Sandcastles and Cigarettes

by Hannah Andrews
 

She appears peripherally—a shimmering blaze of brightness, like sunshine glinting off a mirror splice. I catch my breath and turn my head slowly towards her, anticipating her disappearance. She crisps into focus. I blink, and then again, slide my sunglasses down my nose, then back in place, positive the polarized lenses will render her but a glare. She remains.

            If she is real, am I the ghost?

I pinch myself. Per usual, I feel nothing. My feet hold fast as if weighted, as if they are sandbags guarding against a flash flood. My mouth is a desert. I can only watch.

She looks like a land-legged mermaid—alone at the ocean’s edge, skin summered to deep sienna, toes in the sand. The breeze billows at her crepey white coverup and dances through her inky, spiraled mane.  She’d always been but a concept to me. I’d only recently seen photos, yet I’d know her anywhere. She is Carmen, my birthmother, and she’s but a heartbeat away.

I feel her. Does she feel me?

Look at me, I scream silently.

She turns and I see her face. It is my face—the original to my facsimile. I rush to her, and watch her eyes widen in what seems to me, has to be, recognition. She opens her arms but I stop just short of her embrace. Distance has been drilled into my DNA.

“It’s you,” she says.

“How’d you know?” I don’t wait for her answer before adding, “Did you even see me when I was born?” Or just throw me away? The last sentence is only in my head.

 “Not one glimpse,” she sighs. Winces. “They wouldn’t let me. But, I’d know you anywhere. I imagined you everywhere. It’s the weirdest thing. I swear I saw you on the pier the other day.”

My stomach knots, and I feel like the sand is pulling me under. I can’t shake the feeling that time folded in on itself, reversed, or maybe somehow sidewayed. I suddenly realize I’m wearing some throwback velour tracksuit I hadn’t owned in years, the kind with Juicy written across my ass. I cringe.

“Carmen, what year is it?”

She rolls her eyes like a bratty teenager. “It’s 2002 silly. Why?”

Cold water prickles my feet.

“I drove out here this morning from San Diego,” I say. “It was 2022. I came here to scatter your ashes.”

 I hold out a small 6 by 6-inch mahogany cremation box, with a smiling photo of her framed on the top. She’s 21 in the photo, not the age at which she’d died, but the age at which her friend said she’d prefer to be remembered. She takes the box, but upon realizing she’s holding her own remains, shrieks and drops it in a pillow of sand. The color drains from her face. She volleys questions at me in quick succession.

“My ASHES? I’m dead in 2022? When did I die? When did we meet? I’m dead ?!”

“We never met,” I say, then pause. It occurs to me how confusing it must be to meet your long-lost daughter and also find out you’re dead, in one fell swoop. I wonder if this is some sort of Southern California purgatory or parallel universe. I continue, “I think maybe I somehow found a wormhole. I think this is a parallel universe, and also the past? Can past be parallel?  I don’t know. We never met though. I went looking for you in 2020, but only found a grave.”

“What? Where?” she prods. “I don’t feel dead.”

“Well, not even a grave, just ashes, which your best friend gave me a couple of weeks ago.” I answer, then ramble on, “Well, she gave me her third. Your son and your mother each have a third. They divvied you up. I met your son, but your mom won’t talk to me. Says she doesn’t remember you being pregnant.”

“She kicked me out!” Carmen snaps.

“I know. Your friend told me. Anyway, your son is nice. Successful. Married. Two daughters.” Something in me bites, and instead of softening the blow, I hit harder. “I guess you chose the right kid to keep—”

She bites back. “It wasn’t like that. It was 1969. I was fifteen when I got pregnant with you and thirty-three when I got pregnant with him.” She grabs her beach bag and begins rifling through it. “ It was a whole different world. I was a whole different person.”

“Yeah, me too,” I say, full of venom, "'cuz of you."

“If I could’ve kept you, I would. I looked for you—”

“Your friend told me that too,” I interject softly, wishing I could back up time again. Just five minutes earlier, just to quell my inner mean girl.

I can’t even get retrospect right.

Carmen pulls a pack of Parliaments from her bag, her hand visibly trembling as she lights one. I reach over and pull it from her hand. I haven’t quit smoking yet in this timeline.

“Mmm yummy! Pfunks are the best,” I say, and I take a big drag. I smoked Marlboro Lights but kept Parliaments around for special occasions. This was definitely a special occasion. She pulls another out for herself. Without thinking, I blurt out, “No, it’s cancer. That’s what kills you in 2009. Stop smoking now. I will too,” and I dip my cigarette in the still-moist sand.

“Kiddo, I’m friggin dead already.”

“Unless you’re not. Or unless there’s another you that’s still affected by the actions of this you—”

“Nah, I’m probably dead. I’ve been feeling weird for a while. Can’t believe I didn’t even know I was kaput, though. None of this makes sense.”

She’s right. It doesn’t. You couldn’t plot this into a movie, but still, here we are. I’m sitting in the past, lecturing my dead mother on the evils of cigarettes. Trying to save her life. Carmen looks down, bites her lip, then hands me the remainder of the pack.

“I guess you can’t be too careful,” she shrugs. She speaks softly then, “So, why here, why now?”

“I dunno. Maybe because your friend just now gave me your ashes? See, in the future, after I find your son and your bestie, I also find out that in the past I lived right down the street from you, right here in Venice. Crazy right? Then, back in the future, I start remembering all these weird things that happened to me back then. It occurs to me that all that weird stuff was some sort of cosmic electrical misfire—because we were both there, two blocks from each other. Made me crazy, thinking of all the what ifs—”

“The what-ifs have haunted me since the day they took you away,” she sighs.

Her words crash against me like a cold wave.

“I’m sorry I didn’t look sooner. I didn’t want to interfere with your life—” I cut myself off, then stammer on. “When I finally put our puzzle pieces together, I started wishing real hard, wishing I could bend time or maybe make magic. Like in that one Twilight Zone episode. Or like Bewitched. I was convinced if I just concentrated—you know I used to think she was my mom, actually.”

“Elizabeth Montgomery?”

“No, her TV character. I was a kid. I thought Samantha the character, the witch, was real. Then I thought maybe Rita Moreno was my mom because she actually looked like me.”

She stares at me like I have two heads.

 “It’s called a ‘ghost kingdom,’ and it’s totally normal. Google it.” I hand her my iPhone. She tilts her head like the RCA Victor dog—at it, at me. I surmise Google isn’t a thing yet, or at least isn’t in the vernacular.

I snatch my smartphone back and attempt an explanation.

“Ghost Kingdom. For adopted kids—It’s like subconsciously looking for lost moms and dads and—It’s a trauma response or something. Oh, it doesn’t matter.” Voice cracking, I continue, “Fast forward, I came back to Venice this morning to scatter your ashes. Like, woke up in the middle of the night, and just had to drive out today for some reason. I walk out here in the present, but when I go to open up the cremation keepsake box, all of sudden, you’re here, and we’re in the past. I dunno. Maybe none of this is real. Maybe I’m dead. Maybe I’m a ghost. I never felt real anyway.”

“Nah, I get it. You were always my ghost too,” she says, “I could never shake you.”

            It occurs to me that if it's 2002, I’m twenty years younger, unless I’m now four years her senior. I look at my hands, and their softness shows youth, or at least youth adjacent. I consider asking her for a mirror, then I realize all the mirror I ever needed is in the flesh and blood or phantasm before me.

We sit in stone silence in the velvety sand. Remnants of waves pool around us, then pull away.

“We can scatter your ashes if you want,” I offer.

“Eww. That’s dark,” she says, stifling a giggle, “I guess you inherited my sense of humor.”

We laugh, but the sounds are so similar they meld into one.

“I always knew we were tethered, kiddo,” she says.

And finally, we embrace. She feels so real. I feel so real.  I never want to let go.

“I don’t know how this works, Carmen,” I finally say, tears streaming down my face. “Maybe we live forever in this parallel universe and our other selves live on too. I don’t know. But it's worth a shot, right?”

“It is." She smiles. "But, can you call me Mom?"

            Through blurry eyes, I glimpse the cremation box in my peripheral. I sense something different about it. Then, my heart practically leaps out of my chest.

“Carmen, I mean, Mom, look!” I pick it up and show her. The photo on top has changed. It is still her, still beautiful, but her skin is creased, crepey, and her hair is snow white. She must be 80 or 90 in the photo now. 

She stares down at the photo, then up at me. We burst into laughter, elated at this new “what-if.” Did we wrinkle time? Do we have thirty more years instead of six? I’m afraid to put voice to my query. Instead, I watch the waves crash. I listen to her tell me a million stories. I build long overdue sandcastles with her, the ghost of me, and wish for a never-ending summer.

* * * * *

Hannah Andrews lives and writes in San Diego. Her tragi-comic short memoir, "Skateaway" was a top selection in the 2021 San Diego Memoir Showcase and published in the anthology Shaking the Tree: Vol. 5. Her essays and poetry have been featured online at Severance, Adoptee Voices EZine, and several Medium publications, The Narrative Arc.