From Comfortable Distances (19 page)

After the ceremony Tess
didn’t remember getting undressed, didn’t remember washing her face or getting into
her mother’s bed, although when she woke up from her deep, intoxicating
slumber, she was clear that the ceremony had passed, that some of her mother’s
cremated remains were scattered across the fields beyond the backyard of the
house where she had often seen her mother from her bedroom window, walking, her
white tunic and matching wide legged pants flowing in the breeze as if she were
a ghost about to take flight. The rest of the remains were in an urn that Tess
had placed on her night table. She wasn’t sure yet if she was going to leave
them here, in this house, or if she was going to take them with her back to
Brooklyn so that she could have her mother close to her. Her mind couldn’t get
that far yet.

Tess remembered the
speech she had given more as a dream: she was able to see herself in front of
the group, feel her lips moving, hear her voice coming out of her, although she
didn’t know where the words came from or much of what she said. She remembered
that when she was done speaking people had bowed their heads towards her,
pressed their hands into prayer, and then Prakash was grasping her elbow,
walking her to a seat on the field before he got up on the mock stage and spoke
of his grandmother to the crowd.

Waking up to the new day,
the cool, crisp air seeping in through the slightly opened window, Tess sat up
in bed slowly, inching her way up, as if she were nursing a hangover. She felt
utterly disconnected, as if she were in a bubble, unable to communicate or
connect with any other living thing, and with this feeling of desperation, came
pangs of loneliness, like waves, that washed over her. This was what the
feeling taught her: that all the other times in her life that she had felt
alone were merely trial runs that fell short of preparing her for this
overwhelming moment of her life. Her instinct was to wail and moan, only when
she opened her mouth, no sound would come. Hollow. She was hollow. She
fluttered back down onto the pillow, only the thought of sleeping more filled
her with a sense of dread—she didn’t want to be anymore removed from the world
than she already felt and as she was making her way up again, bracing her back
against her mother’s teak bed board so as to keep herself upright, what came to
her was that this was grief. Feelings of helplessness and anger and fear and
frustration rushed her, landing in her throat and chest, constricting her
breathing so that for a moment she thought she would throw up then and there,
until she focused on her breath and quieted her racing mind down, consoled
herself by pulling her knees to her chest and hugging her arms around them
until she was in a ball, her lips pressing into her knee cap. Her mother had
died. Her life was over. This was how it worked: everyone was going to die. It
amazed Tess that she had never fully believed this. But now her mother would no
longer be there for Tess to call or visit or share any details of her life
with. Tess began to rock herself back and forth, the finality of it overcoming
her: her mother had died. Caroline Rose was dead. White Tara was no longer of
this earth. Her mother was dead.

Tess opened her eyes,
squinting as they registered the light. Just like that, not knowing how long
she had slept, she felt free again, alive, connected. Her t-shirt was drenched,
as if she had sweated out a fever. Prakash was by her bed, his hand on her
shoulder, waking her gently.

“Good afternoon,” he
said.

“What time is it?” Tess
said.

“You slept most of the
day.”

She sat up carefully; she
still felt weak, fragile.

“Did I?” she said.

He sat down on the edge
of the bed. “Rest,” he said, stroking her forehead. Tess was paralyzed by the
way he was looking at her and loving her. She couldn’t remember ever before
being in this situation with her son.

“What’s that face?”
Prakash said.

“I didn’t want to sleep
the day away,” she said.

“It’s okay to rest,” he
said. “There’s nowhere you need to be.”

“You’re leaving today.”
Tess pushed herself back up. “I wanted to spend the day with you. Why didn’t
you wake me sooner?”

“There will be plenty more
days for us to spend together, Mom. You needed to sleep.”

Tess pulled his wrist to
her. “It’s 5:00 pm?” she said. “Oh my gosh. Where’s Michael?”

“We spent the day
carousing Woodstock.”

Tess fell back onto the
bed. “I’m sorry.”

“For what? Needing to rest?”

“Do you need to leave
now? Can you stay up here with me for a few more days?” Tess asked.       

“I need to get back.”

“I suppose I need to get
back to my job one of these days, too, if I don’t want to get fired,” Tess
said.

Prakash smiled, and Tess
shifted, her mind coming into sharper focus. She leaned up against the bed
board.

“Can I ask you something?”
Tess said.

He nodded. He was such a
handsome boy. Such a good boy. Her only child, her son.

“Have I failed you, Kash?”

“Mom, what are talking
about?”

“If I die tomorrow, what
do you wish you could have asked me? What do you wish you could have changed
about me?”

“You are not going to die
tomorrow, Mom.”

“It happens so fast,
Kash. Life is so fast. Tell me. Have I deserved your love?”

“You have my love. We will
always be bound as mother and son.”

“But was I good to you?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“But if you could change
something?” she asked.

“Mom.”

“Tell me, Kash. I can’t
read your mind.”

“Mom, not now.”

“Kash, please? Tell me.
You’re thinking something. Tell me.”

“I guess…you did what you
wanted,” he said.

She took a deep breath,
and let it out shakily. “Is that bad?”

“No. Not bad. It made me
be…responsible.”

“I did what I wanted and
it made you responsible?” she asked. “I wanted you to follow your path.”

“And I did,” he said. “But
sometimes I felt like I was on my own.”

“Kash, we are all on our
own, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t there for each other. That doesn’t mean I
wouldn’t have dropped anything for you at any time.”

He was silent, his eyes
on the floor now as he moved his toes back and forth on the wood, as if he were
polishing it.

“Do you think I was
selfish?” she said.

“I don’t think that you
meant to be,” he said.

Tess shook her head. Her
mind was spinning.

“If I kept you from your
father, it was because he wasn’t good to us, Kash.”

“It’s not about my
father, Mom.”

“He wanted another life,
Kash. One without us.”

“I know this, Mom. I
know. I had Brad, and he was great. For me, Brad will always be my dad. It’s
just all of the other relationships. I don’t know. I don’t want to get into
this now.”

 “Do you think my
marriages were selfish?” she asked, but she knew the answer. They were selfish.
She had done what she wanted, but she hadn’t loved Kash any less because of it,
she hadn’t meant to leave him out. She hadn’t meant to make him feel alone.

“I think we all do what
we can and have to in life to survive,” he said.

Tess was silent, her eyes
on the movement of his toes.

“I can’t change what was,”
she said. The hollow in her stomach was growing. “I can’t undo my actions.”

“No,” he said. “I met
some good men because of you.” He laughed. “Brad, Michael.”

“I’m sorry. I never meant
to fail you.”

“Mom, you started this
conversation. You did not fail me. I wouldn’t change any of it – all that we’ve
gone through has made us who we are.”

“Kash, marriage is not a
trivial thing.”

“I don’t think it is.”

“If my actions have made
it seem that way, it’s not. What I didn’t know then that I know now is that I
needed to get married to myself first, fall in love with me, first.”

“And have you done that
now?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I
don’t know. No. I haven’t done that yet.”

They smiled at each
other.

“No one could ever call
you a simpleton,” he said.

She laughed, deep and
throaty. “Crazy, yes,” she said.

“I have to go,” he said. “Unfortunately
my plain will not wait for me.”

She reached for his hand
and squeezed it tight in her own.

 “We are all always
evolving and growing,” Tess said.

“Amen,” he said.

“I miss you already,
Prakash.”

“I’m right here,” he
said.

“I feel old, Prakash. Am
I an old woman?”

“The older you get, Mom,
the more I like you.”

“That doesn’t answer my
question, but I’ll take it.”

“Promise you’ll call me
when you land,” Tess said.

“Promise,” he said.

She hugged him sitting up
on her knees in the bed and then in a moment, he was heading out the door,
closing it behind him. Tess thought: the hardest thing about loving a person
was the knowledge that one day they would leave you.

Alone again, Tess had started
to pack up her mother’s things. She had always thought of her mother as someone
who didn’t have many possessions, but box after box, she realized otherwise.
Statues and meditation books and relics from her devotees—stones and crystals
and charms. The more she found in her mother’s drawer’s, the more relieved she
was that she had convinced Michael to leave soon after Prakash’s departure. The
thought of him being around to supervise made her cringe, as she was sure he
would have had something to say about each item she packed away to the effect
of I
can’t believe you’re not throwing that rock away
. Actually, she
still wasn’t certain what she was going to do with the boxes she was packing
away. If she donated them to the folks around town, she had a hunch that they’d
go up for sale at a town flea market or in one of the shops on Main Street. The
idea of anything belonging to her mother being made available to the public for
a price made her feel as if she were violating her mother.

She would send some of
her mother’s things to Prakash—her books from Thailand and her small, intricate
statues; he would appreciate that. Kash. She had replayed their parting
conversation over dozens of times. Had she said the wrong things? More
importantly, had she been a terrible mother? She couldn’t change what was, so
all that she could aspire to was to be better moving forward. A new and
improved and more aware version of Tess.

She kept some things on
the side that she would take with her: crystals her mother wore around her neck
on a thin red string and her very own angel statue. She smiled when she thought
about placing that on her night table beside her bed in Brooklyn. Her bed. Home
seemed far away. She could see the front of her house, the large rectangular
windows looking out onto 66
^th
street, the trees shadowing the sides
of her garage, the cherry blossom alongside her kitchen window, the mist of
Jamaica Bay rising across the way. Neal. Standing beside him at the water’s
edge. She couldn’t imagine where he thought she had gone. His confession
letter. She hoped he didn’t think he had scared her away! Perhaps, though, he
didn’t imagine at all. Perhaps he was just going about his daily life and
hadn’t noticed she was missing and one day in the future if they crossed paths
again he’d say, “Oh, hello, Tess,” as if not even a day had passed since he had
last seen her. But maybe he missed her just a little bit. She shook her head
the moment she thought it. Hadn’t she just been through this with Prakash? All
of her relationships. The last thing she needed was another man, but she and
Neal were friends. She and the ex-monk were buddies. Besides, passion didn’t
seem possible for Tess. Right now, sleeping and waking and busy work was all
she could muster.

Tucked away
was what Michael had
said—”How long do you plan to stay tucked away in Woodstock?” Her mother would
have told her that life didn’t stop, that it kept going, and while Tess knew
that, it felt good if only to pretend that life had in fact stopped for a bit.
So much rushing about, for what? That’s what Tess wondered now. For the first
time in a long time, Tess wasn’t sure where she was heading—what it was she
sought. If she didn’t know where she wanted to go, where was there to rush to?
Her life felt uncomplicated now, which made her wonder what all the
complications had been about in the first place. Had she ever known anything
but self-imposed hurdles?

There was a freedom to
wondering the halls of her mother’s home that made Tess feel luxurious. Like
she was a little girl who had control of the house for a few hours until her
parents returned home. It still hadn’t completely sunk in with her that no one
was coming home. That was perhaps the most isolating factor of death: it was
irreversible. Tess moved out onto her mother’s bedroom balcony. The stars shone
in the night sky, like little eyes twinkling down on Tess. She felt as if she
were looking up into a stadium packed with faces she couldn’t see. The night
sky was so bright, so full of hope. She traced the arc of the quarter crescent
moon, which hung like a comma. What came before, what came after, Tess didn’t
know. She laughed. For so much of her life, she had thought she knew the
answers, thought she had it all figured out, until little by little all that
she thought she knew came unraveled. She smiled. It was okay not to have the
answers. For the first time in her life, it felt okay not to know what was
next. She gripped the railing and lost her way in the great expanse overhead.
There was something to being here, in this house, with that sky overhead. Life
was a gift. Tess had always heard people murmur similar sentiments, but she had
never felt truly grateful for life as she did right now. A chill rushed through
Tess, and for a moment, she felt a presence pass by her, like a faint, gentle
breeze, so that she turned all around. Nothing. She waved her hand in front of
her, half expecting her mother’s fingers to grasp hers from somewhere beyond.
Tess wondered what it was she would want to say to her mother if she had a few
more minutes with her. Words seemed trite. She supposed what would matter more
to her mother was to see Tess live her truth, to witness the actions of her
life rather than to hear her speak.

Tess nestled her hands
into her zip-up sweatshirt and shrugged her shoulders up to her ears before she
sighed, letting go, her shoulders sinking into her body. She pulled out a piece
of paper in her pocket and unfolded it. The yoga teacher training flyer. The
wind picked up so that Tess had to grip the flyer in both hands to keep it from
flying away. Yoga teacher training. She had done crazier things in her life.
The prospect of becoming a yoga teacher didn’t compare to her decision to open
up her own business some thirty years back. It didn’t compare to the insanity involved
with her decision to marry Michael, let alone her crush on Neal, the monk. For
one thing, joining a yoga teacher-training program would give her a reason to
return home. It would certainly mark a new phase of her life. An experience she
imagined that her mother would be proud of her for undertaking. It was an
experience that perhaps would lead her to helping people find peace, serenity.
She thought back to the crowds at her mother’s memorial service. She had
touched so many lives. Was it selfish of Tess to want to do the same? Was it
wrong of Tess at this stage in her life to want to be like her mother? A voice
in her said it was too late – she had already carved her path, while another
voice said that it was never too late. She didn’t want to go back to the way
her life had been. Hectic. Chaotic. Tired. Stressed. Change was the way of the
living. Why not become a yoga teacher? Why not try to help people, to make a
difference, to venture out of her safe routine?

She looked up at the sky
one last time and smiled up into it—she imagined herself moving from star to
star, as if she were finding her way through a connect-the-dots puzzle. There
were so many choices, so many directions to explore in a lifetime—Tess wasn’t
sure how you knew if you were moving in the right direction. That was the thing
about life: there was no right or wrong, just living. It was easy to forget
that, easy to fool herself into thinking that she had made wrong moves along
the way. She had grown up being reminded on a daily basis by her mother that
whatever she was doing was exactly what she needed to be doing at that moment
in her life. She had grown up being told each day that everything was always
perfect, including herself. Tess had nodded in compliance, silently rejecting
those thoughts, all the while choosing to complicate her life by always wishing
to be something or somewhere other than where she was. She had convinced
herself that life was better wherever Tess wasn’t. She had wished away so much
of her early years by not living in the moment.  For maybe the first time ever,
Tess felt that she was exactly where she needed to be—it was a delicious,
freeing feeling.  Tess sighed, deep and loud, as if something inside of her was
escaping. Between that sky and the earth, she felt that there was nowhere else
in the world she would rather be but in her own skin. A yoga teacher…why not?

She made her way back
into the house, closing the balcony door behind her, and placed the reels of
packing tape and labeling markers inside one of the boxes before she began
pushing the half-packed boxes into her mother’s bedroom closet. She pulled her
suitcase out from her closet, and moved from her bedroom to her mother’s
bedroom, picking up some of her mother’s books and the Four Noble Truths and
Eightfold Path pamphlets to toss into her suitcase, then downstairs to the
kitchen, gathering up more things. She couldn’t remember at this point what she
had brought with her—it didn’t seem to matter to her if she left things behind.
What mattered was that it was time for her to move on, to find her way back
into her life via a new route. She folded the flyer up again and put it in her
pocketbook, beside her cell phone, which was still turned off. She feared
turning it on and having to face the countless messages waiting for her.
Although she had been safely tucked away in her the-world-will-wait mentality,
she knew that the world had been functioning at full speed. Normally, that
thought would have induced stress, but here, now, Tess didn’t care. She’d take
care of all that needed to be taken care of in her own time. Right now, she
needed to get herself back to Brooklyn and sign up for the teacher-training
program and if the program was sold out, she’d find a way to convince them to
let her in. She made one last trip to her bedroom and retrieved the urn of her
mother’s ashes from her night table, bringing it into her mother’s bedroom so
that she could sleep beside her.

A yoga teacher. Not
exactly a path she had planned to take, but once she determined to do it, it
seemed like the right path for her. The path of the daughter of Caroline Rose.
She washed her face, brushed her teeth, shut the lights off all around her, and
climbed into her mother’s bed for one last sweet night’s sleep in this phase of
her life. She picked it up and held it to her heart. It was hard for Tess to
imagine that her mother was stuffed in there, like a genie. “Mother,” she said,
the sound of her voice startling to her in the silence of the room. “Do you
hear me?” she said. “I hope you can hear me.” Tears formed in her eyes and
began to fall down her face. “I’m going to try something new,” she said. “You
always encouraged me to try new things. To nurture my soul.” She held the urn
to her cheek, wiping away her tears, and then to her forehead, the coolness
soothing to her. “I miss you, Mother,” she said and it was at that moment that
she knew she was going to take what was left of her mother with her to
Brooklyn. “A new adventure for us both,” she said, placing the urn down
carefully on the night table. The thought of having her mother with her filled
her with a sense of relief. She wrapped herself in the ivory afghan blanket,
knowing she was going to take that with her, too, and lie down in bed smiling.
There were some things that she wasn’t ready to leave behind.