In third grade when I ran off the bus, burst into tears and said, “I didn’t get invited to Patsy’s party,” I didn’t expect my mother to hug me, but she did. My mother was not a hugger. I had no memory of feeling her chin move as she spoke to the top of my head.
I had been Patsy’s friend, I thought. We had passed notes, sat beside one another at lunch. What had gone wrong?
“Now I’m going to say one thing,” my mother said. “It’s not good when people are mean. But you already spent the whole bus ride feeling sorry for yourself. No one’s coming around here knocking on the door asking you to come outside and play anymore. You want friends? Go find out how to make some.”
So I did. As deliberately as any architect might have engineered a cathedral, and ever after, I make a plan, I craft an agenda, I don’t shy away from devising strategy.
~
For example, when the first bat appears, clinging to a pleat in the dining room drapes, I don’t panic. I prop open the front door, get the broom and wear a wide-brimmed straw hat from the boys’ old costume box. Look at me, I think. What’s not to admire here?
When the next bat appears, dead on the patio, I do some research. Bats, I learn, can enter one’s house via a number of cracks. They love eaves and a lack of moonlight. So my husband Phil and I open attic windows to give them exits and leave a droplight burning all night to discourage them from stopping by. I call the animal rescue woman to make sure we have no protected species, something that so impresses Phil, he pauses from burying the animal and says, “Few things more attractive than a resourceful partner.”
Though resourceful isn’t exactly what I was aiming for.
~
We only hear the third bat, somewhere we can’t pinpoint. This sends me out to seek advice, which is how I end up at the hardware store where I run into Gina, one of those women you meet because her kids and your kids attended nursery school together. Gina tells me, rather smugly, that, after almost two years of not seeing or speaking to her, Esther is back in town.
No one has said that name aloud around me for so long. I say, “I need something that will keep bats out of my house,” in part because I know this will repulse Gina.
It works, but she recovers enough to say, “I don’t think she told a lot of people. You know how she likes to keep a low profile.” She is holding tiki torches for her son’s Confirmation party, she tells me, beaming. “I’m so relieved the restrictions on outdoor gatherings are lifted.”
Who still has Confirmation parties? I have no one to ask. No one like Esther. Not until I get home to Phil who is tired of being my best friend and who will be busy stuffing wire mesh into foundation cracks. While we’re at it: Low profile? Who says that? Esther is not a celebrity. Yes, she did write a popular self-help book about starting your life over by eating healthy and walking your dog, Sit. Don’t Stay. Eat. But she’s no Stephen King.
“But you’ve seen her?” I ask Gina.
“We had tea.”
“Remember that New Year’s Eve party when you pulled me over to see that Esther had a dishwasher full of dirty pots and pans? How you said you’d never do that?”
Gina blinks at me, clutches the torches closer.
“Is that your idea of friendship?”
The sales kid hands me netting to build something called a bat valve and a spray can of Bat Magic. “They hate this stuff,” he says. “Smells like peppermint. You just–”
I thank him and head for the register, ignoring Gina’s goodbye.
~
Driving home, I think of Esther soaping the moles on my mother’s back, the indentation from the bra my mother insisted on wearing despite that, most days, she kept her pajamas on. She sat on a plastic shower seat. Esther had just come from the Y, surprising us as I tried convincing my mother to let me clean her up.
“I’ll get naked if you will,” Esther said, then clipped her curls atop of her head. As we worked, they escaped in damp coils. Her arms were nicely muscled. By contrast, my mother’s arms were pale and flabby, dotted with bright red moles. Her toenails curled. I worried she’d try to stand, wondered how we’d get her out, slippery, when we finished. Esther was taller than me by several inches, broad shouldered. I am slight, with no upper body strength. How could I have managed this without her?
My mother said she didn’t want us to wash her hair. “I’ll bend over the sink.”
“Not today. Cooperate or I’ll take you right back to the hospital. Remember the deal.”
“Go ahead,” she huffed, as Esther paused, shampoo bottle in hand. “Tell Esther all my secrets now.”
“She’s afraid of water.”
My mother shrugged. “Never learned to swim. In those days, we didn’t have lessons. So you can’t blame me for that.”
“I’m a fish,” Esther said. “The only time I feel truly thin is in the water.”
My mother, eye-level with Esther’s thighs, squinted at them. “You? You are what my mother called zuccina. A little squash.”
A pause and then they laughed. My mother hadn’t laughed in weeks.
“See?” My mother’s words were deliberate, furry. “That was a good thing. No schifozz.”
“Skinny,” I said. “Like me. Which, to some people is a bad thing.”
“But look at those clavicles,” Esther said. “Aren’t they magnificent?”
As my mother tipped her head back and closed her eyes, I held her hand. Esther used the facecloth to soap my mother’s thinning hair, the way we had once washed our babies’ heads.
“Pay attention, Annemarie,” my mother said. She didn’t open her eyes after Esther finished. “This is how you do it without scaring me. Even if it’s not true, you make believe, god forbid, we have all the time in the world.”
After my mother fell asleep, Esther poured us a shot of Polish vodka, the kind with the bison grass. She carried a flask in her purse.
At three a.m., my mother would wake again, ranting, “Take me home right now! I can goddamn well take care of myself.”
I held out an unopened prescription bottle of Zoloft. “She flushed the first ones down the toilet.”
My mother had always torn through life with a survivor’s steeliness. Her father had been a nasty drunk. She’d survived a childhood during the Great Depression. The Hurricane of ‘38 shattered the picture window in their apartment and crushed her young cousin under a cast-off tree limb on his way home from school. Her first marriage ended in divorce because her husband decided to marry their seventeen-year-old neighbor and remain in a house a few feet away from where my mother raised my brother.
Growing up, if you needed stitches, she told you to stop crying, it was only a little cut. If you worried about finishing a science project, she said you wouldn’t starve to death if you failed at something. When the roof needed to be reshingled, she did it before my father could get home from work and tell her to get down. When he died of a heart attack in the middle of the night, she refused to sleep at her sister’s. Instead, she returned to a house still ravaged by paramedics’ attempts to save him, climbed into her own side of the bed and slept or didn’t sleep, but asked for nothing.
Her sister had died a few months earlier: her partner in senior bus trips to see the foliage along the Kancamagus Highway or to lunch at Cracker Barrel, her nemesis in Wednesday afternoon games of rummy with a gang of cousins who had also died or been moved to assisted living. The sister and cousins who set up a water and Italian cookie station along the route of the annual Lady of Mount Carmel procession and spent the day grilling burgers, eating pickled eggplant so hot they mopped their foreheads with dish towels.
“She needs some distraction,” Esther said. “Something to get out of bed for.”
“It’s the middle of winter. The darkest days of the year. Where am I supposed to find that?”
“You? You’re the entertainment queen.”
The next day, she dropped off The Thorn Birds CD collection and a sleeve of kettle corn.
“All she needs now is a few marshmallow peeps and she’ll be cured,” I said. “Where the hell did you find this?”
My mother agreed to watch, guardedly interested in revisiting what had been the most popular television miniseries in my youth, but just to see if it was as good as she remembered. Skepticism, pessimism, these were recognizable traits. By the time the first episode ended, she’d started nibbling some popcorn.
I went outside into the frigid night and called Esther, “Now I’m depressed,” I said. “How did you know?”
“I saw some dusty romance novels on the bookshelf in the spare room. Did a little math. Took a wild guess.”
I had other friends, a fact which surprised my mother, but I couldn’t imagine any of them seeing my mother naked or correctly deducing her unwavering passion for melodrama.
That night, before she went to bed, my mother said, “Maybe I could try half a pill.”
~
Thank God for infestations. For an all-consuming challenge that will keep me from thinking that, just because, a long time ago, someone whose friendship I dearly desired walked away for no reason doesn’t mean history will repeat itself. Esther would have reminded me of this, would have believed it. But if it was true that our friendship might survive this separation, why had two years elapsed since the last time we’d spoken?
She’s been so busy, I tell myself. She’ll be relieved to finally collapse on a swivel stool at the island in my kitchen when this flurry of promotion is done. We’ll laugh about authors’ pompous headshots as we did before her first photo shoot. We’ll read her bad reviews aloud into the air of the kitchen and then burn sage from my spice rack.
Be patient, I tell myself. Don’t push. Don’t think that just because Gina saw your best friend and you haven’t, it was designed to leave you out. You’re a big girl now. You are grateful not to have gone through junior high with an Instagram account. You know how to be a good, entertaining friend. Go home and brandish the Bat Magic. Phil will be happy to see you, and that’s something, right?
I don’t hate bats. Gina would hate bats. But Esther, too, would love their mouse faces. She would also appreciate having a husband who doesn’t need to be convinced not to beat them to death with a shovel or poison us all in an attempt to get them out of our home. Her ex-husband, for example, might have built bat houses to lure them outdoors even. Jonas was a nice guy, a nice guy who’d been blindsided when she’d left him.
When I get home, I call down the cellar stairs. “Every creature is worthy of love. Even bats. Especially bats. Don’t you agree?”
“Please tell me you found what we need,” Phil says.
~
It’s true, what I’ve struggled to believe: friends can materialize out of thin air. Esther did. Just before the library closed one night, I ran in to get a mystery. The old library had been a one-room schoolhouse in the center of a wooded lot. A lone streetlight illuminated the neighbor’s sagging fence. Another time, on a similar emergency errand, a coyote had run between me and my car. But this night, it was Esther trying to unlock my minivan instead of her own.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s my car.”
I could not bring myself to say van. How I loathed that lumbering thing.
Esther stood back and took in both behemoths. “Oh, god,” she said. “How have we allowed this to happen to us?”
A few years later, Esther sat in my kitchen while I toasted raisin bread and sliced a green apple before we headed off to Holiday Stroll Nights downtown where stores lured you with appetizers and alcohol.
“When the world gets me down,” she said, “this is where I picture myself. No one cores an apple the way you do.”
Doesn’t that sound like some kind of promise?
At the Natural Essence shop, we did so many shots of Cuervo, the perfumed soaps lost their scent. At home, my boys had set up their air hockey table in preparation for a tournament, but Esther’s daughter, Shelby, bossed them into playing something called Middle Ages Marketplace.
“I had to pretend I shaved sheep,” Anthony said, when I went up to tuck him in. “It was awful.”
“A sheep shearer,” I said. “That’s what they call those people. Very important.”
“I don’t want to play with her again,” he said.
“What was Shelby?”
“She was the merchant who bought stuff she made Wyatt carry around on his back like a llama.”
That explained the assortment of pots, blankets, bananas, earrings strewn across the living room. I felt a little guilty for leaving the boys alone with her for so long, but I did admire Esther for raising a daughter so willing to take charge. Meanwhile Esther and I had had the kinds of laughs that propel you through the next day’s list of basketball practices, tetanus shots, calls from your mother asking if you can take her to the podiatrist, the eye doctor, the grocery store where there’s a sale on green peppers.
My role was to be ready with predictable but well-executed suggestions for what Esther called Field Trips. I’d nab discount passes for the Museum of Science from the library or block out a day to spring the kids from school to attend the Big E, where we could gorge ourselves on loaded baked potatoes while strolling through cattle barns or watching kitchen knife demonstrations. We kayaked in the brackish pond near Misquamicut and attended outdoor concerts at a local farm where $50 got you folk music, a seat on the grass, and a basket of butternut squash, beet greens, an impossibly small cantaloupe. Shelby did her bossy thing and sometimes, I refereed, shook shiny things like a henna design kit or a collection of my mother’s costume jewelry to get her to look away from my poor boys who promptly dashed off.
Yes, I saw other friends. Colleagues at breweries on the first Friday of every month. A group of college friends for dinners. Walks around my neighborhood with other moms who had kids my sons’ ages. But when Phil complained we didn’t have enough sex and I wondered how often other couples indulged, or when I had to be introduced to people several times and needed desperately to know what was making me so invisible, or when my mother refused to get out of bed or to clean herself, I called one person.
In exchange, I curated moments like the night I hosted a solstice party on East Beach, arriving late with a canvas tote bag filled with pizzas, except that when I carried them sideways, because I imagined that’s the way Esther would strut onto the beach, the toppings slid off.
I returned home afloat on the praise from the people who’d joined us—Great idea! Let’s make this a tradition! Leave it to Annemarie to think of something like this! Esther and I had finished the night with a moonlight swim while others shrieked at us from shore.
I don’t need any of those other people, I thought as Esther dipped under a rolling wave.
On the drive home, I said to Phil, “This is who we are.”
He wrinkled his forehead. “This is who we are? People who are constantly packing and unpacking coolers and running out of mosquito spray?”
I’d imagined catching Esther’s eye as if to say: By we, I mean you and me, of course. No offense, Phil.
Now there is no one whose eyes I would be able to meet for that kind of telegraphing, the way I looked at Esther when we were at the Arts for Alison silent auction and Alison’s widower and his new girlfriend stopped in to thank the organizers. Holding hands. Just back from ice cream.
“Just remember,” Esther told me. “People are never as happy as you think they are.”
~
Phil loved Esther, too, because when we left Boston and moved back to Westerly to be closer to my mother, I had no friends nearby, and the panic returned. I made him play tennis on hot days or hatched home improvement projects so we could spend weekends planting native shrubs to attract birds or spray painting the basement ceiling black. I joined a book club, volunteered for school fundraising committees, began the slow reaccumulation of friends. But when Esther called, Phil could take the boat out, anchor off a sandbar and read biographies beside a cooler of beer. He could scrape the sills and repaint them without worrying about the boys on the ladder. He could watch Premier League soccer uninterrupted. And when I got home, I’d be all talked out.
Our boys are big now. They have jobs and girlfriends, or girls they “talk” to, which is somehow different, and they pursue expensive hobbies like golf and paintball. They love me in a dismissive way that includes proclaiming how short I am and swiping a mouthful of whatever I’ve made for my own lunch. I wonder what Esther’s daughter Shelby is up to. And this makes me feel all grown up. Our children are independent! Everyone has gotten so tall! So many years have passed! Mind the gap!
~
When we’ve sprayed the Bat Magic and replaced the steel wool with the netting, I convince Phil to get beers at the local brewery. It has started to rain and the summer day darkens.
“I’m going to make hotdogs and peppers tonight,” Phil says in the car. “I’ll bring some to your mother.”
“Don’t tell her we have bats,” I say. “She’ll ask questions.”
Phil thinks I am too hard on my mother. But I’m only a bit impatient and, yes, perplexed. I stood over my mother’s hospital bed the night we finally had to admit her, my kick ass mother whom Phil and one of our sons had to almost carry to the car. I convinced myself that if I pretended she couldn’t die from starving herself, from refusing to be part of the world, she wouldn’t give up.
When I tried to explain my thinking to Esther, she stopped me. “Totally get it,” she said. “Deliver the right prophecy.”
Esther with her bass playing father, her mother with her fiddle and her long gray braid. The unheated trailer. Vermont winters.
“But no lies,” she once told me. “The truth, no matter how harsh, was insisted upon. Which, you know, is good, and also really fucked up. Like, imagine telling your boys some of the things you tell me.”
The brewery parking lot is nearly empty. “Esther is in town,” I tell Phil as he pulls into a spot so close to the entrance I check to make sure it’s not reserved for cars with handicapped placards. “But she hasn’t contacted me.”
“Is it part of the book tour?”
“What if it is?”
He’s quiet because, sometimes, if he can’t respond with a question, Phil has trouble figuring out what to say.
“I’m thinking she might be busy, that’s all,” he says. “Haven’t lots of people lost touch after Covid?”
“We lost touch before the pandemic.”
“But it’s an example, right, of how these things happen?”
We’re quiet after he turns the car off. “I know you miss her, Annemarie. She was great with your mom way back then and when the kids were small. But she was never what you’d call–”
“Reliable? I know that, but she had other friends. Her daughter is demanding.”
“I was going to say loyal.”
Esther’s family had a cottage on an island in Maine. “I’ve got to get you there!” she had said. But I wouldn’t hear from her for stretches in the summer and then she’d return telling me how Gina’s kids refused to swim because the water was so cold, or how she wished Violet had disclosed her latest food allergy before they left the mainland, groceries in tow, or how Shelby insisted at the last minute to invite a few friends so the car was too full for me and the boys.
“Maybe what you need to think about is why this one friendship means so much. Why you just can’t let it go,” Phil says. He punches me softly in the arm the way our boys do when they’ve annoyed me with their teasing. “But, look, honey: you’ve got a little Bat Magic in your life now, and this guy right here—your loyal partner in isolation—who is about to pay for your beer.”
The brewery, a dark, low-ceilinged place in an old warehouse, echoes our footsteps. The bartender looks at us the way the bar patrons in American Werewolf in London did when David and Jack said they were going back out into the rain and someone finally said, “Stay clear the moors!” exchanging glances with others who knew: We have secrets we can’t tell outsiders even if it means you’re going to be attacked by a supernatural creature. But who in the world would get this reference except Esther, who once had a crush on David Naughton?
And where is Esther now? And who is she with? And what did she look like with a mask on? And what unnamable thing allows her to not miss me?
I remember what it felt like that first night in the parking lot of the library, knowing: this woman is going to be my friend. I read recently that love-at-first-sight is a sign you knew one another in a past life. I’m not the kind of person who goes down that path normally. But it makes sense. That somehow, I knew her already. For the first time in my life, a friendship came easily, unearned.
That was a long time ago.
“Should we attend the documentary film fest at the United?” I ask Phil.
“It’s been a long day.”
“I can’t help it. I miss Esther.”
Phil takes a long sip of a dark brew and says, grimly, “So do I.”
~
The bats don’t go away. Or we’ve missed a couple. Something scratches the ceiling. We see their dark shadows flapping through trees. Our oldest son, Kyle, makes an appearance on the first floor after seven or eight hours of playing video games upstairs. He’s rummaging through the freezer for—waffles? a lone, flattened, ice cream sandwich from last summer? an ice pack for his thumbs?
“Why don’t you and Dad just do the big people thing and pay someone to kill them?” he says.
Wyatt joins us and says, “The things you people spend money on! You take us to Puerto Rico at the outset of a pandemic, but to get the printer to work, we have to unplug it ten times and plug it back in.”
He moves to the pantry cabinet to shove his brother out of the way and commences his own foraging.
Phil shakes his head. “How did they get like this? We had rules. We had a chore wheel!”
One year, the boys battled in the back seat as we headed out to trick or treat. Kyle didn’t want to sit in the middle and get squished. Someone was stepping on Wyatt’s cape. Anthony had forgotten his pillowcase and now had to settle for a Market Basket plastic bag which was not going to be big enough. Only one flashlight had batteries and everyone fought over who should carry it.
“One more word,” I said, “and we go home.”
Someone elbowed someone else who leaned against another person and they erupted.
“Turn the car around,” I told Phil. “They were warned.”
For dinner, they ate Cheerios, a warrior in a faux fur cape, a Dalmatian in footie pajamas, a bottle of ketchup who never got to meet up with his bottle of mustard best friend.
The next day, I called Esther, full of remorse.
She said, “I hope you took a picture of that family dinner.”
“Why can’t I let them get away with things sometimes? In retribution, they’re going to grow up and marry women I hate.”
Esther arrived with a bag of candy, which she dumped in the middle of the floor where the boys had sat silently playing Dogopoly. They stared at me until I nodded, then fought over it. Not enough Reeses to divide perfectly. No one claiming the malted milk balls.
Esther said, “I love malted milk balls. Hand them over.” Then to me: “Halloween is the way we commemorate the dead, Annemarie. It’s a fucked up tradition you were wise to reject.”
But Esther’s kid? She got to do whatever pleased her. Made volcanoes on the dining room table. Chose a bearded dragon over a cat at the shelter. Painted the upstairs hallway leopard print (and not well).
“She’s what I’ve got,” Esther told me. “Everything else is replaceable.”
The bat scratchings and the boys arguing over who is more likely to refill the ice cube trays wake Bailey, our old dog, who starts barking until I fumble around and attach the bark collar to him. Now my sons protest the stench of eucalyptus from the mist that squirts us and leaves the dog unperturbed.
“Another great use of our inheritance,” one of them says, and the others laugh, heading upstairs with armloads of food.
“When I die, you people can have this house and its infestations,” I say. “I’m leaving my money to the guinea pig sanctuary.”
Anyway, the bark collar was free. Esther gave it to me after she called it quits trying to train her own dog. The one she got after she left her husband and bought a condo. The dog who inspired her to start walking, to eat healthy. To rewelcome her best self!
“I’m one of those people now,” she told me as we sat on her couch amidst piles of unfolded laundry. “Besotted with a fucking dog. Can’t live without her.”
God, I hated that dog.
“I mean, I have all this time on my hands. And this whole new perspective on life.”
No husband. No young daughter. No hours to spend at home making things out of papier mache. No carloads of kids to transport to Big Night to rescue frogs crossing the street from one vernal pool to the next. No carving the brisket she hated serving to her in-laws for Rosh Hashanah. She didn’t have to say it: I need to be done with the old.
“So start a blog,” I said. Kidding. The way we used to kid.
Esther’s book had arrived on shelves just as the vaccines kicked in and everyone was looking for The Next Thing.
~
I don’t go to the signing. Meanwhile, Gina posts a picture of a bookstore line from the perspective of someone sitting behind the cash box while the author signs copies. Then there is the shot of Gina with her arm around the author, supporting the book in her other palm. Caption: My friend the famous writer! The comment thread spools out. Someone is typing . . . blah, blah, blah.
Phil has returned to the hardware store in search of more bat repellent ideas.
“You love your husband,” Esther said to me once. Was it a question? An accusation? Something to defend?
I don’t remember what I said, only that I felt guilty and, possibly, naive. I do love my husband. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?
But one day, Esther handed me a pair of pearl studs. “For you,” she said. It wasn’t unlike her to give me gifts. “Put these away somewhere safe,” so I headed upstairs to deposit them in my jewelry box.
When I turned around, she was behind me, and I panicked wondering if she was going to rob me or profess her desire—didn’t know which would alarm me more. Instead, she started to cry.
“I left Jonas,” she said. “Moved all my stuff to an apartment yesterday.”
“Who helped you?” I said, confused, yes, but also affronted.
~
The last time I saw Esther, I had arrived at the bar early, dressed conspicuously in a black long sleeve t-shirt and jeans, ankle boots. Shopping, I ask myself: Okay, you like this, but would Esther wear it?
She had come in a few minutes late. Jeans. Heels. A loose, gray silk sweater that may or may not have been a man’s. We hugged. Remember when you never would have considered hugging a friend? My friend, Patsy, for example, whose mother died a few years after we stopped hanging out. At the wake, I followed the lead of the stranger in front of me and shook her hand.
But another lesson Patsy had taught me, the spring she unceremoniously severed our friendship, was that you have to say what you want to say when the opportunity presents itself. So to Esther I said, “I’ve really missed you.”
“It’s funny, right? How you get so sucked in by things? I mean, serious crises and then stupid things you think are important? We should meet more often. We should.”
She kept her phone out and it burred. First, a fellow blogger to whom she spoke animatedly. Then a text from Violet, her friend who was always in crisis. Shelby had called and, to whatever she requested, Esther acquiesced, then hung up.
Teenaged Shelby had gone through phases—wearing camouflage, then only thrifted clothes. She matriculated from henna to stick-and-poke tattoos, then shaved her head or pierced things, or became a vegan. The last time I saw her, she told me, scornfully, that no one drinks Merlot anymore, so that night, I ordered a Malbec because other people I know ordered it. My best friend ordered water, something you order when you are making a point about not staying.
Esther would not call me her best friend, even though, one night, she had come into my home in the middle of the night and curled up on my couch with the dog. In the morning, the whistling tea kettle woke me, and I came downstairs to find her feeding my dog a bit of a boiled egg, to find that my plants had been pruned, their clippings on a piece of newspaper on the counter.
After she’d gone back to her own house, Phil said, “Wasn’t that odd?”
“Maybe she and Jonas had a spat.”
“Okay, but she camps out on our couch? Does she even have a key?”
I couldn’t remember.
“She’s unhappy,” Phil said, and it came as a surprise.
“People argue,” I said, though we rarely did.
“I don’t mean just last night. My god, Annemarie. The woman is never home.”
We liked Jonas, a good host who could barbecue ribs outside in January and then come in to caramelize the sugar atop the creme brulee. He took Shelby to music festivals where they’d camp out with hundreds of other unshowered people for a few days. The boys loved his collection of trilobites. Esther sometimes complained about him, the lack of foreplay in their sex life, the way he sometimes raised his voice with Shelby, his insistence on meat at most meals. Normal stuff. Married stuff.
I couldn’t imagine leaving home after an argument with my husband any more than I could imagine that Esther was unhappy. But I felt chosen. Esther had come here. Not to Gina’s, or to crazy Violet’s, or to her sister’s. She’d chosen me the way I would have chosen her.
~
When Phil comes in, I’m thinking of Pop Rocks. Remembering how I would pass them out in Spanish class and we would open our mouths long enough for Senora DeSciantis to say, “What is that noise? Who’s doing that?” before we closed our mouths again. Wasn’t I fun enough for just about anyone?
Phil hands me the bag, and I say, “I don’t want any more of that ol’ Bat Magic,” but he says, “Open it anyway.”
The book’s weight surprises me. Also its shininess. Also Esther Kogan on the spine.
Phil reaches over the back of the couch where I’m sitting and flips the book open to where she’s signed it: To Annemarie, my inspiration. With love and friendship. E.
“She thanked you, too,” he says, showing me the acknowledgements page where my name is listed among names I know (like Gina’s and Violet’s) and some I don’t.
“This is what I wish,” I say, “that once—just once—there was a hard stop. A moment when someone says, I’m here with you today, but after this? Never again. I’d trade one concrete reason why someone goes no matter how painful it would be to hear it. Then I wouldn’t have to see them out there somewhere. Knowing: I have no idea why, but there everyone goes without me.”
Phil says something, but I am busy rereading the names of people I will never meet in the same list, as if we are all equal. It’s not until I close the book that it hits me what Phil said: “Not everyone, Annemarie.”
~
At the bar during that last meeting, an hour had passed with small talk and the interruptions of Esther’s phone. “Listen, Annemarie,” she finally said. “I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch. It’s being back in the world, that crazy place. You know, as a single mother. As a divorcee.”
She said this last word mockingly.
“You’re going to tell me about hot sex.” I braced myself.
“I did recently sleep with a doctor. They kind of get anatomy.”
(Phil is a software engineer. I don’t know why I mention that here.)
“But this blog stuff is taking off. And I’m trying to work again, teaching a few yoga classes, writing a grant or two for the university’s research department. Figuring out what it is people talk about at the copy machine. Like I said, stupid shit.”
“I understand,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere. But you already know that about me.”
“I do,” she said. “I do know that.”
I had told her to go on ahead—that I just needed to use the restroom—because I didn’t want to turn my back and walk towards the exit. I buy jeans a size too big, and Esther has teased me for this, for this and the unnatural fear I inherited from my mother of shrinking things in the dryer.
What is there to go back to, I wonder? When all the outings and concerts and wine tastings are over? The kind of quiet that can make it hard to get out of bed in the morning, that makes even the grittiest among us reach for chemical relief.
~
Friday night, the weather balmy, I fill a cooler with beer and a tray with homemade pretzels from the air fryer Wyatt begged for but never uses.
When I come out, they are assembled: My husband, my sons, my mother, on lawn chairs spaced around the sides and back of our house. We stay within shouting distance, though my mother’s chair is beside mine.
“What am I looking for?” she says.
Kyle says, “Bats, Nonnie.”
I expect her to shriek, but she nods, peers into the darkness more insistently.
“Saturday night in the country,” she says. She doesn’t ask for a beer, but she wants a pretzel and sends Wyatt in for mustard. “It’s like a ballgame,” she says. “Get it? With bats?”
The boys think she’s the funniest person on the planet. They’re always posting videos of Nonnie and her pieces of wisdom, her battles with the childproof caps of her prescriptions, the squirrels at her birdfeeders.
Phil had returned that day with only the bookstore bag. As he’d stood in line waiting to see if he might remind my best friend of my presence on earth, he’d chatted with a man who, it turns out, was a bit of an expert on bat exclusion. The idea was to see where the creatures entered the house. First, find potential gaps and holes, then, stage an observation night to see what spaces the bats favored.
“What do you say, Annemarie? Family fun night?” Phil raises his eyebrows, proud of himself for finally being the one to suggest an idea. He’s one of the good guys, I think, and I wonder if I might cry a little, but I don’t.
I study our house (every light of which Wyatt has flipped on in his search for the mustard). It’s simple and well maintained. I’m no decorator, but Phil and I favor an organized existence and maybe it reflects that with its neatly painted shutters, its precisely drawn blinds. We’ve done a good job, I think. Anthony points out satellites. Kyle remembers a few constellations from a night we spent camping in Vermont when we attended the ranger’s lesson on the night sky. My mother is content with her pretzel and to be, I think, back in the world.
“Ma,” I say. “If you want to learn to swim, we could go to the Y. I could teach you.”
“Are you crazy?” she says. “I never said I wanted to learn how to swim.”
“You did!”
“I said I never learned how to swim. That’s not the same thing. Why do you always have to be doing something, Annemarie? That’s why you’re so skinny. Just sit still for a little bit. Who knows how many more times we’re going to do this kind of stuff. All of us together like this.”
We’ve never done this kind of stuff, but then I remember trying to teach her how to do karaoke and how she couldn’t read the words and said, “To hell with it,” and sang what she knew or thought she knew while the boys cheered her on. Or how she insisted on being pushed in a wheelchair when we took her to Disney and we called her Fast Pass Nonnie because we got moved to the front of so many lines. Fried dough breakfasts. The many times we helped her onto a low bleacher for soccer games and track meets. And now, she’s back.
When the first bat finally appears, it flies just beneath a gutter on the east side. It feels so miraculous that I don’t call out my discovery. Instead, I consider how the things you long to see become impossible to believe in. How, on that same camping trip where we learned the stars, I’d insisted we drive around in search of moose and then how I could not be convinced even in the existence of these creatures. Never mind that one might suddenly step into the beam of your headlights. Why not Sasquatch? Why not Elvis? Why not an explanation that has nothing to do with you?
When a second bat appears, one of the boys calls out.
“Now you and mom can finally solve this thing,” Wyatt says.
My mother suggests we sit a little longer. “Such a beautiful night out here.”
Sometimes, you do get what you want from the world in one brief and fluttering miracle. And it’s enough. Has to be.
