Passed By

It was 7:30 p.m. on a Thursday night. Mom was usually home from work a couple hours ago, especially in winter. It is January after all. Dad tried calling her and so did I. She didn’t answer. Not a big deal. Every once in a while she does go to check on her friends. A little while later, dad got a call. Everything seems fine. Dad, my little brother, and I hang out and watch a movie.

At about 10 p.m. nana shows up at the house. She lives over two hours away so I don’t know why she’s here, but she’s here every once in a while. The weird thing is that dad said he had to go on a run and didn’t let me go. We go on a drive every day, especially now that I am 15 and am trying to get my driver’s permit. Eventually, we all drifted asleep in the living room.

We woke up when dad walked in the front door at about 8 a.m. His face was red and so were his eyes. He had been crying. He sat down, collapsed really, on the couch next to me. He tried to speak but couldn’t. I’ve never seen him like this before. My dad does not cry, he’s too tough. Mom, he choked, passed away last night. She had always been kind of sick but no one ever really understood. The doctors think that her nervous system finally just stopped. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t anything anymore. We stayed in those same spots in the living room for what seemed like days.

I noticed her stack of books on the coffee table. They were sketch books, or journals. They were always there. Mom loved to try to sketch architectural designs, especially the territorial revival style that she loved so much from New Mexico. The books were just kind of thrown there next to some markers and illustration pens. The Christmas tree was still up. It feels like she is still here. If I go through her sketches and I read her journal, I just don’t know.

Tristan, my little brother, is twelve. I call him over so that we can go through her books together. There are three of them and they all have hard covers. This is the first time I’ve ever noticed them. The bottom book is big and grey – and empty. I could have sworn she drew in that thing almost every night.

The next book was one of those medium-sized, navy journals with the dots in them, not lines. There’s not much in that one either. I could tell that mom was trying out her brush pen. The first few pages are full of her practice mandarin that we did together. She made me watch Chinese 101 on Youtube with her. It is pages of “nǐ hǎo” and a couple ways of introducing oneself in Chinese. The best part was her attempt at Chinese lettering. I can’t tell if her interest in Chinese was first or if the brush pen was first. The next couple of pages are sketches of what she wrote as “Moorish country houses from the 11th century in Carmona, Spain.” I could tell that she was trying out perspectives. It was a cute mix of colored pencils and markers creating a walled courtyard with arches and a pool. The next pages had brown sketches of what I would bet money is a view of Oldtown in Albuquerque. She didn’t say. She loved to wonder through the old streets and tell us about the family that was married in the old church that she just found on some ancestry site. She loved most to take us on the haunted tours of Oldtown. It was her way of scaring history into us. And that was it. She didn’t even use the bookmarks that came with the thing.

The last book was clearly used more. It was a little hard-bound black book. A small sheet of exhibit stickers were slipped into the front. Not sure what they are truly used for but they obviously have something to do with her job. She is, was, a lawyer. I know it meant a lot to her, not because she was a lawyer but because of how she grew up. She had me when she was seventeen years old. I heard stories about how she grew up in a Nova from the 70’s when her dad was in prison. After her mom lost it, she was alone with her little brother and sister. She didn’t graduate high school. She never knew college was an option. She told me about how I saved her life and how she worked so hard to be an example for me and my brother. She got her GED. Then she got an associate’s in paralegal studies at the local community college. I know that she worked in law offices for years before she ever considered law school. Once she decided, she did it. Law school was rough for us all. She worked more than she was supposed to while attending law school full-time. Even still, she graduated early. Not only was she the first person in her family to graduate high school, she went on to get a doctorate.

My brother and I slowly go over every page of this black book. She had pages full of yellow sticky notes with to-do lists at the front. Those were followed by pages upon pages of to-do lists written directly into the book. Some were work related, some were not. There was a note about planning her January anniversary with dad, even writing places to look up like Apache Casino and places in Santa Fe. She told dad she had tried to plan, he didn’t believe her. It was also a global pandemic so it didn’t matter, we were not doing anything but getting dinner out. She had pages with quotes from us and pages about “berms and swales.” She was so weird. She got pages noting her research about plant stuff. She had a quote from some guy named Louis Bromfield that said, “This other war, the war upon destruction of natural assets is one that will never be finished. Our weakness in this vast war is largely ignorance, that most of our citizens do not realize what is going on under their very feet.” The quote was followed by a bullet point list of reforestation, contour plowing, terracing, and strip planting. She had sketches of odd rock wall/stairs that she called gabion walls. Then pages full of plant, climate, and soil information from where we live. Clearly, she was trying out different handwritten fonts. She also had Christmas lists and information from our schools. Then there was a map.

In an odd back portion of the book, she drew the plans of our house. There were numbers and symbols and an “X” like you’d see in a pirate’s treasure map. And clues, in a numbered sequence with a note that said “If I had a dollar every time...” What was this? We followed the clues, there weren’t many. If there was something at the end of this, mom definitely wanted us to find it. We went from room to room based on the clues. We found books with notes that led us to each next clue. We ended up in our tiny attic space that was not meant for people by any means. Sitting on the trusses in the attic was a big water jug. There was a note on it that said, “To Damien and Tristan, I love you more than anything. Now that you’re cool teenagers, I tossed some dollars in here every time you were too cool for a hug, a cuddle, a hang. Now that you’re all grow up, maybe you’ll see a small portion of what it meant to me. I will always guilt you for hugs. Love always, your mama.” Mama’s little black book was full of her, and this jug was full of $20,000 of missed years with her.