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The call ended and I stared and my phone, willing my fingers to punch a number it knew by heart. I breathed deeply as I waited for her to pick up.
“Liss? Is that you? Where are you? Is everything okay?”
Belatedly, I remembered my parents were traveling. Of course, she thought something was wrong.
“Mom, it’s ok, I’m sorry, I forgot you were out West.”
She waited for me to continue; I paused just long enough to let the sleep fully lift from her mind.
“My flight leaves in a couple hours. For Laos.”
“Laos? I thought you were off to Bangkok?”
Oh, what a tangled web we weave…
“Well, I’m not. It’s complicated, Mom.” Even in middle age she could still make me feel like an adolescent being told off for too much sass.
“Liss?”
“Mom, I don’t know what I’m doing. I mean, I’m going to Laos. And itiswork. But also, I’m going to see Nao Kao.”
“Nao Kao?” I could picture her, was certain she was pacing next to the bed now, trying to listen between the lines, beginning to parse fact from fiction. I could almost see her long, lean body wrapped in the lilac-colored, silk wrapper she always kept within reach, even when traveling. Her brain, I knew, to be feverishly working over a lifetime of names and faces.
“Oh. OH.”
She had arrived.
“Liss? What do you mean?”
I told her as briefly as I could, the story pouring forth in a torrent. Surprisingly, I felt naught but relief to be unburdening myself to her in this way.
When I finished she was quiet, as quiet as I had ever known her to be. I was about to ask if she was still there when she asked quietly, “Do you love him?”
That blasted, blasted question. Of everything Rachael Zick might have said –Why were you hiding this from me? Is he still married? What are you possibly thinking?– these were the last four words I would have expected her to utter.
I looked out the windows of the Club and down into the terminal at the passengers hurrying to the tram, to their gates, to the planes that would take them anywhere and everywhere. Each of them carried a story, and probably more than one. Undoubtedly more than a few were running to somewhere or someone, while others scurried away from friends or lovers, from hurts or hungers. Running to and running from: just as endings are not written with edges etched cleanly, or boundaries neatly delineated, I was no longer convinced of the firm line between the two. Running to or running from: I couldn’t even say with certitude which I was doing.
“I don’t know, Mom. There are a lot of kinds of love, aren’t there? Maybe I feel one of them for him, and maybe I don’t. I don’t know. And I don’t know what he feels either.”
Certainly, I thought, but could not make myself say, Nao Kao made mefeelloved. Not that I would ever presume to think, let alone utter aloud, that he loved me. The feeling of being loved could easily be nothing more than a figment of my mind – something his words and actions engendered deep within my brain, but without any intentionality on his part. An illusion, like so much else in life. Whether I loved him was equally elusive.
“Don’t you see?” I continued. “That’s why I have to go there. To try to figure it out. To try to understand if there’s anything between us, or if this, whatever it is, is nothing more than a mirage in a desert. Because there might not be anything.”
“I don’t have any advice, Liss. Or maybe only this. Remember: you cannot prove a negative.”
Lack of love, lack of feeling, lack of affection, all of these were beyond the linear proofs into which I tried so doggedly to squeeze my life. But people did not work that way, as I was still discovering. Life was far more complicated, far messier, far harder to predict than any mathematical equation. And far more beautiful.
Our words, my soliloquy and her response, hung between us, more emotion than we’d shared since I was a kid still skinning her knees. Maybe it wasn’t too late to fix that, either.
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, Liss. One more thing: the universe works in mysterious ways. You’ll have more success if you don’t always fight it.”
Her words surprised me, calling to mind as they did someone I had once known, holding my hands tightly in his on the beach at Grand Haven, reminding me, even as the sands of time sped along their journey, to savor every moment.
I peered out my window as dawn broke over the mountains and jungles and cities below.
NAO KAO
