Commonwealth

8

Six months in advance of her retirement, Teresa bought herself a ticket to Switzerland to visit Holly at the Zen center. She did it so she’d have something to look forward to. She wasn’t sure about retiring so much as she feared becoming a doddering presence in the job she had loved for so long. Over time she’d seen everyone come and go, rise and fall and pack the contents of his or her desk into a box. Sooner or later she’d have to do the same, and wouldn’t it be better to do it before they started nudging her towards the door? At seventy-two she might well have the time to figure out another life, not that she was sure what that meant exactly. She thought she might take a bridge class or do a better job with her yard. She’d thought that she could go to Switzerland.

Two weeks after her retirement party, a pretty gold watch on her wrist and a ticket in her purse, she called a taxi for the airport.

Holly didn’t come home anymore. When she first went to Switzerland twenty-five years ago, she had planned to be gone for a month. She came back after six months, and then it was only to apply for a permanent visa. She officially quit her job at Sumitomo Bank, which they had held for her. Holly had been an economics major at Berkeley and even though she was young she’d been valued at her job. She gave up the lease on her apartment which had been sitting empty all this time. She sold her furniture.

“Are you in love?” her mother asked. She didn’t actually think that Holly was in love, even though she exhibited all the classic signs: distraction and dewiness, a loss of appetite. Holly had cut her dark hair close to her head. Her face was scrubbed, and for the first time in years Teresa could see that a smattering of freckles still remained. Teresa was afraid her oldest daughter had been kidnapped even though they were sitting together at the kitchen table drinking coffee, that her brain had been taken over by a cult that had allowed her body to come home long enough to sort out her possessions, throwing everyone off the trail. But asking Holly if she’d been taken over by a cult was a harder question.

“Not in love,” Holly said, picking up her mother’s hand and squeezing it. “Not exactly.”

It used to be that Holly came home from time to time, first once a year, then every two or three. Teresa suspected that Bert bought the tickets but she never asked. After a while the small trickle of occasional visits dried up. Holly said she didn’t want to come back to the States anymore, making it sound like it was her country she was letting go of rather than her family. She said she was happier in Switzerland.

While Teresa ardently wished for her children’s happiness, she didn’t understand why they couldn’t have found it closer to Torrance. With one of them gone, the other three might have chosen to circle the wagons, but it seemed just the opposite had happened, that Cal’s death had flung each of them to their own far corner. She missed them all but mostly she missed Holly. Holly was the least mysterious of her children, the only one who on occasion would crawl into her bed at night, saying she wanted to talk.

You could always come see me, Holly would write whenever her mother complained, first in slow Aérogramme letters and then, blessedly, in e-mails once the Zen center, called Zen-Dojo Tozan, got its own computer. Teresa never could remember the actual name of the place so it helped to see it printed out.

What would I do in Switzerland? her mother wrote back.

Sit with me, Holly wrote.

It wasn’t so much to ask. Certainly she’d sat with Jeanette and Fodé and the boys in Brooklyn. She’d sat with Albie in any number of places including her own living room. Over the long years, Teresa had gotten past her suspicion of Buddhism and meditation. Holly, the times she’d seen her, had still been Holly. And while there had been plenty of good reasons not to go when she was working, without work all she could tell herself was that she was too old, the trip too long, the tickets too expensive, and the connections too intimidating. None of those were reason enough to miss seeing her own daughter.

The flight from Los Angeles to Paris was twelve hours. Teresa accepted the free wine whenever the cart rolled down the narrow aisle, slept fitfully against the window, and tried to read The English Patient. By the time the plane landed at Charles de Gaulle she had aged twenty years. Prosecutors should insist the trials of murderers and drug lords be held in economy class on crowded transatlantic flights, where any suspect would confess to any crime in exchange for the promise of a soft bed in a dark, quiet room. Off the plane, stiff and slow, she shuffled into the river of life: the roll-aboard suitcases trailing behind the cell-phone-talkers like obedient dogs, everyone walking with such assurance that it never occurred to her not to follow them. She was too muddled to think for herself, yet when she finally did, snapped back to reality by the sight of an information desk, she was told that her departure gate was in another terminal that could be accessed by shuttle bus, and that the flight to Lucerne was three hours delayed.

Teresa accepted a highlighted map of the airport from the startlingly handsome informational Frenchman and started making her way back in the direction from whence she came. Her feet had swollen on the flight and were now a full size larger than the shoes she was wearing. It wasn’t that she expected someone was going to show up and escort her to her gate, but she couldn’t help but remember the way things had gone the last time she was in this airport fifty years ago: she was a different person under considerably different circumstances.

Bert had taken Teresa to Paris for their honeymoon. It was all a surprise. He made the hotel reservations, ordered francs from the bank, asked Teresa’s mother to pack her daughter’s suitcase. His parents drove them to Dulles the morning after the wedding to catch their flight and she still didn’t know where they were going. She had majored in French literature at the University of Virginia and had never left the country. She had never spoken French outside of class.

She stopped at a little café on the concourse, collapsed into the white molded-plastic chair, and ordered a café au lait and a croissant, that was easy enough. She had nothing but time. She eased her heels out of the backs of her shoes even though she knew it was a mistake. Her feet would expand like bread dough and she would never be able to cram them back in. For the first time since she was in her twenties she thought about what a beautiful boy Bert Cousins had been, tall and sandy blond, with such dark blue eyes they startled her every morning when he opened them. His family was rich as Croesus, her grandmother liked to say. His parents had given him a little green Fiat when he graduated from college.

When they met he was in his second year of law school at UVA, the top of his class, and she was in her senior year of college. She slipped on a patch of ice one snowy January morning hurrying to class and had gone down hard, books and papers fanning out around her, the icy air knocked from her lungs. She was lying on her back, too stunned for the moment to do anything but watch the flakes of snow wafting towards her, when Bert Cousins leaned into her view and asked if she would allow him to help her. Yes, she would. He picked her up, a stranger, picked her up in his arms and carried her all the way to the infirmary, missing his next class to wait while they wrapped her ankle. A year later, when he asked her to marry him, he told her that he wanted them to move to California after he finished law school. He would take the California bar and they would start a whole new life together where nobody knew them. He wasn’t going to spend his days drawing up contracts for real estate sales, he was going to practice real law. And he wanted children, he said, lots and lots of children. As an only child he had wished for nothing but brothers and sisters. Teresa looked back and forth between Bert and the pretty ring on her hand and thought she must be emitting light from her entire body she loved him so much. It was unnerving to remember that now, at seventy-two, spreading strawberry jam on the tip of her croissant, how much she had loved him. She could barely hold the thought in her mind. She had loved Bert Cousins, and then grown used to him, then was disappointed in him, and then later, after he left her with four small children, she had hated him with the full force of her life. But in the Charles de Gaulle airport when she was twenty-two, her love for him had precluded all thoughts of ever not loving him. They held hands on the way to baggage claim, and while they waited beside the shining silver luggage chute he kissed her, full and deep, not giving a thought to who might be watching, because they were married, they were in Paris.

Teresa looked at all the people walking past her table at the airport coffee shop and wondered how many of them were starting their honeymoons and how many of them were in love and how many of them would not be in love later on. The truth was she had more or less forgotten about Bert. It took a long time but it was a fact that now entire years would pass when she failed to ask the children how their father was because she simply didn’t think of him. She had lived long enough that Bert and all the love and rage he had engendered were gone. Cal was still with her, Jim Chen was there, but Bert, alive and well in Virginia, was gone.

Revived by the coffee and the rest, Teresa stuffed her feet painfully back in her shoes and beat a slow path to her gate. Maybe she would stay in Switzerland forever, maybe she would become a Buddhist. She couldn’t imagine doing this again.

Holly had neglected to go into the tiny room that had once been a broom closet beneath the kitchen stairs to check the computer for the status of her mother’s flight from Paris. It was only now that she was at the airport in Lucerne standing in front of the arrival board that she could see the plane was three hours late. True, she didn’t have occasion to go to the airport very often, but what kind of an idiot forgets to check the time before making an hour-long drive? Because it was a rule that whoever took the car also had to take the phone, she was able to send a text to Mikhail and explain the situation. She knew he wouldn’t care. He told her they didn’t need the car but still, she felt like she was inconveniencing the community by keeping it for so long. Assuming that the time now listed was in fact correct, they would not be returning until after two o’clock. She had told her mother to take the train from Paris. No one flew from Paris to Lucerne. The train was a snap. But her mother had despaired at the thought of taking a train from the airport to the Gare de Lyon and then finding the train to Lucerne. And maybe it would have been impossible, with the jet lag and the luggage. Holly could have taken the train up and met her in Paris but she never suggested that. She didn’t want to be away that long.

Holly had completed her morning kitchen work early, washing and peeling ten pounds of potatoes, cutting them into chunks, and leaving them covered in cold salted water while at every moment striving to remain present in her task. She had gone to the guest-room where her mother would be sleeping to make sure there were towels and a washcloth beside the basin and a bottle of water and a glass beside the bed. She excused herself from morning meditation early, stepping around the cushions of others as quietly as possible to leave for the airport, though of course now she realized she hadn’t had to do that at all. She could have stayed. Her sense of irritation with herself was so ridiculously disproportionate to the event that she had to wonder if the problem wasn’t really that she didn’t want her mother to visit. While she understood the importance of letting all thoughts rise without judgment, to see them and to let them go, she decided it would probably be best just to squelch this one.

Holly bought a Toblerone bar at the news kiosk and then looked around the waiting area for discarded newspapers, as chocolate and news were the two things her life was lacking. And sex. Sex was lacking but she had enough sense not to look for that in the airport. She found copies of Le Matin, Blick (but she didn’t do so well reading German) and, wonder of wonders, a complete Tuesday edition of the New York Times. Suddenly she was soothed. The idea of spending three hours in the airport with three newspapers and Toblerone was nothing short of a miracle. She peeled back the tinfoil and broke off a piece of candy, resting it on her tongue to melt before she read the science section of the Times: Tasmanian devils were dying of oral cancer; there was reason to think it might be better to run without running shoes; and children living in poverty in the inner cities were as likely to suffer from asthma as children in war zones. She tried to figure out what she was supposed to do with the information. How could she save the devils, get them to stop biting one another, which appeared to be how the cancer was spread, and why was she worrying about a small, vicious marsupial in Tasmania and feeling next to nothing about the asthmatic children? Why had she read the entire article about running when she wasn’t a runner but skipped the piece about geothermal energy? Exactly how shallow had she become? She folded the paper in her lap and sat with the information for a moment. She thought that she should leave Zen-Dojo Tozan more often, or maybe leave it altogether, and she thought that she should never leave it under any circumstances, like Siobhán, whom Holly had never seen go farther than the mailbox at the end of the driveway.

When Holly remembered her life in California, she remembered seeing everything in terms of who had less than she did and who had more, who was prettier, smarter, who had a better relationship (everyone, usually), who was getting promoted faster, because as much as they had praised her at the bank there seemed to be people they preferred. She was constantly trying to figure out how to do it better, how to get it right, and in doing so she had started to grind her teeth at night. She had chewed a soft crater on the inside of her left cheek, and was picking at the cuticles of her thumbs until they bled. She made an appointment with an internist, told him her problems, and then showed him the inside of her mouth. He peered around her tongue and teeth with a penlight, looked at her hands, and then suggested meditation. Or that’s what she thought he had said, “You’re going to need meditation.”

The instant she heard the word she felt her heart surge, as if her heart had been waiting for this exact moment. Finally! her heart said to her. At last! “Where can I learn to meditate?” she asked. Just the word in her mouth brought forth joy.

The doctor looked at her as if wondering how crazy she might actually be. “Med-i-ca-tion,” he said again, slower and louder this time. “You’ll need medication for your anxiety. I’m going to write you a prescription for Ativan. We’ll work with the dosage. We’ll have to figure out what’s right for you.”

But Holly dropped the white slip of paper in the trash can after giving the receptionist a twenty for her co-pay. However unwittingly, the doctor had told her how she would be cured. She didn’t even understand exactly what meditation entailed at that point but she knew she was going to find out. She read a couple of books, listened to some dharma talks on cassette tapes in her car, and then found a group that sat on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings. She started a sitting practice at home, getting up early before she went to the bank in the morning. Six months later some people from the Wednesday group invited her along for a weekend retreat. Later, she sat in silence for a week at a spirituality center just north of Berkeley. It was there she saw a notice on the corkboard about Zen-Dojo Tozan. She felt the same acceleration in her heart that she had felt when she first misunderstood her doctor. There I am, she thought, looking at the picture of the chalet balanced on a soft sweep of mountain flowers. She pulled the push-pin from the brochure and let it drop into her hand.

Things like this happened to Holly. At times she had a sense of being guided, and when she did she attributed it to Cal.

For years after Cal died, Holly was rocked with regret that they hadn’t been closer (and there was regret about other things as well). But since coming to Switzerland, she’d started to see that for a fifteen-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl in a stressful living situation they’d done pretty well. They yelled at one another but carried no grudges. They shoved but never slapped or pinched. They threw couch pillows at one another, not dishes. Holly corrected Cal’s homework without condescension, and Cal, in the shining memory of her childhood, had once yanked two girls off of her in the hallway at school, one by her ponytail and the other by her shirt collar, as they were attempting to stuff Holly into her locker. “You bitches get off my sister,” he had said as the bitches stumbled backwards and then ran down the hall in tears. He had hurt them, scared them senseless. Holly, who made it her business to look after everyone else, was for that one golden moment protected. By her brother.

As the two oldest children, Holly and Cal worked together to look after Albie and Jeanette, keeping them away from the stove and the knives when they were younger. And they looked after their mother too, maybe not in tandem, but they made an effort to lighten her load, to keep things from her whenever possible. The more Holly felt Cal’s presence in her life now, the more she knew he cared for her, that he forgave her. The better job she did at keeping her life quiet, her eyes open to the simple beauty that surrounded her, the better she was able to hear him. She didn’t hear him in any nutty way, they didn’t sit around and talk politics, it was more a pleasant feeling, easy enough to achieve at Zen-Dojo Tozan but she could even do it here, in the waiting area of the Lucerne airport. She believed that most of the human population didn’t avail themselves to their full psychic potential. They lived in a state of mental clutter, the bombardment of goods and services, information and striving. They wouldn’t be able to recognize true happiness if it were standing on their foot. It had been almost impossible to hear her brother when she was at Berkeley, at the Sumitomo Bank, or anywhere in Los Angeles, but in Switzerland, this place where he had never been, well, it was better.

Holly went back to her newspapers. She read about Broadway plays. She read a book review and an op-ed about flooding in Iowa. She read about the plight of women in Afghanistan. She finished half of her chocolate and put the other half in her purse for later. Seeing the time, she got up and went to stand with the families and the drivers holding hand-lettered signs. When she saw Teresa walking towards her — so tiny! so much older! how long had it been now? ten years? more than that? — she was flooded with love, such a huge wave, both her love and her brother’s. She held out her arms. “Oh, Mom,” Holly said.

Where to begin with the marvels? First of course was Holly, who, with her cropped black hair touched in gray and her Birkenstocks and wooly socks, was radiant. All those people packed together on the other side of security, all those people making a single, indistinguishable mass, and then, bam! Holly. She was something else entirely, no one could have missed her. When Teresa fell into her embrace it was as if they had never been parted. She had such an overwhelming memory of the nurse coming into her room the morning Holly was born, laying that perfect baby in her arms, the baby who was now this beautiful woman. Teresa kissed her neck, pressed her cheek to her daughter’s sternum. “I’m sorry you had to wait so long,” she said, not knowing if she meant the three hour delay or all the years it had taken her to get there.

“I had a nice time,” Holly said, running her hand across her mother’s head. She took the carry-on and her purse, slung them over her shoulder like they were nothing, like she could have just as easily slung Teresa over her shoulder too. She walked her straight to the restroom without asking if she had to go, and she did. This was the person Holly had always been: in charge, making decisions, being helpful without being asked. When Teresa pointed out her luggage at the baggage claim, Holly scooped it up and laughed.

“You pack like a Californian!” she said, thrilled by such a small thing. “I do, too.”

“How do Californians pack?” Teresa was laughing without getting the joke, her smile so wide she felt certain she was showing teeth that had not been seen in years.

Holly held up her mother’s black wheelie-bag. It was small and discreet, a footnote to all the giant bright-pink hard-sides reinforced with bungee-cords that circled before them. “Europeans pack like they’re never coming home. I think it has to do with the war.”

Outside the air was bright and cold despite it being the first of September. It had been ninety-six degrees when she left Los Angeles. Holly helped her on with her coat. Teresa was proud of herself for having brought the coat in the first place. At home in her living room she had put it on and then taken it off, locked the front door, gone to the taxi, gone back inside and put the coat on again. She could see the Alps in the distance from the parking lot now. She had seen them from the plane, the snow-covered peaks. Alps. She pulled the coat tighter. Who would have thought Teresa Cousins would ever see Alps?

The Zen-Dojo Tozan’s Citroën that Holly drove was more like a soup can than a car. The flimsy metal shuddered as she downshifted around the curves, the gearshift a long stick coming up from the floorboard. Back home on the 405, such a car would be crushed by the blowback from a passing SUV, but on this perilous mountain road it felt like all the other tin cans. They could bump into one another without significant harm, like people brushing past on a crowded street. No one had upped the ante in order to save themselves, built a daily tank that would obliterate the competition. They were all in this together. The guard rail that separated them from the vertiginous drop off the side of the mountain seemed similarly unprepared to save a life, but what difference did it make? They were all going to die anyway, all of them. They weren’t even at the Zen center — whatever it was called — and already Teresa felt she was getting the point. Who needed air bags? The reinforced steel-cage construction that created a barrier to the world? Teresa rolled down her window — rolled it down with a hand crank! — and breathed in the bright Swiss air.

“So beautiful,” she said. They shot into a stone tunnel cut through the side of a mountain: light then darkness then pine trees.

“Just you wait,” her daughter said.

“I have to tell you, Holly, I didn’t understand until now. I mean, I’ve been happy for you, but in the back of my mind I was always thinking, What’s wrong with Torrance?” They drove past two shaggy mountain goats on the side of the road, their curled horns looking like crowns. No doubt they were waiting for Heidi and Grandfather to herd them back into the mountains. Teresa looked over at Holly. “Why would anyone live in Torrance?”

“There’s nothing wrong with home,” Holly said, feeling so pleased to receive her mother’s affirmation. “But it’s quieter here. It’s better for me.”

“I think about Jeanette in Brooklyn with Fodé and the boys. I think she likes all the noise, her tight little space. I think that’s what holds her together. And Albie, always picking up and going someplace else, always looking for something new. That probably works for him. He’s in New Orleans now.”

“He e-mails me sometimes,” Holly said, feeling such a sudden longing for her brother and sister, wanting them all to sit together in the same room with their mother.

“That’s good.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?” Teresa said, craning around to catch another glimpse of the view that receded behind them.

“Has staying in Torrance been good for you? Was it the right choice?”

They were driving through a forest now. The trees, their lower trunks furred with moss, got thicker and taller and started to cut into the light while ferns stretched across the forest floor. There were enormous rocks, boulders really, that looked like they’d been placed by set designers around a fast-running stream. Show me an enchanted forest! the producer must have said.

“Your father wanted me to move all of us to Virginia when he left with Beverly, so we’d be close by. I didn’t even consider it, to tell you the truth. Maybe I should have. It would have made things easier on you kids. I just couldn’t find it in myself to be that accommodating.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” Holly said, foolishly taking her eyes off the road for a second to stare at her mother. “I never knew he said that.”

“Then after Cal died.” Teresa shrugged. “Well, you remember that. We sure weren’t moving to Virginia after Cal died, though I’ll tell you, it bothered me to have him buried there. It was just about going forward in those days, one step, one step, not falling all the way down into myself. I didn’t think about changing my life. My life had already been changed. I just had to get through it.”

“You got through it.” Holly took the car down to second. They were behind a truck, climbing and climbing.

“We all did, I guess, in our own ways. You don’t think you’re going to but then you do. You’re still alive. That was the thing that caught me in the end: I was still alive. You and Albie and Jeanette, still alive. And we wouldn’t be forever, so I had to do something with that.”

Teresa put her hand over Holly’s hand, felt the deep rattle of the gearshift. “Listen to me talking. I never talk like this.”

“It’s Switzerland. That’s what it does to people.” Holly stopped to reconsider. “I should say that’s what it’s done to me. Actually, most of the people I’ve met here are pretty quiet.”

Teresa smiled and nodded. “Well, it’s good. I like it.”

Zen-Dojo Tozan was not in Sarnen or Thun but somewhere between the two, not in a village but in the tall grass and blue flowers. It occupied a large chalet that was built high into the slope of a mountain. The chalet had been the country home of a banker from Zurich. In the summer he and his wife swam with their five children in the lake and in the winter they skied, and in between, unbeknownst to anyone in Sarnen or Thun or Zurich, they sat together on zafu cushions, all seven of them, and closed their eyes and cleared their minds as surely as the bracing mountain air had cleared their lungs. The house was left with a trust to form Zen-Dojo Tozan, with the understanding that the family’s children and their children and all of the children to come would be welcome. Katrina, the fourth daughter, now in her seventies, lived there full time in the small back bedroom she had slept in as a child. Along with Katrina there were fourteen other full-time residents. Twice a year they hosted retreats, running a rented shuttle bus back and forth from the inn in Thun, but most of their income came from walking sticks.

All of the residents participated in some way in the carving or distribution of the sticks, either the art or the business, they liked to say. The sticks were highly sought after, especially by American and Australian meditators who knew that they would never make it to Switzerland. Holly, who displayed no talent with wood or knives, did the accounting. She had found there was virtually no ceiling on what could be charged for a long pole of Swiss stone pine with a carved fish for a handle. Drop a five-euro compass into the fish’s back and double the price, even though no one seemed to understand the basic tenets of orienteering anymore. They bought the wood from a mill in Lausanne, and while they could have had a cheaper and more compelling stock from Germany, they had made the decision to keep the sticks Swiss. That’s what it said on their website: Swiss walking sticks carved from Swiss stone pine by meditators in Switzerland. Every day after meditation and community chores, a few hours were devoted to the sticks: Paul whittled the wood into sticks, Lelia blocked out the crude bodies of the fish with a carving knife, and then Hyla began the delicate work of scales. These sticks, along with their modest endowment, kept up the roof and paid the taxes and put cheese and bread on the table. They had a wait list of eight months for walking sticks. The wait list for residences had gotten too long to be useful and was stuck in a desk drawer and forgotten.

“We’re lucky there’s a guest room open,” Holly said, taking her mother’s hand as she walked her up the steep wooden steps. Her mother, steady enough, would benefit from a stick. The wind could knock a person over some days. “People come as a guest for a month and then they refuse to leave. There are three guest rooms and the schedule is always messed up. People just stay and stay. They think one of us is going to leave and make a space for them.”

The chalet was ringed by a wide wooden porch that jutted out over the crystalline world. Heavy wooden chairs hewn by a careless axe were spread around so that a disciple might rest while taking in the view. The Alps looked like a drawing of the Alps on a candy wrapper, an idealized version meant to draw strangers in. Teresa had to stop and catch her breath, from the view, the thinner air, from the fact that she had actually done it and was there.

“It worked for you,” she said, huffing slightly.

Holly stood there, seeing it all again through her mother’s eyes. “Well, someone actually died while I was waiting them out. That’s when I came back to California and quit my job. He was a Frenchman named Philippe. The walking sticks had been Philippe’s idea years before when they were running out of money and worried they’d have to give the place up. He was a sweet old bird. I still have his room.”

“Do other people’s mothers come?” Teresa asked, trying not to sound competitive but feeling exactly that. She was so proud of herself.

“Sometimes. Less than you’d think.”

As soon as she saw the bed in her room Teresa took a nap. Then before dinner and the dharma talk and the last sitting of the day, Holly did her best to give her mother a crash course in meditation. Breathing in and out, following the breath, letting thoughts come up and pass away without judgment. “You just have to do it,” she said finally, fearing her explanation was doing more harm than good. “It’s pretty straightforward.”

So Teresa, wearing the track suit she wore in the mornings when she did her power walk with her neighbor, sat down on a cushion beside her daughter and closed her eyes.

Nothing much happened at first. She thought about the ache in her left knee. Then there was the thought that the other people seemed nice. She liked Mikhail, the Russian who she had called Michael. Did he run the place? Very welcoming. All of them with their hair cut short like Holly’s. And why not? What difference did it make? There was no one to impress. She could see that Holly was happy here, but was it a real life? And what would she do when she was Teresa’s age? Would they take care of her? She could ask the older woman, the one who’d grown up in this house. Imagine this place as a house, a home for a single family. How many servants must they have had to keep this up? Both of her feet were asleep.

She caught herself then. Such babble! Teresa was shocked by the roaming idleness of her mind, as if she were sifting through trash on the side of the freeway and was stopped, enchanted, by every foil gum wrapper. She came back for a single breath but found herself reflecting on the bean salad they’d had for dinner, some kind of pink beans in there she hadn’t seen since childhood. She couldn’t remember what they were called. Her mother would ask her to pick through the beans before she soaked them, to look for little rocks, and she would be so meticulous until she lost interest, dumping the unchecked beans on top of the ones she had vetted, ruining everything. Did anyone in her family ever bite down on a rock?

One breath? She couldn’t manage that? Maybe a single inhalation that wasn’t burdened by thought? She tried. There. Okay. Her back hurt. Without warning her head dropped forward and for an instant she was sound asleep. She made a small, startled sound like a dog or a pig having a dream. She sat up straight again, opened her eyes slightly to see if anyone had caught her. She looked around at the peaceful faces of her neighbors, her daughter, as if she could see the clarity of their untroubled minds. She was ashamed of herself.

At the end of the session Holly helped her stand. Everyone came to shake her hand, give her a small embrace. They were so fond of Holly. They were so glad Teresa had come to visit.

“Don’t worry about the meditation,” a woman named Carol said, her eyes as placid as a glacial lake. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense at first.”

“I meditated on my own every day for years before I came to this place,” Paul the stick-maker said. “But to meditate here for the very first time in your life? That would be like taking your first run at the Olympics.” He patted her shoulder. “You should be very proud of yourself.”

In the single bed of the guest room, Teresa, wide awake, looked at the ceiling, the regular notches around the crown molding like evenly spaced teeth. She’d flown halfway around the world for this? To sit? She had sat at her desk half her life. She sat in her car, on the plane. What could she have been thinking? She had wanted to see her daughter. Had Bert ever been to visit Holly here? Did Bert sit? Why hadn’t she thought to ask? Light from the enormous moon flooded her little room, painting the walls and covering her bed. She thought of all the women and men, mostly men, she had in her own small way helped the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office send to prison. All of the cases she had worked to prepare so that they would be prosecuted and spend their nights in narrow beds and spend their days in silence. How was it that she’d never really wondered what became of them before? There were hundreds of cases that had come across her desk over the years. There were thousands. Were those men staring up at their ceilings now in the cells where they lived, trying to empty their minds?

It went on like this for Teresa day after day, three times a day. She filed into the meditation room with the others and someone would stoke the blue ceramic stove with coal and then everyone would sit together in a circle on the dark green cushions and wait for Mikhail to tap the little gong that signaled the beginning. It was madness. She would have quit — taken her copy of The English Patient to the second-floor balcony or walked alone through the tall grass while the others looked for inner peace — had it not been for the fact that Holly was so proud of her. Her daughter kept an arm looped through her arm, dragged her cushion closer to be near her. The other residents gazed upon the two of them in deep appreciation — in the kitchen, at meals, while meditating (Teresa would sometimes cheat and briefly open her eyes, causing the others to immediately shut theirs) — other mothers did not visit, and if they did visit, they most certainly did not sit.

Teresa kept sitting.

Lelia gave a dharma talk about letting go of self-definition: I can’t do this because of what happened to me in my childhood; I can’t do that because I am very shy; I could never go there because I’m afraid of clowns or mushrooms or polar bears. The group gave a gentle, collective laugh of self-recognition. Teresa found the talk helpful, as she had been having an extended interior dialogue during meditation about how septuagenarians from Torrance were fundamentally unsuited for Buddhism. Pretty Hyla, whose fine bones were beautifully featured by her lack of hair, took her for a walk and told her the name of every plant and every tree they passed. They saw an ibex in the distance. She rolled a piece of juniper between her palms and let Teresa sniff her open hands, the hands that found the fish inside the handles of the sticks. Hyla told Teresa her mother had died five years ago and that she was very lonely. After that she held Teresa’s hand as they walked back to the chalet. Okay, Teresa thought, I can be your mother today. They went back to the kitchen and sliced apples for a pie.

“I want you to cut off my hair,” she said to Holly before dinner.

“Really?” Holly leaned over and touched her mother’s hair. It was thick and gray and she wore it in a bob with the sides pulled back in barrettes for lack of a better idea.

“I’ve gotten used to the look, and anyway, I think it will help me fit in.” Teresa wouldn’t have done it had she been going back to work. At work her hair would have been a point of conversation, but when she got home it would be a signal of her new life. Her neighbors would see her, the checkers in the grocery store, and they would know she was different now.

Holly went and got the electric clippers out of the small plastic tub where they were kept in the downstairs bath. She took her mother outside on the deck and pinned a towel around her neck. They all cut one another’s hair. They could have done it themselves but it was nice, having someone else’s hands on your head every month or so.

“You’re sure?” Holly asked before she turned the clippers on.

Teresa gave a single nod of assurance. “When in Switzerland.”

And there went her hair, the thick gray tufts settling down around their feet like storm clouds dispersed. When she was finished Holly came around to assess her work.

“What do I look like?” Teresa asked smiling, running her hand over the velvet.

“Like me,” Holly said, and it was true.

Sometimes Holly came into the guest room at night, the same room she had slept in when she first arrived twenty years before. She liked it in there. Teresa scooted over as far as she could in the little bed to make a place for her. The two lay together on their sides, the only way there was room, and talked, two women who hadn’t talked in bed with anyone for years.

“Do you think you’ll stay here?” Teresa asked, pulling up the blankets over their shoulders. It was freezing at night. Holly was forty-five, and while this life was all very beautiful, if she was ever going to want something else, a husband or a job, she had to think about that.

“I won’t stay forever,” Holly said. “I don’t think I will. But I’ve never come close to figuring out how I’d leave. It’s like I expect destiny to throw open the door of the Dojo one day and say, ‘Holly! It’s time!’”

“Call me when that happens,” her mother said.

“You should see how pretty it is here in the snow.”

They were quiet for a while, maybe both of them nearly asleep, and then Holly said, “Do you ever think about staying? You could be one of those people in the guest room who we think is going to leave and never does.”

Teresa smiled in the dark, though she realized then she couldn’t exactly imagine leaving either. She put her arm around Holly’s waist and thought of her body as something she’d made, something that was so completely separate from her now. “I don’t think so,” she said, and then they did both fall asleep.

On the eighth day of her eleven-day visit to the Zen center, Teresa went to morning meditation, sat down on her cushion next to Holly, closed her eyes, and saw her oldest son. He was so clear it was as if he had been in the room with her all this time, as if he had been with her in every room she’d ever been in in her life and she had simply failed to turn her gaze in the right direction until now. She wasn’t having a dream or an out-of-body experience. She understood that she was still in the chalet, still sitting, but at the same time she was with Cal and his sisters. She was with the Keating girls, Caroline and Franny. She saw the five of them going out the kitchen door of Bert’s parents’ house, the door that she had gone through countless times when she and Bert were dating, when they were planning their wedding.

Ernestine, the cook, is telling them not to be a bother to Ned down at the barn and to do what he tells them, and the girls say yes ma’am. She gives a half bag of withered carrots dug out from the bottom of the refrigerator and two small apples to Jeanette, who in return gives her a grateful smile. No one ever gave things to Jeanette. Cal is already across the porch. He doesn’t say anything to Ernestine. He doesn’t wait for the girls.

“Cal!” Ernestine calls out through the screen. “Where’s your brother at?”

He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t turn around. He shrugs his shoulders and lifts up his hands, keeping his back to her. Cal, Teresa wants to say, speak to her! But she says nothing. She is watching a day that happened thirty-five years ago, a half a world away. She cannot correct his behavior. She cannot change the outcome. She is only allowed to sit and watch, and that is miraculous.

The five of them walk down the blacktop drive out the back, then turn onto a dirt road that eventually becomes not a road but two rutted tracks, the grass growing up in between the two halves to form a median. Holly and Caroline are chattering while Jeanette and Franny listen. Cal is off in front, walking fast enough that from time to time the girls have to break into a trot to keep up. They want to stay together without staying with him, and all five of them have a sense of what is close enough. Cal is tall and blond like his father, his eyes the same blue, his skin brown from the summer spent outside. His expression is one of simmering fury, but then it always is. He doesn’t want to be in Virginia, doesn’t want to be with his sisters, with the Keating girls, with his stepmother, with his grandparents. He doesn’t want to curry the horses, to be bitten by the flies and mosquitoes, to stand in the stink of shit and hay, but there is nothing better to do. That’s the trouble with being fifteen — all he can think of is what he doesn’t want. He’s wearing a UCLA T-shirt and Levi’s though the day is hot. If Cal’s wearing long pants it means he’s taken the gun again. All the children know that.

Jeanette had told Teresa that Cal kept the handgun tied to his leg with bandannas. Jeanette had told her mother everything a long time ago, in that year they lived alone together in the house in Torrance. Without Holly and Albie around she was free to talk about the day Cal died, how they’d wasted the Benadryl to put Albie to sleep, the route they took to the barn, how they had ignored Cal while he was dying, thinking that he was playing a game so that they would come close enough that he could hit them. They had waited a long, long time, sitting in the grass making daisy chains to show him they weren’t falling for it. Jeanette had told her all of this but Teresa didn’t see it then. She had never seen anything before.

Holly, who has the nicest voice of all the girls, the nicest voice in her school, starts to sing, her arms swinging back and forth, “Goin’ to the chapel, and we’re—”

“Gonna get married.” Caroline and Franny join her.

“Goin’ to the chapel and we’re—”

“Gonna get married.” Caroline and Franny. Jeanette doesn’t sing at first but she’s moving her lips.

“Gee, I really love you and we’re—”

“Could you shut up for two minutes?” Cal asks, turning around while he’s walking. He is far out ahead of them now, in the tall grass, far enough away that it doesn’t seem like the singing should bother him so much, but it does. “Would that be too fucking much to ask?”

Those are her son’s last words.

“Gonna get married.” It’s all four of them now, even Jeanette is belting it out, and suddenly Cal charges them. It’s impossible to say if he’s really angry or making a joke, but the girls scatter and scream, running in four different directions. Cal could have caught any one of them but now he has to choose and he stops. Something happened, he feels a sharp pain in his neck while the sisters and the not-sisters run a circle around him. He stops and puts his hand high up on his chest near the base of his throat. Teresa, on her cushion in Switzerland, can feel the constriction, her own breath closing off, because she is watching him and she is him. The girls are singing and running and she wants them to stop. He wants them to stop but he can’t say it. The bee is still on the back of his neck, crawling there. He feels it but he can’t knock it away. He is falling, not just into the grass but someplace farther, the sound of the girls’ voices washed away by the tide of blood, his thrumming heart, the color stripped from their T-shirts, the sun and sky and grass, stripped. His tongue is filling up his mouth. He tries to put his hand in his pocket to search out the last of the Benadryl if there’s any left but he can’t find his hand. He spins straight back with the full force of gravity and the earth thumps up against him hard, driving the bee in, and takes with it the last of the air, the last of the light. He is fifteen and ten and five. He is an instant. He is flying back to her. He is hers again. She feels the weight of him in her chest as he comes into her arms. He is her son, her beloved child, and she takes him back.