CHAPTER 1 #2
Bea's eyes fill. She doesn't argue. That's how I know I'm right, and how I know she knew before I did.
I have to sit down. I find the stool by the machine and I sit, and for one moment, just one, I let myself fall through the floor of the present and down into the worst day of my life, because grief is like a basting stitch — pull one thread and the whole seam comes loose, and you have to let it, or it puckers.
June. The bankruptcy court corridor, marble gone gray with everyone's wet shoes.
My father in his good gray coat, the one I'd taken in twice as he shrank that spring, and the proceedings had ended and we were free to go, free meaning ruined, free meaning there was nothing left to take.
He'd handed me his coat to hold while he found his gloves in the sleeves, an ordinary husband-of-the-coat gesture, a thing he'd done ten thousand times, and I'd held it over my arm, warm from him, and he'd put one hand out for the wall that wasn't where he thought it was.
And then he was on the gray marble and I was on my knees in it with his coat still over my arm, holding the empty warm shape of him while a stranger shouted for a doctor down a hall that had taken everything and would not even give us a quiet floor to die on.
That's the part that won't basting-out of me.
I stood there at the end of everything, holding the coat, while the man who wore it went where I couldn't follow.
That is what they do to you, says the voice I've sewn into my own lining over the years, the one that fits too well to take out. To be wanted is to be used. Love is a transaction, and you are always — always — the one left kneeling on the marble when it's done.
The sleet ticks. I come back up through the floor and I am still in my atelier, and my mother is still failing across the river, and that pressed seal is still spread on the cream paper with its talons down.
"I have to go see her," I say.
I call her from the car, because I can't bear to put the paper in front of her, and because if I'm going to do what I'm already, in the bias-cut underside of myself, beginning to know I'll do, I want to hear her voice before my mother becomes a clause.
She answers on the fourth ring, which means she had to find the phone, which means she was resting, which means it's a bad day. "Amara, lovey. " Thin as worn lining. "You sound like the river."
"I'm in the car. Mama, I need to ask you something and I need you to tell me the truth and not the brave version."
A pause. The sound of her sitting up, careful, the small effortful sounds of a body rationing itself. "All right."
I tell her. All of it. The coat, in fewer words, and the calligraphy, and the bird in the wax, and the two clauses, and I do it in the flat even voice and she listens the whole way through without one sound, which is its own kind of answer, and when I finish there is a long quiet, the kind that has weather in it, sleet somewhere on her windows too, the whole drowned Sound between us going dark.
"No," my mother says. "No, Amara. Absolutely not."
"Mama —"
"You will not. " Her voice finds an edge it hasn't had in months, and I'd be glad of the strength in it if it weren't aimed at me.
"I held your father's hand for thirty years and I would not trade one day of it, but I will not — do you hear me — I will not be the leverage that puts my daughter in a cage with the men who built the wreck we're sitting in.
I would rather. Amara. I would rather go.
" She can't finish it. Neither of us can stand to let her. "Let me go before I let you do that."
"That's exactly why it has to be me deciding and not you," I say, and I am surprised by how gentle it comes out, and how certain. "Because you'd say go, and I won't have it. I've stood on my knees in one corridor already. I won't do it twice. I won't."
She's crying now, quiet, and I am dry-eyed in the back of a borrowed car watching the bridge lights smear by in the fog, because one of us has to be the steel and today it's my turn.
"Listen to me," I say. "I'm not going as a sacrifice.
Do you hear the difference? A sacrifice walks in with her hands open and lets them take.
I'm walking in with my hands full. They think they're buying a frightened girl who'll be grateful for the cage.
They've made a mistake about what I am, and I'm going to spend a long time making them regret the discount.
Whatever they think this is, Mama, I'm the one walking in to set the terms."
"You can't set terms with men like that."
"Watch me," I say, and I mean it down to the bone.
Something in me has gone quiet and load-bearing, the way a frame goes quiet when you finally true it.
"I make dresses for women on the best day of their lives, and not for a single fitting have I believed the fairy tale.
I know exactly what I'm walking into. That's my whole advantage. They think I don't."
She's silent a long time. Then, smaller: "Your father would be so angry."
"My father," I say, "would understand a hard bargain.
He made plenty. He just always took the honest end of them, and look where honest got him.
" I close my eyes. "I love you. I'm going to fix this.
And then I'm going to sit with you in your own kitchen, in your own chair, with a heart that doesn't quit on the landing, and you're going to be furious at me about it for years, and I am going to let you. Deal?"
A long breath. The brave version reasserting itself, because she's my mother and that's where I got it. "Don't sign anything tonight," she says.
"I'm not signing anything tonight," I tell her. "Tonight I only make a phone call."
I have the driver take me back to the atelier instead of home, because the call is going to want a witness even if the only witness is my own machine and the dress forms standing around the dark loft like a council of headless women. And because the records are here.