I'd Give Anything(29)

“Did she teach you?” said Avery. “And then she taught me?”

I looked at her, startled. “You know, I don’t know. Maybe. We might have learned in school, but it’s possible she taught us. She liked activities that kept children busy.”

“Mom,” said Avery, reprovingly. “Maybe she taught us because she thought we would like doing it.”

I nodded. “You never know. Anyway, months later, I was getting something out of the front hall table in her house, keys or something, and I found a box inside it with three snowflakes in it. You’d written your name on the backs of each one. And that’s when I knew she loved you.”

“Three snowflakes?” said Avery. “That’s it?”

“She kept them,” I said. “She never kept anything Trev or I made. And you know what else?”

“What?”

“They were awful. All raggedy and asymmetrical.”

“Mom, I was six.”

“True, but they were some seriously ugly snowflakes. And my mother hates—hated—ugly things. She disdained imperfection, and she kept your snowflakes.” I laughed. “I’m sure she chose the three best ones, but they were still some bad, bad snowflakes.”

“Keeping three bad snowflakes would not qualify as most people’s most loving act,” said Kirsten. “But Adela wasn’t most people.”

“Not even close,” I said.

“Not even a little bit,” said Kirsten.

“Still, she kept them. And she gave you that suitcase full of books,” I said to Avery. “What are they, by the way?”

An odd look crossed Avery’s face. Guarded, maybe even guilty. “I don’t—”

“It’s okay if you haven’t opened it yet,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay,” said Avery.

After a while, she said, “She’s just not here anymore. A person can just suddenly—boom—stop being.”

“It’s strange to think about her being gone,” I said. “She took up so much space in the world.”

Avery tilted her head and rested it on my shoulder for a few seconds. “Are you okay, Mom?”

I fitted my hand to the curve of her face. Was I okay? I felt a bodily tiredness, as if I’d spent a couple of days raking leaves (a task I loved, actually), and the fact that my mother had ended her own life existed beyond me for now, ungraspable. I hadn’t spoken aloud or even really thought the word suicide, yet. I could sense it waiting for me, a sibilant, slippery presence, part coo, part wail, in the back of my mind. But I was here in my house. Kirsten, Avery, and my little dogs were here. And my love for them was vast and unreserved and elemental.

“Yes, sweetheart. Thank you for asking.”

She stood up. “I think I’ll go upstairs now.”

“Sure. Go do your thing.”

She turned to leave and then turned back.

“Thank you for telling me about the snowflakes,” she said. “It made me feel much sadder and less sad that I wasn’t more sad.”

And then, to cheer me up, in case I needed it, my precious, funny girl grinned her cheekiest grin at me, the one that bunches up her nose and makes her eyes turn into crescents.

This is how mothers and daughters are supposed to be, I thought, this is right and just and good. Maybe that was where grief would lie: not in my mother’s leave-taking, but in all that she had missed out on while she was here.

“Oh, sure,” I told her, shrugging. “That’s what I’m here for.”



Proof that a person can get used to anything is that there were whole weeks when I didn’t miss my brother, Trevor, and there were phone calls between us during which the sound of his voice did not make me immediately want to fall on the ground crying and making wild bargains with God to get him back into my life.

Most of the time, though, he was my phantom limb, the pauses between my breaths when I couldn’t sleep, the blur caught in my peripheral vision, the voice that came winging at me out of nowhere. I would be in the middle of something—cooking or planting bulbs or watching one of Avery’s games—and it would hit me like a punch in the stomach that Trevor and I weren’t close anymore and that I would give anything to go back and undo what had come between us.

In the middle of my senior year of high school, Trevor and my mother had had a fight to end all fights, and he had gone away, carried on two waves of rage—hers and his—and had never, in any true way, come home again. And right around the time he left, I—cut loose and falling through my own pitch-black, screeching tunnel of depression—pulled away at the exact moment when I should have moved toward, until the space between us got too big to bridge.

He’d gotten married (I’d gone to the wedding; Adela had not), and he and Iris had twin boys, Sam and Paxton. They were almost eight years old and I didn’t even know them. I’d visited them two months after they were born, and I’d been in their presence a few times since, but I didn’t know them. It did not seem to lie within the realm of the possible, not knowing Trev’s sons; my up-until-age-eighteen self would’ve unleashed scorn and fury on anyone who’d suggested such a thing could happen. And yet.

I asked Kirsten to stay while I called him. And right before I did, she gave voice to my own fragile, newborn hope, one I didn’t even realize I had before she said it: “Maybe with your mother gone, you and Trevor can find each other again.”