7. Maya
Maya
"What Renata Knows"
My mother's kitchen smells like the same coffee she has made every morning for thirty years.
Slightly too strong, slightly too sweet, served in mugs that say things like World's Best Grandma and Morning, Sunshine!
in cheerful fonts that are deeply at odds with Renata Torres's personality.
I don't ask where she got them. I sit at her kitchen table in the morning light and wrap my hands around one that says Live.
Laugh. Love! and something about the absurdity of it makes me feel, briefly, a little better.
My mother is not a soft woman. She is warm, but there's iron in the warmth, the kind of warmth that has been tested and has held.
She grew up in a family where feeling things was permitted but discussing them was not, and she brought that particular inheritance into her marriage and her motherhood, and I understand now, with the benefit of adult hindsight, what it cost her to carry it alone.
She pours herself a mug and sits across from me and says: "You don't have to explain."
"I know."
"But you want to."
"I'm not sure what I want."
She nods. She looks at me for a long moment over her coffee. "He's not a bad man."
"No," I agree. "He's not."
"Your father wasn't a bad man either."
This is not the first time she's said something like this to me, but it's the first time I've been in the position to hear it fully.
I look at her — my mother, sixty-two years old, her silver hair down around her shoulders, her face carrying the particular lines of a woman who has been through things quietly — and I try to imagine her at my age.
Sitting at a kitchen table somewhere. Wondering.
"Did you think about leaving?" I ask.
She is quiet for long enough that I think she might not answer.
Then she gets up from the table and goes to the small desk in the corner of her kitchen — a desk that has been there my entire life, a place where she pays bills and writes letters and keeps the accounts of her domestic life — and she opens the bottom drawer.
She comes back with a journal. Hardcover, wine-colored, the spine slightly cracked from years of opening. She sets it on the table in front of me.
"I won't read to you from it," she says. "You can look if you want. But I want you to hold it."
I pick it up. It's heavier than I expected. I can tell from the state of the pages — faintly rippled, soft at the edges — that this book was written in heavily, regularly, over a long period of time.
"I kept that for fifteen years," my mother says. "Starting when you were about seven. I wrote in it instead of speaking. I wrote everything I wasn't saying to your father, everything I wasn't saying to anyone. Every grievance and every worry and every question I was afraid to ask."
I look at her.
"I'm not showing it to you to make you feel guilty," she says.
"And I'm not showing it to tell you to stay or to go.
I'm showing it to you so you can see where a road goes when you only ever walk it alone.
" She touches the cover briefly. "The silence cost me my own self.
By the time your father got sick, I had been living so far inside my own head for so long that I didn't know how to come out.
I didn't know how to tell him, even at the end, what I'd needed all those years.
It was too late, and it was also — and this is the part I had to live with — it was also my own doing.
Because I never asked. I performed okay so long that I convinced even myself. "
I set the journal down on the table between us. I look at it. Fifteen years of a woman writing herself into a book because she didn't know how to take up space in her own life.
"Mom," I say.
"I'm fine," she says. "I worked through it. I've had a long time to work through it." She picks up her coffee. "I'm telling you now so you don't need fifteen years."
I call my one remaining freelance client in the late morning and tell them I need to step back for a week — family matter, I'll be reachable by email if it's urgent. They're fine about it. In the context of everything, this is so small that I barely feel it.
I call Cora Daniels.
I met Cora at an industry event four years ago, when I was still doing occasional conference panels and keeping one toe in the design world as a professional identity rather than a hobby.
She ran a successful studio on the near north side — brand identity work, publication design, some environmental graphics — and she was the kind of person who occupied a room without effort, without performance, in a way I had found immediately both admirable and quietly devastating.
At the end of the evening she'd pressed her card into my hand and said, simply: Call me when you're ready to come back.
As if she already knew I'd left, or was leaving, or had never fully arrived.
That was two years ago. The card has lived in the back pocket of my wallet ever since.
"I don't know if you remember me," I start.
"Maya Callahan," she says immediately. "Of course I do. The Northfield conference."
"That's — yes. I'm sorry to call out of the blue. I was wondering if you had any contract work available. I'm looking to — I'm looking to come back more seriously."
There's a brief, warm pause. "I have been waiting for you to call me," Cora says, "for approximately two years. Yes. I have work. Come in Thursday and let's talk."
I go back to the kitchen table after that. My mother is in the other room. The house is quiet and warm and smells like coffee and the lavender sachets she keeps in every drawer.
I open my sketchbook. The new one, the one I brought with me. I pick up a pencil.
I draw for three hours.
Not for anyone. Not for a client. Not to prove anything or be anything.
I draw the view through my mother's kitchen window — the backyard, the oak tree that's been there since before I was born, a bird bath she keeps filled even in winter.
I draw my own hands. I draw a woman standing in a doorway, seen from behind, looking at something I don't decide the specifics of.
I fill seven pages.
When I stop, my hand is cramped and the afternoon light has shifted and I feel, in a way I have not felt in longer than I can name, like myself.