Welcome Home

My mother died on a Thursday. John Matthew said he had seen her that morning walking by the river, and then downtown later, shopping for yarn, though lord knows why, because she didn’t knit. Barbie Danes said that she drove past her on Ames Avenue around lunchtime. Saw her standing there, still as could be, looking up at that grid of power lines that bunches up near Bridge Street. Barbie said my mother’s bag was on the ground and her arms were straight at her sides, and her neck was craned up so that her skull was almost touching her back. “Figured maybe she saw a bird caught in the wires, or maybe an eagle.” Barbie hadn’t stopped to investigate, which she said she felt real bad about later.

The last anyone saw her was when Calvin Dupont passed her on Bridge Street, right over the Falls. He was pushing his bike, and she was there, leaning on the railing, looking at the roiling water below. He waved, but she didn’t respond. He figured she just didn’t have time for him. They had never gotten along. When he got near the end of the bridge, he looked back and saw her throw her purse over the side of the railing into the water below. Then she just stood there, looking down over the edge into the churning mess of water as it ate her bag up.

Her body was found some ways away, in one of the marshy bogs right off 191. Someone driving had called Animal Control, thinking her corpse was the body of some large terrestrial animal. The animal control officer hadn’t even needed to get out of her truck to see that this was a situation above her pay grade. The police chief himself had arrived at the scene. Her body lay below the surface of the clear water, on her back. Black branches crisscrossed her chest, holding her in place. Her eyes were open, and her face held a surprised expression, “sort of like she saw a ghost.” At least that’s what Danny Thomas, the coroner’s assistant told me a week later when I ran into him at Hannaford's. Danny had never been able to read a room. I’d known him since school, and he was always putting his foot in it. After he walked away from me, leaving me holding a loaf of bread, I looked down to see that I had gripped the bag so tightly that the bread had been compressed to pasty crumbs in my clenched fist.

The funeral was a closed casket. The mortician had explained that bodies that had been submerged in water for any length of time no longer held the structure to be appropriate for a viewing. “The flesh is weak,” he had explained, “floppy and fragile. We can’t do anything with it.” I nodded along as he spoke, feeling a scream stuck in my throat, ready to erupt. My mother, I thought angrily, is not ‘flesh,’ but I bit my tongue. I’ve never been one to make a scene.

The funeral came and went, and things were expected to go back to normal. Everyone seemed to have lost interest in the old lady drowned in a bog. I spent my evenings going through her things, sorting this and that for donation or the dumpster. I found it all so depressing that, to keep my sanity, I took to taking long walks to clear my mind. I would walk through the town, and then as far as my legs would take me. I often found myself on Ames Avenue, never really sure how or why I had walked there. I guess the mind wanders when you're grieving.

One evening I found myself standing there, under the power lines, looking towards the narrow entrance to the bridge over the falls. The sky was rapidly darkening, and the hum of the voltage traveling through those cables sounded like a million angry insects. The dusk dropped like a velvet curtain, leaving a thin ribbon of blue and pink on the horizon line. Street lights popped on, one by one. I felt no urge to move; my body was riveted to the spot. My arms hung long at my side, and I tilted my head back to look up at the stars. A strange calmness washed over me; an alien stillness seemed to embrace my whole self. My body, fragile and breakable, so small and insignificant, seemed disconnected from me. I missed my mother terribly at that moment. A memory like a knife’s blade cut through me, causing my heart to ache as though someone had closed a fist around it. I saw her clearly, in my mind, reaching to me as she had done hundreds of times when I was small. Reaching for me to scoop me into her arms and press her dry, warm cheek against my cool, tear-dampened one. As if in response to this memory, my whole body lurched forward. I began to walk again, now in the full dark. Walking, walking, walking.

Hours passed, and I found myself on the side of a road I didn’t recognize. Everything looks different on foot when you’re used to driving. I was looking out onto the placid waters of a marsh. Dead tree trunks rose from the water like tomb markers. I stood there staring at the water and the hushed, fetid expanse of marshy growth. I craned my neck up, lifting my face to the sky, staring up at distant stars burning coldly in a black sky. A whisper caused me to snap my head back to the landscape in front of me. The sound of a human voice– indistinct, indecipherable, floated toward me. The whispering got louder, and I stepped forward without thinking, my foot sinking into the mire of the mud and the murk. The water reflected the fresh blackness of the sky. A white shape in the water caught my eye and I bent forward to look at it. The pale flesh of a hand floated up at me, and I found myself reaching for it. As its icy grip pulled me under the cool surface of the water, the whispering became the distinct voice of my mother, hissing and tinny, as if heard from another room.

“Welcome home.”