Boy from the North Country

One

My mother lived her own life. She was strong-willed and practiced in forging her own path. She had her private struggles and was used to enduring difficulty alone. Yet as I stood in the doorway of her home, one summer evening when I was twenty-six, nothing could have prepared me for what she had concealed.

A sea-blue dress hung from her gaunt shoulders. Her bare arms, usually lean with muscle, were flaccid and pale. Her hair, auburn the last time I had seen her, was graying and brittle. She smiled at me with the warmth she could always convey with ease.

I stumbled forward and hugged her. Her head to my chest, her arms around me, I listened to her steady breaths. She was my mother. She could not get cancer. If she did, she would tell me right away. But she did have cancer, and she had not told me until the phone call twenty-four hours before, midnight London time, her voice calm as she asked if I could fly home as soon as possible. Now, weary from the transatlantic flight and two-hour drive to her home in upstate New York, I held her closer to me.

We drew apart. Her hazel eyes settled in mine, joyful as she said, "Did you see the peonies along the driveway, Evan? They're having their best year of the decade."

"Mom. Why haven't you told me you're sick?"

"Like I said on the phone," she said evenly, "the surgery is tomorrow morning."

"How long have you known?"

"I thought," she said, "we could have dinner outside. It's such a lovely evening."

She turned from me and passed through the sliding door. My mother, who made sure every leaf of salad she consumed was locally grown and every fish wild-caught, who could explain in charming detail the benefits of kale or coconut oil, who brewed her own kombucha, who practiced yoga each morning and meditated each evening, who jumped rope and lifted dumbbells, who wrote a health column for the regional newspaper, who as a holistic health practitioner spent her days with clients who came to her from across the Northeast, who at sixty-three was often mistaken for being in her forties-how had cancer infiltrated her body?

I followed her into the evening. The field between the farmhouse and woods had recently been mowed, and the smell of cut grass was rich in the August air. Pine trees swayed over the house. Paws tapped on the stone walkway. I turned to see Lucy prancing toward me, all nine pounds of toy fox terrier, her silken ears raised, her pupils as lively as any human eyes. "Are you a dog?" I asked, kneeling to accept her kisses.

The three of us walked silently up the hill behind the house. We were in my mother's landscape. White peonies swayed in flower beds. The crab apple tree held its twisted pose like an elegant dancer. Evening light fell on the maroon barn from which we had retrieved eggs from our hens on the mornings of my childhood. Five ash trees rose from the earth as if the fingers of an open hand. My mother had arranged the cedar table and wicker chairs on the hilltop, facing across the valley, toward the mountain. The only visible human structure in the valley was our house, its green siding blending into the hills.

I glanced at my mother, concerned that the walk might have caused her discomfort. She smiled, setting her hand gently on my shoulder. White clouds kissed in the sapphire sky.

Lucy scampered ahead of us, drawn to the smells rising from the table. My mother had spared no effort in preparing this feast. Rings of lemon lay atop seared tofu. Clay pans offered roasted eggplant, cauliflower, butternut squash, portobello mushroom. A ceramic bowl held blackberries, boysenberries, and Concord grapes, which she must have picked from the vines in our woods. My favorite white wine from the vineyard in town was wrapped in cloth to preserve its chill, thin beads of condensation dripping down the neck of the bottle.

"The berries have been wonderful this summer," my mother said, easing herself into the wicker chair. Lucy leapt onto her lap and tucked her little head over my mother's forearm. She reached for the blackberries, each berry leaving its delicate purple stain on her fingers, and I thought by instinct of childhood mornings I ran shirtless out of the house, sunlight on my naked skin as I hurried through the woods, eager to devour all the berries I could find.

"Try the cauliflower, it's so flavorful," she said, offering me the roasted vegetable in the clutches of a wooden server. "The butternut squash, too. It makes me think back to the first summer we were here, and every road seemed to lead to a farmstand. Oh! I forgot the peaches inside. You won't believe how sweet they are this year."

She made to rise, and I touched her arm, trying to fathom that, despite her tranquil expression, within my mother was a cancerous tumor that had withered her body and begun to gray her hair. Tomorrow morning, at sunrise, we would drive into Manhattan, where a medical team intended to drug her unconscious and cut open her body with technology so complex it had no rooting in ordinary parlance. The articles I had read while waiting to board the plane in London suggested that she could remain in bed as long as a week after surgery. Loved ones should be prepared to assist with walking and eating. She needed every possible moment of rest before the surgery. Over her shoulder I could see the barn, from which she must have hauled the wooden table and chairs at immense physical expense. She had driven to the farmer's market and spent hours preparing our dinner. She had made six or seven trips from the house up the hill, carrying the heavy clay pans to the table. Nothing could justify the effort she had exerted on my behalf.

"Mom, please sit. You need to rest."

"I need," she said firmly, "to enjoy dinner with my son."

She reached for the wine and poured the cool amber liquid into my glass. She nodded to the bowl of fruit, and I reached for grapes, biting into the sour skin, then the sweet pulp. I had been too anxious to eat in the twenty-four hours since I glanced at my phone in the boisterous London bar and saw eight missed calls from my mother. Now, exhausted from the rushed departure, I devoured moist tofu, zucchini, red cabbage.

My mother ate nothing. She reclined in her wooden chair, gazing at me.

The valley was ablaze with the last evening light. Dandelions lay in yellow patches across the lawn. A deer loped across the trail that led into the forest, and Lucy leapt from my mother's lap to give chase. My mother sighed contentedly. I reached for more squash, each bite ripe with the flavor of a vegetable grown less than a mile from where we sat. Through the valley echoed the familiar clatter of the freight train. "Can you hear the cardinal?" my mother asked. "She always sings as the sun falls." And I could, the bird chirping as she flew over the woods.

She reached across the table to give me another slice of roasted cauliflower.

"It's nice," she smiled, "to have you home."

She looked at me with her bright hazel eyes, and I felt the guilt that lingered on my visits home. In my teenage years I had felt suffocated by the remoteness of the town and promised myself that I would leave Goshen to discover places where people lived and life happened. I had completed a literature degree at Oxford, then moved from city to city-Berlin, Jerusalem, London-working odd jobs and never staying long in one place. At eighteen, I had never left upstate New York; at twenty-six, I returned only occasionally to visit my mother.

We spoke by video every Sunday. We texted most days. But I had silently dictated the terms of our relationship. I was the son who lived abroad.

Pine trees swayed over the farmhouse. With each moment London seemed farther away. Last night's phone call had been so brief and, to me, so shocking that we had not discussed how long I would stay. My mother had cancer. I would have to tell friends I was home for the summer. Once the word was spoken it would accumulate an irreversible solidity, the disease within her body becoming a social fact, the explanation of my absence in London repeated by friends and acquaintances. I couldn't say when I might return. Looking at the wrinkles in her face, which seemed to have aged a decade in the two months since we had seen one another, I knew we were no longer living within the recognizable rhythm of time.

"I'll be here," I said abruptly, "as long as you need."

Lucy pranced back to us, leapt for a bite of tofu in my mother's palm, and trotted a celebratory circle around the table. My mother looked at me uncertainly. As if the elegant facade of the evening was giving way to what awaited in the morning. Or perhaps I was imagining this. I was projecting onto her what I felt, my discomfort with this increasingly apparent fact: she had known for some time that she was ill. She had asked to speak by phone rather than video the last two Sundays to conceal her appearance. I wanted an explanation. To argue, if necessary. My mother smiled, sunlight and shadow on her face. I could not bring myself to rupture the beauty of her evening.

Nor could I make ordinary conversation. I wanted to say something. To speak as we usually spoke. To tell or ask about a film or book. To listen to her talk about a patient who had come to see her with an unusual story. To share a memory. But I said nothing.

She withdrew the fraying, homemade pot holder from beneath the pan of cauliflower and said, "Do you remember your knitting craze?"

I laughed, with no idea what she meant.

"You don't remember? You were in second grade. You knit me a pot holder every holiday. On my birthday, you gave me a pot holder. Then Hanukkah, another pot holder. Christmas? A pot holder. Honey, you gave me a pot holder on New Year's Day. You were such a talented knitter. Look at how well this one has held up."

She handed me the pot holder, the aging crimson and white yarn soft to the touch. No memory came to mind.

My mother looked at me with that same hesitant expression, and I felt once more the urgency of the plane gathering speed on the London runway moments before cell service was lost to the clouds. I had reached for my phone and texted her: Love you more than anything. I will be with you every step of the way.

Now I was with her and didn't know what to say.

Dusk was falling over the hills. The mountain ridges had vanished into the night. The clay pans were nearly emptied, only the cauliflower stalks and squash skin uneaten. A coyote howled and Lucy barked in reply. My mother needed to rest before our early morning drive into the city.

"Thank you for such a lovely dinner, Mom. Why don't you rest, and I'll clean up."

"It's wonderful having you home, Evan," she said, looking into my eyes. "You might even say that time with you is my favorite part of being alive."