It was not a natural death.
That was the phrase she kept using, how she chose to index it in her memory. And how could I blame her?
Mom didn’t speak again for a long time, and not once did she look at me. Her thoughts were outside the passenger window, where she could watch them from a distance.
I’d never known anything to upset my mom to the point that she met it with silence. But still, I pressed.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
Soft, almost animalistic, came a little noise of apprehension.
I was relentless. “Please?”
We were only a few minutes from home, but the short road was endless. A moment ago we’d been talking about secrets, or more accurately, I’d been complaining about secrets–how I resented them, how rooted they felt within our family. I’d reacted in my usual way to my own pent-up frustration: by seething, releasing pressure through my death grip on the steering wheel. Even if it was a diffuse anger, even if I’d never meant to condense and locate it directly at her, my temperature was high, and I wanted Mom to feel my heat.
Luckily, and it’s a testament to her beauty as a human being, my mom has always understood my volatility better than I ever have. She absorbed that energy and stifled it with calm, as only she can do. But of course, just minutes from home, I had to heat things up again. I had to have my answer.
A few more seconds of silence and I grew certain that we were done, that Pandora’s box would stay closed (and if I were being rational, maybe I would have been thankful to let it go). Then that little sound again, what I assumed to be Mom’s exhale of relief, the final click of the lock. But instead she says “No. You should hear it.”
It was not a natural death–how unnatural, though, I never knew.
The answer, the long-awaited explanation, appeared to me gradually, indistinctly. It drifted into my consciousness less like a precise thought and more like a weather of thinking, like an atmosphere. It felt like breathing in a foreign air, unfamiliar because, until then, I had been fortunate enough to only know it in the abstract, to have only heard or used it in reference to someone else, to have felt it move in a world separate from my own, in the realm of fiction or a parallel universe – I heard “murder.”
And then, having had my answer, having forced it from her, I knew without having to look what was pressing against Mom’s eyes as she focused them harder than ever outside the window. Having apparently been satisfied, having been vindicated in my war against secrecy, I was met not with triumph or relief but an immediate freeze–an emotion that could only be felt and never adequately supported by the puny “I’m sorry” I trotted out as I pulled into our driveway.
I twisted out the key and the car exhaled heavily, as if grateful to be at rest. I turned to face my mom for the first time, hearing the car’s contented hum louder than ever in our silence. Nothing was moving but everything felt on edge, waiting to be pushed over by the next breath.
For the first time I did not wait for the right words. I did not try to translate exactly what I was feeling, what I was thinking, my shame and regret and my sadness at finally understanding.
I reached over and hugged her.
Talking Leaves 