Her mother was mouth-breathing, staring. “I’m not angry with you,” she said. “I am…” She shook her head. “I knew this would happen. No matter how careful I was, I knew that someday this would happen.”
“That what would happen? That I’d come home and want to talk to you, and be honest, and be part of the two of us again? Because that’s what I’m doing.”
“I knew it the way I know my own name.”
“What is your name? Maybe let’s start with that. Will you come sit in the kitchen with me?”
Her mother shook her head again. “I’m getting used to being alone. I’d forgotten how hard it is. It’s very hard, even harder this time, much harder — you brought me so much joy. But it’s not impossible to relinquish desire. I’m learning it again. I’m making progress.”
“So, what, I’m supposed to leave now? That’s what you want?”
“You already left.”
“Yeah, well, hey, but I came back, too, didn’t I?”
“Out of duty,” her mother said. “Or out of pity. Or because you’re angry. I’m not blaming you, Purity. I’m telling you that I will be all right without you. Everything we have is temporary, the joy, the suffering, everything. I had the joy of experiencing your goodness for a very long time. It was enough. I have no right to ask for more.”
“Mom. Stop talking like that. I need you in my life. You’re the most important person in the world to me. I need you to stop being Buddhist and try to have an adult conversation with me.”
“Or else what?” Her mother smiled faintly. “You’ll leave again?”
“Or else, I don’t know, I’m going to pull your hair and scratch you.”
Her mother’s failure to be amused was nothing new. “I’m no longer so afraid of you leaving,” she said. “For a long time, the prospect was like death to me. But it’s not death. At a certain point, trying to hold on to you became the real death.”
Pip sighed. “OK, frankly — you calling me pussycat, me not being able to end a phone call with you, I’d be happy to retire all that. I’m a lot older than I used to be. You wouldn’t believe how much older. But don’t you want to know what I’m like now? Don’t you want to know the person I’ve turned into? It’s the same old me but also not. I mean, aren’t I interesting to you? You’re still interesting to me.”
Her mother turned her head and gave her an empty look. “What kind of person are you now?”
“I don’t know. I have a real boyfriend — that’s one thing. I’m kind of in love with him.”
“That’s nice.”
“OK, another thing. A big thing. I know what your real name is.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Will you say it for me?”
“No. Never.”
“You have to say it. You have to tell me everything, because I’m your daughter and I can’t be in the same room with you if all we do is lie.”
Her mother stood up gracefully, with her Endeavor-perfected limberness, but her head hit the shampoo basket and knocked a bottle to the shower floor. She threw herself angrily out of the stall, stumbled on Pip, and ran from the bathroom.
“Mom!” Pip said, chasing her.
“I want nothing to do with that part of you.”
“Which part of me?”
Her mother spun around. Her face was pure torment. “Get out! Get out! Leave me alone! Both of you! For the love of God, please just leave me alone!”
Pip watched, horrified, as the person who now seemed entirely Anabel fell onto her bed and yanked the comforter over her head and lay there rocking herself, crying full-throatedly in pain. Pip had expected difficulty, but this was extreme by any measure. She went to the kitchen and knocked back a glass of wine. Then she returned to the bed and pulled the comforter away, lay down behind her mother and put her arms around her. She buried her face in her mother’s thick hair and breathed in her smell, the most distinct of all smells, the smell that there was nothing like. The brown dress’s cotton was soft from a hundred washings. Slowly her mother’s crying subsided into whimpers. Rain pattered on the sleeping-porch roof.
“I’m sorry,” Pip said. “I’m sorry I can’t just leave, I know it’s hard. But you created me and now you have to deal with me. That’s my purpose. I’m your reality.”
Her mother said nothing.
Both of you?
Pip lowered her voice to a whisper. “Do you still love him?”
She felt her mother stiffen.
“I think he still loves you.”
Her mother took a sharp breath and didn’t let it out.
“So there’s got to be a way to move on,” Pip said. “There’s got to be a way to forgive and move on. I’m not leaving until you do.”
* * *
How she got the story out of her mother, the next morning, was by letting her believe that Tom had told her his version of it; she figured, correctly, that her mother would find this intolerable. Her mother omitted the details of her conception, saying only that it had occurred the very last time she’d seen Tom, but she was surprisingly calm and articulate about other details. Pip’s actual birthday was February 24, not July 11. She’d been delivered naturally, by a midwife, in a safe house in Riverside, California. Until she was two, she and her mother had lived in Bakersfield, where her mother cleaned hotel rooms for a living. Then, by bad luck (because Bakersfield was really nowhere), her mother ran into a college friend who asked too many questions. A new friend from the women’s shelter knew of a cabin for rent in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and there they moved.
“I heard terrible stories in the shelters and safe houses,” her mother said. “So many women who were punching bags. So many stories of men whose idea of love was stalking and stabbing their ex-wives. I should have felt guilty about misrepresenting myself, but I didn’t. Men’s emotional cruelty can be every bit as painful as physical abuse. My father was cruel and my husband was crueler.”
“Really,” Pip said.
“Yes, really. I told him it would kill me if he ever took money from my father, and he did it. Did it specifically to hurt me. He slept with my best friend to hurt me. He took my advice and encouragement and used it to make a career for himself, and then, when I was struggling with my own career, he abandoned me. You’re only young once, and I gave him my youth because I believed his promises, and then, when I wasn’t young anymore, he broke his promises. And I knew it all along. I knew he would betray me. I told him all along, but it didn’t stop him from making promises to me, which I believed because I was weak. I really was like the other women in the shelters.”
Pip crossed her arms prosecutorially. “And so it seemed OK to you to have his baby without telling him. That seemed like the morally right thing to do.”
“He knew I wanted a baby.”
“But why his? Why not some random sperm donor’s?”
“Because I keep my promises. I promised him I’d be his forever. He could break his promise, but I wasn’t going to break mine. We were meant to have a baby, and we did. And then, right away, you were everything to me. You have to believe me that I stopped caring who your father was.”
“I don’t believe you. You had some sort of a moral competition going. Who’s better at keeping promises.”
“Things had become so violent and dirty between us. I wanted something purely good to come of it. And something did. You did.”
“I am far from purely good.”
“No one’s really perfect. But to me you were perfect.”
This seemed to Pip the right moment to bring up the money, by way of demonstrating her imperfection. She told the story of her visit to Wichita and explained that her mother needed to be in touch with Mr. Navarre. The way her mother shook her head in response was more bewildered than adamant.