The Push(71)

Instead I filled the car with gas and drove us out to the highway.

Two hours later we stopped for takeout at the first drive-through off the exit ramp. I didn’t know she was vegetarian now—she would only eat the fries. She never asked where we were going, not for the whole two hours. Instead she leaned her arm against the window and slowly pulled strands of her hair through her fingers, flattening them out and running her hand along the silky ribbon like the bow of a violin. This was something I, too, had done as a girl.

My heart felt soft when I pulled into the lot and took a ticket from the machine. I hadn’t been there in a very long time. I got out of the car and waited in the cold for her to join me, but she didn’t move. I opened her door and put my hand on her shoulder.

“There’s someone I want you to meet.”

She didn’t say anything as we checked in at the front desk. I handed over my ID and clipped the visitor passes to each of our coats. She followed me quietly to the elevator and down the hall of the fourth floor. The smell was stale and aseptic but for the waft of urine every now and then. It crushed me to breathe in that air. I knocked softly on the door of her room.

“Come in.”

She sat in an orange slip-covered chair with her legs crossed, an empty crossword on her lap. The lights in the room were off and the pen in her hand had the cap on. A loosely knitted blanket hung around her shoulders. She opened her mouth to speak but then just sighed. She’d forgotten what she wanted to say. And then:

“You’re here! I’ve been waiting for you!”

Violet watched as I hugged her gently. I turned on the lamp behind her and she glanced up at the bulb, surprised by the light. I gestured for Violet to sit at the end of the bed.

“I’m so happy to see you.” She reached her hand to me and I ran my thumb over her skin, as thin as rice paper. Her veins moved under my lips as I gave her hand a kiss. She smelled like petroleum jelly.

“You look so beautiful today.” She spoke so earnestly that I suddenly really did feel beautiful. I thanked her. Her lips were dry and I reached for the cup of water on her bedside table and offered it to her. “No, thank you, dear. You have some. You’re always so thirsty. Even as a little girl, you were.”

Violet looked at me and I could see by her twisting mouth that she was upset. She was feeling uncomfortable, in this strange building with this strange stench and this woman she had never met before. She shifted on the bed and looked to the door.

“I want to introduce you to someone. This is Violet, my daughter.” Violet looked quickly at the stranger in the chair and mumbled a hello.

“Oh. She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

“She certainly is.”

“Do you know how I got here?” she asked me. Her face was worried.

I took her hand again. “You were driven here in a car. You lived not too far away from here, in a house on Downington Crescent. Do you remember?”

“I don’t remember.”

A nurse came in with a covered tray and put it on the small rolling table. “Dinnertime!”

“Leda, I want you to meet my daughter.” She tugged at my hands and beamed at the nurse. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

Violet looked at me for the first time. She stood up and walked toward the door, her hands on her elbows. Her chin lowered, and I wondered if she might cry. The nurse smiled at me and then turned down the bed, fluffing the thin pillow. She dropped two capsules in a foam cup on the bedside table and then lifted the cover on the dinner tray. The room filled with the awful smell of hot, canned vegetables. Violet turned away from us.

“Oh. I’ve got to eat and get ready for bed now.” She slowly stood up from her chair and tried to fold the blanket that had been on her shoulders. She went into the bathroom and shut the door. I arranged her dinner setting for her and put her crossword book on the dresser. Violet eyed me quietly until the toilet flushed and then we watched her settle herself back in the chair.

“We’ll get going, then.” I leaned down to kiss her cheek. “I’ll come visit you for the holidays. Have you seen Daniel or Thomas? Have they come by lately?”

“Who are they?”

“Your sons.” I’d lost touch with them long ago.

“I don’t have any sons. I only have you.”

I kissed her again as she stared at the knife and fork, wondering what to do with them. I put the fork in her hand and helped her stab a green bean. She nodded and then brought the bean to her lips.

We got in the car and I let it run for a minute. I waited for Violet to take out her phone and start texting. She didn’t. Instead she looked straight ahead while we found our way back to the highway under the dark sky. I wondered if she’d fallen asleep. Halfway home she finally spoke to me.

“Who was that woman? She wasn’t your mother. She was Black.” Her tone was biting. Like I had been trying to fool her. Like I had wanted to make her feel stupid somehow.

“She was the closest thing I had.”

“Why don’t you find your real mother?”

I paused, thinking about how to answer her truthfully.

“Because I’m scared to know who she became.”

I looked away from the road to her shadowed profile. Sadness squeezed my throat. For nearly fourteen years I’d wanted to find something between us that wasn’t there. She had come from me. I had made her. This beautiful thing beside me, I had made her, and there was a time I had wanted her, a time I thought she would be my world. She looked like a woman now. There was feminine wisdom growing in her eyes and she was about to thrive without me. She was about to choose a life that did not include me. I would be left behind.