Evidence of Love

On a Saturday I have to abandon the office to cut down bamboo in my mother's backyard. I know she worries about me. She sits, troubled, in her house on the highest point in Washington, thinking about my springtime spent in a windowless office. Her thirty-three-year-old daughter talks on the telephone all day-as she did as a teenager-her job somehow spun, made up by these patchy, thick conversations, fueled by coffee and ticking clocks. She guesses that I am distracted by the problems of other people, swallowed by their plans, ruined on my blurry trips between the Old Executive Office Building and the West Wing basement, my late-night dashes into glaring power. We never discuss my job, though I can't help thinking she views me from afar as a certain kind of ferry in some ever-near typhoon, her daughter chugging back and forth, carrying messages from one sorry piece of land to the other. She reminds me about her "psychic feelings," and by her tone I know these must be ones of darkness and doom. She tells me, too, that she respects journalists, believes in "integrity." And considering my job is to manage the media, herd them like a flock of sheep, she must be more concerned by this than my lack of fresh-air oxygen and my caffeinated complexion. Considering it was once my own vague ambition to be a journalist, she must fret about my own regrets. Plus, her daily view from her French doors over a long lawn to the lovely pines is being threatened by the bamboo. So I stand in the blinding sunlight on Saturday in the backyard of the house I lived in for eighteen years. I know I am pale, skinny, and my eyes are blocked by the same kind of sunglasses I wore in college-many such pairs bought, lost, crushed-Ray-Bans, very black. I like my brightness filtered. I walk down the sloping lawn and have forgotten how green the grass becomes in spring: sharp green even through camouflage glasses. The grass smells dark in the sunshine. It is the familiar damp scent of cool shadows, and it reminds me of the lawnmower buzz on late afternoons. The grass is flecked with violets, small purple spots woven across the endless green, but my feet crunch as I walk. The bamboo sprouts hide everywhere, and I step on them like crackle-back insects. Adult bamboo stands tall, three feet deep against the fence, swaying patiently in the breezes. However, its offspring pop up unexpectedly, spread through the lawn and surprise me like so many rumors. I make my way: bending, grabbing the asparagus-like shoots, and tossing them toward the fence. I haven't told my mother yet how much Harry has changed, slowly over two years and suddenly in the past two weeks. Maybe I am afraid of all sorts of psychic feelings. I will not tell her about the call on Thursday night, when the phone by our bedside sounded alarm at four A.M., the voice telling Harry something as he startled out of an already uneasy sleep. From the other side of the bed through the blue darkness, I watched Harry half-sitting with his head against the wall, his palm pressed against his forehead like a cool washcloth, listening and nodding. "Yes, of course I'll come now," he said simply and only. I knew his mind had already raced past me and was heading right back to the White House. "They can't be serious," I said through a new panic that has taken me over, one that jolts me out of half sleep on these nights when he fumbles through his dark closet looking for the right suit. It's the same panic that sometimes makes me feel uneasy in our apartment, that makes me go to his closet and count his suits, feel each sleeve to be sure they are all still there before I cautiously open the top two drawers of our bureau to be certain that they are crowded with his socks and underwear. I have begun to have the same dream: the one where I am eight years old and I look at the waves on a strong summer day. I walk into the waves and they crash against my chest, low and harmless, greMcConnell, Melissa is the author of 'Evidence of Love', published 2005 under ISBN 9780156030588 and ISBN 0156030586.