Chapter 49 Eliana
ELIANA
chī k?: /ch?r koo/: noun
Bastian’s investor call runs long, which gives me time to catch up on emails that’ve been piling up while we were at the Olympus site.
Across my cubicle wall, I can hear a few girls from HR tittering about the black tie gala.
The whole company is invited, so it’s been like high school all over again, a constant tsunami of gossip about who’s wearing what and who’s going with who.
I ignore the hot wave of shame that rises in my throat at the thought of showing up alone and double down on my work.
I’m deep in a spreadsheet when my phone starts ringing incessantly. Mom’s name flashes across the screen.
I almost don’t answer. She’s been zero dark thirty for almost two months now.
That doesn’t really surprise me—it’s not unusual for her, and besides, our last conversation ended with her kicking me out of her apartment when I suggested her meddling moocher of a new boyfriend might not be the greatest guy in the world, so it’s not as if we’re on the best of terms at the moment.
But something—guilt, perhaps, or obligation, or maybe that stubborn thread of daughterly hope I can’t quite bring myself to snip—makes me swipe to accept.
“Eliana?” she says at once. Her voice is high, thin, trembling. “Eliana, I need you to come over. Right now.”
I drop my pen. “Mom, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“Just—please. I can’t explain over the phone. But it’s important. It’s really, really important.”
“Mom—”
“Please, baby. I need you.”
I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose. “I’m on my way.”
I burst into her apartment expecting bloodshed and hellfire.
Instead, I get the same thing I always get when one of these calls comes through: a mountain of teary, snotty tissues, with my mother buried beneath it.
What’s missing, though, is the acrid stench of wine and self-loathing that usually accompanies this scene. I scour around as best as my eyes will let me, but I don’t see any emptied bottles of liquor.
Nor, I notice, do I see Rick.
“Mom?” I say gently. I go to the couch and settle down beside her. “Mama, it’s me. It’s Elly.”
She raises her face from where it was pressed into a throw pillow on her lap and looks up at me. Her eyes are red-rimmed from crying and her nose is raw and chapped from the tissues.
But the self-hating despair I expected to find is as absent as the booze. She looks almost… resigned? No, that’s not right. Calm? No, that’s not right, either.
Maybe it’s that she just looks quiet. As if the demons that have screamed in her head for her whole life have finally decided to leave her alone, and what’s left behind is silence. Not a happy silence, not a smiling silence, but a peaceful silence, if nothing else.
“He left, didn’t he?” I ask.
She nods and sniffles. “Yeah. Took all my jewelry, too, the bastard.”
There’s not a drop of venom in her voice, though. Just more of that sad but peaceful silence.
“I’m sorry.” I touch her hand. It looks so old suddenly. Have those blue veins always been there? Those liver spots? Has she always looked that frail and pale and fragile?
She laughs, the sound wet with tears. “You don’t need to be. It’s my own fault. You told me. Well, you tried to tell me. I didn’t want to listen.”
I shake my head as tears of my own start to crop up. “That doesn’t mean I want to see you get your heart broken, Mama. You know that hurts me, too.”
“I know, baby.” She pats my hand with hers and drags it into her lap. “I don’t always tell you this enough, but you’re a good daughter. My life hasn’t had many blessings, but God knew what he was doing when he gave you to me. I’m sorry I haven’t always shown that to you.”
“Mama, you don’t have to apologize.”
“Yes, I do.” She knuckles the tears out of her eyes. “I’ve spent my whole life looking for someone to save me and fix all the stuff in me that’s broken. And I put that on you, too, didn’t I? You had to be the grown-up when you were just a little girl.”
I don’t know what to say. She’s right, of course. But hearing her acknowledge it out loud feels strange. Like watching someone finally turn on the lights in a room you’ve been stumbling through in the dark for years.
“Rick leaving,” she continues, “it made me realize something: I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone else to make me happy. But that’s not how it works, is it?”
“No,” I whisper. “It’s not.”
She looks at me sidelong. “I want to try, Eliana. I gotta stop doing this to myself. Gotta stop doing it to you, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She squeezes my hand. “I think it’s time.”
I return her squeeze. “I’ll help you,” I promise. “Whatever you need, we’ll figure it out together.”
She nods and dabs at her eyes with a fresh tissue. “I’ve been thinking about going to a meeting.”
“Like an AA meeting?”
“Yeah. That.” She looks down at our joined hands. “I called them. There’s one tonight at the church on Pulaski. I was… I was wondering if maybe you’d come with me. Just for the first one. I don’t think I can walk in there alone.”
It’s like I’m being choked from the inside out, in a good way, if such a thing is even possible.
“Of course I’ll come,” I manage to say. “Of course, Mom.”
She pulls me into a hug, and I let myself sink into it. She’s thinner than I remember, basically nothing but skin and bones beneath the sparse cotton of her shirt. She’s still my mama, though. She’s been worn down and worn through, but she’s still my mama.
We sit like that for a long time, holding each other while the afternoon darkens to twilight outside the window. After a while, I raise my head. “I was thinking about something the other day. Do you remember that time we got caught in the rain? Outside the grocery store?”
She pulls back to look at me, her brow furrowing. “When?”
“I was maybe six or seven. We were about to go inside, and then the sky just opened up.”
A slow smile spreads across her tear-stained face. “Oh my God. I do remember that.”
“You made me dance with you,” I continue, my own smile growing. “Right there in the parking lot. You were singing—what was it? Something from The Sound of Music?”
“‘My Favorite Things,’” she confirms with a watery laugh. “You were so embarrassed. You kept trying to drag me inside.”
“But then I gave up and joined you.” I close my eyes and remember it. “And when it stopped, there was a rainbow.”
“There was.” She touches my cheek. “You looked at me like I put it there myself.”
“You did, that day,” I tell her. “You were magic, Mama.”
I look up at her face through the ever-narrowing pinhole of my vision and try to memorize the image. There’s so much in there I want to capture. That crinkle in the corners of her eyes and the silver threading through her fading hair, and the pink Cupid’s bow of her lips.
I wrote that down on my list months ago: Remember what Mom looked like when she smiled.
Well, now, that’s complete.
“Oh, Elly,” she says as she swallows me up in a hug again. “Oh, my sweet, sweet Elly.”