STEPHEN KAHN | ONLY AFTER YOU’RE GONE

ONLY AFTER YOU’RE GONE

I never got to tell my mother goodbye, or that I loved her, that I was sorry. If I could share a drink with her today, I’d make it a strong old-fashioned, or just straight bourbon from a paper cup, the way she used to take it. We would sit in her surreal living room and watch the picture cards of hope hang on the mantel, conceiving which one is me. Then we’d drink our words and let the booze bring us back together, let it burn away all the time we’ve missed: twenty-two years, over half my life. I might ask her permission to steal a few lines of poetry; she was a writer, too. She too would have known that it’s safer to employ a third-person narrator to create more distance from dark material, so as not to lose the narrative in a heap of tears. But I think I can take this head on, I’m not afraid of getting in a wreck. Besides, the art is not in the tears we cry, but in the tears we hold back.

Long has she passed, my mother, so long that “Mom” hardly seems appropriate. I’ll call her by her first name, even though it was one she hated: Louisa.

Long has she passed, Louisa, so long that the story hardly seems real, as if I never knew her. And yet, just the other day, I thought I heard her voice in the other room…

It was the day she taught me how to drive. Or how not to. I had a lacrosse game that afternoon, a home game at the bottom of St. Paul’s School for Boys’ sprawling campus, a private Episcopalian school on acres of land, a rich kid school. We were rich: rich and miserable. That morning in chapel, I prayed Louisa wouldn’t show up to the game. Well, actually, that’s a lie, because I never prayed, but if I had, that would’ve been my only prayer.

“Goddamnit,” I said when I saw her red PT Cruiser pull up that afternoon, the game having already started. I took out my mouthguard and spat. “Shit.” Quite a mouth for a fourteen-year-old. Quite a temper too. I was an angry kid.“What’s your problem?” the boy defending me said. “You guys are winning.”

A sunny afternoon in Baltimore County, all the flourishing colors of spring, and a dark cloud around Louisa. I could tell she was drunk by how slowly she rose from the car, and by the way she stood, slumped backward like someone

carrying a stack of books (or a case of liquor), her head cocked to one side, a tipping effect in her posture. She had on a white t-shirt tucked into khaki shorts, open-toed shoes, dark sunglasses, what she always wore. There was about half the length of the field between us, but she was noticeable from afar. She had great hair, wavy and blonde; she went through bottles of hairspray, but it made her hair sparkle in the sun. A very beautiful woman. Always the most beautiful, I remember Dad saying, and always an alcoholic.

She didn’t wave to me; I didn’t wave to her. None of the other parents spoke to her or even stood near her. Throughout the game I’d look up and suddenly she’d be gone, disappeared back into the car, and then she’d reappear, standing there like a drunk scarecrow.

Strange, to think I knew this woman: I saw her every day of my life, ate with her, lay in her bed, touched the mole on her neck and played with the clasp of her gold necklace; I helped her up off the floor of her bathroom, changed her dirty sheets and emptied the handles of liquor I found in her closet. I knew this woman: but in a removed way, as a reader knows a certain narrator, but not the author.

“Stephen, get your head out of your ass,” Coach said during a timeout. The score was now tied heading into the fourth quarter.

“Come on, we need this.”

“Right, Coach,” I said, looking over at the parking lot, Louisa nowhere in sight. “I got it.

On the next play I lost the ball. The boy defending me scooped it up, but before he could heave it downfield, I checked him hard enough that he lost control and dropped his stick. I scooped the loose ball, made a quick pass, and we scored. It was a legal check, I hit him in the upper arm, but so viciously that it stunned him; his arm had probably gone dead. After the play, he took a knee and cradled that arm. The game was paused. I bit down hard on my mouthguard, standing over him with a callous composure, almost able to taste the tears streaming down his face. It’s a rough game, I thought, scrape his ass off the field and let’s go.

As I watched him walk off with his head down, I suddenly felt a deep remorse. It couldn’t have been me who sent that kid weeping to the sideline, but rather an unintentional, exaggerated version of myself, my reflection in a funhouse mirror. But it was me, my furious and scared self. And that dark figure getting out of the car, slouching toward the ground, ready to tumble down drunk: that was me too.

We won the game, not that I cared. Now I had to get home. I signaled to Louisa that I would walk up the campus hill to get changed and meet her outside the gym. She reciprocated with a slight wave. I wondered if she even knew where she was. All the other kids rode with their parents up the hill in fancy SUVs. I walked. For reasons left to a whole other story, I couldn’t call Dad, and never in a million years would I have asked a friend for help; I was beyond embarrassed.

I hurried up the hill and got changed. Having mastered the art of hiding my emotions, I feigned a good mood for my teammates, the whole time worrying about Louisa behind the wheel, drunk navigating the winding campus roads. Upon exiting the gym, I was relieved that she had found her way. Funny how comforting normalcy is, even when normal is totally fucked up. She botched the park job, her tires well over the line, the front bumper riding the block, badly scratched from all the drunk driving. To my knowledge, she never got caught, but to have called her a functioning alcoholic would have been a stretch.

I got in the car without hesitation. There was the sweet, sickly, almost medicinal smell I’d come to associate with Louisa and with failing motherhood, and there was her little paper cup, in plain sight, half emptied of bourbon. I laughed. Her behavior had become so brazen, so absurdly reckless, it was like some trashy sitcom, and I laughed right on cue. It was anyone’s guess how much she’d had to drink; she was always under the influence (always sad and beautiful). But then there were the horrible, heartsinking moments when I realized she was gone, gone from the world and from herself, eclipsed by her own shadow, by this person she hated: Louisa. This was one of those moments. Maybe that’s why I laughed, to fend off the fear.

Her delicate hands clenched the wheel, one of the knuckles black and broken from a fall she took in the kitchen a few nights before. The bridge of her nose was also busted, I saw it in profile as she lolled in the seat. I couldn’t tell if her eyes were open behind her dark shades, but she was very quiet, which was always a bad sign. She was going down.

“Mom,” I said. “Mom. Mom. Shit. Goddamnit.”

“You,” she said, under a heavy, desperate breath.

“What?”

“You…hurt that kid.”

“What kid? You probably don’t even know who we played.”

“You hurt that kid.”

“Who cares. You’re drunk, so who fucking cares. Let’s go.”

It was hard to understand her sickness, why she wouldn’t stop. I used to think it was because she loved alcohol more than me, or because she didn’t love me at all, and so I was very short with her in those days. If I had known just how few of them she had left, I would have been more patient. I would have said, Louisa—

Or Mom. Mom, I say—

Or Stephen says—

I’m sorry, Stephen says. I was mad at you and I took it out on him. I don’t have the temperament for sports, this isn’t me. I’m better suited for the writing world, where it’s really dangerous. I’m a writer, Mom, like you.

No one can save you now, Stephen says, but maybe the writing can. Find a narrator, create the distance, forget about being a mother. I’ll say goodbye and be one of the picture cards of hope hanging on the mantel, just the way you wrote it. And then I’ll write about you someday, all the dark and lovely material you’ve given me, that will be the way I love you. But only after you’re gone, of course, to spare you the pain.

Stephen doesn’t know where the pain comes from, but he hears it in the absence of his mother’s words, echoing from somewhere in the past, if there ever was a time before she was sick. He watches as other boys get into cars

with their mothers and wonders what they talk about, but he’s not envious. What good would a life in writing be without a little conflict?

You know, Mom, Stephen says, if you get in a wreck, they’ll take you back to the hospital, and you’ll have more hallucinations. Remember last time when you thought the nurse was our golden retriever? But if I get in a wreck, I’ll just say you were teaching me how to drive. Or how not to.

So Stephen drives them home. He’s anxious at first, but after a few sips of bourbon, it’s easy, just like driving a go-kart. It kills going down. How could anyone want to drink this, he wonders, but soon the effect is wonderful, almost unbearably so; he’s never felt this good. His mother takes a few sips, then removes her sunglasses. The green in her eyes has dulled. There is very little left, merely a reflection of her son.

Getting dark, she says, and lays her head on Stephen’s shoulder—

Getting dark, Mom says. I hear her in the living room.

Always dark in here, I say. I light the candle, change her typewriter ribbon and turn on the machine. A whir and a clacking, and the brown liquid glows.

Wait, Mom says. There are the pictures hanging on the mantel.

Oh? I thought they were Christmas cards.

Come closer. They’re just little babies. See their faces, black and white. The indistinguishable little shapes, the almost-hearts, hanging there together. Which one is me?

Hard to tell, they’re all so blurry. I’m probably just drunk.

Doesn’t matter. The years have already decided. Now tell me, what are you working on?

It’s different, Mom says, almost untraceable from my other work. I love being able to start over like this, to write about things only as familiar as a distant memory can offer, things I can’t say are true, and yet are of the deepest instinct; to gaze into that forward time, to look back and laugh at what you thought you knew. It’s almost better than booze. Want to read some?

Absolutely, I say, but if it’s good, I might steal a few lines.

Fine, Mom says. After I’m gone, no one will ever know.

Stephen Kahn is originally from Baltimore, Maryland. He began learning the art of narration at The Writers Studio in New York City and has been taking writing workshops ever since. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he works with his brother in concrete construction and volunteers with the Central Virginia Food Bank. This is his second publication.