mortally dangerous to her health. In her place Hiller shows the jury a digital recording of her January testimony. The quality of the footage is bad—Grow flickers in and out, looking even more distressed than she had in person. More disconcerting still is the appearance of my family on this recording, as we all come into view whenever the camera pans over to our bench. We look awful—washed-out, shocked, teary—a mirror image of ourselves today, except that now the cast of characters has thinned out, and we are no longer dressed for winter.
And so Grow tells her story again. The same bloodstained bag, the same Maybe it’s a dummy , the same loafers and nightgown, the same screaming, the same shame, this time her grainy, sepia figure looking very much like the hologram of Princess Leia in Star Wars as she repeatedly appeals, Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope. Obi-Won, you’re my only hope.
AS A RULE, my mother does not sleep well. After I go to bed at Jill’s I hear her fluttering around the house like a ghost. On good nights she talks excitedly to her new boyfriend on her cell phone; on bad nights she drinks wine until it’s gone, then rummages around for something else, anything else. Sits in the dark kitchen, drinking Kahlúa.
But compared to my state, and compared to where she’s been, she is doing quite well. A couple of years ago, after a little over twenty years of marriage, her husband, the housepainter, left abruptly and cruelly. His departure, along with the messy divorce proceedings that ensued, plunged her headlong into loneliness and despair. Her anxiety about being alone for the first time in her life was acute: she could barely go to the grocery store, for example, because she thought strangers were pitying her for buying single servings of food.
I tried to help at the beginning of this period, flying out to California to meet with her and her divorce lawyer, cleaning out my stepfather’s belongings from spaces that were too painful for her to enter. But one afternoon, while scrubbing down his walk-in closet with disinfectant at her request, I lost it. We had been here before. Twenty years earlier my mother and I had spent an afternoon together cleaning out my father’s closet a few weeks after his death, getting his house ready to sell. The same cardboard boxes, the same cylinder of Ajax. The same muted mania in the face of abandonment. Just us chickens.
I had gone along then because I suspected there might be things of my father’s I wanted to keep, and there were. I also wanted to seem brave. More than that, I wanted to be brave, though I didn’t have a clue what that might entail. But my stepfather hadn’t died, he’d just split without saying good-bye, and I didn’t want to pay him the kindness of dealing with his stuff. Certainly I didn’t want any of it.
The more needy my mother became, the less I could help her. Her habitual expression of affection— Don’t you know that I love you more than life itself? —began to sound like suicidal threat. Every time I went back to California, I swore on the plane ride back to New York that I would never, ever set foot in the state again. I stopped visiting, stopped calling. I let my sister take up the burden. Since she had been mostly absent for the many years that I lived at home, I told myself it was her turn.
And she was good at it. Over the years Emily had seemingly discovered infinite stores of patience and compassion. After her two years of chopping wood in Idaho, she went on to college and graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, with a degree in women’s studies. She moved back to San Francisco, bought a beautiful little house with her girlfriend of many years, and started working for a series of nonprofits—Planned Parenthood, the Bay Area Labor Council. It was as though all of her anger and rebelliousness got shot through the machine of adulthood and came out the other side as political conviction, loyalty, and kindness. I envied
And so Grow tells her story again. The same bloodstained bag, the same Maybe it’s a dummy , the same loafers and nightgown, the same screaming, the same shame, this time her grainy, sepia figure looking very much like the hologram of Princess Leia in Star Wars as she repeatedly appeals, Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope. Obi-Won, you’re my only hope.
AS A RULE, my mother does not sleep well. After I go to bed at Jill’s I hear her fluttering around the house like a ghost. On good nights she talks excitedly to her new boyfriend on her cell phone; on bad nights she drinks wine until it’s gone, then rummages around for something else, anything else. Sits in the dark kitchen, drinking Kahlúa.
But compared to my state, and compared to where she’s been, she is doing quite well. A couple of years ago, after a little over twenty years of marriage, her husband, the housepainter, left abruptly and cruelly. His departure, along with the messy divorce proceedings that ensued, plunged her headlong into loneliness and despair. Her anxiety about being alone for the first time in her life was acute: she could barely go to the grocery store, for example, because she thought strangers were pitying her for buying single servings of food.
I tried to help at the beginning of this period, flying out to California to meet with her and her divorce lawyer, cleaning out my stepfather’s belongings from spaces that were too painful for her to enter. But one afternoon, while scrubbing down his walk-in closet with disinfectant at her request, I lost it. We had been here before. Twenty years earlier my mother and I had spent an afternoon together cleaning out my father’s closet a few weeks after his death, getting his house ready to sell. The same cardboard boxes, the same cylinder of Ajax. The same muted mania in the face of abandonment. Just us chickens.
I had gone along then because I suspected there might be things of my father’s I wanted to keep, and there were. I also wanted to seem brave. More than that, I wanted to be brave, though I didn’t have a clue what that might entail. But my stepfather hadn’t died, he’d just split without saying good-bye, and I didn’t want to pay him the kindness of dealing with his stuff. Certainly I didn’t want any of it.
The more needy my mother became, the less I could help her. Her habitual expression of affection— Don’t you know that I love you more than life itself? —began to sound like suicidal threat. Every time I went back to California, I swore on the plane ride back to New York that I would never, ever set foot in the state again. I stopped visiting, stopped calling. I let my sister take up the burden. Since she had been mostly absent for the many years that I lived at home, I told myself it was her turn.
And she was good at it. Over the years Emily had seemingly discovered infinite stores of patience and compassion. After her two years of chopping wood in Idaho, she went on to college and graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, with a degree in women’s studies. She moved back to San Francisco, bought a beautiful little house with her girlfriend of many years, and started working for a series of nonprofits—Planned Parenthood, the Bay Area Labor Council. It was as though all of her anger and rebelliousness got shot through the machine of adulthood and came out the other side as political conviction, loyalty, and kindness. I envied
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