“I’m seventeen,” he declares proudly. “Which is a strange age. Not a child. Notnota child.”
“But how did you come to be a tutor at your age?” she asks.
“That’s a long story and the sun is about to set but suffice it to say I was an advanced student who graduated from school early, and I’ve found tutoring to be a far more exciting learning opportunity than university. As a tutor, I get to travel with wealthy families to countries all over the world. I get to help young people learn, and as I’ve discovered, young people prefer learning from people closer to their own age than...”
“Than me!” Mother laughs.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Shams says.
“Oh, I didn’t take it that way,” Mother assures him. Turning her focus back to the sky, she gasps. “Look at that.”
The setting sun has turned the sky a devastatingly beautiful orange. Like the color of a calm fire, not the kind of flames that could ever burn or hurt you, simply the kind that will warm and heal you. I suppose all beautiful things are like that. They can be used to heal or to destroy. That is, perhaps, the magic behind their beauty.
Mother doesn’t take her eyes off the sky. I can’t help but look at Shams. I find his eyes already directed toward me. His eyes, they’re the color of the sunset right now. Glowing. Warming me. This moment, the two of us sitting with my mother, becoming the three of us... It’s the happiest moment I’ve known in my life. I feel, perhaps for the first time, that someday, she might accept him as more than a stranger on a deck. She’ll accept him as part of our family.
When the sun sets, when Mother has drifted off into the deep sleep this day has gifted her, I creep out of our room and find Shams still staring out at the sky. It’s darker now, but the stars shine in glorious patterns of constellations. “I can’t believe you did this,” I say.
“Are you angry with me?” he asks.
“Perhaps I should be.” I smile to assure him I’m not. “Perhaps I would be if it hadn’t gone so swimmingly. She adored you.”
“And I adore her.” He looks around. No one is on the deck. He grazes his finger against mine. Just that wisp of a touch creates constellations of light inside me. “I had to meet her, and this felt like the only way.”
“Why did you have to meet her?” I ask.
“Because you love her,” he says. “And the best way to know a person is to know the things they love. I know you love your cousin Brendan, and I’ve met him. I know you love music, and I’ve listened to nothing but your favorite composers since we met. But your mother, I do believe she may be your greatest love. How can I claim to know you, to love you, without knowing her?”
I feel my heart race around my body. “But I don’t know any of the things you love.”
“Yes you do,” he declares. He taps my chest gently, the piece of it that houses my heart. “You know yourself.”
And there, under the night sky, we kiss for what I hope is only the first time. I don’t feel afraid in this moment. I feel empowered, like we’re one with the nature all around us. Like we are nature. God’s truest house of worship is our very bodies.
Shams is gone the next morning when we wake up. Mother asks the innkeeper after him at breakfast, and she’s informed he checked out early. I think he wanted me to have this last day alone with Mother, and also, perhaps, he wanted to leave a perfect night alone. Mother and I explore the town during the day. We eat a whole lobster, laughing as we shuck its claws, its tail, its legs. Juice flies at us. She drinks two beers and lets me have a tiny sip. A waiter tells us that this part of the Cape has been an arts colony for two decades. Painters and playwrights and poets flock here, searching for inspiration in the dunes and shores. Mother asks if musicians come here too, and the answer is yes. She seems to love this place even more when she hears that.
On the street, a poet offers to write us a poem for twenty-five cents. “Why, that’s the cost of three heads of lettuce,” Mother observes. The poet brushes his beard away from his mouth withhis dirty fingernails and asks if she believes a poem is worth more or less than three heads of lettuce. Mother laughs and says poetry is priceless. She pays him and he asks us a few questions about us before scribbling some words down on paper and placing them in an envelope that he seals with red wax. He tells us not to read it in front of him. His own words embarrass him. They’re meant to be read and heard by others, never by himself.
We meet fishermen who tell us of the lasting damage of the Portland Gale on their trade even two decades later. We meet an actor who lives in Greenwich Village. He invites us to a show he’s a part of that evening that he warns us is quite experimental. Mother wants to see the local church, and inside, we’re told that the church was turned into a hospital during the flu crisis, and that all the town’s residents wore antiseptic cloth on their faces for the duration of the pandemic. We’re told this is a community that cares for its members, and Mother says, “Care is what makes community.”
Every turn we take, people seem to talk to us. Perhaps this is just a friendlier place than the city. Or maybe it’s us, so high-spirited here that people want to get to know us, this mother and son who wander the Cape together like giggly best friends.
As evening comes and we approach our hotel, I see a group of people laughing outside a theater, no doubt going to see the experimental play we were told about. I ask Mother if she’d like to go, but she says she’s tired. “You should go,” she suggests. “You’re young and your feet don’t hurt after a day of walking.”
I’m about to say I’m tired too, but then I make eye contact with one of the people outside the theater and realize it’s Edna. She stands with a group of young women who all appear to be recent college graduates like her. I wonder if these are her Radcliffe friends.
There’s a look of urgency on her face, which could simply be because she’s not sure whether to approach me when I’m with my mother.
“You know what?” I say to Mother. “I think I will see about getting a ticket. I can walk you to the inn first, though.”
“I’m a capable woman, son. I can get myself across the street, but you’re very sweet. And this time was very special to me. A memory I’ll cherish forever.”
“Me too, Mom.” She flinches sadly. I realize I never call her Mom. Mother is formal. Mother is dutiful. This woman in front of me is Mom. “You sure you’re okay?” I ask.
“I’m just too happy is all,” she confesses. “I’m not used to being this happy, and I suppose it’s made me realize that with happiness comes the fear that you might lose it. Or the certainty that you will lose it. Because no earthly happiness lasts forever. Soon, you’ll be at Harvard.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Well, some university. And then you’ll start your own life, as you should. A wife. Your own children. Life might take you far from me. Another pandemic could come. A war could take you.”
