And the Mountains Echoed

loss as to what I am expected to say in response.
    â€œThank you, Mamá,” I manage to mutter.
    I can’t say any more, and we sit quietly for a while, the air between us thick with awkwardness and our awareness of all the time lost, the opportunities frittered away.
    â€œI’ve been meaning to ask you something,” Mamá says.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œJames Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?”
    I blink and my mother blinks back, and then she is laughing and so am I. Even as I crumple inside.
    The next morning, we lie outside on lounge chairs. Mamá wears a thick scarf and a gray parka, her legs warmed against the sharp chill by a fleece blanket. We sip coffee and nibble on bits of the cinnamon-flavored baked quince Thalia has bought for the occasion. We are wearing our eclipse glasses, looking up at the sky. The sun has a small bite taken from its northern rim, looking somewhat like the logo on the Apple laptop Thalia periodically opens to post remarks on an online forum. Up and down the street, people have settled on the sidewalks and rooftops to watch the spectacle. Some have taken their families to the otherend of the island, where the Hellenic Astronomical Society has set up telescopes.
    â€œWhat time is it supposed to peak?” I ask.
    â€œClose to ten-thirty,” Thalia says. She lifts her glasses, checks her watch. “Another hour or so.” She rubs her hands with excitement, taps something on the keyboard.
    I watch the two of them, Mamá with her dark glasses, blue-veined hands laced on her chest, Thalia furiously pounding the keys, white hair spilling from under her beanie cap.
    You’ve turned out good
.
    I lay on the couch the night before, thinking about what Mamá had said, and my thoughts had wandered to Madaline. I remembered how, as a boy, I would stew over all the things Mamá wouldn’t do, things other mothers did. Hold my hand when we walked. Sit me up on her lap, read bedtime stories, kiss my face good night. Those things were true enough. But, all those years, I’d been blind to a greater truth, which lay unacknowledged and unappreciated, buried deep beneath my grievances. It was this: that my mother would never leave me. This was her gift to me, the ironclad knowledge that she would never do to me what Madaline had done to Thalia. She was my mother and she would not leave me. This I had simply accepted and expected. I had no more thanked her for it than I did the sun for shining on me.
    â€œLook!” Thalia exclaims.
    Suddenly, all around us—on the ground, on the walls, on our clothing—little shining sickles of light have materialized, the crescent-shaped sun beaming through the leaves of our olive tree. I find a crescent shimmering on the coffee inside my mug, another dancing on my shoelaces.
    â€œShow me your hands, Odie,” Thalia says. “Quick!”
    Mamá opens her hands, palms up. Thalia fetches from herpocket a square of cut glass. She holds it over Mamá’s hands. Suddenly, little crescent rainbows quiver on the wrinkled skin of my mother’s hands. She gasps.
    â€œLook at that, Markos!” Mamá says, grinning unabashedly with delight like a schoolgirl. I have never before seen her smile this purely, this guilelessly.
    We sit, the three of us, watching the trembling little rainbows on my mother’s hands, and I feel sadness and an old ache, each like a claw at my throat.
    You’ve turned out good
.
    You’ve made me proud, Markos
.
    I am fifty-five years old. I have waited all my life to hear those words. Is it too late now for this? For us? Have we squandered too much for too long, Mamá and I? Part of me thinks it is better to go on as we have, to act as though we don’t know how ill suited we have been for each other. Less painful that way. Perhaps better than this belated offering. This fragile, trembling little glimpse of how it could have been between us. All it will beget is regret, I tell myself, and what good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
    And yet when my mother says, “Isn’t it beautiful, Markos?” I say to her, “It is, Mamá. It is beautiful,” and as something begins to break wide open inside me I reach over and take my mother’s hand in mine.

Nine
Winter 2010
    When I was a little