The Mothers(70)

Nadia toed the loose gravel, blinking back tears. The crying started suddenly these days, like a nosebleed. She could imagine how Aubrey must have reported the betrayal, how horrified Monique and Kasey had been, because who wouldn’t be? A girl who had lived in their very home, a girl they’d treated like family, a girl they’d whispered about late at night, wondering, did she seem quiet at dinner? Do you think something’s wrong with her? Her mother had killed herself—how could something not be wrong with her?—but do you think she seemed sad today?

Kasey sighed, stepping out onto the porch. “Don’t think this means we’re friends again,” she said. “I just can’t stand to see you cry.”

On the porch step, Kasey rubbed Nadia’s back while she wiped her eyes.

“Jesus,” Kasey said. “What were you thinkin’?”

“I fucked up.”

“Well, no kidding.”

“She won’t let me apologize—”

“What do you expect? She’s still hurting, honey.”

“But what can I do? What am I supposed to do?”

“It just takes time. You gotta let it alone.”

But she couldn’t. She couldn’t stop calling or writing or driving past the house. That was what it meant to love someone, right? You couldn’t leave them, even if they hated you. You could never let them go. She tried calling the house phone once or twice, until Monique answered one evening.

“You’ve got some goddamn nerve,” she said.

“Please,” Nadia said. That was the only word she seemed to say now. “I just want to talk to her. Please.”

“I don’t think it matters what you want anymore,” Monique said.

—

SOON, A MONTH, then two months passed. She brewed her father’s coffee in the morning—half regular, half decaf, the way he liked it. She drove the Mothers to Upper Room and she cooked dinner for her father in the evening. She thought about leaving—but then the holiday season arrived, announced only by twinkling lights strewn in palm trees and thick cotton rolled on lawns like snow. She had not spent a single Christmas at home since her mother died. She’d imagined them, eight years with no traditions, eight holidays where she was emptied with loneliness. No one to hang the stockings or press silver cookie-cutters into dough or wrap garland around the mantel. No one to root through the garage for the boxes her mother had carefully labeled wrapping paper or porch decorations. Just a California Christmas with none of the trimmings, an ordinary sunny day. But this Christmas, she knelt in the garage with a pair of scissors, gently opening the sealed boxes. She hung two stockings, not three, and popped red and green bulbs into the post lights along the walkway. She bought a fake tree from Walmart, nothing like the seven-foot Douglas firs her father used to haul through the door, and assembled it in the living room, pushing the wiry branches into place. She clutched handfuls of the felt tree skirt, lush and green between her fingers, and sniffed it, hoping to catch a wisp of her mother. She only smelled dust and pine.

After Christmas, she thought about leaving again—this time, she’d even bookmarked flights—but each time, she felt something hold her back. Not yet. She couldn’t leave her father again, not yet. In the evenings, she lugged a kitchen chair to the coat closet so she could reach the photo albums her father had stored on the top shelf. The album resting on her knees, she turned each page slowly, staring at pictures of herself as a newborn, pale, wrinkly with beady eyes, bundled in a yellow blanket. Her mother holding her in the hospital bed, hair stuck to her sweaty forehead. She looked exhausted but she was smiling. Her body had split open, and she was smiling. Nadia turned the page. Now she was a baby, crawling near anonymous feet; she was a chubby toddler, chasing ducks at the park; she was a preschooler, laughing and missing teeth. She passed the photo of herself curled in her father’s lap, the one she’d studied when he was overseas, as distant and foreign as war itself. He was smiling into the camera, a tired smile like the one her mother had worn, but he still looked satisfied—happy, even.

Sometimes, on his way to walk his slow laps in the backyard, her father leaned over the couch to take a look at the albums. She turned pages chronicling her first birthday, past photos of her in a high chair, a party hat cocked to the side of her head. One night, she reached a new page at the end of the album that held pictures of her mother as a girl, in a dress and frilly socks, standing in front of a house with the flatness of Texas stretching behind her. In another photo, her mother was a baby, fists buried in a birthday cake, red and green icing smeared on her face. A taller boy hugged her, grinning into the camera. He’d smeared icing on his face to match hers.

When her father bent over the couch, she almost shut the photo album. But he stuck a finger on the page, next to the picture of the smiling baby who would become her mother and then his wife.

“Who’s this?” she asked, pointing at the boy.

“That’s your uncle Clarence,” he said. “Crazy as can be. I wish you could’ve known him. But those drugs got to him.” He shook his head. “I always thought the war would kill us. Then we get back and Clarence does it to himself. He introduced me to your mother and now it’s just me. I’m the only one left.”

She and her father were survivors, abandoned by everyone but each other. She watched television with him after dinner and drove him to church every Sunday morning. He could drive himself now but he still climbed in on the passenger’s side and she wondered if he worried that she might leave if she no longer felt needed. One Sunday, she followed him into the lobby, glancing around, as she always did, hoping she might see Aubrey. Instead, Mrs. Sheppard pulled her aside.