Home by Tonight By Laura J. Oliver

I am in the lying liars’ dressing rooms at South Moon Under, then I walk down the street to Anthropologie. Ever since they changed the lighting, running some kind of warm, magical illumination behind the mirror, I’ve looked suspiciously better in everything I’ve tried on. Then I get it home, and it’s an entirely different animal. One that I should take back, but often just give to my younger daughter, who looks good (for real) in everything. I like to think this is because I am innately generous, but I suspect it’s because I’m innately lazy.

The mirror was telling the story the store needed me to believe–genius marketing for the gullible– and, lazy or not, I have always been that. 

For instance, two contradictory claims floated around my high school, and I believed both.

Everyone is doing it.

No one is doing it.

I’m talking about Driver’s Ed. You knew that, right?

Here are some other claims I heard then that I’ve come to doubt:

1.  No one actually laughed
2.  You’ll be glad someday

As I grew up, the questionable claims didn’t disappear; they simply learned to sound wise.

1. I’m not the same person now as I was then 
2. Life never gives you a loss you can’t bear
3. Everyone else has it better. 

(In fact, everyone does have it better. I’m sorry.)

And lastly? That you will always feel what you feel now.

I have come to believe this is the most deceptive claim of all because there will come a time you need to cast off the line that has held you here in order to sail into what’s next.

We spend our lives attaching and investing in maintaining those attachments. I was at an office party last year at which each member of the staff introduced themselves by introducing their spouse and announcing how long they’d been married– apropos of absolutely nothing. 

Suddenly, I was aware of how often we are defined by the state of our attachments. And yet, no matter what those are, when it’s time to go, we need to let go—to loosen our grip on those here, to reset our GPS for there.

The last day of my mother’s life, she was unconscious, but I believed she could hear me, so I talked to her—telling her what a good mother she had been, how loved she was, reading her own poetry aloud, poetry she had once written, “is me, inside out.”

But when I mentioned the name of an old love, I saw her flinch as if to move from a flame. I knew then it was time to tell a new story. Not a review of who she had been, but a picture of what was to come. Memory was a tether. Imagination could set her free.

We are learning, however, that memory underlies imagination in a powerful way. Many of the brain regions that allow you to recall the past are the same brain regions that allow you to imagine your future. In fact, researchers say that until a child has acquired memory, he is unable to imagine at all.  

So, I began to paint a picture of what might lie beyond that hushed room in her assisted living facility, making it as safe and welcoming as I could imagine. 

“I’ll never want you to go, but I don’t need you to stay. You could be home by tonight,” I whispered.

‘You could be laughing at the dinner table with your mom and your dad. He will have come in from the fields just to wrap his youngest in his arms. Your older brother will be there, too, home from the war, so tall and handsome, and he’ll hug and protect you, and apologize for having been a tease because he will truly know how to love you better now. 

By tonight, you could be sitting on the quilted bedspread watching your pretty, older sister get ready for a date. You could walk down the road to thank the elderly brothers who, when you nearly died from stepping on a rusty nail at the age of five, carved crutches just your size so you could walk again. 

And you will walk again—no wheelchair– but strong and true and beautiful. 

You can stroll down to the creek where you hid an old dress in the reeds and secretly taught yourself to swim. Look! The sun is slipping low in the western sky, the sycamore shadows are long on the pond. Honeysuckle is sweet in the air.  

Listen! Your parents are calling you.

We are learning how the brain works, how memories are made, even how to un-remember. But there by her bed, I could only give my mother my sense of what is to come based on the experiences that have created my imagination. 

But maybe that was the best evidence possible of the mother she’d been to me. Because the world I assured her was waiting, transcended love’s need to stay here.

And she left, without a word, that very night. 

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.