Watch Us Shine: A Novel

Dedication

For

Helen and Tim Boulos,

with love and gratitude

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Marisa de los Santos

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

Cornelia

My mother is a garden.

My father is a street overlaid with gold on that day in fall when all the ginkgoes drop their leaves at once. My husband, Teo, is a salt marsh soaked in dawn and the Blue Ridge from a distance and our backyard and the star-riddled night sky in the desert. My stepson, Dev, is a shining creek running through woods. My friend Viviana is a rooftop museum café. Her daughter, my almost daughter, Clare, is a meadow: bee balm–starred, fringed with goldenrod, milkweed floss skirting the grass tips like ghosts. My sister, Ollie, is a laboratory, gleaming. My brothers are both beaches in July. My friend Piper is a kitchen, immaculate, with white cabinets, white marble countertops, and oversize appliances that beam like the moon. My children. Oh, my children. Rose and Simon. My children are everywhere I am or have ever been or have ever dreamed of going.

When I was a kid, I assumed everyone’s brain did this nifty trick: conflating people with places. And then in fourth grade, in the middle of class, in a preamble to answering God-only-knows-what question, I piped up, "You know how people are places and when you’re with them, it’s like you’re in the place or, you know, you go to the place and the place is them? and then paused before continuing to look expectantly at my fellow nine-year-olds only to find that they did not, in fact, know and could not even imagine, and thus learned that the people/place thing is my own little weirdness. Like most of my weirdnesses, I can’t help it. It’s reflexive, immediate, more synesthesia than simile. When I hear my brother’s name Cam," I picture his face, yes, hear his big, sunburst laugh laughing, usually at me, but also, a little window in my brain opens out on yellow sand blooming with umbrellas; white lifeguard stands; dipping, looping kites; the ocean green as a bottle.

My mother is a garden.

A mild, Upper South garden where butterflies clap their wings in the lavender. You can picture it; I know you can. Clouds of asters. Riots of roses. Shaggy peonies staked into perfect posture. Espaliered magnolia against the garage wall. Delphinium spires, the blue of which . . . well, you know that blue, don’t you?—the one that makes you want to climb inside it and live out all your days. In the garden that is my mother, there is always a trellis strung with morning glories. There is always a mockingbird in a tree.

What my mother, Ellie Brown, is not, not in the slightest bit, is a place where you could plant your boots on snow crust or a frozen lake, tip your head—in its tasseled and probably also ear-flapped hat—back, and watch the northern lights. I am not entirely sure where those places are, except for very far away. Iceland? Finland? Lapland? I’m not even sure if the northern lights are something you watch or merely look at: Do they waver and ripple or just stand still and shine? But I do know that she has nothing to do with any of it, with snowfields or ice floes, with fjords or reindeer or auroras, with any place where people believe in elves. In the garden that is my mother, there are four equal, equally undramatic seasons. And I can see how you might think this all sounds a tad crazy, but I swear if you met her, within five minutes of meeting her, two minutes, you’d know exactly what I mean.

But there she was, in her hospital bed in the rehab center, just out of a physical therapy session, with her spindly hands—never had I thought of them as spindly before, but now they were—kneading the edge of the quilt we’d brought from home, light from the westward-facing window illuminating the tears spilling, spilling, spilling down her tired face—tired in that taut, wasted, frightened way it always looked after a long physical therapy session—her eyes sunstruck with grief and staring straight into mine, pleading, Bring me the northern lights. Would you please, Cornelia? Bring them to me? I can’t believe I left them.

And because none of this, not the request or the halting, blurred-edged voice she gave it in, not the exhaustion or the crying or the regret or the worrying hands or the northern lights, had a single thing to do with the mother I had known for my entire life up until the past eight weeks, I, too, behaved in a way I never had before, at least never toward her: I got down on my knees beside the bed, gently unlatched my mother’s fingers from the quilt, kissed her hands, pressed them between my own, and said, Tell me how.

She was my mother and she wanted the northern lights; I was her daughter and would have given her anything, anything.

We almost lost her.

I was standing in my kitchen unpacking a load of groceries that had just been delivered, while my friend and neighbor Piper commandeered a counter stool like Cleopatra—if Cleopatra had shopped at Talbots and scorned eyeliner—on her throne, watching me, although watching was far too benign a word for what Piper was doing. So are scrutinizing, surveying, peering, and eyeballing. Glaring comes closer. Piper’s eyes were lovely, round, and the blue of June skies and forget-me-nots and truth, but they could tear, raptor-like, into a guileless bunch of bananas with a single glance and rend them limb from limb.

"This, Piper pronounced, stabbing her finger at the bananas. This is what happens when you let those feckless barbarians at the grocery store do the choosing for you."

I dangled the bananas from two fingers.

"What this? I said. This is not a this. It’s just a bunch of bananas. Also, remember how we don’t call people barbarians? Remember how that’s not okay to do?"

In what sick, twisted universe do three bananas make a bunch? (A). And (B) they’re overripe. Look at those spotted peels. Inside, they’ll be bruised mush covered with strings. You watch.

They’re fine.

They’re garbage. May as well take them out back and stick them in your ridiculous grinder right now.

It’s a composter, Pipe, I said. It doesn’t grind. Not everything with a handle that turns grinds. It tumbles.

Maybe, said Piper, shrugging.

Definitely, I said.

All I know is it’s garbage rotting in your yard. But let’s put that aside for the moment.

It’s in a container, I said. It’s contained.

Since when do you buy orange juice with no pulp in a plastic jug, may I ask?

Are you asking if you can ask? Because: no.

Since never. And I guarantee you those salmon filets were in the prewrapped fish section. They did not come out of the seafood case. The fish woman wraps them in brown paper; those are not wrapped in brown paper.

I wanted to remind Piper that we did not call people fish women, that it was not okay to do that, but I couldn’t right at that moment think of what else in the world those women would be called, so instead I said, How can that possibly matter?

I can almost promise that salmon was not properly iced. You’ll probably get salmonella, all of you, the entire family.

I smiled.

Is that funny? said Piper. Salmonella?

"Sam-monella."

Piper threw up her manicured hands.

Other people shouldn’t choose your food, said Piper. "They make stupid choices and then they manhandle it and then they shove it into a bag and who knows how long it sits in their car after that. Their car or—what do you call it—their van, for God’s sake, with, what, some kind of logo on the side. Do they put the air-conditioning on in the back of the van? Do those kinds of vans even have air-conditioning in the back? We have no way of knowing, do we?"

Delivery vans, I said. So distasteful, yet shrouded in mystery.

You know what I’m saying. People should go to the store and do their own shopping.

I set the trio of bananas on the counter and looked at them. Piper was right. They were freckled. They were soft. I sighed and lifted my gaze to meet Piper’s.

I can’t.

You can’t what?

I tried. I keep trying. I drive there and sit in my car and imagine being inside that giant store, waiting in the checkout line. And I can’t do it. I can’t go in.

We sat with this, with my inability to enter a grocery store, for a few seconds, and then Piper said, Well, of course you can’t.

She lifted her right hand, moved it in my direction so her arm was completely extended, and then set the hand down on the countertop. She didn’t expect me to hold it or give it a squeeze. She expected me to not, under any circumstance, hold it or give it a squeeze, would’ve been mortified if I had, but I recognized the gesture for what it was: a Piper hug. Then, Piper lifted her hand and slapped the counter.

Okay! I’ll do your shopping for you. I’ll make Carter go with me and push the second cart. I’ve been thinking I should teach him how to shop before he goes to college, she said.

Carter’s fourteen, I said. He just started ninth grade.

"The child is not a quick study, takes after his father that way. Don’t get me wrong: Carter is at least eight million times smarter than Kyle. Algae is smarter than Kyle, but Carter’s legitimately bright and sweet as he can be. You just couldn’t call him quick."

Piper’s ex-husband, Kyle, had never struck me as particularly stupid or particularly smart or particularly anything apart from smooth and shiny and monotonous. If Kyle were a place, he’d be one of those moving sidewalks at the airport.

Still, I said. Four years.

Enough time to at least scratch the surface.

The surface of grocery shopping. I smiled at her as I lifted a head of lettuce out of a bag. Thank you.

She swatted my thanks away in annoyance. It won’t be forever.

Because I couldn’t in all honesty agree with this assessment, although I hoped with my whole soul she was right, I tossed the lettuce into the air like a basketball and caught it.

If you actually ordered that, this friendship is over, said Piper.

Why do you think they call it iceberg? I said. It’s round.

My phone started to ring. Piper recoiled.

"Who would be calling you? she said. What kind of maniac calls people?"

And green, I continued, eyeing the head of lettuce. Actually, not that green.

I picked up my phone, saw the caller’s name, and my breath skidded to a halt inside my chest. Like Piper, both my parents believed that calling someone’s cell phone unannounced was the equivalent of banging on their door in the dead of night just to say hello. They weren’t texters, either, not conversational texters; they called but always texted first to schedule a convenient time. Always. I answered.

Dad, I said, everything okay?

She’s alive, he said. His voice was high and rushed. I just want to say that to you first. No one here has died.

She had been leaning over to pull weeds from the edge of a stranger’s yard, which for her would have been a long and careful process, no mere, superficial yank. When it comes to weeds, my mother is deliberate, eagle-eyed, and murderous, a sniper. She goes for the taproot, if weeds have such a thing as taproots, a fact I would know if I had followed, even for a few steps, in my mother’s gardening-clog footsteps, which I had not done. I can imagine her in the foggy early morning, her fingers burrowing deep into the soil, pale pink manicure be damned. She had been out for her morning walk, had leaned over to pull the weeds, when a car jumped the curb, hit her, and kept going. We knew this because there’d been a witness, a young man named Landon Smith. He’d been delivering newspapers, tossing them from his car window. He had tossed a paper, then turned back to drive to the next house and saw it happen.

It jumped the curb and hit her and kept going. It was so quiet. Just this thump in the fog.

It’s what he’d told the police officer. When he said it, he was crying, wiping his face and then looking at his wet hand, like people do when they aren’t used to crying. That’s what the police officer told my dad, in those exact words, and it was all so odd and kind and human: Landon crying and staring at his hand, the police officer including this detail, my dad in turn including the detail in his recounting of the awful thing that had befallen his wife, I knew I would never forget if I lived to be a thousand.

She was hit by a car? I said to my father on the phone.

No, no, he said, and I could hear the wince in his voice. "Not hit, I don’t think. They were driving slowly. Bumped. A glancing bump. But you know, she’s just very small."

I did know, but it was a thing you could forget about my mother, with her brisk certainty, her state of constant and efficient motion, her crisp voice and laser gaze. My mother is tiny, like I am, five feet tall, narrow with practically nonexistent bones, and still, she takes up a lot of space in this world; she stands tall. But Landon Smith hadn’t seen her standing, so at first he’d thought she was a child, maybe ten or eleven, lying facedown in the dewy grass in her walking sneakers.

By the time I’d hung up the phone, Piper had finished putting away the groceries and there were four packed overnight bags for me, Teo, Rose, and Simon lined up next to the back door. I had been on the phone for roughly twenty minutes, yet I knew that each bag would contain clothing items for every weather contingency; Rose’s would include whatever book had been sitting on her bedside table; Simon’s the notebook where he kept his sports’ stats (MLB, NBA, NFL, ACC, and whatever other three-letter, ball-involved acronyms might exist) and his eyeless, threadbare stuffed dalmatian named (by Simon at two years old) Pothead. If Piper had not folded sheets of tissue paper into Teo’s ironed dress shirts, it was only because we didn’t have a packet of tissue paper squirreled away in a closet of our house for just this purpose, an oversight I knew Piper would remedy on her very next visit.

I dropped, shaking, into a kitchen chair, struggling to catch my breath. Piper placed a cup of steaming tea—paper-thin disc of lemon drifting on its surface because her friend Cornelia liked lemon in her tea and Piper would be damned if she didn’t have her tea exactly as she liked it—on the table, and then she stood before me, backed by light coming through the windows of the French doors, ablaze with love and fury, her hands in fists on her hips, her blond bob incandescent.

Your mother will be fine, do you hear me? One hundred percent fine. Because this is too much, she said. "It is one thing too many, and I won’t have it. I will not have it. Your mother will be fine."

Teo came home and we all drove down to Virginia, and in the hospital, I saw my father and then, later, my mother. That’s it, all the description I can manage. Language is basically my religion, always has been, and my storytelling style has forever been marked (or marred, depending on who you ask) by leaps and ambles and asides and tangles and tangents. My stories take the long way home. And prior to composing the above sentence about the drive and the hospital, I would say that I had never distilled an entire experience—even an insignificant one, which this one was not; it signified and signified and signified—into a single sentence, but that wouldn’t be accurate. I didn’t distill anything; that flat, lusterless little sentence was built, word by painful word; I laid it like bricks, heavy ones, the kind that strain your back and bruise your hands. For the second time in six weeks, and for possibly the second time in more than forty years, I lived a thing—people I loved lived a thing—I could not instinctively put words to. Could not. Would not. Standing in that hospital room after the first of two surgeries my mother would have, Teo just outside the door, talking to the doctor, my mother there, too—there and also not there—I felt that words were unreachable. That’s what I said to myself. But the truth is I didn’t try to reach for them; it would have been like touching fire.

There are some pains that evade shape and order. What had happened in the checkout line of that, not quite a grocery store, what they call a big-box store—the one I will never enter again—six weeks earlier was one; my mother in the hospital room was another.

The day after we arrived, I opened the door of my parents’ house to find a man and a woman standing on the front steps. They looked to be about my parents’ age or maybe older, and it wasn’t Sunday, but they were dressed for church. The man wore a suit; the woman wore a cream-colored tweed skirt and low beige pumps with a T-strap; her blouse had a pattern of violets and a bow at the neck. A rectangular beige pocketbook dangled from her wrist. At first glance, they looked like the nice elderly couple from central casting. At second glance, though, I saw their faces, which were stricken.

We didn’t know, said the woman, beginning to weep. Not until this morning when we read about it in the paper. We thought it was just the bump of going over the curb. We would never have left her. We are so sorry. Oh, when I think of her lying there—

The man took a white folded handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to his wife. She pressed it to one cheek and then the other.

I’m Thomas Hall and this is my wife, Katie Hall, said the man. We live just a few miles from here. We were going to visit our kids up in Baltimore, so we wanted an early start. But we shouldn’t have gone out in the damn fog. It was damn stupid of us. Terrible call. I’ll not soon forgive myself for that. I will not.

Oh, I said.

Thomas Hall smoothed his red tie with one hand and placed his other hand on Katie Hall’s waist.

We are heading to the police station to turn ourselves in, he said. But we wanted to stop here first to say we are responsible for your family’s hardship, and we’re just sick about it.

Yes, we are, said his wife, her eyes brimming again. I hope it’s all right that we came by. After we read the article, I called my neighbor Eloise, who I remembered knows your mother from garden club, and she took the liberty of telling us your address. We maybe should not have come barging in on you in your hour of distress, but we just had to. Please know we are holding your mother in the Light, just as hard as we can.

Thank you, I said.

If there was something else I should have said in that situation, some more apt response to Thomas and Katie Hall, who had bumped my mother with their car and then materialized on my doorstep, I could not for the life of me imagine what it was.

I pictured the two of them getting dressed for this solemn occasion, dignifying their confession—this one and the one to come—with a tie and wing tips, with heels and a matching handbag and a blouse with violets. I pictured Thomas knotting his tie in front of a mirror, Katie taking care with the bow at her throat, her fingers shaking just as they were shaking now. Then, I pictured her ironing his handkerchief, and something already rickety inside me broke, shattered and fell to flinders, and I started crying, gulping, helpless, heaving, core-of-your-body crying like I hadn’t cried in ages. I stepped out and pulled the door shut so my children wouldn’t hear me, then leaned back against the door and quaked with sobs. Katie reached out and touched my shoulder, then ran a hand over my short hair.

I’m sorry, I said, gasping, I didn’t mean to do this.

Nonsense, said Katie. You cry all you want. When it comes to our parents being hurt or sick, we’re all kids, aren’t we?

It’s just that it’s so like her, I said. So exactly like her.

And the woman said, Yes, of course it is, even though she couldn’t have known what I meant, and if she had, would have certainly thought I was slightly deranged, although I knew she would sweetly chalk up my rantings to stress or exhaustion. Because that would be so like Katie Hall, so exactly like her.

But I knew what I meant, knew that deranged or not, I was right: leave it to my mother, Ellie Brown, to get injured by the nicest people to ever darken a doorstep, to sustain breaks and dislocations and a terrible concussion in a manner adding nothing to the world’s stockpile of rage (because not even avenging angel Piper could get mad at these two), and to hand her stressed, exhausted, soul-jarred, woebegone younger daughter, a woman at the end of her rope, a little more rope and a chance at giving—and getting—grace.

Can you do something? I asked. For my mother?

Anything under the sun, avowed Thomas.

Do not, whatever else you do—and I mean I really need you to promise—do not go to the police station and turn yourselves in.

Thomas drew back; he looked stunned.

But it’s the right thing to do, said Thomas.

It isn’t, though, I said. Maybe in some moral universe, a lot of moral universes even, it would be. I can see that; I really can. But not in this one. In Ellie Brown’s universe, it would be the exact wrong thing to do.

I just don’t see how— said Thomas, shaking his head.

Is it what she would want? said Katie. For us not to? Truly?

I swear it is, I said.

What about our checking in with you about her? asked Katie. From time to time. I might be wrong to ask such a thing, but would there be room for that in your mother’s universe?

So much room, I told her. Acres and acres. Or—what are pieces of universe called?

Solar systems, said Katie. Galaxies.

Galaxies and galaxies, I said.

They called it sundowning.

A pretty word for a not-pretty thing: those near-daily bouts of confusion my mother experienced in the rehab center, usually in the early evening. Asking, always politely, where she was and why someone had brought her there. Mistaking a nurse for my brother Toby: Jasper is too young to be on a surfboard, Tobias. I know you don’t want my advice, but there it is. Answering questions about gardening that her physical therapist had never asked: The problem with your Virginia bluebells is they’re woodland, they like shade. You should replant them around that big oak in your backyard. Pleading for her daughter to bring her, please, please, oh please, Cornelia, the entire swirled, pleated, satiny, draped, and iridescent majesty of the aurora borealis.

After the first time the sundowning happened while I was with her, I sent a text to my family’s sibling chat, a chat that had included my sister Ollie only since my mother’s accident. Prior to that, multiple times, Ollie had been added, had stayed for a few days without making a peep, and then had removed herself after a friendly little sign-off like: Gotta get off this, guys. You should, too. Total waste of time.

Cornelia: Today, Mom asked if I wanted her to take in my homecoming dress.

Cam: Like to Goodwill? Nice thought but you were two feet tall in high school. Who would buy that?

Toby: Someone dressing a squirrel maybe. A child squirrel.

Cam: And hold on, did you even ever get asked to homecoming?

Cornelia: YES, I DID. Senior year, anyway. And no, idiots. She mentioned darts. Running in some darts.

Toby: Harsh. Go run in some darts and then play in the traffic, honey.

Cornelia: It’s SEWING. And Mom doesn’t even sew. Plus, I don’t need a homecoming dress. I’m not sixteen.

Cam: 18 you mean. 16 was you sitting home on homecoming night, remember?

Toby: And every night.

Cornelia: I’m just going to give you two galoots a minute or an hour and wait for what I just told you to sink in.

Cam: Oh shit.

Toby: But Mom’s never had dementia. She has, I don’t know, what’s the opposite of dementia?

Cam: She’s like hyper clearheaded. Nothing gets past her, not even when you want it to.

Cornelia: It’s something that can happen to older people sometimes when they stay in the hospital for a while. They have confusion, often in the evenings. It’s called sundowning.

Ollie: Or hospital delirium. Sundowning is a stupid and unscientific term. And often not accurate.

Cornelia: Thanks, Ollie. I think the sundowning will go away when she comes home. I hope.

Cam: It better.

Toby: It will. Definitely will. She’d never put up with it not.

Cam: It’s kind of funny though. Typical Mom. Other sundowners are probably cussing out the doctors or howling at the moon.

Toby: Haha. And Mom’s version of a werewolf is to turn into someone who thinks Cornelia actually got invited to homecoming.

My sojourn at my parents’ house had begun with my coming down on the weekends, but then one Friday, I told Teo I thought it would be better if I stayed.

Not forever, I added quickly.

My husband smiled at me. I had known Teo Sandoval since I was four years old—so forty years (forty years)—and his smile still felt like a revelation every time I saw it. His mouth, period, was a gift, but