SHORT STORY, Flavia Stefani, Connection Interrupted

My mother finally answers the video call. I miss you, I say—my first words to her since she died. I didn’t say them often when she was alive; no need to, I would see her the next day. But in the weeks since she passed, they’ve become the beat of my heart, the one-song station playing endlessly in my mind.

I miss you, too, she says matter-of-factly, in a tone that suggests that, sure, she misses me: as my mother, she’s been missing me since the day I exited her womb, but she wasn’t missing me in that particular moment. She has moved on to the other side. She’s probably exempted from the burden of missing.

The wi-fi signal, which has always been problematic in my apartment, starts to act up. My phone screen darkens and a message pops up in white letters: poor connection. I jump out of bed and rush to the living room window. Standing on the tip of my toes, I raise the phone with one hand. My mother comes to life again on the screen. It’s summertime on her face: her smile is luminous, welcoming. Her eyes are two brown jewels under her thick eyebrows. I ask her about them.

What about them?

They’re bushy, I say.

That's how they style them here, she says. And then she laughs. I consider this for a moment. My mother didn’t laugh much in life, and, in the rare moments she did, it always caught me off guard, like thunder or a dry cough. I suspected laughing hurt her throat. But now it sounds breezy, it flows off her lips.

What have you been up to, I ask. I sit on the window sill. Six floors below me, a woman attempts to park her SUV in a spot that would be tight even for a compact. Three pigeons fight viciously over the remains of a French fry. Soon, it will start raining, and the memory of summer will fade from everyone’s mind like an old photograph. A million questions bubble up in my throat, but I swallow them. I don’t want to sound desperate, although I am. In the weeks since she died, I’ve called her number over a hundred times just to hear her voicemail greeting. I wanted her to pick up the phone so badly. I wanted to see her one last time, and then a thousand times more. Now she’s here, her face sharp and crisp on my handheld device.

I ask her about the weather.

It’s nice, she says. I see a patch of grass behind her, the bright blue sky towering over her head.

That’s a beautiful blouse, I say. It’s true: my mother always looked stellar in green.

Thanks, she says. Grandma likes it, too.

Is Grandma there?

She was. She left just a minute ago.

I have time to ask one last thing before the wi-fi dies. Are you happy, I ask.


A week later, she answers my video call again. This time, she is seven. I recognize her from the portrait hanging on the staircase wall, the one where she and I look so alike I’ve often wondered if it could have been me in the photograph; me in some past life, smiling with dirty hands, sweaty hair stuck to my temples. She talks to me from inside a bouncing castle, the vinyl walls behind her a bright red that reminds me of candied apples. Her cheeks are flushed and she's lost two baby teeth. I can’t tell if the image is glitchy because of the wi-fi signal or because of her jumping.

Hiiiii, she shrieks.

Where are you, I ask, leaving the word “mom” out of the sentence because it doesn’t feel right.

I’m jumping, she says. Do you see how high I’m jumping?

Very impressive, I say, but it’s a lie. In truth, I’m terrified—of what? Of her getting hurt? Of her dying? I sit up against the wall and place a pillow under my thighs. I've called the Internet company and requested a new modem. In the meantime, I’m spending the day in the same spot near the window.
Do you want to play with me, my mother asks.

With all her jumping and shaking, it’s like being inside a blender. I’m getting motion sick just looking at her. I’m also afraid that if I move even a little, the connection will be lost.

I can’t now, I say. Maybe another time?

Bummer, she says. Or does she say summer? I can’t tell for sure because the call gets disconnected.


Our third video call gets intercepted by a camera and I find myself facing the nave of a familiar church. It takes me a second to understand what is going on, but when I do, I cover my mouth with my hand. I’m witnessing my mother’s wedding. My call is answered right at the time of the wedding march. She walks arm in arm with her older brother, my uncle Alberto, who has been dead for a few years. A rosary hangs from her hand. She’s wearing blue eyeshadow and a bright pink lipstick; her shoulder pads make her torso look bulkier than it actually is, and her dress is tight around her waist. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s pregnant with me. That’s the story I grew up hearing: that my mother could barely fit into her wedding dress that day and she blamed it on all the pamonhas she’d eaten the week before. As she approaches the altar, she looks at me, which is to say, she looks into the camera. She looks at my father. He kisses her on the forehead—I keep the photo of that kiss in a box somewhere—and then the power goes out in the church. That's another story I grew up hearing: right after that kiss, the whole city went dark.


The next day, a storm hits this part of the country. The clouds argue like lovers who no longer have anything in common. The wind is indignant and violent, raindrops splash the windows like a mob sent from above to wipe São Paulo off the map. I try the switch for the twentieth time that evening. Nothing. With the power out, the only lights in the apartment come from the lightning outside. My phone is dead. My mother: dead-dead.


I drive through the city in the middle of the night. The storm has been ongoing: several streets are closed and the power has been out for hours. If it were not for my portable battery charger, I wouldn’t be driving alone in my silk pajamas, which are soft and elegant—a gift from my mother—but also cold as bone. All my other clothes are dirty and the heat doesn’t work in my car. The windshield wiper sways from side to side like the hips of the dashboard Hula dancer I keep on the panel. Technically, the doll belonged to my uncle Alberto, a souvenir for his taxi that my mother bought during her one trip to Hawaii a few years ago. At the time, I thought it crass and tasteless, but coming home after her funeral, I snatched it on a whim and now it spends the days alone in my car.

I think back to our last road trip together. My mother had offered to drive me to the airport in Campinas, an hour-long drive during which I harshly criticized her driving: she was going too fast, and then too slow; her car was dirty, dirtier than mine even, and the engine sounded like an old boat. I couldn’t have known this would be our last trip together. The way I saw it, life was an everlasting unfolding of days. More road trips where I would criticize her driving laid ahead, more time spent together staring out of car windows, the red dirt in between patches of green fields. Dying happens to other people’s mothers, I used to think. Maybe death would even forget about mine.

I drive past the Portuguese restaurant in Vila Madalena where we had lunch right before she was diagnosed. My mother insisted we sit in the back by the Ipê tree. She didn’t give a thought to the suffocating heat or the sweat stains forming under the armpits of her blouse; the tree was in full bloom, its silky yellow petals landing softly on the floor like tropical snow. We’ll sit under the tree, she informed the host. Holding the menu with both hands, she read each item out loud.
Do you want to share the sardinhas, she asked.

No, I said firmly. I did not want to share the sardines with her, on that day or any other. The moment hadn’t come yet when I would find myself driving alone in the middle of the night in my pajamas, the heavy rain battering the rooftops of my Fiat, and I would suddenly feel an urge to devour dozens of those stupid, stinky fish, to crush each delicate bone against the roof of my mouth with my tongue.
And all those times she cooked bacalhau for me when she couldn’t stand the stuff? I can only hope there’s plenty of lasagna and banana pie in heaven. I’m going to ask her next time.


The next time is a few hours later, and my mother looks young in it. Her brow is like marble—shiny, no wrinkles on it, no gray hairs on her temples. Her eyes sparkle from the inside. Youth makes her look like an earlier version of herself, I’m thinking, but then I realize it’s not my mother who picked up the phone, but her mother.

Grandma, I say with surprise.

Hello, dear.

You look amazing, I say.

Thank you, she replies. This is the happiest I have ever seen my grandmother. Her expression is full, as though she has finally solved the problem of her loneliness, which is the complaint I remember most vividly from her. At the end of our monthly Sunday visits to her house in the country, she would often say that she wished we'd visit more, that her house wasn’t always so empty. And I wish you wouldn’t live so far from us, my mother would reply, hugging her. She passed away before I was old enough to visit her on my own.

Where is Mom? I ask.

Grandma gives me a mischievous smile. She pulls the camera away from her face and points it to her round midsection. Her summer dress is stretched around her expanding waistline, as though working hard to cover every inch of her skin.

Right here, she says. She places a hand on her stomach. She’ll be out any moment now, she adds. I have decided on a name. Would you like to hear it?

As I open my mouth to speak, the screen freezes. I see the daisy pattern of my grandmother’s dress, my mother warm and safe under the flowers before she came into this world, decades before she left it.

I drive up a narrow hill, the paved highway snaking into a narrow road the further up I go. Below me, the city is asleep and out of focus; in the rearview mirror, some neighborhoods seem erased while others shine like distant lighthouses. I put the car in second gear. With one hand I clutch the wheel while I wipe the fog out of the windshield with the other. The rain begins to die down. I pull up to the end of the road and park near a wooden gate. On a giant sign, I read the name of one of São Paulo’s biggest cell phone providers. “Trespassers will be prosecuted,” the sign reads. I turn off the car and unplug my phone from the charger.

I get a signal and immediately tap the dial icon. The call doesn’t go through. I redial the last number and this time I receive a recording. “That number has been disconnected.” I look out the window at the unfolding darkness, then down at my pajamas pants, a stream of tears dripping onto the fabric. Alone on the hill, no one can hear me scream. I run through all the things I want to tell my mother. That I’m thinking of adopting a cat. That I’ve started looking for a new job. That although I must, I can't go on without her. The glow from my phone dies down. I grip the steering wheel. She was so close to me, a combination of numbers under my fingers. Where did she go?


Image: Eberhard Grossgasteiger