Every Monday, Meri started again: even though she had cleaned the house on Saturday, she cleaned it again on Monday morning, after Robert and the kids had left for the day. Every week started out with an explosion of energy. Robert rushed out the door by seven. He’d jump in the shower, gulp down coffee, grab his briefcase and tablet and charge to catch the 7:26 to the city. The kids were their own storm — Mondays and all days. Robert Jr. got up at 6:15 a.m., not because he had to — not at all, but to emulate his father. Bobby was only nine years old, but he insisted on order. Being late to anything: school, soccer, Cub Scouts or a playdate — especially a playdate — would send him into fits of frustration. Before the meltdowns, Meri was always struck by how much he was like his dad, whose agitation from the family’s weekend chaos only mellowed slightly by Sunday night with a little bourbon, until the cycle started over.
But there was never a reset or a pause. The family churned through the weeks, constantly moving, full of the usual busyness of well-lived lives. They are just being kids, she would say, to keep the peace when the chaos irritated Robert into sulking, although the noise would get to her too. Meri didn’t often challenge her husband, but she allowed her silence to appear as tolerance, as acceptance, a level of easy-goingness that she didn’t actually possess. She knew her outward patience shamed Robert into annoyed apologies, even though she might have been yelling at her children to clean up their messes, turn down the T.V. or pick up their shoes on Friday evening, before Robert got off the train at 7:30 p.m. herself.
Nicole and Caitlin were both middle schoolers now — not that they ever talked to each other in school, with a whole year between them. They were tall, lanky girls, whose long hair gathered in taut ponytails that swung with their strides. Nicole would be heading to high school next year, having never acknowledged her younger sister in middle school, while Caitlin navigated the school hallways like an only child.
Girls, Meri shook her head. She was in the basement now, pulling laundry from the washer. She had seen the weather prediction the night before, and she decided she had to make the most of this first warm spring day. She’d tried getting a head start on the dirty clothes last night but forgot and left them damp in the machine overnight. Outside, the flowers had already started to bud and the meteorologist on the eleven-o’clock news last night had nearly jumped out of her blue dress with excitement: it had been a relentless, dreary winter, a delayed spring, but finally, finally the air would lose its chill this week. The sunshine outside had already begun to warm the glass in the window. Meri held one of Nicole’s t-shirts to her nose and inhaled the scent of artificial flowers.
What brand is this? she wondered, the name barely out of reach — which would have seemed odd if she’d thought about it, because she had used the same brand every week throughout her marriage. She forgot her question and tossed the wet clothes in the dryer and set its timer.
Meri climbed the steps with the laundry basket. She forgot many things these days, and sometimes she realized it. Thoughts, memories, ideas — all cycled through the mind, she knew.
At thirty-nine years old, she was old enough to know that the harder you tried to remember something, the more elusive it was, but if you changed course, did something else, it was the darndest thing: all thoughts, memories and ideas came back, as if the mind was not a container but more like a water wheel, turning buckets of water over and around, dipping back into the stream before coming back up. But now she knew there wasn’t time to wait for the cycle to come around again. In quiet moments, she tried to gather feelings and memories like bouquets of rare flowers, desperate to retain their exquisite ordinariness. On Mondays, before she attended to her own work, Meri cleaned the upstairs bathroom — another task that waited until the kids were at school, after dirty uniforms, muddy cleats and damp socks were discarded from the weekend’s games. It was late April, and just getting warm, and soccer was still on through the month. She noted that the fall season had extended infinitely through the year, through their lives. Bobby was on the in-house team and Caitlin was doing travel this year. But maybe not for long, Meri thought. Caitlin was beginning to show signs of withdrawing. She knew her middle child. When Caitlin was losing interest or when things were getting too competitive and she didn’t see a clear place for herself or a reason to work at it, she started to pull back. She’d done it with the figure skating lessons at the ice arena with Nicole. Meri had spent years frozen, alongside the rink, watching the girls jump and braid their skates in and out on the ice. She would hold her breath and say a little prayer, crossing herself like a Catholic, so that St. Michael might keep them from losing their balance and slamming their heads on the ice or that some other child wouldn’t plow into them. The hockey players sometimes tore out on the figure skating rink to warm up, avoiding the hockey rink to keep the ice pristine until game time. Reckless and wild, they threaded through the girls practicing footwork and swizzles, their abrupt hockey stops making snow within seconds and their armored bodies crashing into the rounded walls.
Meri shook her head and wondered why she was thinking about hockey players. Her girls had stopped figure skating lessons years ago.
That’s right, she thought. The girls don’t skate anymore. But that was also her loss. One of the best parts of being a parent, she’d come to realize, was introducing the kids to the activities she’d done as a girl. Meri loved trying them all out with the kids: ice skating, skiing, hiking, horseback riding, Girl Scouts — and even those she hadn’t tried as a child: Boy Scouts, soccer and musical instruments — clarinet (Caitlin), guitar (Bobby), flute (Nicole). Her favorite activity remained ice skating, though. On certain mornings, after Robert and the kids had left for the day and before she settled down to edit for a few hours, she’d drive to the ice arena, lace up her scuffed, white skates, and glide on the ice free and alone.
Those were good times, Meri thought. A little lonely, but good. Then she looked down.
She had a clean shirt in her hands, and she was standing over the bed, where piles of clean shirts and pants had come from the dryer. She had already started a stack of folded clothes for each person who lived in her house. She held the shirt to her nostrils and inhaled the detergent scent as if it were the first time, trying to remember it for always. Meri wasn’t sure how much she’d remember, but she wasn’t going to take any chances. Where are they? Her thoughts drifted back to the kids. Why are they not here? Meri looked around her bedroom and saw the framed photos of her children. Pictures of each child surrounded a larger one with the three children grinning together. The photograph of them was six years old. Why was it so hard to get them next to each other for a photo? Nicole was always off with friends. Bobby couldn’t ever sit still. Oh, and Caitlin. She never liked to, either.
After Meri finished folding the laundry, she started down the stairs, gripping the wooden railing. She paused. She thought she heard something. Voices. Like the kids’ voices, older now, elusive. She strained to hear the sounds again. Nothing. Meri began to move again, silently, just in case. Her clothes felt loose against her skin and her slippers made no noise on the stairs. She felt the wood beneath her palm as she slid her hand on the railing with each step, and she promised herself she would remember how this felt. When she reached the downstairs hall, she let her slippers slide a little beneath her and pretended she was skating again. Like a little girl, she laughed. Not that long ago, when the medication couldn’t subdue the pain anymore, she would have been terrified to move like this. Today, it did not matter. Meri felt the pain, was aware of its presence, of course, but even that had changed: it felt more like an echo, a memory of pain; she could glide and laugh too — a little. She felt muted bursts of joy like the way the sun beams through spaces in the clouds.
Meri remembered what she was doing and headed to the makeshift office that led off the kitchen. There had been a mudroom here first. In the years since they’d lived here, the door that used to lead to the backyard had been taken off and the mudroom moved — boxed outward into a quasi-office/play space. When the kids were young, she could keep an eye on Nicole and Caitlin, and later, Bobby, while she cooked or cleaned up in the kitchen. She couldn’t actually edit the medical articles she was sent monthly from the managing editor at the trade journal if the kids were playing in the room. And now it was a big kids’ space with a ping pong table and a Wii that no one ever used. But Meri still had her little office area, her own space, which she was desperate to have after the kids came. At the time, she’d felt she needed something to remind her of her autonomy, something for her alone. Robert got to go out to work every day, but she had opted to stay home to raise their children, a choice her own mother had rolled her eyes at.
“You know you’re setting back the women’s movement fifty years,” her mother had said when Meri had told her the plan.
“It’s my choice.” Meri was eight months pregnant with Nicole. “That’s what the seventies gave us: a choice.”
“It won’t feel like a choice once you’re in it.” Stubborn and oversensitive from raging pregnancy hormones, Meri waited until her mother had left to cry. As it turned out, her mother had been right. Not that they’d ever spoken about Meri’s decision to stay home again. Only Robert could see her fragility after the babies came, a kind of vulnerability that she didn’t know words for and that shot doubt through everything she thought she was before the children came.
The sound of voices again. It’s them, she thought. My babies. Meri thought she heard a man’s voice. A man’s voice telling them to let go. Time to go now. Let go. Wait! she wanted to tell them. Wait! There is so much more I wanted to show you.
Meri was about to sit down at her desk and pick up the manuscript she’d been working on — a doctor’s narrative about end-of-life patients and something about palliative care. Ironic, she thought. Then Meri decided instead to put the kettle on. Since she’d started editing this piece, she had the persistent feeling that she’d already read it through. In fact, every time she returned to it, she had the vague sense that she had been reading it over and over, like a déjà vu that wouldn’t let up. Some tea, she decided, to stop the cycle of her thoughts, yes. Something with a little sugar in it. She laughed but this time her laugh felt more forced. Oh boy. I’m really living now!
The laugh came with a price: the sudden sharpness in her lungs made her wince. Meri grasped a nearby kitchen chair to steady herself. Although she concentrated on recovering her breath, the air barely filled her lungs.
Meri glanced at the clock over the stove. It was nearly eleven o’clock. Oh no. Already? she thought. The pain dulled again — still present as always, but not stabbing. The pain no longer stayed in her center, the abdominal area. Now it rose like the ways currents in a stream do, sometimes moving steadily through her and sometimes swelling and pushing past its boundaries, flooding, as if after a storm, everything on the parameters. The medicine helped to keep it . . .
Keep it breathable, she thought, almost.
Carefully, Meri brought her tea to the desk. Above the space where she kept her laptop, a large window opened to a view of the backyard. Beneath the window, a stone patio extended from the backdoor. White outdoor furniture that matched the house was arranged in an expectant way, ready to accommodate guests who’d stopped visiting once they all knew she would not get better. No one wanted to impose or say the wrong word. The final word, this.
The yard was simple and neat: a green swing set stood unmoving at the back. The grass behind the house filled a neat rectangle bordered by a high white fence—a fence she insisted that Robert put in when the kids were small. At the time, she’d used the same logic as she’d had when they built the playroom. Meri had told Robert that she wanted to be able to do the dishes and see the kids playing. She’d thought if she had to tend something on the stove, she would be able to look away from the children for a few seconds and they would still be safe. But she never looked away. In fact, Meri couldn’t remember if she’d ever stayed in the kitchen while the kids played out there; she remembered now the warm spring days when she sat at the edge of the sandbox while Bobby piled sand into old plastic cups and pails and the girls played on the swings they’d put up when Nicole was five.
The best days were the snow days, though. Robert would still hurry off to work. He wouldn’t even wait until the driveway was plowed. He couldn’t wait. The city doesn’t have snow days, he’d say. On those days, Meri would feel cozy. There was nowhere to go. Even if she had wanted to, she would have to wait until the snowplow guy showed up with his truck to clear the driveway or later, when the kids were older, and all four of them would get out there and shovel — a job that took twice as long than when she would do it alone, no matter how old the kids got.
Once they completed a 1000-word puzzle during a snowstorm, a detailed, maddening puzzle. Card games were big one winter, she remembered. Five Hundred Rummy. She couldn’t remember the rules now, or the point of the game, for that matter. Meri was tempted to look up the rules on Google, but she forgot to search as soon as she opened her laptop. The screen felt brighter than usual, and today her eyes couldn’t bear the artificial light. There wasn’t much time to waste, she knew. Besides, there was a flicker of light, a different kind of light, she’d noticed earlier — she couldn’t remember when she first noticed it: this morning? Yesterday? She wasn’t sure. But — there it was again. It happened a second time, after she promptly closed the laptop.
From her peripheral vision, Meri saw a gold glow. It pulsed more than flickered, more like a heartbeat than a flash, and it felt more familiar to her than the sun — and certainly more elusive. Meri’s stomach growled. She realized she had forgotten to eat. The tea she had brought into the office sat next to the laptop, cooled and untouched. That’s odd, she thought when she glanced again at the clock. Hours had passed, but she could swear it had only been a minute or two. As she walked back into the kitchen, her cell phone rang. Quickly, she turned back to pick it up but the caller had hung up; the missed call had come from a number she didn’t recognize.
Then, something else caught Meri’s attention from outside the window. A figure, a movement. She couldn’t be sure what. Elusive as the flickers of light. She dropped the phone and squinted her eyes to see better. Nothing. She only saw the magnolia tree that stopped growing years ago and the white fence that enclosed the yard.
The pain was getting louder, as Bobby used to say when he was really little, and Meri realized it was probably time to take more painkillers. The pain had its own will; it moved through her on its own rhythm, somehow seeming separate from the body it had spread through, no longer emanating from the sear of its original place, but loosened, streaming and churning everywhere inside her.
Meri steadied herself against the counter. She breathed in. She decided she would wait on the meds. She’d wait as long as she could. The pain made her feel embodied. For this reason, she would go a little longer. The kids would be home soon — in an hour or so, she guessed — and she wanted to feel it all. She could pick up her editing later, maybe tonight, when they were online or gaming or whatever. The great thing about having older kids was that they could occupy themselves — she and her mom friends sometimes marveled about the freedoms they enjoyed once the babies had gotten older and able to do things on their own. Still, even as Nicole, Caitlin, and Bobby might disappear into their rooms or their tablets, Meri always listened with one ear, sensitive to the excitement, the tears, the movement — the very breath — of her children.
Meri could hear water running. Did someone leave the faucet on? When she checked the kitchen sink it was dry, but the sound continued, steadily coursing through an unseen channel.
Where the heck is that coming from?
Her mind abandoned the question. She thought about when she and Robert were dating, when it seemed inevitable that marriage was the endgame. Before meeting him, Meri hadn’t considered getting married or what it would mean to be someone’s wife, or especially, someone’s mother. Robert was still devoted to her, she knew, despite his physical absences and his emotional distances — the results of nearly sixteen years of commuting to the city. She was the only woman he could marry, and he was the only man she would ever love. She knew what the wedding vows meant, finally, after all these years: through sickness and in health. Before now, she’d thought these were only code for all the inevitable little irritations and disappointments, the tensions and clashes that happened in marriages — most of which, for Meri and Robert, arose once they had kids. They both had different ideas about how to raise them.
But, she thought, we managed, better than most. Didn’t we? Her fondness for her husband was no longer the exhilarating romantic love she felt when they first met. Of course. Although she seldom thought about it now, she realized that was probably true for him too. Till death do us part, she thought. It sounds so serious, so final. Not like this, not at all. The idea made her smile to herself. Then Meri thought, I have to remember to tell him. Won’t Robert be surprised to know.
A warm, golden light made Meri look up. This time, there was no flicker. The light seemed to come from the front door, but when she walked through the hall and opened it, the brightness had succumbed to the light of an ordinary spring day. The mail had come, and she gripped the iron railing while she gingerly stepped down the brick stairs outside the house to retrieve it. She noticed that pink and purple buds now dotted the azaleas. Meri wondered when the flowers would bloom. She had the sudden feeling that she couldn’t wait to see them.
Privately, the azaleas had always been her favorite. One autumn, Robert had hired a gardener to arrange tulips and gardenias, but it was wasted money, Meri had thought at the time. Despite the wonder of the orchestrated bulbs, when the azaleas opened that spring, their bold symphony, a floral Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, overpowered the curated garden.
I’m going to miss the flowers, she thought now. Oh, I will so miss the azaleas.
Meri collected the mail. Once back inside her house, she rifled through the envelopes and catalogs: bills, notices — all the usual mail that arrived these days, every day. Then she noticed a postcard addressed to her. The front side was a picture of a wide, full stream, running right to left. Some white curls erupted over underwater rocks. Beside the stream stood a large evergreen, with branches that stretched over the current. Other trees blanketed the water on either side, but none protected it like the evergreen. Meri stared at the image and tried to remember where she had seen it before.
She turned the postcard over again and read her name and address. The message only read: Always. Meri studied the handwriting. She knew she recognized it but couldn’t quite place it. It vaguely resembled her grandmother’s — which was probably the only handwriting she would ever remember because of its elaborate curlicues at the end of every sentence. Here, the ink swirled off the last letter, and the “S” in “Always” appeared as if it were an extension, almost like a hand that might reach out to the viewer. This observation made Meri laugh out loud, but that made her wince in terrible pain and she dropped the card. She fell to her hands and knees and gasped for breath. She didn’t realize it at first, but one of her slippers had come off and the little bobby pin that held back a new lock of hair had fallen to the floor.
I can’t stay here, she thought. The kids can’t see me like this.
Aware only of her breath, Meri had no strength to move at first. She felt a chalky taste that reminded her of the box of hot cocoa Robert had given to her on her birthday one year. They were dating, and the little hot water heater in her dorm room was broken, so they licked their fingers and dipped them in the cocoa powder. Robert, my love. Kids, really, when they met in college, with no idea what waited for them in the years ahead. She remembered Nicole’s tantrums when Caitlin was born — those sleepless nights caused not by the new baby, but by her firstborn’s jealousy and insistence to sleep in their bed. She remembered Bobby’s soccer goals — every time, he’d glance over at her right after, to see if she was watching.
My son, she thought now, I wouldn’t dream of looking away.
Meri felt a sharp jab, and the pain folded her in half. She grasped her stomach with one hand. The origin. With her eyes unfocused, she stared at the floor beneath her.
The children, my precious babies, will be OK. Robert too.
She heard the hallway clock strike the hour but she could not count the chimes. Meri no longer felt the hardness of the wood under her knees. She breathed in deeply, pushed with the other hand, and lifted herself off the floor. She was lighter than she’d ever felt. Her hand released her stomach, and she stood.When Meri opened the front door this time, the azaleas had burst into a chorus of pink and purple. She walked outside, not noticing that both slippers were left behind in the hallway. Golden light radiated from all things — the flowers, the road, the trees and the sky. The scent of the blooming azaleas was getting louder, louder and it reminded her of the ways her children’s hair smelled when they were little. She felt the softness of their skin, and the rhythm of their voices moved through her. The taste of sweet cocoa on her tongue. A small, soft palm touched her hand, and she stepped into the current of the stream. Meri heard her grandmother say her name, Always, into the churn of the water wheel.
Heather Ostman is a professor of English at SUNY Westchester Community College, where she also serves as director of the Humanities Institute. She has published ten books on literary criticism and writing pedagogy and one novel, The Second Chance Home for Girls.
ELEVENTH HOUR LITERARY 