Chapter 33
“I haven’t talked to you in ages” is the first thing she says when I answer the phone, and I nearly hang up.
I breathe as slowly, as deeply as I can before I speak. “Hi, Mom.”
“Well, don’t sound too happy to hear from me. My ego might get too big.”
I press my lips together, glance out the window.
The street outside is still, no movement.
The flowers I’d halfheartedly planted in the front garden last week are already wilted, petals clinging to the sparse mulch.
Turns out, I have a black thumb. And my planting them had pleased you, so maybe that’s why I let them die.
I’m using a finger to hold the living room curtains to the side.
When we first moved into the house, I would pass through each room every morning, throwing curtains open, tugging blinds upward, until natural light touched everything, as though the sun could warm the coolness rising within me.
But as the summer heat has intensified, I’ve been trying to limit the amount of sunlight that streams in, to keep things cooler, and I do sometimes wonder whether the darkness is making me the tiniest bit more depressed than I otherwise would be.
“I’m surprised you answered.”
Me too.
“How’s everything?” I ask, trying to sound cheery. I try to sound like I care.
“Things are fine. It’s been hot as hell. Thank God for the pool here, and the beach.”
“It’s been hot here, too.” I’ve reached the edge of the living room, so I turn and start toward the opposite end.
I’ve always paced while I talk on the phone.
I used to wear the commercial-grade carpeting in my 150-square-foot office thin, from one wall to the next, phone to my ear, negotiating settlement deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“You should take a vacation,” my mom suggests. “Come down and visit.”
“I don’t know if we’re going to be able to get away this summer. Things are busy.”
“You work too hard.” She somehow manages to make it sound like an insult, her voice devoid of pride.
“I enjoy it.” The lies flow easily when it comes to my mom.
“I’d love to meet my new son-in-law, you know.”
There’s a pause. My mother inhales wetly while I swallow acid.
“I know that, Mom. We’ll make time soon.
” She’s still upset with me for excluding her from the wedding that, I have repeatedly insisted to her, wasn’t even really a wedding.
And she knows nothing of the baby, of my abrupt unemployment.
I fear that if I tell her about the baby, she’ll be on a plane.
I won’t be able to stop her. Visiting, purportedly, to help, but I can picture her sharing stories about taking care of me when I was a newborn, her own tales of new motherhood, ignoring the unignorable fact that she’d left it all behind.
She’d tell me about her customers at the salon and her friends, chatting with forced pleasantness as I tried to nap, asking with obvious impatience when I planned on making dinner.
“I know I’m too Florida for you,” my mom says suddenly, voice shrill. “My lawyer daughter with her fancy and expensive degrees. But I am still your mom, whether you like it or not.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, reach up to pinch the bridge of my nose. “Mom, stop,” I say. “Don’t be so dramatic about it.”
I don’t say what I want to, what I wish I had the courage to remind her. You’re the one who left.
Perhaps my mother isn’t wrong—that I’m ashamed of her, that I might behave as though I’m superior.
But those are such small lines pulled from our long and complicated story.
So it’s beyond irritating for her to distill our history down to something discrete and solid, something that makes our distance, both physical and emotional, seem like my fault, as though she hadn’t made me feel unwanted for nearly my entire life, as though she hadn’t moved out when I was ten, using her tips and salary as a hairdresser to rent a condo near the beach, almost an hour from the bungalow where we’d lived as a family, with no warning at all.
I came home from school to find my father, who was far older than all my friend’s fathers, red-eyed and stunned.
“Mom left,” he said. And everything he didn’t say became clear to me over the weeks and months and years that followed: My mom had left. Not just left my father, but me, too.
She’d created a new life. One that didn’t involve my dad at all. One that rarely involved me.
She was still young then—younger than all my friend’s mothers. She was pretty and thin, and she liked to go out dancing with her “girls.” She liked frozen cocktails, sunbathing, and painting her nails.
“When will Mom be home?” I remember asking my dad every night, and he’d shrug, tuck me in, pat the covers uncertainly.
“I don’t think she was really ready to become a mom,” he’d say apologetically, which seemed strange to me because she’d given it a go for ten years.
Ten distracted and distant years. But I would have preferred eight more years like that, until I was off to college, than her disappearing entirely.
And my dad did his best, but he never really caught on.
When I think about my mother’s abandonment, it hurts my heart—the way she looked at me on my rare visits, like I was a kid stepsister she’d unfairly been asked to babysit.
How she’d take me out for manicures, then sigh loudly about the cost and murmur that we should have just done them ourselves at home.
How she’d answer calls from her friends and tell them, “I wish I could come, trust me, but Klara is here tonight,” when I was mere feet away.
She always said my name, never referred to me as “my daughter,” as though a daughter was such a shameful thing to have.
So I try not to think about it. I try not to think about her.
I’ve always put my head down and focused on my schoolwork, and I wasn’t the smartest student in my classes, perhaps not even in the top 20 percent.
I couldn’t control that. But I could work harder and longer than anyone else.
I earned a scholarship to college in Maryland, then law school in DC, and things finally felt smooth for me.
I was free. I was in control. I escaped Florida and I fled the mother who’d already fled me.
When I was twenty, and so many miles away from the place that had never felt like home, my father suffered a massive heart attack. Although I’m no longer a child, ever since he died, there are times when I feel like an orphan.
After all these years, when I think about or talk to my mother, I no longer feel such sharp pain.
There’s mostly rage, rage that simmers and hums like a white fluorescent bulb that might soon die, that probably isn’t healthy, and probably should have dimmed by now, and is probably something I should discuss with a therapist.
I cannot stomach my mother playing the victim.
And I absolutely refuse to contemplate or to allow myself—or anyone—to analyze how my relationship with my mother might affect my feelings about becoming a mother myself.
Which is another reason why I don’t want her to know about it.
You don’t sound happy, Klara, she’d say, glee so thinly concealed.
Because it’s trapped me, just the same way it trapped her.
I know my options. I always have. But it’s not so simple. Because there’s you.
“I’m still your mom,” my mother repeats, as though I hadn’t spoken. Her voice wobbles.
“I know that.” I sigh again. “Look, we’ll plan a visit soon, okay?
We’ll get something on the books. Let me check my work calendar and check in with Troy.
I’ll text you.” Saying this is easier than reminding my mother of her failings, than reminding her why I really don’t want her to visit us or vice versa.
And maybe I like the fact that brushing her off this way will hurt her more—reminding her that I’ve built something. That I’ve built a life, in spite of and irrespective of her. I’ve built a life that’s nothing like the one she walked out on. A life I so suddenly scarcely recognize.
I open my eyes. “Mom, I have to go,” I continue. “Troy’s calling me.”
“Oh,” she says. “Troy.” She repeats your name, and it’s almost impressive the amount of judgment she’s imbued into that single syllable.
“I’ll text you,” I say again, and I end the call.
I won’t text her. Still, our conversation will buy me some time. I’ll be able to ignore her calls for a few weeks before I’ll have to pick up the phone to have the exact same conversation again.
I wasn’t lying to her about your call. I stare at the phone, your name glowing white across the black screen.
I don’t want to talk to you. I never do anymore, while you’re at work and I’m not.
I don’t want to hear the hum of office background noise, voices rising and falling, the trill of a desk phone, the click of your mouse, the tap of your fingers across your keyboard.
I miss that. I miss my work. I miss talking to my colleagues.
Heather’s sharp wit. Gathering in the conference room to hash out case strategies over sandwiches from the deli around the corner.
But I can’t return to my firm. Not after the way I left things.
And I don’t feel well enough to perform with any competence.
How are you feeling? you’d ask, as you have every day of these past three weeks, ever since we moved into the house. I’m tired of telling you, Not good.
I shove the phone into my pocket.
As if on cue, the nausea grips me, clamping my insides.
I shuffle into the powder room and kneel on the floor.
I heave into the bowl, the coffee I shouldn’t have drunk, the chalky orange-and-cranberry scone.
You’d picked them up from a bakery near your office, presented them to me proudly that night when you got home, a kiss to the side of my neck.
I didn’t tell you that I don’t like cranberries, yet I was simultaneously certain I’ve told you that before, could recall it with vivid specificity.
I was afraid, somehow, that if I tossed the scones in the trash, you’d know.
You’d open the can to see them there, a satisfied smile on your face, which would drop as you turned to me.
“You could have just told me you didn’t like them,” you’d say, and when I insisted that I had before, you’d insist, even more convincingly, that I hadn’t. Somehow it’s better if I eat them.
I wipe my mouth with the hem of my T-shirt. My palms feel clammy, my forehead damp.
I think about calling Zoe. I’m surprised that I haven’t heard from her since the day she came to visit—not even a text to check in. But I don’t want to bother her during work hours, even though I know she’d answer.
I feel my phone vibrating in my pocket. You again, I’m sure. But I don’t slide it out. Instead, I place my palms flat on my stomach. Beneath my shirt, beneath my flesh, is a bundle of cells. The size of a fig.
“It’s just you and me,” I whisper, and that’s the first time I feel it—the love, the hope. And the surprise, the strength of it, nearly winds me.