Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,71

for not notifying you of this earlier. You see, we are accustomed to people judging her for this flaw, which of course is no fault of her own, and we did not want her condition to hinder her chance of leaving the country. Dear Mr. Winton, I am telling you this now in hopes that you will be able to find room for her on your next train. The truth of the matter is, she is very vulnerable, unable to defend herself, and unable to run should the need arise. She walks only slowly, and with a crutch. I do not need to inform you of the political situation here at the moment—you are obviously acutely aware of it, to have embarked on such a noble project as yours is. So I beg you, please, to help our Helga. She is an only child, and exceptionally kind and gentle, and I know she would make any British family happy.

I thank you a second time for your kindness.

Marianna Bruckner

(FILE UNDER: Bruckner, Marianna. Died Birkenau, 1943)

AT NIGHT I WALK BY THE RIVER and think about everything lost. It’s a cliché, sure, but for every decision that gets made, a billion other options are forsaken. This is true even of happy events. Take a wedding—one future chosen and an infinite number of others let go. Or conception: Think of all the sperm! Of all the people who now never will exist.

I wonder if this is how my mother thought of me. If she would have preferred me to arrive at another time. Or perhaps as a different child entirely.

I imagine her as a woman not particularly taken with motherhood. As a woman with other things on her mind.

“Lisa,” I tell myself, “don’t be so dramatic.”

The truth is I’m a little prone to wallowing.

After you stood me up at Schwartz’s I closed my file on you. I closed it the way I’ve tried to close the one on my mother, the one that nevertheless always finds its way to the top of the pile. The Freudians were wrong—about so many things!—but the influence of parents, that part at least they got right. There’s a feeling that comes over me, a feeling that has nothing to do with my mother and at the same time equals her absence. If I’m walking late at night through the quiet winter streets and the smell of someone’s laundry floats up from the vent in their basement. If there’s a light on in a living room, a table lamp or the TV’s blue glow. If there are people moving around behind a lace curtain. Their details are obscured; I pretend it could be her. The longing sharpens until I think I might pass out. I find some excuse to lean over, to tie up my bootlace; I catch my breath and straighten back up and crane my neck. Trying to get a glimpse. Once a man came to the front door. Snow boots pulled on over plaid pajama bottoms. He cleared his throat. “Can I help you?” he asked.

I realized I’d been standing there for probably half an hour. “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was just . . .” But I could not think of anything I might have been doing, so I turned away and kept walking.

One step. Two steps.

Hope, unanswered over a life as long as mine, becomes more of a curse than a blessing.

I don’t really know what to say about my mother. I wonder who she could have been as part of my adult life. When you don’t have something, it’s easy to idealize it. I understand that, I really do. Still, I hate to hear people complain about their mothers. I always have to fight back the urge to tell them how lucky they are.

Which, of course, would make me sound like a mother myself.

There’s a park I sometimes pass when I’m walking late at night. The playground abandoned, ghostly. Sometimes I’ll wedge myself into one of the swings and drag my heels in the sand for a while. Once I happened by the park in the middle of the afternoon and the place was full of women and strollers. It was easy to pick out the parents from the nannies. The parents were the ones who were showing off their children, bragging about math scores and soccer goals, as though intelligence and good behaviour on the part of the child makes the parent herself worthwhile.

The nannies had enough detachment to give the