The Daughters: A Novel (28 page)

Leaving John behind in the cab to handle the payment, I step carefully out and stand beside her. Without speaking, I breathe in the scent of her cigarette smoke, which hangs around us like a cloud. It smells sweet and like dirt, with a bit of canned tomatoes underneath it, a trace of peat. I can tell right away it will stick in my hair and on my clothes, clog my throat. So that’s real enough.

“Mama,” I say. “Hello.”

She’s looking at me. No, she’s looking past me, for the baby. She won’t quite meet my eyes. I, however, cannot look away. I take in every inch of her. So different. So the same.

My mother’s cigarette has burned down almost to its base, and it’s only when the heat reaches her fingers that she realizes. She lights another from the glowing tip, tossing the spent one onto the sidewalk and grinding it beneath her boot. Her hands are stained orange between the index and middle finger. Now that I’m next to her, I can see that her skin is loose in odd spots around her face—not uniformly, like an old woman shrunk into herself, but here and there. A sag near the left eye. A few too many lines by the mouth to be accounted for as the product of old smiles.

And yet for all that she’s held on to at least a modicum of her beauty. She’s managed it well, with dark lines around her eyes and a professional dye job in her hair. Still dark, almost black. Shining against her shoulders.

I feel a stab of impatience. Isn’t she even going to speak?

She fought the pirates and came home, brandishing her sword. They let her go when she kicked a chest full of treasure off one side of the boat, then jumped into the water and swam the other direction. The pirates all dove after the gold, stuffing coins in their mouths for safekeeping so they could grab more and more, until they sank. Too heavy with treasure. My mother was picked up by the coast guard of a small island nation and flown back to civilization, and now here she is. But she has a heavy coin in her mouth, too.

“So,” I say. “You came.”

“Can’t get anything by you.” Sara sucks in her cheeks to pull the smoke in deeper, faster. She flicks her ash onto the toes of my shoes but then, surprisingly, looks sorry. “Hmm.”

“Why, though?”

My mother glances up, at last, into my face. Her eyes are softer than I thought they would be. If I didn’t know better, I’d say there were some tears there. But of course it’s cold. The wind makes you cry, too.

“You’re kind of a mess, aren’t you?” Her voice strains towards indifference, clipped efficiency. Not quite reaching its goal. She licks two fingers and sticks a flyaway piece of hair down to my skull—I inhale sharply when we touch. Part of me wants to hit her hand away, and part of me just wants to hold it in my own, run the tip of my finger over the hard sheen of her painted thumbnail, as I did when I was a girl. She’s so close. I can smell a little something acid on her breath, maybe juice and unbrushed teeth. Maybe vodka. “You know, I went to see my mother in her goddamn grave and there weren’t any flowers there. I mean, dead flowers, yes, but not real ones.”

“I haven’t been back yet,” I say. “Since the funeral. I told you, I tried to go.” John has finished with the cab and is beside me now, holding Kara. He has a look on his face of unbridled morbid fascination. I ask, “Why didn’t you bring her any?”

“Ha.” Sara goes in to touch Kara on the cheek and then looks between her and John—fast, just a flash of appraisal. That’s all she needs to know everything. “Well, you’re right. I didn’t.”

My mother locks eyes with John, very casually. “When you’re not invited to the funeral, these things have a way of becoming someone else’s responsibility. Wouldn’t you say,” she asks, “that when someone takes matters out of your hands, that leaves you more or less free of obligation? To the results?”

“So you’re Lulu’s mom,” he says. “It’s nice to meet you.”

I tug on his coat sleeve. “Let’s go in.”

He’s still staring at Sara. “I can see the resemblance.”

“Can you?” she asks. “Me, I’m not sure.”

John balks, genuinely surprised—my mother and I really do look quite a bit alike. And Sara laughs a little, seeing him compare us. Looks between him and Kara. I hold my breath and wait for a wave to crash into me. To sweep us all away down the street, our voices lost in the roar. But my mother doesn’t press. For once in her life.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m sorry. I thought we were talking about something else.”

A
s we walk into the church I want to hold someone’s hand. The idea is so grounding—a hand, like a lightning rod. John’s hand, with its funny wrinkles, or my mother’s, once pristine. Now a bit dirty and tattered. What I need is a little warmth to keep me going. Someone to lend me a little strength. But everyone is all bound up in themselves right now, and I can hardly blame them.

Sara bends down and picks a piece of paper up from a basket by the end of the pews.

“Programs?” she asks. “At a christening?”

“Baba Ada planned all this.” I take the paper from her and cluck at how it flops around, flimsy. “She wouldn’t have been very happy. It looks cheap.”

“She would have gone and burned down the store that sold it to her. Held the clerk’s whole family captive until he agreed to a twenty percent discount.”

“No.” I fold the program and replace it on the pile. “She wouldn’t have.” I’ve tried to bring Ada back with stories. Since she died, I’ve been telling myself every Ada story I ever knew. But even the true ones just make it clear something’s missing. False ones would be worse. Rewriting. Erasing.

“Are you cold?” my mother asks. I realize I’m shivering.

“No,” I say. “I’m just nervous.”

“To sing?” I can see how it would sound ridiculous. Me of all people. But whatever lurking danger has been following me since Kara’s birth has crawled here, certainly. The delicate balance between my mother and my husband—secrets. The knowledge that what happens to me could happen to Kara a hundredfold if I sing to her. Good and bad.

She could have a better voice, a purer song. And. My fingers find my midriff, walk along the scar, which has been slightly weeping, so I have to dress it again. Beneath my clothes, a thin band of cotton wool. Am I to be ridiculed for worrying that the wound means something worse is coming? I move my fingers to my forehead. It’s enough to drive you mad.

“About you,” I tell my mother. “Wouldn’t you be?”

She smiles. “Oh, definitely.”

But the smile fades. She sits down in the last pew and drums her nails on the space beside her. I hesitate, but follow, and we both watch John at the front of the church, directing people around. There’s something funny about the arrangement behind the altar, but before I can think too much about it, my mother asks, “Don’t you want to know what I’ve been doing all these years?”

“What?”

“You know,
Hello, Mama, I’ve missed you. What on earth have you done to fill the time?
I’ve been waiting for you to ask any one of the sensible questions, but you never do. It’s not your style, I guess.”

“Huh,” I say.

Sara plays with her bottom lip without realizing it and then sees the lipstick on the tips of her fingers. She pinches her lips together to smooth out the shade, and runs a nail along the line of pink and pale, to assure the definition. This is what she pays
attention to as I sit beside her, not answering. I,
the daughter,
a vague notion she has carried in her head.

“Maybe I don’t want to know.” My voice, catching in my throat, sounds husky. “Maybe I have other things on my mind, or maybe I’m just not interested.”

“Oh, you’re interested.” She takes my hands, both of them, just what I wanted, only times two. Too hard. “You’ve always liked to be told scary stories.”

“Come on,” I say. “You live in the city. How scary could it be?”

She tilts back her head to look at the ceiling and her mouth falls open, just a little. Puppet jaws, on a hinge. The inside of her mouth is just as dark pink as her lips, teeth pearlescent, but studded with aluminum fillings. One gold, in the back. Sara sighs, upward.

“You asked me, on the phone,” she said. “About Greta? I mean, talk about your spook stories. Let me tell you something.” My mother rights her neck and I hear a small crick. “About you.”

“Okay,” I say. Sara angles her head and indicates me closer.

“Well, doll.” She used to call me
lalka
, like Ada did. Little doll. I guess I’ve grown up. “You were always looking for the curse.
Always
. Every little bad thing that happened to you, everything you did wrong, you asked me,
Was that it? Was that the curse?
As if taking five dollars out of my purse without asking is the kind of thing that you’d be forced to do by magic.”

“No,” I say. “I don’t remember that.”

“You were a child.” Sara squeezes my fingers so they crush together. “What the hell do you know?”

“What’s your point?”

“Sometimes,” she says, and then stops. There’s a sound up by the sanctuary. “Things happen just because we do them. Not for any other reason.”

The sound comes again.

“What is that?” I ask. But Sara doesn’t answer. She knows. I know.

It starts as a low moan. The keening of a child who is lost in the woods. And then the sound lifts mercifully, a feather on the wind, that same child looking up at the trees to see a familiar face through the leaves. There is an element of sobbing that I can feel in my own chest—the phlegmatic stickiness and heaving—but also something of joy. I feel my body unsettle as though it had been covered with six feet of dirt and then suddenly dusted off. Light as air.

A violinist I recognize from the Lyric orchestra, the assistant concertmaster in fact, stands on a podium dressed in a dark blue gown. She tilts to one side with her instrument cradled under her chin, bobbing back and forth. Her hair, chopped short against her ears, shakes against the movement of her body. If she tilts right, her hair falls left. Beside her sits Rick, looking at her with suspicious eyes and wearing a tuxedo. With tails. I didn’t expect that from him, today, though I knew he would be here. The godfather. Apparently Ada planned something more for him and didn’t tell me. I put a hand over my mouth and bite back a bit of sudden laughter at the seriousness of his dress—I don’t want to interrupt the violinist. She’s practicing an accompaniment to “Ave Maria
.
”

The song is so common that it’s almost a rite of passage for singers—everyone must record an “Ave.” Jazz it up or dress it down. And it’s a rite for musical audiences too, performed so often that people like to pretend the song bores them. Like to think they know the story of it. But they’re usually wrong—ask almost anyone on the street and they’ll tell you the piece is a song of worship, in Latin, when in fact it’s Schubert, and the words are German.

It’s not a prayer. It’s an appeal. A young woman, called the
Lady of the Lake, asks the Virgin Mary for help and peace in a time of war. Families fighting one another, families perishing. And a man who loves the singing lady leaves for battle, realizing he will never hear her voice again. But the lady doesn’t sing for this warrior, she sings for her father, who has declined to fight and has therefore made himself terribly vulnerable.
Hear for a maid a maiden’s prayer. And for a father hear a child.

We haven’t had very many fathers in my family, so maybe I’m not accustomed to them. What I hear is a girl crying for her mother. For a hand that soothed her in the night, and touched her cheek, and disappeared.

I look at Sara. She seems bored, or maybe just distracted.
Where
did
you go?
I do want to ask her.
How on earth
did
you fill the time?
But I think I missed my chance. Maybe I’m not supposed to know. Or maybe it’s not fate, but just the choice I made.
Things happen just because we do them
, she said.
Sometimes.

The violinist reaches the end of the song and nods to Rick, seated beside her at a piano that I’m sure he had brought in especially for the occasion. He’s very particular about what he’ll play on, sometimes going to the trouble of tuning an instrument himself if he’s displeased with a damper or the tension in a wire. The two of them wait for a moment and I can hear them counting, getting into the same rhythm of notes per heartbeat. And then they begin to play together. The piano is the lake water. The violin plays the part of the wind in the trees.

As they run through it, the song begins to feel like a round, or a fugue. Repeating itself only to pick up more steam, to grow and expand. First there was silence, then the violin, and then the piano layered on top. I sway slightly, listening. Because soon the piece will end again, and if it picks back up, I could add my voice. Take the journey a little further.

I feel a bit nauseous in my desire to do so. To sing this song, and every song. To never stop, and damn the consequences.

The Lady of the Lake performs her “Ave Maria” in a woodland cave, and I can feel the forest floor beneath my feet, the soft bed of pine needles and birch leaves dried into a crackling path. I bite my lip and watch Rick’s hands tremble over the keys, the violinist bob and weave like a river wave.
The past, and the future
, I think.
The past and the future.
Ada lying on the hospital floor, already gone while busy people touch and urge her. And Kara, my baby. Is it worse if she caused Ada to fall by being born, child of a curse made well before her reckoning, or is it worse if I let her become part of that birthright so that someday, somehow, she loses something too?

The answer is: both, both. Somehow I am the survivor of both deaths, if I believe all that nonsense that my grandmother told me. If I stand up and do the only thing I’ve ever known how to love completely. If I stand, and sing my appeal.

L
ast night when I was dreaming, I sat beside Greta on a knoll in Poland and we shared a cigarette. A luxury for both: Greta chewed tobacco because the papers were expensive, and the absolute proscription on smoke coming anywhere near my throat has long been a contentious part of my existence. Sara once threw an ashtray at the wall when Ada asked her to take her filthy habit out to the fire escape on a cold day.