My Mother's Van

Even now it idles outside the houses where we failed to get better at piano lessons, visits the parking lot of the ballet school where my sister and I stood awkwardly at the back. My mother's van was orange with a door we slid open to reveal beheaded plastic dragons and bunches of black, half-eaten bananas; it was where her sketchbooks tarried among abandoned coffee cups and science projects. She meant to go places in it: camp in its back seat and cook on its stove while painting the coast of Nova Scotia, or capturing the cold beauty of the Blue Ridge mountains at dawn. Instead, she waited behind its wheel while we scraped violins, made digestive sounds with trumpets, danced badly at recitals where grandmothers recorded us with unsteady cameras. Sometimes, now, I look out a window and believe I see it, see her, waiting for me beside a curb, under a tree, and I think I could open the door, clear off a seat, look at the drawing in her lap, which she began, but never seemed to finish.