I Will Never Erase You Virginia Lee Wood (bio) The moles on your face are a roadmap of your future trials. My mother’s face is covered in dark moles. They are hereditary. She laughs at my nose bridge. Unlike her side of the family, there is nothing there for me to touch. Iwipe both my eyes in a single back and forth motion. Now that I am getting older, it is more and more clear that I have my mother’s nose-tip. But most ofmy face, including my eyes, comes from my father. Canthoplasty. Narrowed alars. A lifting of the mouth corners. Cheek threading. Glass skin. Digesting my face in surgical detail. Once you start doing it, it is hard to stop. I can see where all thescars would go. When, between the ages of twenty-six and thirty, more moles began to appear on my face, I watchedeach one with concern. Misfortunes. I go from skincare to reforming myself. I cannot prevent them. They line up like little soldiers. Silent oracles. Portents without language. And as totems, left behindas I wander blindly, fearfully. Which of you is my drinking habit? Which of you is prescription drugs? Which of you did this to us?I won’t blame you. Did you disappear into my hairline in shame? Which of you knew about my father? When did you know? Tell me. My eyelids are capricious. Often one is mono-lidded and the other has a crease. Like my father’s.Two lids or one, they are the same eyes. I looked at him when younger in order to investigate myself.When I looked at him, I looked only for me. The body. When older, I looked in anxiety, at that timeunfounded. A pernicious, crippling fear of losing. [End Page 38] Notions. I watched his ear. That crease in old men’s ears can mean heart disease. I watched his weight for him. “You have diabetes.” I rolled open the drawers in his office, looking forchip bags. I watched his knuckles for inflammation. I watched the doctor poke his feet with little pins. None ofthese things “got” him. “Got” him is how the hospice nurse put it. Alzheimer’s begins in a single moment when a protein curls in the brain incorrectly. Without reason.They form plaques. On x-rays they look like stones. White, glowing constellations. He is not only a body. His life is not for me to speculate upon. But the life retreated long ago. Thatbefore-life. The why? And how did we get here? And what could we have done? Then it was only thetwo us, trying to find joy the way children find it, in moments. In wonders. The week before youleave us, we are two children eating jelly beans and laughing at Mommy, because Daughter keepsgiving her the pear-flavored ones that we don’t like. I will own it. I wish that I had been someone else. So that I would have been there sooner. Someonewho wasn’t angry. Who wasn’t resentful. Someone who could have recovered from childhood faster.So I could have known it faster. But it wouldn’t have saved you. There is no timeline where yourecover. It wouldn’t have mattered. But that doesn’t comfort us. Nothing can comfort us. My mother is laughing at the little pointed divot in the curve of my upper ear. “Selfish ears,” she says. Eyes cutting at me, wet with laughter. Cutting at me. We have arrived here together, somehow. We watched deer by the woodpile from the window, together, from your bed. When my father passes, when the blood drains from his face, I see for the first time a mole on hischeek. So prominent, as if he has been dabbed with a fine-pointed brush. He was always rosy-complected. I couldn’t see. If I had been different, I wouldn’t have been so cut open. I wouldn’t have been able to know you. On other girls, the frozen moles ready to fall off, hidden under pimple patches. Go away, death. Go...