Missing

This is the day that forbids reproduction. Mother's Day, May 11, 1991, I arrived at my mother's home with a card and Crimson Glory, a vibrant bush of red roses. She had the hand, the one that touches those temperamental flowers - violets and roses - and brings them to bloom.

Then the hollow, the dread, the emptiness of silence, the open door, the tools on the table, the machine still running, the sight. I can't say what but something went out of me in those moments. There she was, humbled on the floor of the bathroom. There was her neatly folded polo shirt, pink-striped with the scent of Tide still clinging to its weave. There was a single tissue in the empty waste basket, a blotch of rusted blood. There was her flip flop, bent. There was her toe against the tile, broken.

My brother saw her face. He told me about the purple stain. But I felt death. I touched the utter cold of skin without spirit on a balmy May morning. Mother's Day. Seventeen years and it's still unfinished. The something that escaped that day is more than haunting. The something that escaped was replaced by something like skin, something without volume or sheen. Something ungraspable.