Intermezzos Along the Road Home by Kathryn Petruccelli

I.

I am peering into Pacific tide pools with my five-year-old son. Farther off shore, jet black cormorants dry their wings on rocks that sustain the constant orchestra of crashing waves. At our feet, lesser movements of water play out the aftershocks. Place shifts easily here, sand walls collapse, footprints disappear with the next sweep of foam. It is the day before I board a plane to get to my mother, before the panicked call from my sister (“You need to come straight to the hospital!”), before the two-hour delay in Chicago due to lightning, the flight through flashing clouds.

The fog is low along the horizon. Figures of people and dogs, outcroppings of rock appear veiled, unreal. I wander down the beach to take the call, clutch my cell phone through the low tide listening to my mother hum show tunes, tell me she is fine.

It’s minutes or lifetimes before I rejoin my son and the class of half a dozen other five-year-olds and their parents watching crabs and touching sea anemones. Half-way through our time together, as our troupe clamors over slippery boulders avoiding limpets and barnacles, a little boy I don’t know, who happens to be next to me, one foot planted on a mossy green rock, the other just lifting to find its next stronghold, instinctively reaches out and takes my hand for balance. 

II.

We are traveling on toward our new home, the one we haven’t found yet. There is a picture of my mother taped on the wall in the back of the van. In it, she is standing along a path in what was one of her favorite gardens next to a sign that reads, “Why are you hurrying?” I had tried to sing to her at the end, a song she made up for me as a child, but she had waved me off, like that wasn’t the direction comfort flowed, like maybe the notes could no longer reach where she was going. I’m not sure about what the guidelines are for where she was going. I know no more about where we are headed, but for now, I am in charge of doling out comfort in the parent-child continuum: there is a boy asleep in the back of the van, and one kicking the inside of my abdomen. 

The steady hum, the motion of traveling itself a kind of balm, on the road the edges of scenes are fuzzy, temporary flashes: skylines, pastures, bakeries and gas stations. It is day. It is night. You rent time in rooms; you put up tents. You are passing through. You are a probe, a beam of light, searching. You are perfectly positioned to root out what you are looking for, if only you knew what it was. If only the percussion of what you left would stop its drumming inside your head.

We stop at a campsite west of the Rockies. There, a man from a neighboring site returns from the restroom and reports a bird apparently trapped, unable to find its way out the open door. “That thing’s confused,” he says dismissively. 

In the evening, I will see the bird shoot from the archway of the men’s room and notice the nest expertly attached to the crook in the wall just outside of it. She knew exactly how to get out all along. She has little ones to protect. How could I not know her? I stop and listen to her song – beautiful warning.

III.

If you’ve done any road tripping in the U.S. at all, you may know that there is just one woman who works in all the visitor centers across the country. You will have met her: Coiffed grey hair, full make-up. No matter the weather, she is wearing a hound’s tooth blazer over a white turtleneck. Pearl earrings. Her darkly penciled eyebrows raise in delight as she greets you and, of course, asks where you’re from. Then, only after you agree to sign her guest book, she settles in to circle attractions upside down on her plexi-glass-covered map and tell you how much your little boy with enjoy the (fill in the blank kind of) museum. 

If you are like me, you watch her go on and on, and the weariness and the trip ahead and the things behind, all creep into your bones until you have to lean hard on her map to balance yourself. And how can you tell her that what you need is for her to come around the counter and clasp you in her arms? To hold you to her hound’s tooth breast, in the thrum of her heart song, right there, next to the displays of Mount Rushmore magnets and postcards of the Black Hills. And I choose to believe that that’s just what she needs, too – to forget for a minute about her kids, grown and flown, who don’t call enough. To be what she’s best at being – mother, respite for the visitor, a home base. 

But there she is in front of you – smiling expectantly now, the music of her voice rising in a question you’ve daydreamed through – and so you try to recover, come back to the present moment, in which there are decisions to be made about lodging and entertainment, in which she is held back from truly fulfilling her role as mother-figure by the laws of social convention, where you are still a traveler, alone here, and where your own mother comes to you only sporadically in dreams touring you through various houses you once lived in, every door opening to an ocean you cannot cross.

IV.

Reaching a destination is a beginning. We stop driving. The steady beat after miles and miles of tires on asphalt still rings like a concert in our heads. We make an offer on the second house we see and hurry through a closing with a baby due in just another month. 

But the night we move our things into the new place, I feel a little hazy. Just tired from the heat, surely. Just swirling in the emotion of the biggest purchase of my life. Just very pregnant. The sound of the world is muted, the colors carry a sheen I haven’t seen but once before.

The haziness doesn’t lift and soon the midwife is there, and soon, so is the baby. A month early. Amongst the boxes he comes. He has been waiting for home and doesn’t see the need to delay his appearance once it is secured. I reach down and grasp my floppy doll like I’ve always known him, spill lilting sing-song words to rouse him. These notes that present themselves in my throat are not ones I’ve practiced or whose origins I can conjure.

Is it a single door through which we leave and arrive? 

This baby arrives still in the amniotic sac. Such babies are said to be clairvoyant – born “in the caul,” “behind the veil” it’s called. 

V.

Once there were three brothers – Alvah, Walter and George Howes, who made their living traveling and taking pictures at the turn of the 20th century. More than 20,000 glass negatives were found in apple crates in an attic and are now stored in a former meat locker turned historical society. We have managed to flush a negative from one of those crates that contains the image of the house we now own, birthplace of my younger child. 

In the picture, a robust-looking woman in an apron appears on the open porch next to a young boy in overalls. The mother has moved during the long exposure, however, a visual glissando, and though the image of the boy remains crisp, she has turned ghostly, a blur of whomever she might have been.

VI.

It is bedtime. Time of magic. When the sky of my son’s mind opens its blue-black expanse. The baby seer has grown. He has been telling me secrets again: the opposite of a snowflake is a star. From the bottomless well of wisdom, bucket after bucket emerges, contents flowing unselfconsciously. He expounds on the virtues of certain spinning tops, makes shadow wolves on the wall next to his nightlight and wonders aloud about how long it’s been since he’s seen the hunched old man who walks our street. And then: “There is a cricket in the corner by my bed, Mommy. It’s been here for days.” 

My mind goes back to the bugs populating my youth around the edges of our small brown ranch house, incessantly pulling their infernal legs across the instrument of their bodies, avoiding capture night after night despite my mother crouching with a paper cup, hoping for catch and release. I see her on her hands and knees, crawling into corners, discovering things we didn’t know were lost.  

“I like the cricket, Mommy,” my boy says, shattering my reverie, “It means there is always someone there to sing to me.” And for a moment, we are both quiet, straining to hear.

Kathryn Petruccelli is obsessed with place, language, and the ocean. Her work can be found in the Southern Review, Massachusetts Review (forthcoming), Gulf Stream, SweetLit, Rattle, Poet Lore, Tinderbox, Arcturus, and elsewhere. She teaches online writing workshops and tour guides at the Emily Dickinson Museum. Come say hello: poetroar.com, @kathrynpetruccelli. 

17 March 2023