I clutched the railing with both hands, fighting a wave of vertigo. Panic came over me: I feared I would tumble over the railing and fall into the black void beyond the balcony, plummeting forever in endless darkness. I closed my eyes against the vision and when I opened them I saw the lights of Los Angeles, distant and cold, but infinitely reassuring.
I quit drinking. I did not sleep, but I quit drinking. And in the small hours before dawn, I decided to find my mother. The need to find her seemed linked to my drunken vision of falling and to the restlessness that had plagued me even before my father's death.
I shifted uneasily in my seat, listening to the reassuring hum of the jet's engines. I tried to imagine my mother's face, building it out of the darkness. A thin face, dominated by restless blue eyes. Short and unruly hair, brown with streaks of gray, the color of an English sheepdog. A slight woman whose clothes were too large for her, whose hands were always moving, whose eyes were bright and curious. The picture of my mother that formed in my mind was static, frozen, but I remembered my mother as being constantly in motion: walking, cleaning, cooking.
When I was a child, I had daydreamed about my mother constantly. I dreamed that she would come home. How and why she came changed with each dream. She drove up in a jeep to take me away to an archaeological dig. She roared up on a motorcycle and took me to live with her in Berkeley. She rode into town on a black horse and we galloped away into the sunset. Details changed: she wore khaki, jeans, Mexican costume, ordinary dress. But always the dreams were bright and clear, and always the ending was happy. Fifteen years ago I stopped dreaming.
It was Christmastime. The air had been scented with burning pine; the wine had sparkled in my mother's glass. I was fifteen years old, and 1 sat on the carpet by the fireplace. Robert, my father, sat in an easy chair beside me. My mother sat alone on the love seat, an ugly antique with carved wooden arms and upholstery of heavy tapestry cloth. She had flung her left arm carelessly across the back of the love seat and the sleeve of her shirt, a baggy shirt that was a little too large for her, had fallen back to show the white scars that marked her wrist. Her skin was tanned around the scars.
Robert and my mother were talking politely. "Are you staying in town?" Robert asked.
"At the Biltmore," she said. "I'll be heading back to Berkeley tomorrow. I've been in Guatemala for two months now, and I have much too much to do."
At the time, I wondered what my mother could possibly have to do. She seemed out of place in my father's house, but I could not imagine where she would be in place. She seemed a little nervous, glanced at the clock on the mantel often.
"Where were you in Guatemala?" I asked.
"Near Lake Izabal," my mother said. "Excavating a small site. A trading center. We found some pottery from Teotihuacán, up by Mexico City, some from farther north." She shrugged. "We'll be arguing for months about how to interpret our findings." She grinned at me—a brilliant, open smile very unlike the polite smile with which she had greeted Robert. "After all, archaeologists need to do something in the winter."
"Would you like some more wine?" Robert asked, cutting off my next question. He moved quickly to refill her glass.
He changed the subject then, talking about the house, his business, my schoolwork. When my mother finished the glass of wine, we exchanged presents. Her package for me was wrapped in brown paper, and she apologized for the wrappings. "The Guatemalan market offers a limited choice in wrapping paper," she said in a dry tone that seemed to imply that I had been to Guatemala and knew the market quite well.
I unwrapped a shirt made of a heavy cloth woven of burgundy and black thread. On the pockets and back, a stylized bird surrounded by an intricate border was woven into the cloth. "You can watch the women weaving these shirts in the market," my mother said. "That's a quetzal bird, the symbol of Guatemala. It's called a quetzal shirt."
I pulled the shirt on over my T-shirt. It was loose on my shoulders, but I pulled it