My parents live about fifteen minutes away from me, on the other side of town. I work from home, so sometimes I’ll go over and spend a night or even a few days staying with them if we’ve been working on a project together (lately, it’s sourdough bread). When I moved out six years ago, they turned my childhood bedroom into a storage space, so I stay in my brother’s former bedroom instead when I visit. I don’t mind it, since he has a large and very comfortable bed there, and living out of state, he rarely drops in to claim it for himself. The only complication is that we all have very different, and often variable, work hours, which leads to a lot of tiptoeing about in the mornings and evenings to accommodate the people who haven’t gotten up yet or who have gone to bed earlier.
My parents’ house is a large three-story house in the suburbs. It’s the kind of house where the heat rises upwards but so does noise. Given that I work from home, usually I am the last one to get up in the morning: my mother teaches and my father is in medicine, so their cars are usually gone by the time I’m up. If I sleep through the coffee maker, the smoothie machine, the garage door and the morning news, I’m a lucky man. This morning, I slept fairly well, but still woke up maybe half an hour before my alarm was set to go off.
Winter in Pennsylvania is complicated; any given day it could be sixty degrees or six below, sunny in the morning or dark as night. Today, a cold grey light permeated the room, enough for me to see clearly even with the blinds down. Maybe I was tossing and turning and hadn’t realized it, or maybe it was one of those days when I just needed a little less sleep than a full eight hours. I resisted the urge to reach for my phone, and decided to just sit in the quiet and see if I went back to sleep for a few minutes more.
The windows in my brother’s room face directly towards the east, so it gets sunlight before most of the house does. I had slept with my bedroom door cracked open to improve air circulation, and so I could see into the darkness of the hallway still. I lay there, eyes unfocused, looking at and thinking about nothing, just waiting to see if I would go back to sleep or have to get up.
The longer I looked into the darkness of the hallway, the more my eyes adjusted and started to discern features in the darkness. It seems I wasn’t entirely alone; through the bedroom door I saw half a pale face, dark hair and red lips- my mother. I wasn’t sure if she’d been there peeping in and I’d just noticed, or if she had just come down the hall and I’d seen her arrival. I smiled, she smiled back but made a finger-to-the-mouth “hush” gesture. It must have been my father’s late day. And if I was seeing my mother at this hour of the morning, it meant she must have received either a two-hour delay or a cancellation.
My mother smiled, then crooked her finger in the “come here” gesture.” I smiled, laughed silently and shook my head. She made the gesture again, a little more insistently, then stuck her hand through the open door and hooked her hand into a clawlike shape, squeezing the air. It was the sort of gesture you’d associate with “coochie coo” on a pet, or “the tickle monster” with a small child, but her long, white lacquered fingernails made it look more like scratching than squeezing. Again, I shook my head with a smile and a silent laugh. My mother frowned theatrically for a second, then blew a little kiss and retreated into the dark again.
I lay awake for the last remaining minutes before the alarm, then got up and headed downstairs. Oddly enough, I seemed to be alone; maybe my mother had gone back to bed. Must have been a school cancellation after all. I worked the first few hours of my shift before I even bothered to look outside. To my surprise, the ground was bare. No snow, no ice, not even rain. This piqued my curiosity, so I crept upstairs and peeped into my mother’s bedroom, just as she’d peeped into mine this morning. The bed was empty and made up. I tried to put my confusion out of my mind and return to work.
At around half past three in the afternoon, my mother pulled into the driveway and came in through the front door. “No two hour delay?” I asked her.
She laughed and said “I wasn’t that lucky.”
“But when I saw you this morning, it was already-“
At this, my mother paused, with a look of mild confusion on her face. “I didn’t see you this morning. I was gone before you got up.”
“You don’t remember looking into my room and going like this?” I lifted my hands to the level of my face and did the clawed “coochie coo” gesture. My mother’s face fell, just slightly, then she composed herself and changed the subject, asking me about my work day. It was at this moment that I noticed my mother was not particularly pale. Her lipstick was not bright red, and her fingernails were short and natural, not long and lacquered in white.
I decided to press the issue a little. “You asked me to get out of bed and come see you, then you went-“ I repeated the gesture, but my mother snapped “Don’t do that!” with a biting harshness totally out of character for her. I tried to ask her what was the matter, but she dodged the issue, turned on the TV and started up some idle chatter clearly intended to change the subject.
When my father got home, about three hours later, my mother went to greet him at the door, but they lingered there. I could hear them whispering and murmuring for nearly ten minutes. Finally, I got up and walked over, making a pretense of greeting my father. Both of them immediately clammed up, and forced small talk. After dinner, while my dad brought out the ice cream to thaw before dessert, he casually and lightly suggested I might want to head back to my place and sleep there tonight. “We can handle the sourdough for ourselves at this point.” When I mentioned no one would be home to feed the starter during the day, he shrugged. “Maybe we’re just not sourdough people,” he said, then sent me upstairs to pack up. Barely a minute later, he came up with me, ostensibly to lend a hand, though we both knew I wouldn’t need any help with as lightly as I’d packed.
I finished my ice cream, said my goodbyes and threw my bag into my SUV. Driving out of the neighborhood, I rounded the turn by my parents’ house and saw my mother and father sitting at the dinner table, deep in conversation. Just before I left line of sight, I saw my mother make the “coochie coo” gesture to my father, with a look of apparent distress and worry on her face.
When I got home a few minutes later, I texted them that I’d arrived. I waited a minute, not sure how to proceed, then texted them “is everything okay?”
My mother texted back, “Of course!!! :)” almost immediately. As the type of texter who typically ends messages with a single terse period, the exclamation points and smile raised alarm bells in my head. Moments later, my father texted “Don’t worry about it.”
I replied, “Do you want to talk about this?” Almost immediately I got back a “no” from both of them. That ended our conversation for the night. I’ve tried to bring it up a few times since, but each time they shut me down immediately and look almost offended that I bring such an unmentionable topic up. Since then, I’ve gone over to visit a few times a week, but I’m always careful (at their request) to wait until at least one of them is in the house, and when they leave, I leave too. And now, even at my own house, I sleep facing away from the door.