“What?” I asked. But Ada only shook her head.
“Never you mind, child,” she said. “We should celebrate.”
And so we did.
7
Kara and I walk through the streets of North Chicago and I point things out to her that she probably cannot see. She’s almost completely invisible in her winter clothes — out of reach of wind and dirt and water and snow — and yet everything touches her. When a bird skims the air above her, suddenly flight is possible. When she smells bus exhaust, the world loses its semblance of perfect cleanliness. Every time I stroke her cheek, she remembers tenderness.
My stitches feel better than I had expected — much better, considering that I have an extra six pounds attached to my chest. But the day is undeniably frigid, sleet sticking against my coat and wetting my hair, and when I turn the corner and see we’re at the end of our journey’s first leg, I want to laugh with happiness. Across the street is a florist’s shop where I sometimes order bouquets for dinner parties. They do nice window displays — right now, big puffs of hothouse hydrangeas to simulate snowballs and frozen hillsides, as if to taunt the real winter landscape, which is spitting mad. The shop is always warm inside, and they have a counter where you can sit and order coffee or tea while your flowers are being assembled. They’ll do something nice for Ada, I know. It’s stupid to leave flowers in the cemetery to wilt and freeze, but going without them seems callous to me. Presentation and all that. I look in both directions down the street and begin to pick my way across.
I’m almost at the sidewalk when a stylish woman emerges from the florist’s door cradling a tall bouquet of peonies and lilies. Various shades of pink and white and yellow, which she’s adjusting with her thumb when she loses traction on a patch of ice.
The woman is wearing inadvisable heels — she was probably planning to walk all of two paces before hailing a taxi — and one toe slips forward while the other slips back. I suck in a breath and hold out my hand, but I’m too far away to help. And do I really want to? Would I really have offered myself to grab if I’d been closer? I pull my hand back and shrink into myself, hugging Kara close.
“Oh,” the woman gasps.
She skids her feet around and then falls hard on both knees, the flowers spilling out of their wrappings in front of her.
And she screams.
Wherever she thought she was going — a party, an office building — she didn’t expect to make a noise like that on her way. The woman’s voice is so shrill that every pedestrian within a block turns to see what the commotion is. But what I hear mostly — what I cannot stop hearing — is the crack of her kneecaps. A sickening crush, palpable as footsteps on glass. I turn back and walk with purpose to the other side of the street and keep going. Tell myself I imagined it; she couldn’t have been hurt that badly. People slip on the ice all the time. But a few blocks later, hurrying in the opposite direction with my eyes down, I hear the wail of a siren approaching from somewhere to take the woman away.
Just a little farther, I think. Almost there. I rush past coffee shops, antique stores with furniture peeking through the windows. But I can’t go fast enough to calm down my frantic breathing.
Wounds have their own gravity — isn’t that what I was telling myself before? That injury draws further injury, and a person, once damaged, is never safe. I had believed, though, that the gravity was localized. Attached to its object. Kara murmels against my chest, sucking intermittently on the strap of her carrier, and I hold her closer, imagining an underground rumbling coming from the direction of the accident. A great wrenching moan as the street rips open. Buildings falling away into nothingness. People struck by bricks and swallowed by the void. Even though I know it’s not real, a large handful of my heart believes that if I look back, I’ll see destruction barreling down the road. That it’s only by averting my eyes that I can keep us both from being consumed.
St. Boniface Cemetery is surrounded by high walls, situated on the liminal edge between two neighborhoods — the wealthy one I’ve just passed through and the penniless one on the other side. In death they move closer and finally meet, the rich and poor alike. I stop when I reach the fence and rest my hand lightly against it, as if this were home base in some cosmic game of tag. I think of all the things Baba Ada saved me from, how close she hewed to me when I came to her crying after school or after a bad audition, any little injury. The cemetery is full of statues of saints, robed figures who peer out at me from their veils of stone and snow. I walk a few more paces to the gate, trying to ignore the nest of anxieties beneath my lungs.
I have no flowers after all, just a child half sleeping, but it’s Ada I’m here to see. She won’t be angry about something so petty. She’ll take me in her arms, put her hand to my cheek. That’s what she always used to do. Listen to my troubles. Tell me a story.
In the distance I hear some scratching, shuffling steps, but there’s no one in sight. Maybe it’s a stray dog, or a teenager avoiding school. The statues are perfectly silent, as statues tend to be. The snow has picked up, still wet, hitting hard against my skin, and I curl my fingers around one of the bars on the gate, the iron freezing even through my gloves. Somehow, I can’t bring myself to step inside. Ridiculous. What am I afraid of?
The saints, concrete and marble alike, stand still and wait for me, eyes hidden under hoods. I shiver and turn away.
All day I’ve been trying to save Kara, save myself from danger. A curse. The pressure of my secrets and fears building up inside me to a boiling point. Yet this is where I brought my child: not somewhere safe, but to a graveyard, a mausoleum. Maybe I hoped the silence would make me feel at home. This isn’t where my baba is, though, not really. Ada hated dead things. Or at least that was my impression. She would never talk about them as they really were. She had a taste for the living, or perhaps the living dead.
I remember. It was, after all, a taste I came to share.
A da earned our keep doing alterations at the Marshall Field’s annex store on East Washington. When she arrived in Chicago in 1938 it was a good job, better than doing tit and tat as a home seamstress, and certainly a vast improvement over anything connected to the city’s infamous slaughterhouses, where her cousin Freddie worked until they closed down or until he died — I’ve never been sure which.
To me the work at Marshall Field’s always seemed beneath my babenka, who herself wore clothes tailored to make her look like a lady, with precision pleats and hidden darts. None of the other women Ada worked with seemed to know who Greta was, and they took liberties with my baba that I didn’t think anyone had the right to: they laughed with her, they scolded her, sometimes they told her what to do.
Basia was my grandmother’s particular friend, the only one who ever came to our home. They drank tea out of our two good cups and generally chased me away to discuss “things a child wouldn’t understand.” So Basia put it.
Not long after the day Ada rescued me from my exile of painted nails, Basia sat in our kitchen listening to me go on about Greta’s powers. She turned to Ada and frowned.
“What nonsense are you filling this girl’s head with?”
I actually gasped, a terrible piece of theatricality.
“Oh, lalka.” Ada waved her hand at me. “Go to your room. Give us some time.”
“Baba—”
“Go on.” She set down her teacup. “I mean this.”
As I stalked out the door to what felt like another banishment, I heard her say to Basia: “. can’t know what she’ll make of it.”