When Weezie came to pick me up for our road trip to the mountains, six months after her husband Emmanuel was diagnosed, she looked excited. But it felt forced, like a child who no longer believes in Santa but pretends to believe so they may feel the old tingle of anticipation. What I saw was grief.

“So, what route do you want to take?” I asked.

“Let’s take the thruway, Bird. It’s faster and there’s a Starbucks on the way.”

We talked about the weather, what we brought to eat, my kids. We were just getting warmed up. On our first stop Weezie gassed up, and I ran in and got lattes. I returned to the car to find Weezie slumped over the wheel.

“I am so tired,” she said. “I’m up all night, bringing water and cool washcloths. Emmanuel is scared and angry. I read out loud to him from his goddamn history books, and I want to fall asleep.” She paused as if angry with herself for complaining about the man she loved. More quietly, almost like a whisper she added, “I love him, Bird, but he doesn’t feel like my husband. He feels like my responsibility. I can’t do this.”

“But you are doing it,” I said.

Then she did something unexpected, she leaned, with both hands, on the horn. Other travelers at the rest stop swiveled their heads, checking to see where the blare of the car horn was coming from. It had a high pitched, insistent sound. It sounded like a night egret I heard once in a forest. Just as I was ready to put my hands over my ears, Weezie stopped. In the silence she looked at me, tears in her eyes.

I offered to drive for a while and suggested we take the back roads. “Come on, Weezie, the trees will be spectacular. You were never the beaten path kinda gal anyway.”

The trees were spectacular. They seemed to glow from within. The weekend was predicted to be peak autumn foliage. It felt like looking at one of those movies with a filter where all the colors were heightened, before the black of white of winter that was to come.

“You know I never wanted kids,” Weezie said. “All that care-taking, I’m just not cut out for it. I don’t think I have that maternal gene, to soothe and coddle and nurture. And yet, and yet that’s what I’m supposed to do now with Emmanuel.”

“I always considered you brave for not having children. Back in our twenties people pitied you if you didn’t want children. It’s as though you were signing up for a life without a limb.”

“I’m not brave.”

“What you didn’t realize is that you were definitely signing up for a life without a midriff bulge from childbirth and nipples that would point down for the rest of your life.”

Weezie laughed and pointed at my chest.

“Seriously though, motherhood was the only creative activity that was sanctioned back then. It wasn’t like that for you.” I took my eyes off the road to gauge her reaction. “You were a rebel. I hate to think you didn’t have kids because you didn’t believe you had the ability to nurture.”

Weezie was silent. Then, “I gotta pee,” we both said at the same time.

Laughing we entered the first roadside store we saw, grabbing Twizzlers and trail mix, the perfect road food. We paid, although we didn’t use to do that back in college.

“And besides, I didn’t exactly have a model of how to be a good mother,” Weezie continued, picking up the thread of conversation right where we left off. We had the ability to do that. Sometimes we didn’t talk for eight days, and whoever picked up the phone would begin talking as though the previous conversation hadn’t ended. We had spools and spools of conversation.

Weezie took off her shoes. “One time, my mom left me for six hours at a store, she forgot me. What mother does that? Besides, taking care of my sister and little brothers all those years, I think I used up my nurturing muscles. I have over-use syndrome.”

Chewing on a Twizzler, and cracking my window I said, “Or maybe it’s a well exercised muscle. For Chrissake Weezie, you’re the woman that volunteers to go into the city to wash the feet of the homeless and clip their toenails. There’s a big ick factor there for most people, like me for example. But you do it.”

“Did you ever wish you had taken a different path, one that didn’t include kids?” Weezie asked.

“When the kids were young, I thought of that constantly. I would envision what I was missing in life. I imagined being a photographic journalist, having a small peppy two-seater little sports car, a brilliant blue silk blouse without spit-up on the shoulder. With every choice there’s loss.”

“Yeah, Bird, I get it. There’s the road you take, but there’s always the idea that you’re missing out on the one you didn’t.”

“Yea, that’s it,” I said.

“And by the way Bird, you just missed our turn.”

I like to imagine, as we kayaked and hiked and sat around the campfire that weekend, that the oxygen from the mountain trees—the sugar maple, American beech, yellow birch—filled Weezie up with their sweet breath and prepared her for what was to come. Three months later Emmanuel died. It was not lost on me that his journey to that unknown territory took nine months and was just as difficult as a birth. I know she held him and soothed him and nurtured him as he made his way out of this life.

I like to imagine that after she dropped me off that crisp October evening, after we hugged in the driveway with our hearts touching, that she drove home, walked in her door and down the well-worn hallway, past the doors of all she had missed and into the room where Emmanuel lay waiting, his arms open.

-Margaret Berliant

For Margaret Berliant, writing is a logical extension of her lifetime love of stories. Her mother and grandmother before her brought family lore to life through the art of vibrant storytelling. Teaching the deaf helped her understand the value of language in all its forms, and her years of work as a psychotherapist revealed the power in the language of the heart. She lives in Rochester, New York.