The Cliff at the Edge of the Universe

“You are a damned liar.” My mom points her finger at my younger daughter. Seven years old and stick-insect small, she clings to my waist. 

Mom tugs at her wild, grey curls.  “She said I couldn’t play with her.” Mom’s fists clench like she is reliving some playground fight from long ago.

My kids look at each other. The younger one has Mom’s wiry limbs. The older one has her pointed elf ears. Their voices pitch high, “But we didn’t!”

Out here in my parents’ yard, the grass cools our bare feet. I keep my voice steady. “Are you sure you didn’t tell Mamaw that she can’t play with you?”

The girls nod. “She can play. We were playing statue-maker.”

The sun sinks behind palms over the California ocean. Mom grew up in Indiana, raised me in Michigan, and she scans the yard like someone switched landscapes on her. I try to hug her bony shoulder, but Mom elbows me away. “Go!”

Two crows squabble over a roost in the branches above. Mom turns to watch them. On the phone, before I came, she confided in me that the crows say terrible things to her and to the other birds. She narrows her eyes and leans down to my youngest, now wet-faced from tears. “You are a lying ass.” This kid once threatened to hit a bully with her own cast—but right now she just gapes.

My children remember the fun of earlier visits with my mom: making lemonade from backyard lemons, examining dragonfly wings under magnifying glasses. But they also remember Mamaw’s dire warnings: if you ride the escalator with your shoes untied, it will suck in your legs and crush your bones.  If you fight with your sister, we will make you sleep in the parking lot. 

My younger child squeezes my back. “I didn’t do it, right?” Her grandmother’s certainty has left her confused about what’s real.

“It’s like she’s stuck in a nightmare,” I try to explain.  The nightmare has been following her for years now, conjuring up false memories of rejection from everyone in our family. I get it.  Rejection reaches deep into the animal brain, the part of us bent on survival.

The summer my younger daughter turns ten, my family stops on a road trip to visit Husband’s childhood friend. They share memories of junior high. They joke about how she doesn’t remember much, not even that time he biked to her house and she cut his hair. Later in bed, Husband tells me it bothers him that she has forgotten. We hike above the lake together. She asks the girls about ski competitions, and I connect to her kids about their favorite books. She and Husband catch up.

Then they have an affair.  He leaves me for her.

I am twenty-two the summer I first introduce my parents to Fiancé. We all ride bikes out to Carpentaria. My parents have purchased silver road bikes, and it thrills me to see them zooming along. Dad rocks his shoulders side to side over the handlebars, and Mom sings Irving Berlin: It’s a lovely day today, and whatever you’re going to do, it’s a lovely day for doing it, that’s true.

I crank on a rusted mountain bike to keep up. Catching views of the ocean waves behind them, I feel like I might ride that bike up into the sky.  

We reach a restaurant and lean our bikes against the wall. Standing in line to order, Fiancé squeezes my hand. “Here goes,” I whisper to him. My parents have just met him, and we want to tell them we are getting married.  I want so badly for them to be happy for us, but I’ve never even introduced them to a boyfriend.

We eat fish tacos at one of the brightly painted picnic benches. Mom chats with Fiancé. “That book you left at my mother’s, the one by Herman Hesse—it’s complete crap, you know.”

Dad wipes salsa from his mustache and watches the pelicans in formation overhead. Like me, he knows Mom is just making conversation.  Fiancé does not know this. He laughs uncomfortably. “I agree. Steppenwolf is not his best book.”

Mom bites into her taco. “No, all of his books are trite and arrogant.”

Fiancé turns pale and changes the subject.

I’ve always loved the rough edges of my mom, even though I sometimes scraped myself on them. They make her more mine, not the same as all the other moms.

I take a deep breath. I have told my friends that this falling in love feels like running downhill through a meadow without worrying about rocks hidden under the wildflowers. “Mom, Dad, we are going to get married.”

Mom leaps up and hugs us.  “Oh!” She rocks us back and forth. “You two are going to have so much fun.”

And for a time, we did.

Months after Husband leaves, Mom and I sit together at her home on the same beige couch Husband sprawled out on for the past twenty-three years. He liked to pull books from my parents’ shelves and read through the afternoons. Sitting right here, I would run my hand through his thick hair.

An image pops up on the screen of my wedding day out in a field beneath Colorado foothills. Paw prints from our muddy dog speckle the skirt of my white dress.

 “He moved out,” I tell Mom, knowing she won’t understand my words. “He wants to be with someone else.”

Mom scrunches up her face, her eyes so deep now in her sockets.

“My husband,” I say.  “Remember?”

“Shit,” she says.

I don’t know if that means shit, I don’t remember, or shit, you are sad, or just shit in general.

The winter before the affair turns physical, our truck-top camper chugs up the road beyond the ski area through dumping snow.  We’re here for our older daughter’s freeride ski competition.  

We park down a backroad, make burritos, then play the card game Exploding Kittens. The kids thump their chests when they win. We pile into the bed lofted above the cab of the truck to read. The dogs sleep on the foot of the bed, groaning.  The older girl sleeps on the bench below. 

In the middle of the night, she climbs into bed with us.  “I got cold,” she says, wedging herself between me and Husband.  I have to lie on one side with my legs on top of the younger girl and the dogs, but we all puzzle in to fit. Outside the plastic window, the moon comes out and the clouds clear. Inside, I smell my pack around me.

The next day, we drive early to the ski area, and Husband chats with the competitors. He coaches both our girls himself and everyone else has a team and uniform jacket. It doesn’t matter because we have each other.

My younger daughter and I cruise to the base of the venue, nestled just below the treeline.  It’s snowing again, and we shiver, waiting.  I hear my older daughter’s name announced and stop breathing.  I chant inside my head, “Don’t fall.  Please don’t fall.” Somehow, she guides herself off each cliff, down every bony steep, and glides through the final gate, fists in the air.  Her sister tackles her.

Before she has caught her breath, Husband joins us.  We ski down towards the lodge for hot chocolate, weaving behind one another—a flock of birds in migration.

The visit before Mom calls my daughter an ass, I make quesadillas on the cast-iron skillet for the kids.  Mom hovers over me. “That’s too much cheese.”

“I’ve got it, Mom.”  Irritation edges my voice.

“Fine.” She marches out of the kitchen.

I finish the quesadillas and call in the kids from playing with my old block and marble maze.  “Where’s Mamaw?” they ask.

I call, “Mom, want to come eat with us?”

No answer.  I check the living room, the bathrooms, her bedroom.  “Mom?” I search the backyard. Nothing.

“Check the house again,” I tell the kids.

I run outside and up the steep hill of the sidewalk.  This is my fault.  I shouldn’t have snapped about the quesadillas.  I should have kept an eye on her. Months ago, she walked all the way to the beach, miles downhill, and forgot her way home.  Now, I’ve lost her.

The sun beats down.  My calling turns to crying. “Mommy!”  I run, peering past bushes and fences as if she might be hiding like a lost cat.

At last, I see her sitting on a low wall in someone’s yard with statues of children playing.  “Mom!” I run up to her.

She squints at me through the sunlight.  “Hi,” she says flatly.

“You can’t run away like that!” I take her shoulders and squeeze too hard. “You have to tell me if you’re going somewhere.”

She stares back at me, her eyes murky from cataracts, her eagle nose shiny with sweat.

I start to cry.  I lean over and hug her. “You scared me, Mom.”

I should have understood about running away.  Sometimes when I’m out running in the sage desert, I wish I could just keep going and never turn back.

One afternoon after Husband leaves, the sun warms away the autumn chill, and I run past the last of the Indian Paintbrush, bright red flames against the earth. My dog shadows my ankles, pausing to sniff for rabbits. I don’t want to go back to the house, empty on his day with the kids. Out here amid the smell of juniper, I crank up my music and pound uphill.

Near the ridge, an animal lopes through the brush.  Fox?  I grab the dog’s collar.  Bigger than fox.  Coyote. I stop to watch as coyote glides past sandstone boulders out of sight.

An hour after she calls my younger child an ass, Mom croaks out from the bedroom, “Help!”

I sprint to Mom’s room, kneel beside the bed, touch the blue veins in her forehead. She whispers, “I can’t breathe.”

I put my hand on her chest and feel the rapid rise and fall. Small gasps fail to bring in enough air.

Her eyes find mine. “My chest hurts.”

Behind me, my girls hold onto each other. “Is she going to be OK?”

 “Breathe with me,” I say. I touch the box of the Pacemaker under the skin of her chest.

“Call 911,” Mom whispers.  “I think I’m going to die.”

My voice sounds calm with the dispatch: symptoms, address, stay put.

I watch as the paramedics roll her from the bed, strap her to the stretcher, and carry her to the ambulance. Her face is white and her cheeks sunken as they pass me. She has her eyes closed, the delicate lids still.

In the hallway, my older child asks, “Is she going to die?”

“She’ll be OK.” But Mom’s body looks too weak to carry on in the world.

I want to remember all of the ordinary days with Mom from before she got sick--sitting on the kitchen cabinet eating home-baked cookies. My friend holds Mom’s old copy of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. She flips the yellow pages.

“He is absolutely brilliant,” Mom says. “And heart-wrenching.”

I hold Mom’s hand with one hand.  With the other, I trace her fingers, the knuckles swollen big as marbles from arthritis.

I let go to bite into a cookie, the chocolate chips still melty inside. 

“Hand me one,” Mom says.

My friend closes the tin and grins at me. “We’re not sharing. They’re all for us.”

Mom lets go of my hand, and smiling, she flips my friend off.  I gape.  I’ve never seen her do that before, but now she and my friend are laughing so much that our dog tilts his head at the noise.

Mom can’t laugh anymore. She can make appreciative sounds as the girls show her pictures on their phones. She can walk, hug, eat by herself, exclaim at flowers, clap at the end of orchestra pieces on the stereo.

She can curse.

Identity slips for her.

I still feel that same life force of my mother inside her body. But changed. 

Identity slips for me, too. Mom rarely uses my name anymore. Sometimes, she doesn’t know it’s me. The web of who I am as defined by those who care for me shifts as some strands break and others must take more weight.

I have learned too that “Wife” was a temporary status for me.  Ex-Husband and I work together. We have lived in the same small mountain town for nearly twenty years with his siblings and their kids nearby. People say our names together. Call our extended family a clan. I don’t know who I am in my town or my family.

Only when I am out running do I still feel fully myself, just another animal on the landscape.

That day Mom says she can’t breathe, we follow the ambulance to the hospital.  I read to the girls from Tuesdays at the Castle, a book with magic and dragons.

Mom rolls her head towards us. “What book?” She points to the cover. The fluorescent lights bare down.  Mom can’t read anymore.  She can decipher the words, but she can’t hold the meaning from the beginning of the sentence until she gets to the end.

Mom once said, “Reading is not a luxury. It’s a necessity.” I don’t remember when was the last time she took solace in reading a book.

She closes her eyes and sinks into the pillow. “More,” she says softly.  I read on.

The doctor comes in and talks to me as if Mom isn’t in the room with us. “She had a panic attack.”

I hold her hand, the skin soft as rose petals. She stares at him, frowning.

“This is common. It presents symptoms similar to a heart attack, but it’s not.” The doctor stands close to the door, like he wants to leave, like we already took too much of his time by calling the ambulance for our non-heart attack.

“So, she’s OK?” I say.

He nods and passes me some paperwork.

But she’s not OK.  She is afraid to die. She can’t read anymore.

Nothing happens all at once. Far before anyone knows Mom is sick, she loses my car in the parking lot. She has come to help me because I am on bedrest and pregnant.  She takes me to the pool to float in the water and goes to the grocery. But she doesn’t come back. Lap after lap. My arms start to ache. At last, she arrives.  Red-faced, she bends down to me in the pool.

“I’m so sorry. I forgot where I parked the car. Then I forgot what the car looked like.”

“It’s OK.” I make excuses for her. It’s a big parking lot. She has a lot on her mind.

Had I chosen to look, the end of my marriage was inside the stream of our lives from the day we met and even before that. Snowshoeing on our second date, Husband told me about his alcoholic father who left when he was in junior high. I told him how I had perceived my family job as caretaking everyone else’s feelings.

For me, however, two moments split my life into pieces.

The unicycle and the phone call.

One evening in August, my younger child holds one hand on the brick pillar of the high school entrance and balances on the unicycle seat. I stand four feet away with my arms out.

“Back up,” she says.

I step backward. She leans forward, pedals twice. Veers left. She Superman sprawls into a bush.  She’s laughing so hard she can barely speak.

“That bush is out to get me.” She shakes leaves from inside her shirt.

I take my position, this time sliding further from the bush. “You’ve got this.”

She pedals, wobbles, flails her arms, rights herself.  I jog backward along the sidewalk, and she keeps coming towards me. Five feet, ten, fifteen! Her mouth opens, amazed at her own self—the same expression she wore when she learned to ride a bike all those years ago.

At last, she hops off.

“Yes!”  I swoop her up in my arms.

We practice until the sun sets in orange and pink over the cottonwoods. Bats wing past the streetlamps as we push the unicycle home.

Inside, Husband is lying on the couch. Sometimes, walking into a room with him is like walking into a cloud of cold mist. “What’s wrong?” I ask. I don’t want to know.

He stands up like he’s built of clay. “Let’s tuck her in together because after what I have to tell you, you aren’t going to ever want to look at me again.”

Everything stops inside of me. I know in my body what is coming, but my brain won’t let me know in words yet.

Upstairs, we hug our daughter. Her sister is at a sleepover.  We walk out of her bedroom door past the stuffed animals, art supplies, and ski medals. I cross the threshold to what’s next.

Husband is on one couch, huddled up. I lean forward, elbows on my knees.  “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

He looks at me, his face crunched and sickly pale.  “You know about three years ago.” He means when he moved out to work on himself after his beloved brother-in-law died. “You know that while we were separated, I slept with my addict friend, right?”

“I did not know that.” My breath keeps coming in and out. It blows cold across the top of my mouth.

“We were separated,” he says. “I thought you knew.”

“OK.” I don’t mean that I’m OK with what he did or OK at all, only that I hear what he said and that I can’t think of anything else to say. I hold onto the couch like it might float away. “At least it was a long time ago.”

“Actually…” He rubs his hands down his face. “There’s something else. In July, I slept with my junior high friend when I was visiting.”

“Oh.” Everything feels slow—the movement of my hands to my mouth, my chest constricting, the blackbird out the window flying down to the lawn. “Fuck.”

His voice sobs out. “I am a terrible person. You don’t deserve this.”

My body stands up and goes to him. A needle of anger pushes under my sternum, but on top of that, I feel Person I love in Pain. I hold him like I do the kids, rubbing my hand through his hair. “It’s OK. We’re going to be OK.”

“I’ll never talk to her again.” He wipes tears off his face. “Why are you so amazing? You should hate me.”

Hate will come later, sweeping over me in sudden waves that threaten to drown me. But not yet.

He has a hole in the bottom of his socks, and through it, the skin on the ball of his foot is so smooth. So human.

Before all of this, when the children are in first grade and preschool, we sit on the porch of a vacation house in Fort Collins, the same city we were married in.  Husband has planned the weekend for my birthday, and he and I lean back in wicker chairs, looking out at the wide street.

A red car parks across the street under a crab apple tree just starting to flower, and I watch lazily.  Two people get out of the car. They look strangely like my parents.  Wait—they are my parents!

Dad has his fluorescent biking jacket, and Mom the sweatshirt I bought her for Christmas.  I leap up and run across the grass. I pause long enough to swoop our younger child onto my hip, her favorite pink dress puffing around me.  We run across the road to my parents.  Dad smells like hay. Mom smells like soap.

Husband helps with the suitcases. “You didn’t suspect?”

“I thought I was hallucinating.” I kiss his cheek at the rough edge of his beard.

The next morning, we have brunch in town at a restaurant with fresh orange juice. 

The kids order waffles, and they open their eyes wide at the pile of fresh whipped cream and fruit on top. The waiter laughs. “You think you can eat all that?” he asks them.

Mom says, “This is the same waiter we had when we were here last night.”

Husband and I look at each other. Mom has never been here before. None of us have.

“We went to a different restaurant last night,” Dad says.  “You had falafel.”

“No,” she insists.  “Of course, we were here. We had a marvelous time. I remember.”

The table goes quiet. 

When we leave, Husband puts his arm around my shoulder.  I fit perfectly under the familiar squeeze of arm in flannel.  He whispers in my ear, “I’m so sorry.”

I take his hand where it comes down across my shoulder and hold it tight.

The phone call comes weeks after the unicycle night.

As a family, we are watching TV on the couch. I have only told two friends about the affair because I’m ashamed that I’m still with him. I work the secret around my belly along with the question of what I want to do. Work together to fix us? Walk away? I try to look down inside myself, to measure the losses in all directions. 

Then his phone rings.  “I have to take this.” Husband walks out into the still-light summer evening. I sit frozen, afraid my children will feel my heart pounding. They look at me and ask, “You OK?”

I stare at the television. The laugh track is playing, and I have no idea why. These past weeks, we watch TV through the long-light evenings instead of playing outside on the trampoline. I feel too weighed down to jump.

Husband texts me. Come talk to me outside.

I text back: I’m worried. What’s happening?

No answer.  I leave the girls and run out along the rec path looking for him. I call his name. I see him there by the elementary school playground. Relief surges through me. Because I see him, everything must be OK.

“What’s going on?” I run to him.

He’s crying. “We’re going to date. I’m so sorry. We’re in love.”

My brain stops working.  Date? Who’s going to date? Why? Love?

I back away.

But reality catches up with me. He is going to date her. The woman from junior high who makes beautiful pottery.

I shout all the curse words my mom remembers and a lot of things about his dick. Husband reminds me that the children on the playground can overhear me. I don’t care who can hear me.

“Sit down and talk to me.” He gets to be the calm one.

I rush away from him, shouting, “I hate you. I feel like I’m going to die.” Like Mom in her panic attack, my animal body feels abandoned in the forest, useless to the pack.

He follows me. “What if we just take a break? You could date too. We each go on separate journeys, and maybe one day we come back together.” I think of the journey in the Herman Hesse novel my mom hated.

“I don’t want to date.” I turn off the gravel path and flee across the field of sage, shouting back, “Why did you do this?”

He catches up.  “I don’t know why. Love makes you do crazy things.  Cupid’s arrow.”

“Don’t talk about fucking Cupid.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I don’t care what you mean anymore.” I crawl under the bushes. Branches scrape my arms. Like a wounded fox, I curl my body into the earth. Overhead, crows caw and clack their beaks.

In the end, I get cold. It grows darker.  I push through the red-veined leaves of the dogwood bushes. I crawl out, finally certain of my next step. I say, “Let’s go inside and tell the kids.”

I am in third grade learning about leaves on dogwood bushes. Mom volunteers, leading field trips in the parks around Ann Arbor.  On a hike in spring, she shows me a trick. You take a dogwood leaf, bright green with a reddish stem. You pull it apart perpendicular to the stem so that you separate the veins slowly. You can hold the top of the leaf and let the bottom dangle below, the barely visible strands holding the parts together.

“You have to do it gently.” She smiles, her nose red from the cold.

I build intricate leaf mobiles each summer. When my kids grow old enough, I share the secret with them. If you want to pull open a dogwood leaf, I tell them, you have to move your fingers gently. You let the sticky threads hold it together for as long as they can.

On a visit after the trip to the hospital, we cook lasagna together. We’re celebrating Thanksgiving in the depths of the pandemic—we’ve isolated, tested, and brought our virtual work along. It’s like we’re the only real people in the world.

Mom begins chopping up strawberries and dropping them into the sauce. I try to block her hand as she pours them into the pot.

Mom pushes my arm away and scatters in the strawberries. “Let me. I’ve been doing this much longer than you.”

She is right.  She has.

We sit together at the sturdy wooden table I grew up with. I scoop the food onto the kids’ plates while the crows settle in the trees outside.

We all eat lasagna with strawberries. I chew it up and gulp it down with sparkling cider.

It’s not bad. Kind of strange and kind of sweet.

I am eleven, and Mom and I stand at the edge of a Fjord in Norway. Below us, cliff-dwelling puffins and cormorants soar with fish-filled bills.  Below them, the icy ocean tumbles against the cliffs. We hold hands, and I lean out and stare all the way down. It makes my belly hurt. I could so easily slip out of her grip and fall into all that depth below.

The wind blows up hard and cold from the ocean, past my teeth, down my throat.  I can feel the whole big, scary world.

I want to swallow it all.

Now Mom and I stand at a different edge. She can hold my hand, and we can look over the rim of the universe together.

Two weeks before my divorce is final, I am sitting at the table with Mom and my kids.  Dad is at his college reunion, and it’s just the four of us. Mom starts dropping her leftover flauta bits into her lemonade, and so the kids clear the table.  “Do you want to go to the living room and listen to polka music?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Let’s stand up,” I say, even though I’m already standing.  She presses her hands against the table, but she cannot stand.  I put my elbows under her armpits in what Dad calls a “hug-up.” “We’ll stand together.”

She starts to stand and her weight wobbles with her legs stiff.  “No!” she says.  “Please, please, please.” She grips me hard, leaning away from me.

Dad says it’s best to keep going, but it feels all wrong, hauling on her body while she begs me to stop. I bend my knees and pull her feet.  My older daughter rolls the walker over so Mom can support herself with the handles.  I ease away from her so that I’m only holding her by her upper arm.

 “Thank you.”  Mom grips the walker and starts to push it.

“This way.” I try to angle her in through the kitchen to the armchair.

But Mom has other ideas. “No!” She pushes the walker towards the door.

“Do you want to go outside?” my younger daughter asks.

“Yes!” Firmly, Mom shoves the walker against the ridge at the bottom of the door.

“Where are we going?” I ask her.

“Yes,” Mom says in answer.  She pushes the walker out into the backyard, past the blooming lemon tree.

My younger child and I look at each other. If she tires out on this walk, I don’t know how we’ll get her home.  “You sure you want to keep going?” I walk behind Mom supporting her waist.

“Yes!” She looks around at the sparrows chortling in the golden light among the long shadows.  We progress slowly from one sidewalk crack to the next.

“Should we go back?” I ask Mom.

“No.”

My daughter walks backward, leaning down so she can peer into Mom’s face.  “Are you having fun?”

Mom doesn’t answer, but my daughter looks up at me. “She’s beaming. She loves it out here.”

We keep walking, not sure what happens when she tires out.

I don’t know how I’ll get Mom home tonight. I don’t know how I’ll keep breathing when I return to my own home where my children will spend time with Ex-Husband’s girlfriend.  I don’t know how I’ll make it through the meeting before the judge where we finalize the divorce.

But I know that I’ll do all of these things.  When Mom no longer wants to walk uphill, I’ll lead her back inside somehow and help her change for bed, then lower her as softly as I can onto the mattress.

Mom walks with a hunch, and she cranes her neck up to scan the neighborhood, the thick honeysuckle smell, the grey cat investigating us from a front stoop. We walk through the evening light together, slowly with uncertain steps.