MY STEPFATHER BROKE DOWN MY DOOR AT 2 A.M. — UNTIL ONE TAP UNDER MY KITCHEN TABLE TURNED HIS RAGE INTO TERROR

Chapter 23

October came to Norfolk the way it always does — suddenly, in the middle of a week, with a wind off the water that makes everyone on base wear a jacket over a T-shirt and act like they planned it.

The second month is when I learned what healing actually looks like, which is not what any of the pamphlets say.

The pamphlets say it looks like peace. What it actually looks like is a Tuesday.

A Tuesday where somebody knocks on the door of my rebuilt apartment and there is a half second before I answer — a half second, not a minute — and then I answer it and it is Mrs. Delgado with a covered dish, and the half second never fully goes away but it stops being a thing I plan around.

Nightmares, four or five times. Not nightly. I had been told to expect them and I got them, and I will record honestly that they were worst in the first six weeks and that the one I still have, occasionally, is not about the beating. It is about the hallway light. In the dream I lie on the tile and the hallway light flickers on and off and I cannot hear the boots.

My mother called every Sunday.

She kept it to Sunday. There was one week in November when she called on a Wednesday because a hurricane was forecast and she wanted to make sure I had water, and she started the call by saying, “This isn’t a Sunday call, this is a weather call,” and I laughed for a while and then we talked about water for six minutes and hung up.

The Sunday calls were strange at first, and then they stopped being strange.

We talked about ordinary things, because there was no other way through it. Her garden, which had been dying for four years and which she resurrected that fall with a level of commitment that bordered on alarming. My work, which I have to describe to her in general terms because half of it is classified, and which she has learned to ask about in a way that respects that. Otto, whom she asks about by name.

One Sunday in December she said, mid-sentence, “My therapist says—”

“Your what.”

“My therapist.”

“Since when do you have a therapist?”

“Since three weeks ago.”

“Three weeks—Mom.”

“I was going to tell you.”

“Were you.”

“I was going to tell you when it was going well or when it was going badly,” she said, and I could hear her being honest about exactly how she had justified it to herself. “Otherwise it just sounds like I’m announcing it.”

“Announce it.”

“Fine. I have a therapist. She’s sixty and she doesn’t laugh at my jokes.”

“That’s the second time in twenty years you’ve made a joke to me.”

“I’m aware. I’m keeping count too.”

I sat on the floor of my apartment with my back to the wall and one knee up and the phone warm against my face and looked across the room at a fern on the windowsill that Mrs. Delgado had given me to replace the one whose pot had been knocked over the night my door came down. It had grown four new fronds.

“There’s something else,” I said.

“Go ahead.”

“I have an aunt.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to go see her on Sundays now. Not every Sunday. Sometimes. It’s about forty minutes.”

My mother did not say anything for a moment. I had braced for something, and whatever it was did not arrive.

“That’s good,” she said. “Tell her I said hello.”

“You could tell her yourself.”

“I could.”

She did not say she would. She has still not said she will, and I have stopped waiting for it. Some of the wounds in that family are older than I am, and it turns out that repairing a thing that took forty years does not happen because a younger person finds it convenient.

“He planted hydrangeas out front,” I said. “The year before he died. She’s been telling people she hates the color for about twenty years.”

My mother laughed for a long time. When she stopped, she said, “He planted them the spring he came back from Oregon,” which was a piece of information she had apparently been holding since before I could talk.

I had not told her about Oregon. Paul had. She had known for twenty years.

I sat with that for a second and then I decided not to.

“That’s a thing you knew.”

“I knew.”

“When were you planning to say it?”

“Next Sunday,” she said. “I made a list.”