A Good Private Eye

Stephanie Clare Smith

How did you turn things around, get a new lease on life, and make a new start?

 

These questions are coming for me as my book makes the rounds—the book about my challenging start and traumatic beginnings. The book exposing my mother’s problematic parenting style that left me alone to fend for myself in a sink-or-swim world. The book I am giving readings from in bookstores and on podcasts.

But where does a start start? Especially a new start. Reincarnationists would understand my objection. Buddhists describe beginningless time. Every start is a snake with its own tail in its mouth. I’ve said it before, nothing’s ever really over. Trees breathe in what we breathe out. And so it goes around the world.

But this Socratic answer of mine is not going to cut it. People see me as free and clear of the snake and want to know how I managed the magic. If anything, it was grief that broke the spell I was under. The spell I cast on my own self to see nothing less than the best of my mother.

When my mother died, a gap appeared in the fairytale fabric. And in the space of that gap, I glimpsed the way my mother’s shaky life begat my shaky start and the trauma that followed.

The glimpse was a clue to the fresh start that was coming. That was born from a dream I had a month after she passed. My mother was lying in bed, just like at the end when she had dementia and I was her caregiver. She was so skinny back then, like the tapered tip of a tail that gets eaten first.

In the dream, my mother was even thinner than that. She appeared as a pale thread collapsed in bed on a small silken pillow. A thread with a face. And like a little stick figure, she looked up from the pillow and said in a thready small voice—It wasn’t your fault.

She was back on Earth for one single evening. She wanted to take me downtown, window shop together, then find a café for a meal and some music. She’d always loved evenings full of artistic expression. She wanted to buy me a gift, maybe some pottery, to thank me for the way I cut off my life and then my two arms to help her back then. Or how it felt like I did. But what can a thread do? Too little and skinny for our night out on the town.

See how little I had to give, she said from the pillow. It wasn’t your fault.

I thought she meant not my fault for having to move her at the end to multiple facilities and all the tears that it caused. But she meant so much more. She meant the whole gig. The limbs I’d cut off right from the start of beginningless starts when I cast my first spell.

***

Ever since I was young, spies have fascinated me. Now I know why. The first word a spy learns at the knee of their family is the word betrayal or one of its cousins. Spies grow up eager to mask their past and take on a new start, a false family tree. And if they don’t become spies, they become writers or actors.

Just ask John LeCarre, the ex-spy turned prolific spy-writer. I heard him speak of the bubble world he lived in when writing a book. The happiness he found in his fictional worlds with its fictional people. I understand bubble worlds, the way they uplift and linger, conjured from the air of an imagined new start.

Other people, who aren’t professional spies or spooks who can write, have their own reasons to try and steal a new start. Some people fake their own deaths and go missing on purpose—mostly men disappearing with a treasure they’ve stolen. They fly off to a third world. They buy a dead Jane or John Doe unclaimed and on ice in the back of the morgue. For an additional corrupt fee, the morgue cremates the corpse and sends the man’s next of kin a box full of ashes along with a story of his untimely death in this faraway place. That’s when the search usually stops.

But a good private eye knows the dilemma that comes along with the con—runaways are still attached to their past. You can’t just delete it. That’s not a thing. Nine times out of ten, the escapee slips back to their life like a fake ghost for a visit.

That’s my window of opportunity to spot them and catch them, I heard a private eye say on a radio interview. He went on to describe how he once staked out a college stadium during basketball playoffs. The ghost had season tickets from before he went missing and was sitting midcourt enjoying a hotdog with relish.

Every good spy and good private eye has personal experience with the sticky parts of the past and what can’t be shaken off. That’s what I’d tell the runaway ghost if I was the private eye who caught him midcourt. That’s what I do tell sci-fi fanatics who’d like to escape to a parallel world and leave this one behind, completely forgotten. And that’s what I tell myself now as I exit my bubble.

I aim to digest my history, transform the old structures, and add something new into the mix. Isn’t that what some of us would like to do as a nation? Digest our whole history and add in our whole selves? For the sake of our future?

That’s what I’d ask the popular podcaster who used the stuck in the past slur to describe the lifelong trauma of a Holocaust survivor. I nearly threw up. A challenging past just wants to be heard, not abandoned again, and left in the dust.

When we silence our stories, we are diminished as beings and poorer as nations. Scratch the ground under your feet and our foundational past is laying right there. Archeologists and reincarnationists would understand my conclusion.

Maybe we can think like the Black scuba divers who’ve been searching for old slave ships drowned in old storms, submerged and ignored. The hundreds of slave ships that fell to the seafloor carried enough people to populate a modern-day Dallas. Now, we mostly skim over the top and ignore what’s offshore, as if those waters don’t touch our land every day.

One of the divers surfaced from the ocean with a smile on her face after touching the timber of a centuries’ old slave ship. It’s like visiting our ancestors, she said to the reporter as she climbed back onto the boat and pulled off the hood of her navy blue wetsuit. They’ve been there all along. Waiting for us.

Waiting to be added back into the midst of the national conversation for the good of us all, our shared future freedom.

I began diving into my own flooded wreckage when my mother streamed into my dream with her gift-giving wish. Nothing was easy peasy. But there was my past waiting for me to name her and claim her and add myself in to start a new start.