Chapter 47 Clara
CHAPTER 47? CLARA
Lake District, England
“Mother,” I said in a voice young and tender, hopeful. I stood.
The woman, no, my mother, gingerly stood and faced me and then looked to see Wynnie, who stepped forward into a puddle of light, a nimbus of her innocence around her. “I’m Wynnie.”
The woman, no, my mother, leaned down and kissed my child on her cheek. “I am your grandmother.”
“Your book is my favorite thing in the big world, and Emjie is my best friend.” My daughter’s voice held such endearing expectation, and I pulled her toward me. I wanted to wrap her in my coat, protect her.
Love and anger, despair and longing, relief and rage battled inside me like a churned-up sea battering against my ribs. I felt nearly faint, unsteady. I reached for Charlie’s hand.
The woman, no, my mother, smiled at Wynnie. “I’d wondered where Emjie went.” Her voice now with a slight British accent.
There was so much I wanted to say. Didn’t I have a million sentiments inside me? Didn’t I have questions and childhood imaginings of what I would utter if I found her? But I came up empty of any language, even hers.
I couldn’t access the anger, only the longing that I’d carried with me to this moment.
“I am lost,” Charlie said as he held my hand. “You are my father’s great cousin… You are Clara’s mother. You are…” He looked at me. “We are related?”
Mother touched Charlie’s arm. “No. We are not related. There is much to explain.”
Then Mother searched my face with the look I knew as a child when she turned her attention to me, the full-hearted and overwhelming devotion I dreamed of in the nights I cried myself to sleep, the adoration that once made me believe that if she was alive, she would come back to me. “You named your daughter after me?” Mother asked.
“Yes, I always wanted you there.” The truth I barely would acknowledge flowed out of me.
She let out a cry of pain.
“How could you have done it?” I cried out, dropping my face into my hands. “How could you have left us?”
Mother’s cottage glowed warm, and the kettle sang its song while we sat around her hand-hewn oak kitchen table. We cradled teacups with violets painted along the porcelain rim. Mother —it was so odd to think this word and attach it to this woman in front of me instead of to an idea. She’d made a mug of hot chocolate for Wynnie, whose feet bounced up and down under her seat.
We’d been silent in the tea preparation, as if we each and one needed to settle into this new truth: Mother was alive in a cottage at the edge of a lake in the wilds of England.
It was a cramped, timeworn, cozy space. Visible behind a white-painted wooden door with an egg-shaped brass handle was her single bed covered in white and pale-blue quilts. The living area flowed into the dark wood kitchen. The blazing fireplace crackled when Charlie set a new log onto the stack. Shelves lined the wall on either side, where books were stacked sideways, up and down, in piles two and three deep. Our coats and hats and gloves were bundled together on a bench by the front door. The low, wood-beamed ceiling held us all in the palm of this cottage’s hand.
I wondered how long Mother had lived here. On the table, Mother lit two creamy candles in brass holders and then sat and faced me. My body trembled, and Charlie set his hand on my leg. “Are you cold?” she asked.
“I am not,” I said, and then said again, “I need to know what happened.”
“Clara.” Mother’s voice choked with tears. “My heart is so full right now, and it is breaking for the pain I see in you. I wrote this in the letter, but the truth is both simple and complicated—I truly did sew myself into my secrets. And after arriving here, even more so.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I know you have so many questions, and I promise to answer them all. But I want to begin here.” Her voice cracked, nearly broke over the next words. “I have loved you all my days. Every day. Everything I have painted or created or taught has been for you. It will be and is nearly impossible to understand why a woman who loves her daughter would leave her daughter, but I will do my best to explain. Everything I have done since the day I left has been for you, an amends, a restoration of my soul—the language and the art. This life here in Sawrey has been my exile and my salvation, but the rest, the creations, have been for you.”
I swallowed tears; I needed to stay strong and alert, understand. “Did you mean for us to find you? Did you lead us here?”
“No. I didn’t want you to have to endure the pain of seeing me. I knew you did not want… this.” She turned away and wiped at her tears, then looked back at me.
“So those papers. I wasn’t meant to have them, at least not yet?”
“Ah, so that’s what happened.” She looked to Charlie. “You found my dictionary in your father’s belongings.”
“Yes.”
“Why did Callum have it?” I asked.
“We’ll get there,” she said. “The hurt I see in you right now, that is the pain I didn’t want you to feel. All I have wanted for you was to be able to live a beautiful life. And you have. I know.”
I’d imagined, as a child at least, a mother who was an angel, who orchestrated my life from heaven. But Sawrey, as delightful as it was, was not heaven. And if she had sent good toward me, it was a farce, and a poor proxy for having her. “I would have rather had you,” I said.
She shook her head. She was only fifty-five years old, and her handsome beauty hadn’t faded, but the lines on her face told of a life lived in the elements. Those tears now caught in the story of those days etched on her cheeks.
“No, you would not have rather had me. I need you to believe me.”
Wynnie and Charlie stayed silent as Mother and I faced each other, each with our own pains and reasons and memories.
“Yes, I would have,” I said. “I most assuredly would have rather had you with me. So would Dad.”
“Listen to me, my most beloved and only child, listen to me. You were better off without me. I nearly killed you, and for this I can never forgive myself. A young man died because of my negligence and escape to imaginary worlds, but I still didn’t want my words to die with me—I wanted you to have them when I was gone, to know that I loved you by staying away from you.”
“Why do you get to decide my life is better without you?” Anger seethed below the surface; I felt its burn returning.
“Clara, the decisions I made were irreversible. I faked my own death. I left you. How was I to ever return?”
“And what of my consequences of living without you?”
“If anyone could have been both mother and father to you, it would be your beloved dad. I have never loved anyone else. I have never taken another husband.”
“You could have stayed and faced the consequences as we did.”
“I could not cause any more heartache. I could not and would not return to a world where you’d have a mother who most likely would find herself in jail or a psychiatric institute for a while, medicated, treated, undone. This would have been as good as dead.”
“But not dead.” My voice held all the anger, all the frustration and hurt and heartache.
She leaned forward, pleading now. “I needed to let you mourn me, let me go.”
“I can’t accept this. I am… lost. You think they would have thought you unbalanced?”
“I know this, Clara. They’d already done so. There was no going back. You must know—you are the love of my life, Clara, and there was no going back.”
“I have blamed myself. I thought my fire sent you away. I thought…”
Mother’s left hand covered her mouth; her teacup clattered to the table, pale, milky tea running into the cracks of the oak table. She didn’t move to wipe it up, but her face became distorted with tears. “No!”
Wynnie leaned into me, whispered, “Mama, she’s so sad.”
The sludgy feeling of missing her, the hours and days and months and years that the hunger for her consumed me, now rose in a tidal wave inside my chest. For here she was, right here in front of me.
I stumbled from my chair and knelt before her. She leaned down and I took her in my arms, the hardwood floor pressing against my knees and her head on my shoulder.
“ Adorium ,” she cried out as I held her.
I opened my voice and my heart cracked only the littlest bit, and I couldn’t say the heartfelt word in return. I’d held the secret word inside for so long that it didn’t yet rise.
“What does that mean?” Wynnie asked, her voice buoyant.
Mother leaned down and kissed me on either side of my lips. She spoke while staring into my eyes. “To love with forgiveness, to love without deserving, to love when the truth has been exposed, to love with a heart that gathers the other into itself.”
Wynnie gasped. “That’s so beautiful.”
Charlie cleared his throat, and we looked up. “May I ask something?”
Mother let me go and held her hand across the table for Charlie’s. “Of course!”
“You are my cousin, is that right? Great cousin? Dad’s second cousin? This is what I have been told. You were in America, you’d emigrated as a young child, so you weren’t there when the Easter Rising took the rest of the family.”
“I know I have much to explain. I have loved you as though you are mine, but I am not your cousin, Charlie.”