Reflections of fluorescent lights are beginning to show on the windows as the sky outside darkens. The night seems contained by the glass, while the reflected brightness is the uncontained. I am sitting next to my father in a hospital waiting room on a plastic couch that is warm from our bodies. My mother is somewhere behind double white doors with hinges that swing both ways. It is over seventeen years since I remember them being in such close proximity. Just before their divorce, I was five years old and my father took the three of us to the beach for the day. But I know he is thinking of another time. My father has been left waiting for my mother before.

I know this, but not so much because I have been told. I was not there the last time, but I've filled in the blanks between facts so many times, I almost recognize the scene.

Sometime after my parents married and well before they decided to have me, there was an accident. And although they were both in the car when the truck hit, my father escaped relatively unharmed while my mother was rushed to the emergency room unconscious, with head trauma. I imagine my father standing helplessly in a long hallway. The doctors would have insisted on examining him as well. They would have ushered him into a tiny, white room and looked him over carefully for hidden bruises, secret ailments that might haunt him later. But there wouldn't have been any they could find.

I wasn't there next to him in the waiting room then, and that is not the only difference. The last time was sudden, like thunder without rain. There was no warning, no time to prepare for the changes that rushed in and stayed.

I spoke to my mother last month from across the country, about fireflies. William and I had spent the weekend at the beach in North Carolina. I told her how we stood on the sand a few nights before, watching a throng of fireflies flickering in the dark brush. I rushed the story - I knew that even as I was telling it - but I kept talking, heaping words upon the delicate thoughts between us. She had called to tell me the date of the operation.

"I talked to the doctor today. It's the same one. Did I tell you that? He remembers me," she had said when I picked up the phone. I knew the operation was going to be an update. As far as I understood there were things they used to put her back together the last time - shunts and tubes that redirected fluids, prevented floods in her brain - that needed to be replaced. It seemed appropriate that the doctor who put them there in the first place would be the one to do this.

"Are you scared?" I asked her then and heard little puffs of uncomfortable laughter in response. "I'll get the plane tickets tomorrow," I continued. I wanted to ask more questions, but not about the operation. Do you remember who you were before the accident? Do you always wish you could go back? When you look at me that way you do, are you seeing the piece of yourself that you've lost? In the silence I heard her moving. I imagined her in the kitchen, her short, dark hair uncombed, gripping the phone in one hand, handling things with the other. She would be rubbing her thumb against water spots on clean glasses, scribbling pencil marks on scraps of paper, picking at hangnails.

That's when I told her the story about the fireflies on the beach. It occurred to me that I had never seen fireflies at home in California, and I wondered if my mother had. Had she ever seen them at all? But as I painted the hasty image for her, and tried to get the details right, I heard only the metallic clanging of pots in the background.

My mother tucked me into bed every night when I was little. But instead of reading me stories, she would eagerly listen as I made up my own to tell her. They usually began with what I had done in school that day, and then they would stray into fantastic realms where people with purple skin and bright, glowing eyes lived at the bottom of the sea. Sometimes I made up stories about her. Once I told about how a pot of spaghetti she left cooking on the stove had overflowed and engulfed the town with sticky noodles, slithering out of sewer grates and into the streets.

When I think about that now, it makes me wish the stories I had to tell were still that simple. Would she have kept listening so well if they were?

"It looks like I'll be gone for a month," I said to William when I got off the phone. He looked up at me from our bed where he was reading the newspaper, his brown curls flattened on one side of his head where they had been pressed into the pillow. I waited for an angry scowl to open up on his face. "Maybe two," I tested. He smiled instead. "Your mom must be so happy you're coming."

"You're not going to miss me?"

William didn't answer. He rolled his eyes slightly and smirked. Then he patted the bedspread next to him. "Why don't you tell me why you don't want to go."

I sat down. "Of course, I want to. It's just that it goes without saying. She didn't ask me; she just expects it." I turned to him. "And I know what she's really thinking."

"That she's scared," he said.

"That she's getting me back - all to herself."

William put his hand on my knee. "But I'm not giving you up. You're only on loan." He laughed softly and pulled me close. His neck was warm against my face. "It'll be fine," he whispered. I lay down next to him and let myself be comforted.

A year ago, after graduating from college, I stood in the kitchen and told my mother that I was moving east to live with William. It was a cold day and she was wearing thick, wool socks.

"He's already found an apartment for the two of us," I said. At first she didn't respond. It seemed that she was waiting for me to disappear, as if saying the words was more a factor in my leaving than actually packing my car full of clothes and books. I saw her looking at the floor, struggling, but I couldn't tell if she was more scared or angry. It was hard to differentiate those emotions as her face reddened and her hands began to shake. I wanted to fill the empty space, so I talked. I told her that he and I cared about each other. I told her William wanted me to come.

"Are you sure?" she snapped suddenly. Her eyes met mine.

"What if you get all the way out there and he doesn't want you? What will you do then?" She was desperately searching my face. I looked down at her hands as they curled into fists. I wasn't sure if she wanted to hit me, or if it was me in those fists that she was holding onto. "Are you sure you know what you're doing? How do you know he loves you?" I started to cry, but not because of her words. I was watching her fists, squeezing tighter and tighter. I felt like I was seeing what my father had seen all those years ago when he left. He explained to me once that he hadn't been able to communicate with her anymore, that she wouldn't connect. I used to wonder if she ever blamed him. Now, looking at her whitening knuckles, I knew she must - not for the accident, but for leaving her. There was a pane of glass between my mother and me. She had her words on one side and I had mine, but she wouldn't let them in. She kept saying, "Are you sure?" I wanted her to know that I wasn't, but that was no reason not to go.

Through my tears, I asked her to tell me the truth: that her fears for me were really her own. I screamed at her, "Don't put your doubts in my head. It's not my fault you're afraid. I'm sorry, but you can't put all that shit on me!" I wanted to hurt her. I wanted her to break. I kept on screaming until she did. She sank to the floor, curling her woolen socks under her and sobbed round drops onto the linoleum.

I left her there.

If I had turned around, I would have kneeled down and held her, taken back all my words. The only way to leave was to keep moving, past her into the hallway, out the front door.

As a child I used to flip through photo albums, looking closely at pictures of my mother as a young woman - with thick blond hair and curvaceous hips. There is a gap between those young photographs of my mother and the ones in which her long dark hair hangs over my crib, protecting me like a wing. On the day of the accident, she was taken straight to an operating table where doctors shaved her blond hair. She told me how afterwards it had grown back as a dark, chestnut brown. There are no pictures of the in-between time, but as with my own blond hair, I have inherited the unspoken memories, passed down from mother to daughter. And I keep them, like a locket containing hazy photographs, tightly shut and close to me.

My father comes back from the hospital cafeteria with coffee for the two of us. I hold the warm paper cup in my hands and fiddle with the cardboard handle that is stapled to the side like an ear. The clock on the wall above us ticks loudly, but I am used to the sound now. My father tells me he is glad he's here; he wouldn't want me to have to wait alone. But I think he's here as much for himself as for me.

After the accident, my mother was in a coma for three months. My father sat by her bed almost everyday. Sometimes it is hard for me to picture that - him waiting for her to wake up. Wouldn't it have been too much? I imagine his body filled with too much hoping, unable to hold it in, leaking it out with desperation and useless, stingy tears. All this while her body lay stiff and quiet.

But maybe the waiting wasn't the worst part for my father. When at long last my mother finally came out of it, she was missing something. She was someone else. But not like a soap opera character who awakens with an entirely different personality. In some ways it was more basic than that. When my mother woke up, she had forgotten how to write or even walk, and her speech was garbled. Yet, she was able to relearn all that- coordinating her muscles, retraining her tongue - relatively easily. She walked, if with a taut, careful gait. And she wrote, gripping the pen tightly in her hand, tracing awkward, block letters. The part that didn't come back was nothing that could be taught.

I didn't know the woman she was before so I can't say, "She used to crack jokes all the time," or "She never used to be so quiet." Only she and my father know the comparisons, and yet from them I have inherited the loss. Even after everything - physical therapy, buying a new house, having a baby - she remained in a kind of shell. I imagine my father back then, desperate to crack it open and rescue her from its depths, until eventually he gave up.

I'm not sure this is what he wants to think about right now, but it's what I want to hear, so I ask: "Dad, tell me the story of how you met?" The waiting room is empty except for a couple sleeping on the couch at the far end of the room. They stir slightly as my father begins. I see that, like me, he has been steeped in memories all day because the words come easily, with a lightheartedness that surprises me. My parents met in college, but my father, as usual, starts the story this way:

"Well, we met in the woods.

"My friends and I were looking for a party we had heard about. It was supposed to be somewhere out in the forest on the edge of campus. So there we were, stumbling through the trees, each of us with a couple of beers stuffed in the waistband of our pants." He snorts a quiet laugh. "Then we came across your mom. She was alone out there, wearing a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt spattered with paint. There was a blue streak on her left cheek, even some in her hair. But next to her - well I guess she wasn't alone - next to her stood that gigantic monster." He laughs quietly again.

"You know, your mother had been working on her final project for a sculpture class. When my friends and I found her, she was putting the last touches of green and blue paint on the ten-foot statue. It was made of paper-mâché, and she called it the 'Great Mother.' Of course, I didn't know any of this until later. I didn't even know who she was. I looked for her at the party that night, but she wasn't there. So I went around telling people about this woman I'd met in the forest. 'She's beautiful,' I kept saying. They probably thought I was high." He lets out a real laugh, and in this stale room the sound echoes.

When I was young, I thought my parents' story was romantic and fateful. My father, out of all of the boys, was the one who noticed her, instead of the over-sized art project. Now, he quiets and says those words again: "She was beautiful, then. She really was." And I understand what he is saying more than I ever have.

In junior high I started spending my summer vacations with my father. His apartment was part of a marina complex, and his sailboat was moored at the docks that I could see from the living room window. We were out on the boat almost every weekend, taking along a cooler filled with turkey sandwiches, pickles and cans of soda. When we set out just before noon, the sun was hot, but on the water the wind would drop the temperature and fill the empty air with its howls. My father took the helm, and I tightened and released the sheets as we tacked into San Francisco Bay. Later we would find a leeward shore of an island and set the anchor so that we could eat our lunch to the sound of the flapping sails. Usually we brought out the binoculars and passed them back and forth to one another, looking for pelicans up in the cliffs or the bobbing heads of seals out on the water's surface. Then we made our way home before the sun set.

I always loved how my hair smelled of salt hours after we were back on land, playing cards at the kitchen table. Each night when he started off to bed, my father would tell me I could call my mother if I wanted. "Feel free," he said from the doorway, before leaving me alone in the room. I often went for weeks those summers - reading books, meeting friends at the beach, then sailing with my father on the weekends - without ever picking up the phone to talk to her.

My parents got married soon after their graduation, and moved into a small apartment in Berkeley. My mother got a job teaching art classes at a local school. At home she continued to mold strange figures that she left sitting around the living room. All her sculptures had bulbous heads and limbs made from balloons she covered with wet newspaper. When the paper dried to a hard shell, she stuck a needle through and popped the balloons, leaving their limp rubber skins inside.

I know this because I asked, because I've been told. But I never asked about the accident. I couldn't be sure I wanted to know. And yet somehow, the unsaid memories are as clear to me as if my parents had spoken them aloud. Without my inviting them, the noiseless images flash in my mind:

It is late morning and the sun is dimmed by the Bay Area fog, which has not yet burned off. The waves on the rocky coast are wild and white-capped. Above on a high cliff, a road meanders through a grove of eucalyptus trees. A small car, with its top down, appears from around a bend. My father is in the driver's seat. He has a moustache and long hair that curls up around his ears. My mother is in the passenger seat, her hair pulled up in a ponytail, making her look younger than she is. I think they are holding hands.

Looking down at them in that car, I have a hard time keeping my mother young and blond. She wants to change and shift constantly. She becomes the woman I recognize, with long dark stick-straight hair, parted in the middle. Her eyes have not sunken yet. But then suddenly in that car, she is sick and old. Her face is misshapen, her hair cut short and uneven. Wisps of brown stick up in places while others lay plastered to her skull. Her eyes are sad and differently shaped, as if she's trying to look out a broken window and force all the fragments to make a whole.

That's the same mother I see next to the car. It has flipped over and the wheels are spinning in the air, the engine is running, but everything else is still. There is a close-up of my mother lying on the ground. She is face-down as if sleeping, except that her limbs are too relaxed. One cheek is pressed into the ground, her arms splayed, hands palms-down at her side. I don't see any blood; nothing is oozing. But she is quiet, and not life-like.

I am able to look at her like this, focused in the camera's frame, until it widens and my father enters the scene. When he does, his man-face is contorted, trying to find its way back into the folds of a raw, baby's wail. I always close my eyes and look away at this part - before he succeeds, reddening and opening up, unbounded.

The doctor comes through the double swinging doors. The couple in the corner of the room sit up suddenly, but as he walks toward my father and me, they lean back into one another, closing their eyes. My father and I stand.

"She is out of surgery and doing fine," the doctor says. "She's still sleeping, but you may go in and see her if you'd like." He thinks he is being reassuring in the way he tilts his head when he speaks to us, but he makes me feel small and disconnected from my mother. He has had his hands in her head. I think, with some amusement, that this is something my mother would like to do to me - have her hands in my head.

When I arrived home last week, my mother was waiting in the driveway. I saw her from down the street, standing with her arms crossed over her body and hopping from one foot to the other. She hurried to the sidewalk as my taxi pulled up. I got out, and she put her arms around me tightly; her cold hands flitted across my cheeks. I stepped back abruptly and said, "It's freezing out here. Let's go in." But then I took one of those cold hands and warmed it in mine as we walked towards the house.

In the kitchen I put the teakettle on, and my mother settled into a chair across from me at the small, round table. Her eyes were wide as she looked at me, peering into hidden places, and I could not answer with a steady gaze.

"How's William?" she asked finally.

"Fine. Good," I told her. She stared at me as I poured hot water over the tea bags in each of our cups.

"What about your job? You have to be back in September, don't you?"

"Yes, but they know I'm out here. And if I have to stay . . . if you need me to stay longer, then I'll let them know."

"But they are expecting you back?" It was as close as she would come to asking me to find a job here and forget about North Carolina. I gave her a hard look. She backed off for a moment and grew quiet. I sipped my tea. I thought she was finished, but then she sat forward and said suddenly, "Has he talked about marriage at all?"

I was silent again, but did not look up, only feeling her eyes on me.

"Is he serious?" she said.

I couldn't stand it. I stood up and went over to the sink with my mug. I dropped it with a thud into the pile of other dirty dishes. I wanted to say, "I'm not like you. I won't be like you." Instead, with my back to her, I managed to say, "No, mom," although I couldn't keep the strains of annoyance from my voice. She was always pulling at me, asking for reassurances that don't exist. "No, we haven't talked about that," I told her again and walked into the hall.

For the few days leading up to the operation, she and I spent as little time as possible in the same rooms of the apartment. I had come back to care for her, to hold her hand, but I couldn't stand the feel of her smooth fingertips touching my palms. When I heard her moving in the other rooms, she was like a small elephant with heavy, tired steps. But when I caught glimpses of her face as she passed doorways, I saw it was a bird's, with piercing, uncertain eyes. Perhaps it was that she was filled with bird-thoughts - dreams of flying on wide, mighty wings - so that when she was awake, her delicate feet pounded the earth in frustration. Through the walls, I listened and wondered what she was stamping out.

My father and I pass through the hinged doors and walk down the hallway to intensive care. Now that it is almost over, I move slowly. I am in no hurry, although last night I hadn't been able to sleep as I quietly willed time to speed up. I lay in the dark, thinking ahead to getting my mother up and ready to go to the hospital in the morning. After a while I called William.

"I just wish it was all over already. Then I could relax." I was complaining again, but he didn't seem to mind. We were feasting on each other's voices through the phone, no matter what they had to say.

I asked him about work, if the new grocery store had opened up down the street, if someone had finally cleared away the tree that had fallen in the back yard last month. He asked me if I had gotten together with any old friends. He wanted to know if I was remembering my way around the city, and if it felt strange to be home. We spoke in questions that had definitive answers. William allowed me this and didn't ask me to explain my fears. Silently I envied his patience.

"Remember the fireflies?" He said it suddenly.

"Mmm." I nodded. I did. And I realized that it was the last time I could remember not waiting.

The late morning sun was dimmed behind layers of white clouds. Our small car rounded a bend, following a long, thin road that stretches the length of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. On either side of the car were low shore weeds and marshes filled with birds. William was in the driver's seat, wearing a pair of sunglasses and a baseball hat. I was in the passenger seat watching intently out the window as we passed small towns where vacation homes lined the road. Their weather-beaten wood siding was the color of sand, and colorful beach towels and fluorescent bathing suits hung like flags from their balconies. I could feel that the ocean was near us, on both sides, but we couldn't see it yet. We drove on, watching through droplets on the windows, the presence of rain making the island hushed and empty, as though it had sent the regular beach-goers home so that we could hear ourselves breathing the salty air.

We pitched our tent in a campground near the beach and then headed for the ocean. The trail was narrow at first but widened, coming out onto a bluff covered in low bushes. The earth was sand and dirt, the color of clay. It gave under our feet, and we left deep impressions of heels and toes behind us. On the beach, we took off our shoes and rolled up our pants so that we could feel the waves rush over the tops of our feet. I stood, William's arms around me, listening to the sound of water turning in on itself. I tried not to think about my mother, the operation, going home. I thought about how warm William's body seemed, as though it hadn't soaked up the dampness like mine had.

At dusk, the ocean, receding into grayer blues, was no different than the sky. I could no longer see where they touched. I felt safe - a great protective sphere, limitless and deep, was rising up from the sand in front of me, curling over us, and down our backs. William spread a blanket in the sand and pulled me down onto it with him. He laid his head on my shoulder and closed his eyes. He was silent and listening. I felt the sphere of water and air embracing us. I heard the night coming. It sounded like wind in trees, or cars rushing on a wet road; it sounded like arriving.

In the quickly darkening sky we began to see flashes of lightening far out on the ocean. We could see the ragged edges of black thunderclouds touching on the seam of the horizon. They were monstrous and heavy. We watched, peering into the dim night for another glimpse at the depths of the sky. From far away, we heard the low groan of thunder.

When we finally left the beach, William and I walked down the path through the bushes without turning on our flashlights. In the darkness, we were startled by the lights of thousands of fireflies. Their sparks, tiny embers, made it seem as though we were wading through the starry sky, as if the world was upside-down and all around us. The light traveled in chaotic patterns, mixing and churning the dark air. And although we could still hear the faint sounds of waves crashing and occasionally thunder, we heard no noise from the bushes. The frenetic energy was strangely silent, almost suspended. I looked over at William's silhouette against the sparking night, and it was an empty black, as if he had gone, having left only a William-shaped hole in the air.

Later on I couldn't sleep. It was finally raining, in long sheets of water that pounded the tent and seeped through at the seams. The drops that fell on my face and shoulders were icy. Next to me, William was sleeping quietly, unaware of the drops forming and hanging perilously above his head. I wondered what he was dreaming. Then I thought about the fireflies. I remembered how, standing so close to William among them, I felt both connected and alone, their energy passing through me to him and back again. Empty and full, then empty again.

Quietly my father and I enter the room we have been directed to. At the end of a row of beds I see my mother's, near a window. I know my father does too because he takes my hand. I wonder if he is nervous about being here. For so long I have been the only connection between them. Because of me they have conversed briefly on the telephone or have seen each other from across the room at school plays, at my graduation. Now my father stands a few feet from my mother's bed. I expect to feel strange about his being here, but I'm the stranger. In this place, somehow I am the one who does not belong.

I let go of my father's hand and step close to my mother. She does not open her eyes. She lies in front of me, all her tender eagerness drained out through plastic tubes, and I am frightened by its absence. I notice the skin on her face is smooth like the surface of a balloon, although there is no color to it. And the pallor is not translucent, but dense, as though in working inside her head, they have added more to what she'd had before. Her eyelids are slick with some kind of ointment, and a white bandage circles the tufts of brown hair above her ears. Even though I know she is only sleeping, she looks to me as though she is caught between hanging on and letting go, between awakening and falling more deeply under the effects of the drugs.

Turning to my father, I see that he is more relieved than I. I realize suddenly that, for him, this is nothing like the last time. I can see that he is reassured just by the sight of her. This operation was prearranged, and now the waiting is over. We have made it to the other side, to an outcome that was planned for. There are not going to be any surprises. I try to look at my mother and see her in the present, but I can't help remembering - memories that aren't even mine.

As I stand over my mother, I feel history rushing up to grab me by the elbows, shaking, shaking my body until I crack. Her return to the operating table, the re-opening of her skull, has let loose mildewed, smoking odors that I recognize but cannot place. I wonder about the doctor. Did he remember the soft curves and raised, pink track along her scalp? Could he see his own fingers, thirty years younger, pulling that seam into place with thick, black thread? And in undoing it all these years later, does he feel the same rush that I do? As though we are answering some indecent call to reverse the growth of time and listen to whispers long unspoken?

I feel as though I am remembering rather than experiencing. As though she will open her eyes and see through me, a ghost, peering in on an old, old story. Soon I will be born and the silent transcript will be written underneath my skin so that on a day like today I'll suddenly hear it. It will sound like waves, turning and mixing with one another, washing over me, knocking me from my feet. And when I get up, everything will be different. I will not be able to decipher what is memory, what is experience.

Or which is my own story.

Author Bio

K. Rae Gilbert has lived on both east and west coasts - she's a little bit country, a little bit New York City. She currently resides in North Carolina where she peers out the window near her writing desk for glimpses of the great blue heron who's been known to visit her yard.