The Greenhouse

Four

We continue to drive through the lava field in silence. I still feel the farewell dinner in my stomach and sense that the nausea that probably started with the green sauce is mutating into a persistent ache, right here in the middle of the lava field, not far from the spot where Mom capsized the car. I know the curve where the car lost control; there’s a small basin there overgrown with grass. I can picture the spot where she was cut out of the wreckage quite vividly.

— Your mom shouldn’t have gone before me, sixteen years younger, says Dad as we drive past the spot.

— No, she shouldn’t have gone before you.

Mom had whims like that, going off to pick blueberries on her birthday at the crack of dawn, to some obscure favorite spot she had; that’s why she had to drive across the lava field. Then she was going to offer us — her boys, as she liked to call Dad, Jósef, and me — waffles with freshly picked berries and whipped cream. I realize now that it must have been hard to only have men in the house, not to have had a daughter, I mean.

I give myself some time before I get to Mom in the car, capsized in the lava hollow. I give myself plenty of time to scrutinize the nature and glide around the spot a long moment, like a cameraman on a movie taking an aerial shot from a crane, before I zoom in on Mom herself, the leading lady this whole scene revolves around. It’s the seventh of August and I decide to make it an early autumn. That’s why I see so much red and glowing golden colors in the nature. I picture nothing but varieties of red at the scene of the accident: russet heather, a bloodred sky, violet red foliage on some small trees nearby, golden moss. Mom herself was in a burgundy cardigan, and the coagulated blood didn’t become visible until Dad rinsed it in the bathtub at home. By dwelling on the small details of the set design, like you might look at the backdrop of a painting before shifting your gaze to the main subject itself, I somehow manage to put Mom’s death on pause, and therefore postpone the moment of the inevitable farewell. The scene plays out either with Mom still inside the car wreckage, or she’s just been cut out and is lying on the ground. I decide that it’s on a level plain, the flat base of the lava hollow, as if the tops of two tussocks had been sliced off and grass had been sown on the wound; that’s where they very gently lay her down. In my mind she’s either still showing some sign of life or she’s dead. Dad is driving so slowly that I can check out the tree, which is still there where I planted it, a dwarf pine, my attempt to plant a wood in the middle of a rugged lava field, one isolated tree in the rocky barren landscape; that is how I sanctify Mom’s spot.

— Are you cold? Dad asks, turning the heater on full blast. The car’s roasting.

— No, I’m not cold.

I do have a pain in my stomach, though, but I don’t tell Dad about it. He’d smother me in worries. Mom used to worry in a different way; she understood me.

— Well then, Lobbi lad, we’re there now, see the planes?

As soon as we reach the airport, the black blanket begins to lift off the mountain range, uncovering the first rays of dawn below it, like light blue wisps of smoke. The horizontal February sun reveals the dirt on the smudged windshield.

My brother and Dad follow me into the terminal.

Dad hands me a wrapped package as we’re saying good-bye.

— You can open it when you land, he says. Just a little something that might remind you of your old man at bedtime.

When I say good-bye to Dad I give him a firm hug, but not a long one, just a brisk embrace and slap him on the back like a man. Then I do the same to my brother, Jósef, who immediately recoils toward Dad and takes his hand. Then Dad takes a fat envelope out of his back pocket and hands it to me.

— I went to the bank and got some cash out for you; you never know what can come up when you’re abroad.

I fleetingly glance over my shoulder and see Dad leading my twin brother out of the terminal, Dad’s wallet sticking halfway out of his back pocket. They’re both in the gray waistcoats that Dad recently bought; it’s impossible to say which of the two is the best dressed. Jósef is my total opposite in appearance, short, with brown eyes and dark skin, as if he’d just strolled off a beach. He’s so immaculately dressed that, if it weren’t for the color combinations of his clothes, my autistic twin brother could be mistaken for an air pilot. In the image I decide to store of him in my mind he is in a violet shirt with butterfly patterns. By the time it’s full daylight I will have left this brown slush behind me, and the salt of the earth will only survive in the form of white rings on the rims of my shoes.