Looking for Her

In the scrum of the state fair exhibition hall, ​I was beside her and now I am alone in the crowd, seven or eight ​years old. I strain for her not-from-here accent, a frequency above the others.

In the woozy blackness of night, mouth parched with fever, I barefoot the eternity to her side of the bed. Her hand on my forehead, ​and now the chalky taste of St. Joseph’s children’s aspirin.

As the custodian locks the school, the violin lesson long over, I explain she’s late, not absent. No, she hasn’t forgotten me. Any one of these car headlights, this one, this next one, will be her.

Twenty-five and hastily flying home, I look for her at the international arrivals gate. She pulls the family car into the taxi lane, a day of driving nothing at all, she says.

Ragged and leaking, finally winning the baby home from the neonatal unit, I look for her in the apartment. She’s put on tea, filled the refrigerator, turned the lights low.

At that child’s graduation party in the Bronx loud park, I look for her, unsteady now on frail legs, determined to be of the crowd.

As the elevator doors ping open to fluorescent light, I search the ward. She​ is tiny in the bed, confused. No, this is not her normal way, I tell the doctors who never listen.

As she slides between here and somewhere else, I crawl into the bed beside her, hoping to see where she is going. Her hands are warm, but the skin is turning waxy, her breath shallow.

She is barely a shape under the shroud as they carry her from home to hearse and we stand in sad salute on the front lawn. We are all of us, suddenly, old.

I am looking for ​h​er now in the thrift shop, rotely shifting the blouses on their hangers, Shht. Shht. Shht along the rack. She isn’t here but I am, old as she was when she’d haunt the sales, buying sweaters I wouldn’t wear. So much easier to care for babies than teenagers.

At the garden center, thumbnail on the velvet of the purple pansies she planted each spring, I fall apart weeping. Then put them in pots on my stoop.

With the immigrant mother selling mangoes at the traffic light, a toddler on her back, I chase her. My stupid lack of Spanish, my mother’s will to connect.

I am looking for my mother, so I commit to the volunteer shift, enroll in the committee, make the calls. I show up at the meetings with her arched eyebrows. Her zero poker face.

I thrill to glimpse her sharp glance, the mischief of crows’ feet, the downturned mouth. But it is only a mirror. My own aging face.

I send myself to silent retreat​ at this guest house in the country, ​mumbling through the last Station of the Cross. They got him in the end. After all that. Death insatiable with its great gaping maw.

Then a blur of purple at the bottom of my vision. A crocus, impertinent in the March cold: and I’ve found her, winking.