Adrienne Celt - The Daughters

Rick barked out a single laugh, then stared straight ahead as if it had been someone else. It was then that I truly began to adore him. I allowed my hand to stretch and flatten against the cold bulk of the piano’s hood, for balance. Raised my eyebrow.

“If anything, I may be too much for her.”

Martin sighed.

“You’re going to owe me,” he said to Philippe. And then, looking me up and down, “And spoil her rotten.”

Philippe just smiled.

“You know,” he said, “I quite intend to.”

That night I could barely hold my keys as I jammed them against the door, only tumbling into the apartment when Ada stood up from whatever she was doing and put me out of my misery by unlocking it from the inside. She was already an old woman then, my babenka , but you’d never have known it. Her hair was dark brown and piled on her head in an impressive bun, and she was wearing a wool pencil skirt that gave her the shape of a girl. Ada always said I kept her young, and it certainly seemed true that night. I bounced from one foot to the other and infected her with the aura boiling around me until she started to do a little shimmy of her own.

“What?” she asked. We were both laughing, though she didn’t yet know why, and I spun around, allowing her to pull my coat off my shoulders.

“Three guesses,” I said. And she considered, poking her tongue out thoughtfully to touch her upper lip and wrangling my coat onto a hanger. We had pathetic little wire hangers, from thrift stores and the odd dry cleaning mostly, bent into oblongs and suffering greatly under the weight of their burdens . First thing to go , I thought. Wooden hangers forevermore.

“You found a pile of gold,” she said. I clapped my hands as I bounced.

“Not exactly. Two more guesses.”

“It turns out that your shoes are magical dancing shoes, which will skirt you away to the land of the eternal ball, where you will dance faster and faster, until at last you light on fire.”

Ada made eyes at me, but I tucked my chin down, unwooed. Lowering myself calmly onto flat feet, I shook my head.

“Well, all right then,” said Ada. “It can only be one thing.”

“Oh yes?”

“Oh yes,” she said. She brushed an imaginary beard against her pale skin. “You figured out that Mélisande is not so bad after all and remembered that you’re about to sing on a real stage. I will admit, doing away with the silly goosey versions will be a difficulty, but I think, all in all, I can manage.”

Baba Ada looked happy with herself. Always upon making some sort of breakthrough in my singing, I’m consumed with a ball of energy. She assumed that the rehearsal onstage, with live accompaniment and professional critiques, had plucked me from my slump and reminded me to thank heaven for the favors I’d been granted.

“Oh no,” I said. “Oh no no no.”

“Well then, what?” she asked. “I do have to get dinner on, you know. You aren’t over the moon about a movie coming out or some other nonsense like that, are you? Because I told you last time, I can only care so much about—”

“I’m going to be the Queen of the Night,” I said. “I’m going to sing The Magic Flute .”

Ada stopped in the middle of hitching up one of her nylon stockings as she turned back to the kitchen. I watched the air leak slowly out of her, only to return, transfused, as if made into champagne. She bubbled upward back towards me and put both hands on my shoulders. They were surprisingly strong, and in other circumstances I might have winced.

“Are you being serious, Luscia?” Her voice was deadly focused, and her eyes shone like gunshots right into my own. I nodded.

Ada rested her forehead on mine, leaning down just slightly. She had three inches on me. “I knew it,” she said. So softly I almost couldn’t hear. “I knew it.”

Her fingers were still digging into my shoulders.

“Can you imagine,” she continued, as if to herself, “what your daughter will be like someday?”

I craned my neck back, away from her.

“What?” I asked. But Ada only shook her head.

“Never you mind, child,” she said. “We should celebrate.”

And so we did.

Kara and I walk through the streets of North Chicago and I point things out to her that she probably cannot see. She’s almost completely invisible in her winter clothes — out of reach of wind and dirt and water and snow — and yet everything touches her. When a bird skims the air above her, suddenly flight is possible. When she smells bus exhaust, the world loses its semblance of perfect cleanliness. Every time I stroke her cheek, she remembers tenderness.

My stitches feel better than I had expected — much better, considering that I have an extra six pounds attached to my chest. But the day is undeniably frigid, sleet sticking against my coat and wetting my hair, and when I turn the corner and see we’re at the end of our journey’s first leg, I want to laugh with happiness. Across the street is a florist’s shop where I sometimes order bouquets for dinner parties. They do nice window displays — right now, big puffs of hothouse hydrangeas to simulate snowballs and frozen hillsides, as if to taunt the real winter landscape, which is spitting mad. The shop is always warm inside, and they have a counter where you can sit and order coffee or tea while your flowers are being assembled. They’ll do something nice for Ada, I know. It’s stupid to leave flowers in the cemetery to wilt and freeze, but going without them seems callous to me. Presentation and all that. I look in both directions down the street and begin to pick my way across.

I’m almost at the sidewalk when a stylish woman emerges from the florist’s door cradling a tall bouquet of peonies and lilies. Various shades of pink and white and yellow, which she’s adjusting with her thumb when she loses traction on a patch of ice.

The woman is wearing inadvisable heels — she was probably planning to walk all of two paces before hailing a taxi — and one toe slips forward while the other slips back. I suck in a breath and hold out my hand, but I’m too far away to help. And do I really want to? Would I really have offered myself to grab if I’d been closer? I pull my hand back and shrink into myself, hugging Kara close.

“ Oh ,” the woman gasps.

She skids her feet around and then falls hard on both knees, the flowers spilling out of their wrappings in front of her.

And she screams.

Wherever she thought she was going — a party, an office building — she didn’t expect to make a noise like that on her way. The woman’s voice is so shrill that every pedestrian within a block turns to see what the commotion is. But what I hear mostly — what I cannot stop hearing — is the crack of her kneecaps. A sickening crush, palpable as footsteps on glass. I turn back and walk with purpose to the other side of the street and keep going. Tell myself I imagined it; she couldn’t have been hurt that badly. People slip on the ice all the time. But a few blocks later, hurrying in the opposite direction with my eyes down, I hear the wail of a siren approaching from somewhere to take the woman away.

Just a little farther , I think. Almost there . I rush past coffee shops, antique stores with furniture peeking through the windows. But I can’t go fast enough to calm down my frantic breathing.

Wounds have their own gravity — isn’t that what I was telling myself before? That injury draws further injury, and a person, once damaged, is never safe. I had believed, though, that the gravity was localized. Attached to its object. Kara murmels against my chest, sucking intermittently on the strap of her carrier, and I hold her closer, imagining an underground rumbling coming from the direction of the accident. A great wrenching moan as the street rips open. Buildings falling away into nothingness. People struck by bricks and swallowed by the void. Even though I know it’s not real, a large handful of my heart believes that if I look back, I’ll see destruction barreling down the road. That it’s only by averting my eyes that I can keep us both from being consumed.