CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Diana and the Terracotta Wall
My mother arrived from Atlanta on a Thursday with one rolling bag, a cool-box of puff-puff wrapped in foil, and the particular energy of a woman who has been waiting three hundred miles away to be allowed to be useful.
She had not asked to come. She had told me she was coming, which was a different thing, and she had told me in the voice that did not leave room, and some part of me that had spent four years managing everything alone had been too tired to fight it and, underneath the tiredness, had wanted her, badly, the way you want your mother when your body is doing something enormous and you are doing it in a small apartment by yourself.
She came up the stairs breathing hard and set down the bag and looked at me—at the nineteen weeks of me, the real curve of it now, undeniable under the jumper—and something moved across her face and was gone before I could read it, and she put her hand briefly against my cheek, cool and dry, and said, "You've eaten today? "
"Yes, Mummy."
"Mm." Which meant she would be the judge of that, and she went to the kitchen.
She walked the whole apartment first. I watched her do it.
She went through my seven hundred square feet the way she went through everything, slowly, taking its measure, opening the fridge and closing it, testing the window latch, standing a moment in the doorway of the small bedroom where nothing yet had been done for the baby because I had not let myself begin.
She said nothing about the sparseness of it, the secondhand sofa, the bare landlord's-white walls, the general air of a life assembled fast from very little.
She only looked. And then she came and stood in the middle of the living room and turned a slow circle and stopped facing the long wall, the blank one, the one the afternoon light fell across, and she narrowed her eyes at it.
"This one," she said, "needs terracotta."
A sound came out of me that surprised us both. Half a laugh, the first real one in days, startled out of me. "Terracotta."
"Warm. Like the wall in the Peckham flat.
You don't remember, you were small." She was already taking off her good cardigan, folding it over the back of the sofa, rolling up the sleeves of the blouse underneath.
"We're not living with a wall the colour of a hospital.
Where is the hardware shop. Every neighbourhood has one. Get your coat."
And so we painted a wall.
I want to slow down here, because it was nothing, and it was one of the largest things that happened to me that whole winter.
We walked to the hardware shop on Court Street and my mother held four paint chips up to the light in the doorway and rejected three of them on sight and settled on the fourth without consulting me, a deep warm burnt orange the colour of clay, the colour of somewhere neither of us had been in a long time, and we carried it home with the rollers and the tray and the tape, and we moved the sofa to the middle of the room and covered it with a sheet, and we painted.
She talked while we worked. She told me about the Peckham flat, the first one, before my father was doing well, the one with the wall she had painted this exact colour against the landlord's wishes because she could not, she said, raise a child inside four white walls like a person in a waiting room.
She told me about the night my father first cooked for her, badly, a jollof that was somehow both burnt and undercooked, and how she had eaten all of it and told him it was wonderful because she had already decided about him and was not going to let rice change her mind.
She laughed, painting, at her own story, and I stood on a kitchen chair doing the top edge with my belly making the balance strange and I laughed with her, and the wall went from hospital-white to warm, foot by foot, under the two of us.
She painted her corner badly. I saw it—the roller marks showing, a thin patch near the skirting where the white grinned through—and I opened my mouth and she said, without turning around, "Don't," and I closed it.
Later, when it dried, the bad corner would still be there, and neither of us would ever fix it, and it would be, for as long as I lived in that apartment, the thing I looked at most in the whole room.
My mother's imperfect corner. The proof that she had stood here, in my new life, and put her hands on it.
The letter came in the middle of the afternoon, while the second coat was drying.
Jade brought it herself, by hand, up the stairs—she would not put it in the mail, she'd said, some things you carry—and she handed it to me in the doorway with paint on my hands and my mother behind me in the paint-smelling room, and Jade looked at the two of us and the half-painted wall and the sheet-covered sofa and something in her face softened, and she did not come in.
"I'll leave you to it," she said, and pressed the envelope into my hand, and squeezed my wrist once, and went.
I stood holding it. It was not the law firm's cream this time.
It was a plain white envelope, and on the front, in his own hand—I knew his hand, the hard slanting capitals, I had four years of it on birthday cards signed by an assistant and notes left on counters—in his own hand it said only Naomi.
Not my full name. Not Mrs. Hargrove. Naomi.
My mother saw my face. "Sit down," she said. "Whatever it is. You don't read a thing like that standing up."
I sat at the small kitchen table. She sat across from me and did not reach for it and did not ask, only sat, present, her painted hands folded on the wood, and I opened the envelope with my thumb and unfolded the single sheet inside.
It was short. He had covered less than a page. And I read it once fast, the way you do when you are afraid of a thing, and then I made myself read it again slowly, and it was this:
That he had tried to write it many times and every version had sounded like a man who still did not understand, so he was going to stop trying to sound like anything and only say what was true.
That he had been absent. That I had been there, entirely, for four years, and he had been absent, and he could not explain why without making excuses, and I did not need his excuses.
That he was sorry. That he did not yet know how to be different but that he was trying to find out—not so that I would come back, he wrote, he had no right to ask that and was not asking it, but because it was true and I deserved to have it said in his own hand and not through anyone else.
He signed it Cal. Only Cal. The name I had given him.
I read it twice and then I folded it back along its creases, carefully, and I set it down on the table, and I kept my hand flat on top of it for a moment, and I looked at the drying wall.
There was no case in it. That was the thing that had gone through me reading it, the thing I was sitting with, my hand on the folded page.
Four years of Caelum Hargrove and every word he had ever sent me had been building toward something, an outcome, a close—and this had been building toward nothing.
He had asked for nothing. He had not asked me to come back, had said outright he had no right to, had written a letter whose only purpose was to tell me a true thing I deserved to hear, and then had stopped.
In four years I had never known him to want something and not reach for it.
He had wanted my forgiveness and not reached for it.
He had left it lying there, unasked-for, and signed his small name, and let it be.
My mother watched me. She had not moved. When I finally looked up from the wall she raised her eyebrows a fraction, the whole question in it, and she said only, "Well?"
I looked at the folded letter under my hand. I thought about the wall, and Dr. Nwosu's question, and the seven torn pages I did not yet know about but somehow could feel behind the eighth, the plainness of it that could only have come after a great deal of failure.
"It's a start," I said.
My mother held my eyes for a moment. She did not smile, did not push, did not say more than the moment could hold.
She simply nodded, once, and took it in, and then she got up from the table and filled the kettle and set it to boil, and that was all, and it was exactly right, and I loved her so much in that moment that my throat ached with it.
We sat in the newly warm room as the evening came, the wall drying to its deep clay colour around us, two cups of tea going cool on the table, the bad corner grinning faintly in the last of the light.
My mother talked about nothing, about the flight, about her neighbour's dog, the easy undemanding talk of a woman who knew when to stop asking questions, and I sat with my hands around the warm cup and let the day be over.
And that was when it happened.
Low down, on the left side, under my own folded hands—a flutter.
Faint, and quick, and utterly unlike anything, not the gut, not a muscle, something else entirely, a small distinct turning, there and then gone, the first one, the first time.
I went completely still. My mother was mid-sentence about something and I did not hear the rest of it.
I sat with my whole attention dropped down into that one place in my body, waiting, not breathing, and it came again—the smallest possible thing, a brush, a flicker, the baby moving, my baby, moving, for the first time where I could feel it.
I did not say anything.
I do not fully know why. My mother was right there, across the table, and there was no one on earth I would rather have told, and I opened my mouth and then I closed it, and I let the moment be only mine for one minute longer.
I put my hand flat and low against the place, pressing gently, as if I could hold the feeling there, as if I could keep it, and I looked at nothing, at the warm wall my mother had painted, and inside me the small new life turned over once more and settled.
My mother stopped talking. She looked at me—at my hand, at my face, at whatever was in it—and she understood, the way she understood everything, and she did not say a word either.
She reached across the table and put her painted hand over my free one, and the two of us sat there in the terracotta light, not speaking, while the thing that could not be spoken moved quietly under my palm.
His letter lay folded on the table between us.
It's a start, I had said. And it was. But it was not the largest thing in that room, not anymore, not by a great distance—the largest thing was the flutter under my hand, the small insistent proof that whatever I decided about the man who had written that letter, I was not, in the end, deciding it only for myself.
What I did not know, sitting there with my mother's hand over mine and my child moving under my palm, was that across the river the man who had signed that letter Cal was, at that very hour, preparing to do a thing he had not done in twelve years at the head of his company—a thing that would cost him something real, that no one had told him to do, that he would do in a room full of people who had never once seen him loosen his grip on anything.
But that was tomorrow. That night, there was only the wall, and the tea, and my mother, and the small turning under my hand.