Driving through the town where Mike, my son, briefly parked before grad school took him to California, I found myself a block north of his old apartment building. As traffic slowed, I looked over my shoulder. Yes, those were the cross streets. My eyes returned to the flow of traffic, where, just ahead, a large yellow arrow blinked. My lane was closed. I made a spontaneous right turn and looped back to Mike’s old neighborhood.
As I passed the apartment building, I slowed. There was the wide white door we’d propped open to bring his furniture inside. There was his wrought-iron balcony. There was the car wash where I sometimes parked when visiting.
Clouds of sadness, loneliness and regret blew through the sky outside. I hadn’t been the worst mother on the planet, or the best, but I’d always loved my children with a fierce attachment that went soul deep. I still do, long distance.
I thought of all Mike’s places away from home, away from me. The first dorm, those solid cement steps leading up and away from childhood. The second dorm, set halfway underground, with lots of windows and a pair of sneakers slung over a ceiling pipe. The tiny little half house where I brought a picnic lunch we ate before Mike’s graduation from Michigan State.
Then the moves farther from home: a new job in Chicago bought him a silver sports car he drove from Detroit to an clean, uncluttered apartment in Illinois. A few years later, after he’d left Chicago and moved home, he went away again, this time a more permanent move to California, first to the sunny Spanish-feeling place in Culver City, and now to the light and open Beverly Hills space he shares with Jessica.
But the place I have visited most is this apartment building standing alongside my car in Royal Oak. Another September, Mike had painted his walls bold colors and hosted a family birthday celebration. He barbecued steaks on his balcony grill. I brought potato salad and Aunt Becky baked a cake. We were all there, our family, together, intact, just as we had been every September for as long as my boys had lived.
This is the apartment where I left Rusty for a week while Al and I vacationed. Mike was allergic, and Rusty was high-maintenance, but, with the help of Allegra, they calmly co-existed. When I came to fetch Rusty home, Mike showed me the place above the highest kitchen cabinet where my climbing-crazy cat liked to nap. On another visit, he showed me his new glass topped desk, and the clever way he hid electric cords in a white plumbing tube. He pointed out the framed poster of Richard Feynman he’d successfully bid on at eBay. That poster, one of the few possessions he took with him when he moved west, is now in his kitchen in Beverly Hills.
My car rolled to the end of the street and, as I made another turn, I saw a second block of brick apartments, identical to those I’d just passed. In a moment of clarity I understood that this building, and not the other one, had been Mike’s. And where, for me, he truly resided was not here, or Chicago, or even Los Angeles, but safe inside my heart.
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