Cocoon

published in Third Coast Magazine, 2024

After the trial, I found I couldn’t bear the silence of my own company. I bought a plane ticket and flew from San Francisco to Madison. My mother had parked in the expensive airport garage and was waiting for me at the arrivals gate. Wrapped in a blue quilted coat and fawnskin boots, she tilted forward, searching the crowd. All I had to do was be found.

I fell into her arms and when we came apart, she tried to carry my suitcase, but I refused, and instead, hooked her arm. It was dark out. Snow was falling everywhere. It made me sleepy. We passed the curbside pickup queue of shuttles, buses, and taxis to the parking lot, which smelled of wet cement.

She blasted the heat inside the car. The salted roads crunched beneath the tires. When we stopped at a light, an Asian woman my mother’s age waved from the next car, and my mother waved back. “Oh, that’s Patty,” my mother said, “from my morning walking group.” Wherever my mother lived, she created community. She attended church, counseled children and families, and hosted a cultural exchange gathering for friends and neighbors so her white friends could learn how to wrap dumplings and her Taiwanese friends could learn how to make apple pies. My mother was a marvel, thriving anywhere she went. She could continue no matter the circumstance.

“So how did it go?” my mother asked.

“It was long,” I said. “I thought I’d only be on the stand for a few minutes.”

“What did they ask?” She put on her blinker and looked in her blind spot and side mirror.

“It’s a little too hot,” I said, trying to adjust the heat.

“It’s broken,” my mother said. “It only goes on all the way, or you have to turn it off.”

“They asked me my name. They asked me how I knew him. For how long. How our families knew each other,” I said. “I said I knew him before he was born. While he was still in the womb.”

“Thirty-five years is a long time,” my mother said. The windshield wipers swept the snowflakes into a bank at the bottom of the glass.

“They asked me how often we talked and saw each other,” I said. “They asked if I knew his wife.”

“It must have been hard to serve as a witness,” my mother said.

“Did you call his mom?” I asked.

“Twice,” my mother said. “She’s relieved he didn’t go to prison. But she’s heartbroken.”

“That he had to stand trial, or that his wife is still missing?” I asked darkly.

“Probably both,” my mother said.

We pulled up to her little blue house. In the wintry landscape, it was inviting and cozy with its red door and yellow birdfeeder hanging frozen in the big pear tree. The windows glowed. I liked how my mother left a light on for herself whenever she went out.

We stayed up and drank hot ginger lemon tea. I borrowed a pair of her woolen socks and fell asleep on the sofa watching a British gardening show. It was slow and aesthetically safe. On the show, couples or families presented crude drawings and discussed their ideals and inspiration for their small lots, and a master gardener shaped these desires into tasteful and feasible landscaping plans. Small paths were carved out, variegated herbs and flowers planted, logs and old pots adapted into miniature ecosystems.

That night I dreamed I was digging with a spade, but the dirt was the texture of crushed Oreos. And what was I unearthing or burying?

 ~ 

In the morning, I accompanied my mother to a late church service. I met her many friends, who welcomed me over hot coffee in the church foyer. The sanctuary was lined with glossy, wood pews. On stage, the worship leader, a slender Black man in a silk shirt, led the congregation through the traditional hymnal while an elderly white woman with purple hair played the keyboard. We stood to sing, my mother and I sharing a hymnal.

The pastor, bland and polite, opened his sermon with a prayer and encouraged the congregation to turn their Bibles to Psalm 4.  “What does the Bible tell us about rest and sleep? For many of us, we struggle with ceasing our daily activities to rest and sleep. Yet we need to pause–psychologically, spiritually, and physically–to recover our strength. ‘In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat,’” he said, looking out over the believers. “We strive and work so hard but the Lord ‘grants sleep to those he loves,’ and the Lord loved King David, who said, ‘In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.’ Remember that King David was not born into the lavish life of a monarch. He was a young shepherd in the hills who had to keep watch of wolves and feral dogs, marauders, and violent men as the country erupted into war.”

“Let’s go to lunch,” my mother said afterward. “The Lazy Rose Café has good soup and sandwiches.”

We ordered cream of broccoli and chicken salad sandwiches and sat in a booth near the window. Through the frosty glass, snow soundlessly coated everything in a soft, white fur—buildings, car tops, stop signs, bushes.

“Eat before it gets cold,” my mother urged.

The soup was thick and comforting. It hadn’t occurred to me that country music was playing in the background. A very young woman refilled the napkin dispenser at a nearby table. Did anyone ever believe they could die at any moment?

“How did he seem at the trial?” my mother asked.

“He looked down in his lap most of the time,” I said. “I saw him writing in a notepad, but maybe he was drawing. I don’t know what he was thinking.”

“I feel so sorry for her parents,” my mother said.

“Me too,” I said, and wondered if my mother, a counselor, had ever heard a criminal confession. Surely, she had in her decades of practice. But certainly nothing like what my childhood friend had been prosecuted for.

“Think about what her mother must be feeling,” my mother said. “She still doesn’t know where her daughter is.”

“I told them I saw him the night she disappeared,” I said. “I texted him and asked if he wanted to have dinner. I hadn’t seen him in a few months.”

“Did he seem strange?” my mother asked.

“He seemed a little stiff, not as relaxed. I could tell there was something on his mind,” I told her. I set my spoon down and creased the edge of my napkin. “We met at Ester’s downtown, that place next to the gallery.”

“What did you talk about?” my mother asked.

“He was trying to lose weight before a big ride. He was going to cycle up the coast with some friends. He didn’t want a cocktail, just water,” I said. All this I had offered in court. We’d talked about work. He was bored at his new job, but his wife wanted to try for a baby, and so he was staying to create stability. He said he also felt pressure from his mother who wanted him to stay at the job because it paid so well, and he was sending her a little money every month. The last job he’d had was wild—crazy hours, blurry boundaries, drugs, everyone young and inexperienced and looking to him for direction. I told him I was interviewing for a new position and hoping to transition by the new year. He asked about my breakup, and I told him I’d put up a paper calendar in my kitchen and was circling every day I survived. I’d written a note to myself six months ahead that said: You’ll feel better now!! and we both laughed because it was sad and true.

“Did he talk about her?” my mother asked.

“Not really,” I said. “He said she was with her sister, but didn’t seem to know what they were doing, or when she would be home.”

My head kept splitting into parallel screens—one playing out what he’d told me and the other what the prosecutor had said. When I told him I’d taken an Uber to dinner because my car was being fixed at the dealership, he didn’t offer to drive me home, which was odd. In the courtroom, her parents and sister were watching, living every scene that witnesses described. I couldn’t look at them because I knew I would burst into tears. Everything that I told the court was true, and now it seemed, had helped him. The jury had found him not guilty. Even though—even though all those other little things the jury couldn’t add up to make a coherent story. He’d been acquitted. He’d smiled into his lap. He’d looked at her family, his head down, like a bad dog.

“Desperation—that’s what I would feel,” my mother offered. “To find my daughter, if I were the mother.”

“He never cried,” I said.

“You look tired,” my mother said.

I nodded. I was tired. Outside, the sky had turned the color of a bruise and it had stopped snowing.

My mother drove us home and helped me unbutton my coat. She led me into the bathroom so I could take a bath, then towel-dried my hair. Naked, I sat on the edge of the guest bed, unable to lift my head. I listened as she lowered the attic door and climbed up. She dropped the massive plastic case into the hall and climbed down after it.

“You told your work you’re taking time off?” my mother asked even though she knew.

“Yes,” I whispered, my hair dripping onto the mattress.

“Good,” my mother said, and unzipped the big, clear case and pulled out a long panel of thick, white cloth, layering the folds onto the bed. She guided me down onto the fabric, and carefully working one side of my body, and the other, encased me from my feet up to my shoulders. I tried to take in a deep breath but all feeling in my body had receded. I could no longer sense anything but the hot air blowing up from the heating vent, drying my lips, eyes, the damp hair around my ears. Then, I felt her wrap the top of my head and finally, my face, in the cloth. She may have kissed or patted my forehead, and I heard her, muffled and as if from the other room, say that she would check on me and wake me in spring. The room went dark and quiet, and I was finally suspended in the warmth of the cocoon.

My thoughts and impressions dimmed, and what I saw last was bicycling with him, my friend, as a child, through Madison on a humid summer day, buoyant, racing beneath hickories and maples humming with cicadas. And then the sick feeling I couldn’t displace or escape. At the restaurant with its glass bar and big, leafy plants. My cocktail full of crushed ice. My friend across the table, looking down with the same faint smile he had in the courtroom when he said he didn’t know where she was. And all this time, she was somewhere, thrown away, disguised or buried, waiting and alone, desperate to be found.