I was seven years old the first time my mother landed in the hospital. Explaining, they told me something about a tick, a bite, a burrowing. It was difficult to follow the jumps in their logic, to understand exactly what had happened to make my mother pale and sick and so unlike the woman who normally ran our household from the sun’s first emergence to its final dissolving into the shaded trees and woods behind our house. There she was in her plastic bed, half-hidden under a rough cotton gown, and instead of grasping the seriousness of it all I sat back and watched the place work. This was a new space where strange things happened, where bustling, efficient figures moved in and out of rooms as if what they had to do was truly urgent and essential. Of course, most of the time it was – more so than I could recognize with my child’s brain. It was 1992, and someone had left a hardcover copy of The Bridges of Madison County on the table next to my mother’s lunch tray. It was a strange choice for a patient who was normally more interested in books about herbalism or vegetarian cooking than in torrid narratives of romance. I leafed through the book unnoticed in moments of quiet when the bustle faded and there was little to take in or think about besides the glossy smoothness of the book’s jacket and its crisp unread pages.
*
The squelch of wet boots on the patch of floor tile echoes through the downstairs. My mother brushes the snow from her short black hair and displays proudly the evergreen branches she has trudged through the woods to find for our winter table. She is always outdoors, always has her hands in a trench of soil or a cluster of lilies or a lavender bush. The stone walls and paths that dot the acre of land have meant afternoons of sweat and strained backs and rock scraping against the tinny sides of the family wheelbarrow. They give an illusion of order to our life around the small house.
*
Driving anywhere that meant anything to the world outside our provincial town took an hour at least. But sometimes, in the years before my mother got sicker, the two of us would just pile into the hot car to go nowhere in particular. The roads wound their way around houses and fields and sometimes turned unexpectedly from asphalt to crushed stone or sand. They had names like Quasset and New Sweden. I would eventually learn to read them for what they were: tokens of a colonial history in which “settling” a place had meant murder, had meant stealing something and then pretending that you had been entitled to it, or even that the theft had been divinely ordained. For now, what I loved was to command my mother, the driver. Take a left, I’d say. Now a right. She would pretend to be lost and I would laugh until I couldn’t breathe.
*
One summer, my mother and I went swimming in a pond near the house, not the one where she skated in the cold months and I slid along the ice in my boots, but another one set deeper into the dense forest. The sandy beach doubled as a launch for small boats and was narrower than it was long, shaped like the necks of the bottles people sometimes left behind after holiday weekends. Once she is gone, I imagine her there alone, the drives she must have taken by herself into the woods during the months between my visits from another coast. I imagine the slowly ticking minutes she would have spent, suspended, floating in her one-piece with eyes closed to the sky.
*
Some people with Lyme disease spend weeks or months tethered to an IV, which renders impossible the activities they once did that landed them in this position in the first place. The hikes through fields of tall grass and visits to muddy swimming holes are supplanted by regimens of antibiotics and hours in doctor’s offices and yes, sometimes hospitals, where they work diligently to regain the energy that they’ve lost to a tiny creature dug into their skin. They try to erase the memory of the telltale red mark, the bull’s-eye left in the creature’s wake. Sometimes there is no easy recipe for this: the disease settles into people’s bones, haunts their brains. Sometimes it disappears from test results, disguising its true self, blending in with the wallpaper in the old colonial houses beside the fields of tall grass and the muddy swimming holes. This is when it becomes more insidious, burrowing more diffusely. This is when the haunting starts.
*
I grew up believing in the healing power of the ocean like I believed that once, on a lonely back road on the way home from someplace less important than the journey itself, my father’s car had been followed by an unidentified flying object. No matter which direction the small car was traveling in, the trio of lights remained in the same place in the rearview mirror every time my father checked for them. He turned and they turned. He stopped and they stopped. Finally he convinced his friends to listen to him, and they pulled the car over to the side of the road and turned the engine off entirely, listening to the low hum in the distance. They all were still, breathless, for what seemed like much longer than the few minutes that passed before the lights suddenly began to move again, accelerating so quickly that they were sure what they had seen was no ordinary aircraft. I believed in this like I believed in digging your fingers into the sand, lying belly-down and listening to the rush of the tide, the way my mother had done when she was five, after her own mother had gone to Fisher’s Island one day and had failed to return home, undone by fire. One element or another was always undoing us – undoing us or putting us back together.
*
So many feet above the sea, the wind rushes into our ears and stays there, inhabiting us so that we become colder and start to shiver. There are turned leaves that suggest we’ve come too late in the season to enjoy the view of the smaller hills from the almost-top of the mountain slope. My mother doesn't share my logic, suggests that to view this spectacle of dying is in fact the point. I am hungry. I am maybe ten years old. My teeth are chattering with more drama than I have actually earned. I am most interested in rushing impulsively to the edge of lookouts like Marianne Dashwood displaced to Vermont from England’s milder atmosphere. I have been reading Sense and Sensibility, but these theatrics my mother is decidedly not interested in. She is ever pulling me back from the verge, ever exclaiming at the danger.
*
One night I dreamed that my mother was pulling favors for me in a version of the afterlife that seemed more carnivalesque than majestic. There were arcade games and she was playing them on my behalf, racking up points and prizes to barter for my survival in a world of lost, dissolving girls and insistent, concrete things.
*
Someone is always digging up the memory of my mother. Often that person is some version of me, like the me who insists on chopping down a pine tree and dragging it through our front door and into the living room at the start of December, or the me who keeps on raising and lowering and raising the window shade for a more direct angle of communion with the sun. Sometimes it’s a person like my aunt – my mother’s half-sister – who, on hearing of my son’s birth, sent a card that couldn’t help itself: inevitably, somehow, it left off talking about life starting and began rehearsing the story of my mother’s death. It is something I will never understand, my aunt wrote in sloping blue cursive sandwiched between the congratulations and well-wishes and the news of other family members three thousand miles away.
*
There are objects embedded in the landscape everywhere we turn, boats and bottles and houses and hospitals and examination rooms. There are histories of how these items came to be and how they came to find their stopping place, truths that are buried over and over by generations of people who find them too inconvenient to face. There are also fields and winds and sands, ticks and bites and burrowings, little rebellions everywhere. I saw my scans, my mother tells me over the phone, her voice strangely resonant. The images don’t make any sense. They don't know what to say. I picture gray matter, white matter, regions of mind lit up in different hues – my mother’s eyes burnished, open and blinking, shot through with currents of light.
Suzanne Manizza Roszak is an assistant professor of English at East Carolina University. Her writing has appeared in Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, and Third Coast.
Photo of the author’s mother.