Chapter 20 Clara
CHAPTER 20? CLARA
London, England
I unfolded the letter. If there had been any doubt where this had come from, now it was clear: this was not a forgery; it was undoubtedly Mother’s handwriting. Wynnie sat by my side, the click and whir of the two-bar electric heater the only sound. Then, outside, a siren blared.
“Please! Read it,” Wynnie said.
I nudged her and looked down.
Dearest Clara.
No date. No place.
My darling daughter. Doesn’t it seem so dramatic to start with “If you are reading this…”? So I won’t.
Instead, I will start with an expression of my great love for you. If you have ever doubted it, and I am sure that you have, please do not. Leaving can be a greater kindness than staying, and this is true for me.
I should not have left you alone by a burning cigarette, not for even a minute. For that lapse in judgment, I will live for as many days as I have left in fathomless regret. But I cannot return to you in anything but this letter, for to do so would ruin both your and my beloved Timothy’s lives.
It is here in this pile of papers that you will find my dictionary. I began to create these words when I was five years old. I have always and desperately needed to find a way to describe a world in which I felt so alone. The many languages I was taught were never enough for me.
We create words to define our life, and then they begin to define us.
People who cannot choose their destinies often need to create words all their own. For all my life—however long it is or was; I don’t know as I write this, of course—I have added words and phrases to this list. You may do with this as you please, for it is yours—keep it, publish it, or use it to translate Emjie’s sequel. These are now your choices, as I have saved this for you.
Clara, I have sewed myself into my secrets and there is nothing to do but live in here, stitched into this world of exile.
Only for you.
Adorium,
Mom
Wynnie sighed when I finished reading it out loud. “?‘I have sewed myself into my secrets,’?” she said quietly. “That’s so pretty and so sad.”
“She was both,” I said. “Pretty and sad.”
“What is that last word?” She ran her finger over Adorium.
I was thrust back in the closet during that day of “disappear and reappear,” back to the slanted-light afternoon when I’d found the sequel’s manuscript, to the moment Mother told me the definition of this one word. Through the years I’d memorized its definition, once hearing it in her voice but now in my own as I told Wynnie: “It means the kind of love that obliterates all sense and logic and has the world appearing just as it is—completely and utterly magical. This word is the knowing that all things are one and that we are connected to all things—the love that created you and the love from which we came and the love to which we will one day return. The greatest love.”
Wynnie’s eyes filled with tears that ran down her right cheek, creating a path through the smudged soot. “That is so beautiful, I feel like I could float,” she said, and sat back on the saggy couch as the light outside dimmed and dampened.
Still holding the letter, I walked to the window. Outside, the lanterns flickered inside the suffocating fog, strangled by the air. “We need to stay in this evening,” I told Wynnie. “I’ll cook up that sausage and we’ll have a nice, quiet night. Tomorrow the fog will be gone, and you and I will visit that museum.”
“Okay.” She paused. “Mama, I bet Papa is wondering what you found.”
“I’m sure he is, and I’ll tell him everything once I look through all of it.” I turned to her. “Wynnie, sometimes I feel as if you are too young for all of this, for what I have shown you here. There must be no fear that I will leave you. Ever.”
“Mama, I’m not scared of that. I’ve never been afraid of that.”
I nodded and felt the swampy feeling of my mother’s abandonment, along with the surge of anger that I usually pressed down. I wanted to scream, to holler out that no good mother would leave, and yet this letter seemed to shimmer with love, and I felt as Wynnie said—I might float.
I was standing at the window, wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake coming here, when Wynnie jumped up, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and came to my side. “Let’s make up people stories,” she said, and tapped on the window.
This was a game I’d played with my mother and then taught to Wynnie—a pastime as we waited in the car or a queue at the market.
“All right,” I said. “Look down there. See that man walking slowly in the fog right outside. Who is he, and where is he going?”
“He’s a doctor and he’s headed to the hospital, where a lady is having a baby who will one day find a cure for asthma,” she said.
I laughed and hugged her.
“That woman?” I asked, and pointed at a short woman in high heels and a red coat. She carried a market bag and swiped the air in front of her as if she could move the mist like windshield wipers.
“She’s late for a date and she has the food. She is very worried. Her roommate told her to leave earlier, but she didn’t. Her last boyfriend left her for a very tall woman and she’s worried because she’s not tall.”
“Your imagination!” I said. “It’s a wonder. And the man?” I pointed to a tall man moving quickly, with a large case bouncing against his hip.
“That’s Charlie Jameson on his way to visit us,” she said.
I laughed again, but then stopped, because Charlie Jameson indeed stood outside, squinting at the numbers on the building. Moments later a staticky buzz filled the room and we both turned to each other. “Are you going to let him in?” Wynnie asked.
“I am,” I said, and tussled her fog-tangled hair.
“What is he carrying?”
“Hard to tell.”
I pushed the button that opened the front entryway and then opened the door to watch him walk down the hallway. He wore a long gray wool coat, and his shoulders were covered in black flakes, as if he’d walked through a snowstorm from a dark fairy tale. A round case hung off his shoulder, a Celtic knot design emblazoned on its cover. He smiled as he neared us, and he removed his wool cap. “Sorry to bother. I wanted to make sure you were both all right. This is a bloody wicked night, and Wynnie…” His gaze wandered to her.
“Come in,” I said. “Warm up for a moment.”
He entered and placed his case on the chair by the front door.
“What’s that?” Wynnie asked him.
“A drum. I play in a band.”
“Oh!” She clapped her hands together. “Can we come hear you?”
“Tonight’s in a pub,” he said with a grin. “Your mum might not be up for taking you to a pub in London at the moment.” He looked to me. “Am I right?”
“You are right.” I smiled at him for saving me from explanations.
Silence fell over us; the heater clicked and buzzed. He ran his left hand through his hair. “I thought you might have gone to the museum,” he said.
“The air worries me with Wynnie’s asthma, so we are waiting until tomorrow,” I said. “She had an attack on the way home.”
He took a step toward Wynnie. “Are you okay? We have a family physician. I can call him, and he will come straightaway.”
“We have medicines,” I told him. “And she’s fine for the moment, but could you possibly leave us his name and number in case we need it later? It would be nice to have it.”
“Yes, absolutely.” He paused. “I was worried about you—people get lost in this fog. They can’t find their way. They—”
“Mama never gets lost,” Wynnie said. “We know our routes and we know our way. Don’t you worry about us.”
He laughed, and it was such a booming sound, filling the room. I wondered what his father had been like, if he’d been as jovial.
“Will you play the drum for me?” Wynnie pointed at the round case.
“Wynnie!” I said. “He’s running late for a performance. He doesn’t have time for such things.”
“Yes I do,” Charlie said, and reached for his case. “For this sprite, I have all kinds of time.”
I motioned. “Please sit. I’m being rude. Between the travel, seeing Mother’s letter, the fog, and the weird, dreamy way the world seems to be closing in on us, all of it has me a bit on edge. Forgive me.”
Wynnie sidled up next to him. “Mama is really nice. And fun. Just give her a chance.”
I rolled my eyes at him to say kids these days . “Please let me get you something. At least a cup of tea or coffee?”
“Thank you so much, but I don’t need anything. There’ll be fish and chips waiting for me at the pub.”
“Mama, please, can we go? Just for a little bit? I want fish and chips, whatever they are, and I want to hear Mr. Jameson play.”
Charlie saved me when he shook his head. “Not on a night like this. Tomorrow it should clear, and you can visit all the places you’ve planned in that busy head of yours.” He sat on a large, cracked leather chair and unzipped the canvas bag. He pulled out an eighteen-inch drum, a circle bound by dark wood and a black metal band, all covered in a creamy skin or leather I couldn’t identify. It was stained with unidentifiable marks, telling of a well-worn life.
He held a twelve-inch wooden stick with two bulbous ends and then glanced at the coffee table, where the letter sat open. “Did it give you what you needed?” he asked.
“What I needed?” I stared at those dark eyes and shook my head. “No.”
He nodded, and with the polished stick, he began to beat the skin of the drum, back and forth, a slow rhythm and then faster, while he stared at me as if he saw through me, or maybe into me.
What I needed?
Nothing would ever give me that, because what I needed walked out the door twenty-five years ago. I wanted to tell him this. I wanted the man playing the drum to know that nothing could fill the void left by a mother who walked out.
Instead, I told him, “It was an ‘If you are reading this’ letter.”
“So, she’s… gone,” he said, without missing a beat.
“I assume so, but the question is—then—how does your father have her papers?” I tapped the pile while he played.
Hypnotized by the soothing beat of the custard-colored drum, I felt a low vibration echo in my chest. Each beat or roll sounded like its own language, one of melancholy and hope blended in a low, warm hum. Tones rising and falling depending on where the beater landed.
The sound seemed to guide Charlie’s hand more than his hand guiding the sound. There were clicks as he hit the edge of the wooden rim, and the room thrummed with the sound, the air shifting around him. Wynnie cuddled into me, and then Charlie sang. His voice rose deep and resonant, as if someone else had entered the room. He closed his eyes, and I did the same.
He sang in another language, one I didn’t know but felt the strength of at the very center of my body, up into my throat as if I were trying to release something that was stuck.
I wondered if this was how my mother once felt when she could not express herself, the reason she made up words because the ones inside her weren’t enough. It was a feeling much like melancholy, but also like hunger.
I wanted to reach out and hug Charlie, but he seemed unapproachable, a man unto himself. Who was I to think that he’d want me to hold him? I sensed some old hurt in him, the same that was in me, but that was most likely fancy thinking. He was a stranger, and I knew better than to put my own rising feelings onto someone else. I’d learned my lessons about attractions—I couldn’t be trusted with them.
When Charlie finished singing, tears ran down my cheeks. I didn’t understand the language, but somehow I knew what it evoked—the singular ache of losing something so dear that you cannot recover.
There was a part of me that didn’t want the song translated, because whatever Charlie Jameson sang allowed me to finally, for the first time since the phone call, cry for all that was waiting in these papers, and also irrevocably gone.