“I’m unemployed. Grandmothers hate the unemployed.”
“Nice to her granddaughter would trump that. Trust me,” said Meredith.
“I wish I knew her,” said Sam. “She seems like an amazing person.”
“I can’t believe you never met her. I can’t believe you’ll never meet her.”
“I’ll get to know her anyway.”
“How?”
“By living in her house,” said Sam. “By loving her granddaughter.”
They finished packing and moving their own stuff into Livvie’s over the course of a couple weeks. But that first night after her family left, Meredith went home and untied all of her model airplanes. When Sam got back to their new apartment, he found clean sheets on the bed, two dogs in the kitchen, and hundreds of model airplanes hanging from the rafters. Then he and Meredith went into the bedroom to properly christen it as their own.
Afterward, Sam watched the airplanes tracing swinging shadows over both their bodies, airplane shadows over his chest and stomach and feet, like strange tattoos over her face, her breasts, circling her navel like an air base.
“How many are there?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know actually. I lost count at some point.” She raised one naked leg and pointed with her toes to a World War II Hellcat in the corner painted a sloppy mess of pinks and purples. “That one’s the first one. My dad built it. But I painted it.”
“I guessed.”
“I was a pacifist, but we lived on an island. It was hard to find model kits that weren’t warplanes. I’d build them then paint over their insignias in pastel hearts and flowers. I’d put little plastic puppies in the cockpits. I’d replace their machine guns with pretzel sticks.”
“Why’d you start making them in the first place?”
She shrugged. “Probably there was no reason why. Probably the reason was if they didn’t give me something focused to do, I tore around the studio and broke things. If you’re going to make pottery for a living, you have to find a way to corral your toddler.”
“You longed to fly maybe? Escape?”
“I think it was about achievement instead. You know, like, ‘Look what we can do—fly!’ And look what a kid can do too—take a big pile of wood and a bottle of glue and some paint and mess with it all afternoon until it makes an airplane. Maybe that’s what my parents wanted to give me—a sense that I could do anything.”
“I wish I’d known you then,” said Sam.
“Why?”
“You must have been the smartest, sweetest, funniest little girl.”
“Yeah, but it would have been creepy if you’d thought that when I was six.”
“Not if I were six too. I could have helped you build planes.”
“You still could.”
“Where would we put them?” Sam asked.
“That’s why I started hanging them from the ceiling. I ran out of room on the shelf. But on the ceiling is where they belonged all along. They’re airplanes—they should fly. And then at night I’d have flying dreams.”
“Everyone has flying dreams,” said Sam.
“Not like mine,” said Meredith.
ABSENT IS ABSENT
What happened next happened because Sam couldn’t stand to see Meredith so unhappy. It happened because he was desperate to help. It happened because he was still in the trying-to-prove-his-love-and-win-her-heart phase. It happened because he was unemployed and had the time, and summer waned into fall, and the weather got wetter and colder and more discouraging. Mostly, it happened because he was just cocky enough to believe that it could. That and he had no idea where it would lead. None at all. How could he possibly?
It happened too because Sam was stunned to find himself jealous, envious, of Meredith’s grandmother’s death. Not her dying—Sam didn’t want that, obviously—and not the loss of a loved one, of course; what Sam coveted were the memories. This took him a while to figure out. First he thought he just felt bad for Meredith. Then he thought he just felt sad because she was sad. For a bit, he thought it was that he never had the chance to meet Livvie. For a bit, he thought he was being a selfish asshole who just wanted his girlfriend to get over it already—old people die!—so that she could get back to being the nondepressed, nonmorose, nondejected woman he vaguely remembered. But no, it was none of that. Sam was missing his mom. And that was hard.
That was hard because it’s hard to miss someone you’ve barely met. It’s hard to miss someone you can’t remember. Missing is remembering. They are the same act. They are part and parcel. But Sam didn’t have a single actual memory of his mother, so it was hard to, odd to, miss her. It was more like the other kind of missing—missing a bus rather than missing a loved one. He was aware that something huge had passed him by, but without memories to dwell on and pore over, it was hard to hang on to what it was.
She died in a car accident when he was thirteen months old. His dad said Sam was already saying, “Mama,” his first word, that he adored her and wailed when she left the room even for a moment, that they couldn’t leave him with a babysitter because his mother couldn’t pry Sam out of her arms, so ferocious was his grip. Sam believed these stories, not because he thought his dad would never lie to him—to give him back even a small piece of his mother, to fabricate even the tiniest scrap of memory, Sam suspected his dad would lie happily—but because all of that sounded exactly like any thirteen-month-old. Sam’s dad offered these details as proof of extraordinary love, but in fact, Sam knew, it was the most ordinary kind of love there was.
The photographic evidence suggested ordinary too. There he was—red and wrinkled and wailing at first then wrapped in a blanket like a burrito then posed with the dog, with a snowman, with a very drippy ice-cream cone, covered in flour, surrounded by Tupperware on the kitchen floor, grinning naked and filthy in their front garden, on top of a slide in a too-big hat, and being nibbled variously by geese, calves, sheep, goats, and in one even a yak. There were pictures of Sam and his mom in ridiculously wide-legged pants and hideous shirts with walleyed collars and voluminous curly hair (his mom’s; she didn’t live long enough to see Sam grow much hair). Two pictures in particular stood out, at least to him. In one, she lies on green pile carpet on her back, her crazy hair spread out above her like when someone gets electrocuted in a cartoon. Sam sits inside this nest of hair, gathering and tossing it in great handfuls like snow. In the second, she’s nursing him, and he has a ringlet of that great mane clenched in a tiny fist and wound all the way down his arm in a move that would be illegal in professional wrestling.
Sam scoured his memory but could not conjure the sensation of that hair. When he was seven, he found out from his dad what kinds of shampoo and conditioner she’d used and used them himself, hoping to trigger some olfactory memory. When he was ten, influenced by cop shows on TV, he went in search of hair samples, painstakingly looking through the boxes of her stuff bound for charity that his dad had never found the strength to move beyond the basement. He’d managed to untangle from old sweaters and dresses and jackets and the hinge of a pair of sunglasses seven longish strands which he secured with tape inside the back cover of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. These he traced endlessly with angsty preteen fingertips but could never recover memories tactile nor, though he sacrificed one precious strand to Genevieve Trouvier’s Ouija board, even occult. When he started dating, he watched himself for a proclivity toward hirsute girls or, at the least, toward running his hands through their bobs or twisting their braids around his fingers or yanking their ponytails in playful flirtation, but he didn’t find any of that in himself, at least no more than ordinary. Ordinary seemed to be the hallmark of Sam’s brief relationship with his mother. But ordinary as it was, there was no getting it back of course, not even a moment of it. In contrast, it seemed to Sam, Meredith retained so much of Livvie. Comparatively speaking, it was almost like she was still around.