More Than Words(40)

Nina sat down on the bed. She didn’t have a ton of memories of her mom, but sitting here, she remembered one she was pretty sure she could trust. It was summer, so her mom wasn’t teaching, and Nina wasn’t in school. They’d come up to the country for a long time, just the two of them. A few weeks, maybe a month. And her dad came up on the weekends, but not all of them.

“What would you think about taking a trip to Colorado?” her mother asked. “You know you have a new baby cousin out there.”

“I do?” Nina said. She knew her mom had grown up in Colorado, that her aunt and uncle and grandpa lived there, but they hardly ever visited. Her dad didn’t like it out there. He didn’t get along with her mom’s father or her younger sister very well. They thought that he’d changed her—turned her into someone who wanted to live in a world that made them uncomfortable. His gifts were never appreciated, which hurt him. It might have been why her father always wanted Nina to date men who traveled in the same circles she did. He didn’t want her to repeat his mistakes, make her life more difficult than it had to be. Even if making money didn’t matter to her the way it did to him, it was still there. It was still the world she knew.

“You know, Ballerina, you’re not just a Gregory. You’re a Lukas, too,” her mother told her that summer. “That was my last name before I married your dad. Maybe we could make some plans to spend time in Colorado soon and you could get to know that part of the family better.”

“Okay,” Nina’d said. “And I can play with my cousin.”

“Sounds good to me.” Only it never happened. They didn’t visit Colorado over the summer, and then her mom died that Christmas, and Nina had never met her cousin. Actually, after her mother’s funeral, she’d only seen her aunt once more—and had never seen her grandfather again. When she’d asked her dad about it, he said, “They don’t want to be a part of our world.”

“But I want to be a part of theirs,” Nina replied. Her aunt Daphne sounded just like her mom when she talked. They had the same laugh. And she always hugged Nina extra hard when they saw each other.

“No, you don’t,” he said. “I promise. They don’t like us.”

And that was what she’d grown up thinking. That her mother’s family didn’t like them. But was that true?

Nina wondered, now, if the time she and her mom spent at the country house that summer was an indication of something she hadn’t realized then. Something that was wrong in her parents’ marriage, that made her mother think more about her own family, about visiting them with her daughter and not her husband. Something that reached its apex on Christmas Day.

Nina walked to the closet, hoping to find something there. What, she didn’t know. Perhaps a dress that would rekindle a memory. A bottle of her mother’s perfume. A book she’d forgotten existed but had once loved.

With her heart beating hard, she opened the closet door. And there was something inside. But not what Nina hoped. A few pairs of jeans. Some sweaters. A pair of sneakers. Clothing she didn’t remember at all. She was getting a small piece of her mom back, after all these years, but it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough. Nina pulled out the jeans and held them up to her own legs. Her mother was shorter than she was, Nina discovered, by about an inch. She’d never wondered if she’d grown to be taller than her mother. In fact, she’d always assumed she hadn’t. In her mind, her mother always seemed so tall. Nina was only a year younger, now, than her mother was when she’d worn these clothes. Nina wondered if her mother felt as confused as she did sometimes. As conflicted. She wished more than anything that she could ask her. Mom, she thought, I wish you were here with me.

Nina hung the jeans back up and opened the drawer in the night table she remembered was on her mother’s side of the bed. Inside she found a drawing she had no recollection of making. It was a yard with grass and two bunnies. Nina had written Hoppy Sunday! on it. And she’d labeled all of the items in Spanish and English with arrows—tree arbol, her younger self had written, bunny conejito, sky cielo, sun sol, lawn cesped, flowers flores. She wondered now if it was a project her mother had given her, the Spanish professor helping her daughter learn, or if it was something Nina had created on her own to make her mother happy.

Either way the drawing made her smile. She wondered if Rafael had made similar drawings, or if it was different, growing up bilingual, two languages being an innate part of who you were instead of learning the building blocks of a second language one by one. Nina pulled her phone out of her back pocket and snapped a picture of the drawing.

Then she looked around the room some more. There was her parents’ wedding picture standing on the dresser next to a picture of her mother holding an infant Nina. Both of them were asleep on a couch, Nina on her mother’s chest, her hands gripping her mother’s wavy, dark hair. Nina picked it up, trying to see herself in the tapering of her mother’s fingers, or the tilt of her neck. She thought maybe the shape of their earlobes was the same.

It was mind-blowing to be here. This place she grew up in but didn’t. This house she had known but forgotten. It was a place where memories lived. Where they’d been stored up waiting for her, but she never knew. And now that she did, now that she’d found them, the one person who’d been keeping them from her was the only person she wanted to share them with.