Daughters for a Time (23 page)

“Yes, the circle of life is an often cruel reality.”

I nodded, wiped my eyes.

“You’re scared,” Elle said. “The cancer means that you might lose your sister, that your niece might lose her mother.”

“That’s not an option,” I said. “I can’t live without Claire.”

“You love her a lot.”

“It’s beyond love,” I said. “We’re sisters.”

“That Claire’s sick,” Elle went on, “what does it mean to you as Sam’s mother?”

I thought of Sam, how sure I was in promising her forever, when in truth I hadn’t a bit of control over what the future would bring.

“It means that I’m no more immune from it than Claire was,” I admitted. “The ironic thing is, in the months leading up to the adoption, I worried that an adoptive daughter might someday leave
me
. It never occurred to me how devastating it could be to her if I were the one to leave. So, yeah, Claire’s cancer makes it real. That I could get it, too. And the thought of leaving Sam too early scares me terribly.”

“Being left is a terrible thing,” Elle said.

“I want to give Sam the childhood I never had, one that doesn’t end at age twelve when a father leaves, or age thirteen when a mother gets sick. I want to be her rock. I never want her to feel scared or alone or uncertain.”

“Your father left,” Elle said. “What was that like?”

“It was a crazy time. My mother was sick, and she and my father were separated. Then he left during it all.”

Elle paused, twisted her ring. “That must have made matters worse that he left at such a difficult time, with your mother being ill.”

“It
seems
like that would have made a big difference,” I said, remembering how chaotic it was back then, “but you know how those things go. Life doesn’t stop for illness. Mom was working. Larry traveled a lot. Claire was in college. I was just starting high school. Normal life, except that Larry had become an outsider. Following his affair, he moved out for a while. During that time, Mom and Claire and I banded together. When Larry came back home, it couldn’t have been too much fun for him.”

“What was that like?”

“When I saw him recently,” I said, “he told me that he used to sit in the driveway and think, ‘Who the hell even cares if I come in?’ I can totally understand why he felt that way. Our house couldn’t have been too inviting to him. Claire, especially, was as cold as ice. That’s Claire. If she’s on your side, you’ve got yourself a strong ally. But if you cross her, look out. She considered Larry’s infidelity as pure treason. And Mom just kind of moved around him. Her Catholic sensibilities, she’d rather stay married in some awkward limbo than get a divorce.

“Then, just like that, we find out that Mom has ovarian cancer. I remember how we all sat around the kitchen table as she explained it, almost apologetic to Larry, like her being ill was going to inconvenience him in some way. She kept saying
stuff like, ‘I’m fine. No one needs to do or change anything. Life will go on just as it had yesterday.’

“If you knew my mom,” I said, feeling a wave of emotion rising in me, “you’d understand how the cancer was probably easier for her to reconcile than the end of a marriage. At least with cancer you have the statistics screaming at you, ‘Don’t take it personally!’ It taps you on your shoulder whether you’re ready or not. But ending a marriage is a conscious choice, one she wasn’t willing to make. Not like any of it mattered, once she was sick.”

“Were you angry when your father left?” Elle asked.

“Mom and Claire were angry, and I wanted to be like them—to be included in their club—so I played along. But I never hated him. I remembered some good times, and I just wanted those good times
back
. I felt sorry for him, imagining him all alone in some studio-apartment dump, eating cold beans out of the can. I didn’t put all the blame on him is what I’m saying. I was only twelve years old the first time he left, so basically, I still had thoughts like, ‘If we were nicer to him, maybe he would have stayed.’”

“And now?”

“
Now
is a brand-new time period. I’m a mom. He’s an old man. He failed at fatherhood, but he wasn’t the worst thing in the world.”

Sam started to fuss and that was when I remembered that Elle had come to check up on her, not to hear my life story. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’ve unloaded all sorts of my baggage on you. I’m sure that’s not your job.”

“Actually, it is,” she said. “Writing home studies is only part of my work. The rest of my practice is counseling adoptive parents, and believe it or not, that involves all of their baggage.”

After Elle left, seemingly satisfied with Sam’s care and my mothering, I lifted sleeping Sam from her playpen and settled
into the sofa. She wiggled and fussed but settled right back down.

“What about you, peanut?” I whispered, fingering her new wispy hair. “Do you have plans to leave me?” I wondered whether Tim was right, whether I even had the capacity to believe that someone in my life could stay.

The other night, I had had a dream about Sam when she was older. She was in college, a beautiful, confident twenty-something coed, majoring in math or physics or something else that confounded most people, but that, to her, made perfect sense. I saw her dating her future husband, maybe a grad student: smart, enterprising, and Chinese. He took her home to meet his parents. They served her a traditional Chinese dinner, spoke easily in English, then slipped into Mandarin and back to English again, explaining the meaning of the silk scrolls that hung on their wall. They asked her about the province in which she was born. Coincidentally, they had ancestors and friends who were from the same region. They conveyed more to her about her birthplace in one evening than I had been able to impart to her in twenty years. At the end of the night, Sam looked over her shoulder to find me standing in the doorway. She shrugged and then walked to her new boyfriend, a magnet pulling her toward the life she’d been born to live but hadn’t been able to, due to circumstance. Just as I had once strode headlong into Tim’s family, people who offered to me the security and stability that my childhood had lacked, Sam insinuated herself into this Chinese family’s world without looking back.

When I woke in the night and replayed the dream in my mind, I was disturbed that Tim was right, that my mind seemed hardwired for being left. Then I turned onto my side and told myself to see it differently, to see Sam coming home during Christmas break, falling into my lap, curling up beside me on
the sofa, and yapping all night long about her first semester of college.

I let that happy image hover, let it sink into my bones, but it wasn’t easy. I was resistant, as if allowing myself to hope in such a manner was superstitious and indulgent. It was better to take it one day at a time.

As if Sam were reading my thoughts, she stirred, pushed up onto my chest, and looked at me, as if to say,
That’s not going to happen, Mom. I’m not going to leave you, as long as you don’t leave me.

“I’ll never leave you,” I said.

The following Monday morning, Claire was scheduled for surgery. She and Ross dropped off Maura on their way. Claire, dressed smartly in her chinos and cashmere cardigan, kneeled down next to her daughter. “Be good for Aunt Helen, okay?” With wide eyes and a stretched mouth, Maura nodded.

“We’re going to have fun, right, Maura?”

Maura began to cry, sensing that her mother was vulnerable. She was whiny and clingy and making it difficult for Claire and Ross to get out the door. You’d think that a four-year-old wouldn’t have a clue what going to the hospital meant, her knowledge bank having been filled primarily by
Blue’s Clues
and
Dora the Explorer
. But her intuition was right on. You could see the worry in her eyes, and she didn’t want to let her mother go.

“Please stay, please stay,” she pleaded between heavy sobs, her arms wrapped like vise grips around Claire’s neck.

“Sweetie,” Claire tried. “I’ll be back before you know it. You’re going to have so much fun with Aunt Helen and Sam.”

“But I want
you
!” Maura wailed. Fighting words. A hot knife cutting through butter.

Claire looked away as I pried Maura off her mother with promises of making a gigantic jaguar bed out of all of the pillows in the room.

“Aunt Helen,” Maura gulped, her mouth a centimeter from mine. “I want to go to the hospital with Mommy.”

“Hospitals are boring,” I said. “There’s nothing to do there.”

“Mommy always has stuff to do!”

“Yeah, but I’ve got really cool stuff to do. Just wait and see! In fact, want to have a tea party?”

“Okay,” Maura said, “but Aunt Helen, guess what? X-rays are pictures of your bones.”

Phew.
Back to four-year-old talk.

“Call me the second you hear anything!” I said to Claire and Ross.

“Ross will call,” Claire said, and then kneeled down to hug Maura. “I love you, honey.”

I kissed Claire and hugged her tightly. “You’re going to be okay,” I said, as strongly as I could, though my chest was already heaving.

“You’re very convincing,” Claire joked. “We’d better get out of here before I start crying.”

With Maura coiled around my neck and Sam toddling around the room testing her new walking skills, we waved to Ross and Claire from the front stoop as they drove away. In the kitchen, I strapped Sam into her high chair and made a pot of tea. Then I set out the miniature tea set—little white porcelain dishes with delicate pink roses. I placed a cookie on Maura’s mini plate and one on Sam’s tray, filled the creamer with milk, and scooped some sugar into the bowl. Maura and I called each other “Miss” and used our best “May I’s” and even stuck out our sophisticated little pinkies. Sam gurgled and smashed her cookie.

When we were finished, I changed Sam’s diaper, sent Maura to the potty, and packed the bag.

“Who wants to go to the park?” I asked Maura in my elevated, enthusiastic voice.

“I do, I do!” Maura cheered. “Mom said I could bring my bug net.”

The park was Claire’s idea, and she had sent along buckets and bug nets. She said that Maura loved to wade in the water in the little stream beyond the playground. We eased our way down to the shallow stream. Sitting on the bench near the pebbled shore was Larry, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. His newspaper was folded by his side. I’d called him the day before and filled him in on Claire. He wanted to see her. “Let’s take it slow,” I had said.

Maura led the way down to the stream, walking right by Larry as she kicked off her sneakers and plowed into the water.

“Maura,” I called casually. “This is Larry. Can you say, ‘Hi’?”

“Hi!” Maura hollered.

Larry looked at me expectantly. “This little peach must be Sam.”

“Yep,” I said.

“Well, I’ll be,” he said. “She’s a beauty. May I?” Larry held out his arms for Sam like a real grandparent would do. Because I didn’t know what else to do, I handed her to him. He lifted her high up on his shoulder, just as she liked.

“Have a seat,” he said, scooting over to one side of the bench. I did a quick look to see if there was another bench, but there wasn’t, so I sat down at the opposite end, with only a few feet separating us.

“How’s Claire today?” he asked.

“She’s acting real tough,” I said. “But we’ll see how the surgery goes. Then she’ll have chemo. I read about it online last night. It says that everyone tolerates it differently.”

“It did a job on your mother. I remember that,” he said, shaking his head. “Watching her go through that. Pure hell.”

I nodded, remembering Mom locked in the bathroom, the sound of her being so sick, moaning.

We stared at Maura kicking at the shallow stream. Occasionally, she would be splashed, but she didn’t seem to care.

“Maura looks a lot like your mother,” Larry said.

“Claire and I say that all of the time,” I agreed.

We nodded, stared ahead.

“This reminds me of that area behind our old house,” Larry said, slinging his arm across the top of the bench, his fingers only a few inches from my shoulder. “Do you remember that at all?”

At the back of our yard, a trailhead wound through the trees. There were plank bridges covering the little streams and a giant log crossing a dry bed where we would play “balance beam.” Under mossy rocks, we’d search for frogs.

“I’d take you and your sister back there and you’d try to fish with sticks.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling like I was six years old again. “I loved it back there. You showed us the markings on the trees. You said they were from the deer.”

“That’s right,” Larry said, smiling. “You do remember.”

I remember a lot of good times
, I wanted to say.
That’s the problem. Trying to figure out why you left when there was so much that was good.

I glanced at Larry. His mouth was twitching. God, I’d forgotten about all that twitching. I looked again at Maura. It appeared that she was trying to engineer a boat out of a piece of wood. To watch her ingenuity: the furrowed brow, the mouth falling open in concentration, the intensity of the eyes. She was squatting in the water, not at all aware or concerned that the seat of her pants was wet, as she tried to tie a twig mast onto the makeshift boat. She was a carefree child. I hoped that she’d stayed that way, that her mother’s illness wouldn’t take that from her as I think our mother’s illness had taken it from us.

“How are
you
doing?” Larry asked. I hadn’t noticed him looking at me, seeing me wipe a tear from the corner of my eye.

“Fine,” I said quickly. I stood up and walked a few steps toward the water, fluttering my eyes to stop the tears, wondering how long it had been since I’d cried into my parents’ arms. Over two decades, easily. I wondered if there was muscle memory involved in being consoled, like there was in riding a bike or rolling out pie dough. Did the body know instinctively what to do? Or did some skills, even one as primal as being comforted, wither from lack of use? I was once a daughter. We all were—Sam, Claire, me. We just didn’t know that it wasn’t forever, that we were only daughters for a time.