shaking. The kitchen window was at my back, but I didn’t dare look through it. I had seen my dead mother, and now I had heard her voice. I had broken parts of my body before, but this was the first time I worried I had damaged my mind.
I stood there, my lungs heaving in and out, my eyes locked on the earth in front of me. As kids, we’d called this our “backyard,” but it was just a square of grass. I thought about bounding across it to a neighbor’s house.
And then the door opened.
And my mother stepped outside.
My mother.
Right there. On that porch.
And she turned to me.
And she said, “What are you doing out here? It’s cold.”
Now, I don’t know if I can explain the leap I made. It’s like jumping off the planet. There is everything you know and there is everything that happens. When the two do not line up, you make a choice. I saw my mother, alive, in front of me. I heard her say my name again. “Charley?” She was the only one who ever called me that.
Was I hallucinating? Should I move toward her? Was she like a bubble that would burst? Honestly, at this point, my limbs seemed to belong to someone else.
“Charley? What’s the matter? You’re all cut.”
She was wearing blue slacks and a white sweater now — she was always dressed, it seemed, no matter how early in the morning — and she looked to be no older than the last time I had seen her, on her seventy-ninth birthday, wearing these red-rimmed glasses she got as a present. She turned her palms gently upward and she beckoned me with her eyes and, I don’t know, those glasses, her skin, her hair, her opening the back door the way she used to when I threw tennis balls off the roof of our house. Something melted inside of me, as if her face gave off heat. It went down my back. It went to my ankles. And then something broke, I almost heard the snap, the barrier between belief and disbelief.
I gave in.
Off the planet.
“Charley?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
I did what you would have done.
I hugged my mother as if I’d never let her go.
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