The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear Read Free Book Online Page B

looking back.
    I N A NDREI ’ S STORIES I had pictured his mother as invincible. She was always making, arranging, mending, planting, polishing and carryingthings. To hear Andrei speak of his mother in other terms was disquieting. And I was disturbed by all this talk of death. I remember it made me think of my own mother, now living close to the mail office at Sakura, a seniors’ home for Japanese Canadians. My mother was sixty-nine and by all accounts less active than Andrei’s.
    My mother’s was a body gradually subsiding. Hands in need of regular massage to relieve crippling arthritis. Soaring blood pressure in need of pills. It wasn’t just her body. It was her mind. She was more forgetful every day. And because I had a tendency to mistake forgetfulness for fretfulness, I had to remind myself continually that she was not especially miserable. (I once received a gentle reprimand from another resident at Sakura, Gloria Kimura, who said: When you are old, Naiko, it becomes almost impossible to persuade other people that you are still sharp, current or—hardest of all—happy! )
    I was determined that my mother shouldn’t feel abandoned, particularly by me, so I visited her at every opportunity. My sister Kana wasn’t immune to our mother’s decline just because she was far away. I could tell from her letters and phone calls that she was upset by my reports, and sometimes incredulous. To protect herself she insisted that our mother was exaggerating her memory loss. Strangely, I think she felt cheated. I was managing to sustain a relationship with our mother, who even in her declining state was a more active parent than our father.
    As Andrei spoke, I pictured my mother’s dark head nested on the bed, covers bunched in her hands, a spare pillow cushioning her body.
    “Did you think about your mother a lot?” I asked him.
    “Of course. She was at the front of my mind.”
    “But something pushed you to leave anyway.”
    Andrei glanced up, then down again. We were having lunch by the loading docks. The picnic table was covered with takeout wrappersfrom the falafel shop down the street, dribbles of tahini across the surface, but Andrei seemed not to notice or care. His attention was fixed on his notebook and a drawing of a suspension bridge he had started as soon as we finished lunch. His long rake-like fingers gripped a thick mechanical pencil. I studied the graphite dust on his shirt cuffs, then peeled back the lid of my coffee cup and took a sip.
    Andrei’s hands were seldom idle. He was always sketching or picking at his fingernails or tearing off pieces of paper napkin and twisting them until they resembled tiny maggots.
    “The hardest part was leaving my mother, but I don’t feel that I abandoned her,” he said, and rested the pencil in the gutter of his book.
    “I’m sorry, Andrei. I didn’t mean it to sound that way.”
    “I wasn’t a runaway like you see in the movies. There was no thrill to it. I didn’t want to leave; there just came a point where I had to. There was a rumour that our names were on a list of people suspected of anti-government activity.”
    O NE AFTERNOON , A NDREI HAD returned home from school to find his mother sitting at the dining-room table. She had placed her hands flat on the table surface with an intensity that suggested an effort to remember or to communicate. Her gaze was toward the living room, focused on one corner, though there was nothing there.
    What she was staring at was the apparition of an old armoire, which once stood behind a dark velvet sofa. She was staring at it in the same way that she would sometimes gaze at an empty bookshelf, stacking it in her mind with leather-bound editions of Eminescu, Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare, dictionaries and the Talmud, the hundred different titles that had formed her father’s collection. Andrei knew his motherwould enter this trance-state occasionally, revisiting her childhood home, taking inventory of even the smallest