Where Reasons End 01 Do Not Let Mother Dear Find Us 2

Do you want me to feel sad for myself, too? Nikolai said.
I thought about the question. I didn't know the answer.
I'm not as sad as you think, he said. Not anymore.
I didn't need him to tell me that, but wouldn't it be good, my child, if you could still feel sad as I do, because then you could feel other things as I do, too? But I didn't say these words to him.
Instead, I told him a story about my high school classmate's mother.
The woman grew up on an island in Indonesia. One day she climbed a coconut tree to pick a coconut for her little sister, and plunged from the tree. She did not die but lost most of her hearing from the accident. Later she became a pianist and taught in a conservatory. You had to shout into her ear for her to hear you. I'd never seen her play piano or teach. It was a mystery to me how she could do either.
Beethoven was deaf, too, Nikolai said.
Only later in his life. She was deaf since she was seven.
Was her life more of a tragedy than Beethoven's?
No, of course not, I said. The reason I was telling you the story was that I now remember she liked me a lot.
As I was talking, more details about the woman and her daughter came to me, the first time I had thought of them in thirty years. My friend was a wild, unruly girl of sixteen, with hair cut by herself, unevenly in the back and front. She failed the college entrance exam and we drifted apart. I had heard she had become a freelance photographer.
The friend's mother liked to keep me next to her, feeding me sugared citrus and tea when a group of us visited their apartment.
She and I rarely talked, but we smiled at each other often. She was an odd woman, half a head taller than her daughter, who was among the tallest in my class, and she was helplessly quiet in front of her daughter, who often joked that I was a perfect companion for her mother.
Not only this friend's mother, I said. Back then I happened to be liked by all my friends parents.
I am not liked by all my friends parents, Nikolai said with some pride.
I know. I admire you for that, I said. All the same, they still cry for you,
It doesn't matter now, he said.
Had it been me at sixteen, many of my friends' parents would have thought it an inexplicable tragedy. But that knowledge would not have made the world less bleak for me. I hadn't thought about my friend's mother for decades. Other than a few facts about her life and her smile, I didn't know her at all, nor she me.
I suppose you're right, I said. Still, I wish you knew how much you are missed by many people.
Mommy, Nikolai said, and the way he said it almost made me weep. Mommy, you know that's a cliché.
What if life could be saved by clichés? What if life must be lived by clichés? Somewhere tomorrow and somewhere yesterday-never somewhere today but cliché-land.
You promised that you would understand, Nikolai said.
Understanding I had promised him. And other things, too: a house in the woods, a kitchen with sunlight, many new recipes, rights to my books-—after you die I want the rights to the books you've written, but only the good ones, he had said to me at nine. Yet all these promises were as inadequate as love, promise and love being two anchors of cliche-land.
That doesn't change how sad I am, I said.
But you wouldn't want people to feel sad all the time if you were me.
I was almost you once, and that's why I have allowed myself to make up this world to talk with you. Sadness one can live with, but sadness is a helpless garrison against the blindness of tragedy. A mother and a child cannot be contemporaries at any given age, and for that reason my sixteen-year-old self could not befriend yours.
Each refusing to be saved, we could not save each other when young.
Older-and you were still young—I was the White Queen who put up the sign. Do not let mother dear find us. You were the one better at hiding.