The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 6 Clara

CHAPTER 6? CLARA

Bluffton, South Carolina

My mother’s love was as overwhelming as her abandonment, both with me even now.

When I was a child, we played a game of disappear and reappear. There was no simple hide-and-seek for my mother. No, ma’am, she was more fun than all the other mommies.

One afternoon, at seven years old, I hid in the closet of her writing studio behind an old fur coat, from the days when she lived up north, somewhere I’d never been. It smelled of must and wet animal. I slid down the back wall, landing upon a pile of books. I scooted to the side, and with a sliver of light falling in around the door, I spied a pile of papers bound with a rubber band.

I’d never seen these papers before.

I knew this old house’s every nook and cranny, its every creak and corner. I could walk its halls with my eyes shut. I’d hidden in all its secret places—from the eaves behind the stairwell to the crawl space under the house, a damp hutch of dark soil and scuttering animals.

How could something possibly exist in our house that I’d never seen? I heard Mama calling my name in her singsong voice, looking for the invisible me.

Clara, Clara, Clara.

She’d always find me, though sometimes it took a bit longer because I was very good at disappearing. Or so she said.

In the closet, I brought my knees to my chest and listened. Even if I stayed hidden here for a long time, her voice calling my name would keep me feeling safe and expectant, a giggle trying to burst through, a deep desire to be found, to be seen by someone who truly loved me.

Waiting, I slipped out the top pages and saw her slanted penmanship. I squinted for a familiar word, but these were words I’d never seen. Pages upon pages of them. French or German, maybe Spanish, I didn’t know. I knew one word, a name— Emjie . My mother’s imaginary character from her first novel, one she wrote when she was twelve years old, a novel so famous people still sent her letters that she asked Daddy to toss in the trash.

The door opened, and I pulled my feet toward me and put the papers down. Then Mother stood in the doorway, filling the entry as completely as she filled my life, backlit in her tall and willowy beauty, like a tree reaching over a river. Her dress was green cotton, and her long dark hair was tied up in a loose ponytail.

She pretended not to see me, then she uttered the word miraculum.

When she said that word, I appeared to her. The mysterious-sounding word’s meaning, she’d told me some time before, was “an object of wonder.”

She repeated it— miraculum —and her eyes widened as if I’d just materialized before her.

“There you are!” she called out.

There you are.

“I thought you’d never find me!” I said. These were the same words we always said, the incantations we spoke in the same order each and every time.

“I will always find you.”

I will always find you.

Mom pushed aside the coats and reached down to tickle me before gently pulling me from the closet. Next she bent down to hug me—my favorite part, so I allowed her to hold me for a moment.

After we stood, I reached into the closet and presented her with the pages in my hand. She took them, a look of sadness falling over her face.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Tears filled her eyes, and she opened her mouth, but not a word came out. I tugged at her dress. “What is it?”

“A book.” She held it to her chest with both hands as if it were a kitten who might escape. This was the first time I realized there was a part of her I didn’t know, something secret and hidden.

“What book?” I asked, not yet desperate, just curious. Desperation came later.

“Another Emjie book, what is called a sequel.”

“There’s another Emjie book?” My heart raced toward her answer. Her first book, The Middle Place , ended with her character stuck between worlds. Now Emjie might be saved.

“Yes. One where she tries to come home.”

“Tries?”

“That’s what it is all about—the attempt to return home.”

“But I don’t know these words,” I said.

She sat on the edge of the bed and patted it, indicating that I should sit next to her on the blue quilt.

When I did, she put her arm around me and pulled me so close I felt her ribs beneath her dress. “Not all the words we know can describe how I feel about everything. Sometimes I must write new words, and they help me understand, say, how I feel.”

“So you make them up?”

“It doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I find them—like they’re words that have been lost by the people who decided what words we would use.”

“Who else knows them?”

“No one.”

“Please teach me. I want to know.”

“Someday I will,” she said.

“Why not right now?”

“Okay, one word.” The playful mother returned, a sly smile and a nudge. “ Adorium .”

“ Adorium ?” I asked, tasting the word on my tongue and liking it already. I could speak an entirely new language with my mother. Make it ours. All ours. There were other tongues to speak and other worlds to explore.

“ Adorium means ‘great love,’?” she said. “The kind of love I feel for you. The kind of love that obliterates all sense and logic and makes the world appear just as it is—completely and utterly magical. Adorium is knowing that all things are one and we are all things—the love that made you and the love we came from and the love we return to.” She stopped, as if she knew I could not keep up, drowning in the waterfall of her definition.

“That’s so much for one word,” I said.

“Yes, that’s the very point of it all. Sometimes the words we have aren’t big enough.”

“One more?”

“Later,” she said. “When the time is right, I will teach you each and every one of them.”