“I tried to kill myself,” I told her. “I took out a knife and cut my wrist.” I was shaking.
“I know,” she said, as casually as she had commented about the weather. Her gaze did not waver from the winter landscape. “I saw the marks. It is unmistakable. You try to hide it, but I knew immediately. Because I tried it once myself.”
“What?”
She turned to stare at me. “After your father died, about six months after. You and Duncan were at school. I was standing in the kitchen chopping onions and crying. Suddenly I realized I wasn’t crying from the onions. I stared at the knife for a few minutes, and then I did it. I slid down to the floor and watched the blood. Susan, our neighbor—you may remember her?—found me. I was in the hospital for three days. You both stayed with a friend for a week. You were told it was to give me some rest. When I came back, I wore long-sleeved shirts and blouses until the marks had faded into scars. Then I wore bracelets to cover the scars.”
I was shocked. My mother had been mad—mad like me. {Neither of you were mad—you were both sad, sad, sad, like me. I didn’t know Mom tried to take her own life, but thinking back, it doesn’t surprise me. It just makes me weary, somehow.}
“Anyway,” she said, “it isn’t really that important. One day you feel like dying. The next day you want to live. It was someone else who wanted to die, someone you don’t know very well and you don’t ever want to see again.”
She stood, patted me on the shoulder. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ll be fine.” And left the room.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both.
Did I believe her? Was it true that you could leave your old self behind so easily? There was an unease building in me that said it wasn’t true, that I would have to be on my guard against it, as much as Duncan was on guard against the underground. {You misunderstand me—I embraced the underground. It fascinated me. There was no dread, only situational dread—the fear that came over me when I clearly did not fit in underground, when I thought the gray caps might no longer suffer my presence.}
After that, we avoided the subject. I never discussed my suicide attempt with my mother again. But we did continue to talk—mostly about Duncan. Duncan’s books. Duncan’s adventures. Duncan’s early attempts at writing history papers.
We shared memories we both had of Duncan. Back in Stockton, sometimes, after breakfast, Duncan would sit by Dad’s side and scribble intensely, a stern look on his face, while Dad, equally stern, wrote the first draft of some paper destined for publication in The Obscure History Journal Quarterly. Mother and I would laugh at the two of them, for Dad could not contain the light in his eyes that told us he knew very well his son was trying to imitate him. To become him.
It seemed safe, to talk about Duncan in such a way. Or at least it did, until I discovered my mother had one memory of him I did not share with her.
Something “your father would have been able to tell better,” she said. We were in the kitchen preparing dinner—boiling water for rice and preparing green beans taken from the deep freezer in the basement. Outside, the river stared glassily with its limitless blue gaze.
“You know,” she said. “Duncan saw one when he was a child—in Ambergris. Your father went there for research and he took Duncan while I took you to Aunt Ellis’ house for the holidays. You can’t have been more than nine, so Duncan was four or five.” {Yet I remember this trip as if it had happened this morning.}
“What do you mean he ‘saw one’?” I asked.
“A gray cap,” she said, snapping a bean as she said it.
The hairs on my neck rose. A sudden warm-cold feeling came over me.
“A gray cap,” I said.
“Yes. Jonathan told me after he and Duncan came back. He definitely saw one. Your father thought it might be fun to go on an Underground Ambergris tour while in the city. They still offered them back then. Before the problems started.”
“Problems.” My mother had a gift for understatement. The tours to the tunnels beneath the surface stopped abruptly when the ticket seller to one such event popped downstairs for a second, only to run screaming back to the surface. The room below contained no sign of the tour guide or the tourists—just a blood-drenched room lit by a strange green light, the source of which no one could identify. Much like the light I write by at this very moment. {Apocryphal. Most likely, they closed up shop because they were losing money due to their poor reputation. The gray caps have often been bad for certain types of business.}
“They bought their tickets,” my mother continued, “and walked down the stairs with the other tourists. Your father swears Duncan held on to his hand very tightly as they went down into a room cluttered with old Ambergris artifacts. They went from room to musty old room while the tour guide went on and on about the Silence and Truff knows what else…when suddenly Jonathan realizes he’s not holding Duncan’s hand anymore—he’s holding a fleshy white mushroom instead.”
Our Dad stood there, staring at the mushroom, paralyzed with fear. Then he dropped it and began to run from room to room. He was shaking. He had never been so scared in his entire life, he told my mother later. {Where was I? One minute I was holding my father’s hand. The next…}
He started to shout Duncan’s name, but then he caught a blur of white from the next room over. He ran into the room, and there was Duncan, in a corner, staring at a gray cap that stood right in front of him, staring right back. {…I was staring at a gray cap. Just as my mother said. I wish I knew what happened between those two points in time.}
“It was small,” my mother said. “Small and gray and wearing some sort of shimmery green clothing. There was a smell, Jonathan said—a smell like deep river water trickling through lichen and water weeds.” {It smelled like mint to me. It opened its mouth and spores came out. Its eyes were large. I felt a feeling of unbelievable peace staring at it. It immobilized me.}
Our father screamed when he saw the gray cap—and he knows he screamed, because the other tourists came running into the room.
But it was as if Duncan and the gray cap were deaf. They continued to stare at each other. Duncan was smiling. The look on the gray cap’s face could not be read. {Later, I became aware that we had stood there, watching each other, for a long time. At that moment, in that moment, it seemed like seconds. I felt as if the gray cap was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t understand what it was saying. I don’t know why I thought that—it never made a sound. And yet that’s the way I felt. I also felt as if I had been somewhere else part of the time, even if I could not remember it. Somewhere underground. I had a taste of dirt and mud in my mouth. I felt dirt under my fingernails as if I’d been digging, frantically digging for hours. But, later, when I checked them, my fingernails were clean.}