Evidence

Photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash

I started hearing stories about Uncle Gum around the time my mother began disappearing. He was my mother’s uncle, and everyone called him Uncle Gum because his upper lip curled up when he smiled, like a fat worm rolling over, to reveal a set of dull red gums. My mother was just a young girl when Uncle Gum rode his bicycle into the river and drowned. She would have forgotten all about him were he not a recurrent topic during family reunions and festive occasions. Funerals and births. By the time I started hearing about Uncle Gum, he occupied a space of mythic dimensions.

We lived in a small mining town. I was going to elementary school. My mother took me on the back of a bicycle on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. It was a military-grade clunker left to her by her dead father, who used to ride it to work at the palm oil estates that wrapped around the outer perimeter of the town. On Thursdays and Fridays, I rode in a lady’s air-conditioned sedan. A luxurious experience. The lady sold Amway products and took the neighborhood children to school for a modest fee. I wanted to know what it would take to grow up to be someone like her. This was before my father could afford to pay her for all five days of the week. My mother accused my father of torturing her — before she got pregnant with me, he’d promised to buy a family car. Look at her now, suffering under the hot sun, bumping up and down on that immovable tank of a bicycle. Was this her destiny?

I loved that bicycle. In the morning, we rode to school in a cool, pleasant breeze. It was the afternoons you had to worry about. The sun turned the air into molten lead. Every hot breath was humid and thick. Or else it rained. Then I held an umbrella from behind, my other arm wrapped around my mother’s waist while my bony butt perched precariously on a metal rack that served as a back seat.

Either way, I hugged my mother tightly, drenching myself in her sweat as she pedaled across different neighborhoods of identical row houses. On particularly cloudless days, when the sky was a pale blue all the way down the horizon, it was difficult to keep my eyes open. The whitewashed walls of the endless row houses reflected the brilliance of the flaring light. I would press my face into my mother’s lower back. My nose flooded with her faint acidic-sweet scent. I felt intoxicated by the certainty that she would never leave me, that she was always within arm’s reach.

Until one morning, when she told me, as the Amway lady honked for me outside, “When you come home later, use the key under the flowerpot.”

In the afternoon, when the Amway lady sent me home, I walked into a profound silence. My mother was missing. But I felt her presence everywhere. She’d left some food out on the kitchen table under three red plastic domes. I lifted the covers gingerly. There was nothing out of the ordinary: oily rice, boiled chicken, and a bowl of soup. In the kitchen, a redfish was thawing in the sink for dinner. Laundry was drying on the clothesline outside the back door. The bathroom tiles were still slippery from her shower. These traces suggested she was not far away. I ate the chicken, rice, and soup. Then I waited. I turned the TV on. Every time I got bored, I lifted my gaze and watched the dust motes near the ceiling, shimmering in the afternoon light.

I was a chatty child, but I knew not to talk about my mother’s disappearances. Not even to my brother, who was a year older and went to a different school. My mother always reappeared before he returned home in the evening with my father. She would ask me about my day. She looked over my homework and made gentle corrections whenever she found mistakes. I stared at her face and could find nothing peculiar. Then she made dinner, and we ate