Adrienne Celt - The Daughters

But once I got her started, Ada was relentless. She wrapped an arm around my waist and told me to go grab my coat, we’d take the train right away, absolutely.

“You can get down on your hands and knees.” She rubbed her palms together. “Tell her how sorry you are that she’s gone. How much harder things are now. How much worse, lalka .”

“We can’t.” I stomped one foot. “She was kidnapped.”

“She wasn’t.”

“She was .”

I started to cry, tugging my body away from my babenka ’s, curling up into a tight little ball. Ada watched me for a time, and then leaned down and put her arms around my shoulders. With great heaves, I wept.

“Oh darling,” Ada murmured. “What do you want me to say?”

As John, Kara, and I approach the church, I can see a figure that must be my mother, from an almost impossible distance. She is the first point my eyes focus on in the horizon, the dark mark on the road, the glint in the glare. I watch her grow from a featureless manikin into a woman. Her hair emerges, combed into a bun. The curve of her hip issues out from her waist. As we get closer, I can see her fingers, the blink of her eye. Our driver stops the cab with a lurch at the corner.

“Cortland and Hermitage, right?” he says.

She was kidnapped , I think. Taken by pirates and sent around the world in a galleon with only old burlap to make into dresses. Life with the pirates made her hard. Too much salt on her skin. Too much sea rum. Even with no one to contradict the story, it doesn’t much satisfy. Sara idles on the sidewalk, one foot atop a pile of calcified snow. She looks like she’s waiting for us, but I think she’s just smoking. My mother. She’s here.

Leaving John behind in the cab to handle the payment, I step carefully out and stand beside her. Without speaking, I breathe in the scent of her cigarette smoke, which hangs around us like a cloud. It smells sweet and like dirt, with a bit of canned tomatoes underneath it, a trace of peat. I can tell right away it will stick in my hair and on my clothes, clog my throat. So that’s real enough.

“Mama,” I say. “Hello.”

She’s looking at me. No, she’s looking past me, for the baby. She won’t quite meet my eyes. I, however, cannot look away. I take in every inch of her. So different. So the same.

My mother’s cigarette has burned down almost to its base, and it’s only when the heat reaches her fingers that she realizes. She lights another from the glowing tip, tossing the spent one onto the sidewalk and grinding it beneath her boot. Her hands are stained orange between the index and middle finger. Now that I’m next to her, I can see that her skin is loose in odd spots around her face — not uniformly, like an old woman shrunk into herself, but here and there. A sag near the left eye. A few too many lines by the mouth to be accounted for as the product of old smiles.

And yet for all that she’s held on to at least a modicum of her beauty. She’s managed it well, with dark lines around her eyes and a professional dye job in her hair. Still dark, almost black. Shining against her shoulders.

I feel a stab of impatience. Isn’t she even going to speak?

She fought the pirates and came home, brandishing her sword. They let her go when she kicked a chest full of treasure off one side of the boat, then jumped into the water and swam the other direction. The pirates all dove after the gold, stuffing coins in their mouths for safekeeping so they could grab more and more, until they sank. Too heavy with treasure. My mother was picked up by the coast guard of a small island nation and flown back to civilization, and now here she is. But she has a heavy coin in her mouth, too.

“So,” I say. “You came.”

“Can’t get anything by you.” Sara sucks in her cheeks to pull the smoke in deeper, faster. She flicks her ash onto the toes of my shoes but then, surprisingly, looks sorry. “Hmm.”

“Why, though?”

My mother glances up, at last, into my face. Her eyes are softer than I thought they would be. If I didn’t know better, I’d say there were some tears there. But of course it’s cold. The wind makes you cry, too.

“You’re kind of a mess, aren’t you?” Her voice strains towards indifference, clipped efficiency. Not quite reaching its goal. She licks two fingers and sticks a flyaway piece of hair down to my skull — I inhale sharply when we touch. Part of me wants to hit her hand away, and part of me just wants to hold it in my own, run the tip of my finger over the hard sheen of her painted thumbnail, as I did when I was a girl. She’s so close. I can smell a little something acid on her breath, maybe juice and unbrushed teeth. Maybe vodka. “You know, I went to see my mother in her goddamn grave and there weren’t any flowers there. I mean, dead flowers, yes, but not real ones.”

“I haven’t been back yet,” I say. “Since the funeral. I told you, I tried to go.” John has finished with the cab and is beside me now, holding Kara. He has a look on his face of unbridled morbid fascination. I ask, “Why didn’t you bring her any?”

“Ha.” Sara goes in to touch Kara on the cheek and then looks between her and John — fast, just a flash of appraisal. That’s all she needs to know everything. “Well, you’re right. I didn’t.”

My mother locks eyes with John, very casually. “When you’re not invited to the funeral, these things have a way of becoming someone else’s responsibility. Wouldn’t you say,” she asks, “that when someone takes matters out of your hands, that leaves you more or less free of obligation? To the results?”

“So you’re Lulu’s mom,” he says. “It’s nice to meet you.”

I tug on his coat sleeve. “Let’s go in.”

He’s still staring at Sara. “I can see the resemblance.”

“Can you?” she asks. “Me, I’m not sure.”

John balks, genuinely surprised — my mother and I really do look quite a bit alike. And Sara laughs a little, seeing him compare us. Looks between him and Kara. I hold my breath and wait for a wave to crash into me. To sweep us all away down the street, our voices lost in the roar. But my mother doesn’t press. For once in her life.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m sorry. I thought we were talking about something else.”

As we walk into the church I want to hold someone’s hand. The idea is so grounding — a hand, like a lightning rod. John’s hand, with its funny wrinkles, or my mother’s, once pristine. Now a bit dirty and tattered. What I need is a little warmth to keep me going. Someone to lend me a little strength. But everyone is all bound up in themselves right now, and I can hardly blame them.

Sara bends down and picks a piece of paper up from a basket by the end of the pews.

“Programs?” she asks. “At a christening?”

“Baba Ada planned all this.” I take the paper from her and cluck at how it flops around, flimsy. “She wouldn’t have been very happy. It looks cheap.”

“She would have gone and burned down the store that sold it to her. Held the clerk’s whole family captive until he agreed to a twenty percent discount.”

“No.” I fold the program and replace it on the pile. “She wouldn’t have.” I’ve tried to bring Ada back with stories. Since she died, I’ve been telling myself every Ada story I ever knew. But even the true ones just make it clear something’s missing. False ones would be worse. Rewriting. Erasing.

“Are you cold?” my mother asks. I realize I’m shivering.

“No,” I say. “I’m just nervous.”

“To sing?” I can see how it would sound ridiculous. Me of all people. But whatever lurking danger has been following me since Kara’s birth has crawled here, certainly. The delicate balance between my mother and my husband — secrets. The knowledge that what happens to me could happen to Kara a hundredfold if I sing to her. Good and bad.