SUMMER 2007 SHORT FICTION CONTEST

FIRST PLACE WINNER

We Believe You to Be Our Mother
by Linda C. Wisniewski

The letter was delivered in the early spring, on a wet day in April between snow and sunshine, in that gray, indeterminate time of no season. In the morning, Ginny had pulled the covers over her head, wanting to cry, wanting to stay in bed all day. She tried but could not coax out the tears. Frustrated, angry, depressed. She named her feelings, because if she could name them, surely she could fight them; she wanted to fight them.  She tossed and turned until the sheets and quilt were tangled around her small body. Her feet were cold and she thought they might never be warm again. She pulled herself up and out of the tangled sheets and staggered to the shower. The hot water soothed her back, and she sighed as she held onto the shower rod with her left hand, stretching her left side, where it bent inward. Her deformity was called scoliosis, a permanently out of balance and frequently achy condition. Out of the shower, she blow-dried her hair, dressed and ate a bowl of raisin bran. 

On the way to work, as she drove along the river, Ginny felt a familiar uneasiness. Trees were blossoming everywhere, through the rain, on both sides of the road: dogwood, forsythia, apple blossoms; and the green, the new, fresh, neon green was nearly unbearable. Spring — new beginnings, joy, rebirth — it always hit her hard. People said that fall and winter, and especially Christmas, were often depressing. Lonely people had no one with whom to share the celebrating, no one with whom to sit by the fire and dream. Other people had families they loathed; some were stuck in lifeless marriages. But for Ginny, the season she hated was spring: all those chirpy little birds; spring cleaning; open the windows and let the sunshine in; all that hope and newness, even in the rain. 

Driving, she saw in the space between swipes of the wiper blade, that she was on the inside lane of a six lane highway going south, and knowing this made her feel trapped.  She put on her right signal, planning to move through each lane until she could get off the expressway. Get off. Suddenly it was the most important thing in the world. She had to get off. Her heart pounded and the blood pulsed in her ears. Her breath came fast and shallow. Breathe, Ginny told herself, slow deep breaths. This is a panic attack. Yes, it is.  You get through these. Focus. Focus. Turn on the radio, sing a song, think about something else. Nausea moved up her chest from her stomach. Breathe. She forced herself to inhale slowly and deeply; visualized clean white light entering through her nostrils and filling her with peace; forced her shoulders down; listened to the song on the radio. Ginny tried every calming technique she had ever learned. One of them worked or maybe all of them did. She got to the exit, the one where she got off every day, in the right, exit-only lane. There were no other cars on her right; she was free.

During that day, Ginny remembered the panic and worried it would come back if she wasn’t careful; she tried very hard to be mindful. She focused on the tiny details of her job at the pharmaceutical company, making tick marks on manila cards, checking in the copies of scientific journals. She listened closely to what other people were saying and gave interested, cheerful answers as a way of staying connected to them.

The letter was in her mailbox when she arrived home. She carried it into the kitchen with the rest of her mail, placed the little pile on the table, and started the tea kettle. Unfolding a little blue sheet of paper, she read:

“Dear Miss Catania,” in beautiful cursive strokes, “We believe you to be our mother. We are two boys in Nigeria of good disposition. Surely we understand that you must flee [sic] with your company when the fighting started. Our father did tell us of your great beauty.  Sadly, we must now tell you he is now dead. Please may you send the money to come to you? Your sons, Jonas and Martin Choque.”

Ginny looked at the return address, but it wasn’t familiar. What address in Nigeria would be? she thought.

She tossed the letter aside and made her tea. But the little blue page was like a living thing on her kitchen table, demanding action. She could throw it away; she could leave it there and do nothing; she could answer these children, whoever they were. Tell them they had the wrong mother; tell them she was nobody’s mother. Sorry, can’t help you. Best of luck locating your mother.

She ate her favorite Lean Cuisine®, Chicken with Almonds, with Peter Jennings at 6:30. Peter didn’t mention it, but Ginny knew there was a civil war going on in Nigeria. “The fighting,” her would-be sons had called it.  

I wonder who I married there, she thought, or had children with? Was I ever married?  For God’s sake, Gin, you are now totally nuts. Nuts. Nuts — I have some somewhere.  She got up and found a can of salted cashews in the cupboard, grabbed a handful and picked up the TV Guide.

The rain continued for two more days before it finally stopped, leaving Ginny with one of her killer sinus headaches. She always got one 24 hours after it started to rain. This spring was going to be one long headache, from the feel of it. Her job was boring, like all the others before it, but Ginny couldn’t think what else to do; she had to work somewhere.  She had no friends, unless you counted the women with whom she ate lunch at work.  Maybe they thought of themselves as her friends, but Ginny knew better. They were OK, but just as stuck as she was. She almost said “boring.” She wasn’t boring herself, was she?  I am boring myself, and I am, myself, boring.  Geez, Ginny thought, I am living entirely inside my own head.

She took herself to the movies on Saturday afternoon, and picked up Chinese takeout for dinner. She read The New York Times on Sunday morning, alone. She thought about calling some women she used to know. She ironed an outfit for Monday, and as she moved the iron over the warm cloth, she began to feel breathless again. Her heart pounded and she knew that she had, in that instant, to leave the apartment. She imagined herself falling through the floor, eight stories to the basement. She forced herself to slow down long enough to turn off the iron, before she grabbed her trench coat from the closet, picked her backpack off the floor and ran. Not the elevator, take the stairs. Out in the street, at last, she could breathe — she could breathe — and so she walked, and thought, for a very long time. She thought about her life, and she thought about the little blue letter on her kitchen table. When the rain started again, she walked into a café, sat down near the window and ordered a large black tea. She took off her damp coat and carefully folded it over the other chair. Then Ginny took her notebook and pen out of her backpack and began to write:

“Dear Jonas and Martin, I believe that you have found me.”        

Linda C. Wisniewski lives with her husband and teenaged son in Bucks County, Pa. where she is a substitute librarian and writes for the Bucks County Herald. Her memoir, "Off Kilter," will be published in 2008 by Pearlsong Press.