I find myself holding my breath. If anyone knows, it’s Sara. If anyone can tell me what’s happening. What comes next. But she doesn’t answer me — at least, not exactly. Her voice, when it comes, is distant and distracted.
“Did you say you were at the Green Mill?”
“Nearby. I was going to visit Baba Ada’s grave.” I’m talking as much to myself as to my mother now. “What a stupid idea that was. No wonder I’m being so morbid. But I can’t shake it. This feeling that something even worse is coming.”
Another silence. Another inhalation. My hackles are raised, and I laugh, not a pleasant sound.
“I almost died having the baby,” I say. “And then Ada. ” I let myself trail off. “You know. Don’t make me say it.”
“I didn’t know anything.” Sara is cold. “No one told me anything.” The temperature around me seems to drop, complicit with her. “Where is she? Not in Graceland, I hope. She hated that place. It’s tacky.”
“St. Boniface,” I whisper. And then, in my own defense, weakly: “I was unconscious. I didn’t know who was called.”
“The hell,” she says. I hear her breathing. Then her voice drips once more into my ear. “I’ll see you on Tuesday. You and the baby.”
My phone beeps as the call is dropped.
I barely remember leaving the bookstore. What I do recall next is being in a cab and asking the driver to stop a few blocks from our apartment because I need to walk and clear my head a bit. My whole body feels shaken — literally shaken, as if some giant pair of hands has picked me up and rattled me around. I stop in a neighborhood café and order a glass of wine, drinking it too fast as the eyes of the other patrons bore into me, taking in the baby.
The wine laps back and forth inside me, nauseous, sweet. Heavy, salted foods are stacked under the counter, hanging off the walls. Fat of the goose. Marbled meat of the pig. Pungent cheese dripping from a blood-red rind. I want to be calm, sniff indifferently at the mozzarella and the duck confit. All my favorite foods, and John’s too. But the richness just makes me sick — one more indignity visited upon my body. And that makes me angry. I set down my glass and skid towards home as quickly as I can.
It’s dark by the time I arrive, and John is in the living room, lying on the couch. As he reads he rubs his feet together, an idle gesture, the wool socks scratching against one another. Velcro, Velcro, tiny fibers linking and wrenching apart. He sees me over the top of his book, and he smiles.
“You bastard,” I say. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
He is momentarily too shocked to speak, and I hear this beat, this pause, and I take it.
“You had my phone.” I lift Kara out of the carrier on my chest and set her down in a car seat on the floor, which we’ve been using as a makeshift bed. “For days, I think. So it’s not as though you didn’t have her number.”
“Her?” John has gained enough composure to be dubious of my choice of pronoun. It occurs to me that we may be about to have two different fights, but that’s all the more reason to push my advantage. I don’t know if I’m ready to be honest. But I’m ready to be angry.
“What were you thinking? What kind of a person are you? You just let her go on living, thinking everything was fine, when her mother had died? Did you think that would be better?”
So far John has not moved off the couch. What he’s ready for is not yet clear. He lies back, his neck on the sofa arm and his head hanging off into nothing. I tear off my coat, kick both shoes across the room away from the baby, throw my unwound scarf in front of me, where it flutters ineffectually and falls into a heap. John sits up and leans his elbows on his knees.
“So,” he says, “did you go to the cemetery after all?”
“Shut up.” My voice is shaking, and it feels wonderful. “You want something good? You always want something good. But some things are just bad, and you can’t talk your way out of them. You can’t tell a little lie to make the world look the way you wish it did.”
“Who are we talking about now?”
“We are talking about you.” I reach down into my lungs for the words, giving them enough force to reach back fifty rows in a theater. That’s something a good singer will practice for years, being able to intone while still projecting, making yourself heard but still making yourself clear. “Your little stories. Telling me Ada was fine. Telling my mother. ”
John walks across the room as I talk and puts his face very close to mine. Here it comes, I think. He’s right next to my mouth, close enough to bite it and take a piece out. For a second I wonder if he might kiss me. He sniffs.
“I think,” he says, “that you’ve been drinking. You always get like this.” He picks up Kara, turns a slow circle while holding her above his head and smiling. Then he looks back at me. “Unreasonable.”
He walks to the kitchen and I can hear him take out a bottle of formula that we have on hand in case we want to go out to eat and have a drink, just relax together. Something untarnished for the baby. With her in his arms, he goes into the bedroom and gently, so as not to scare her, closes the door.
We are still frightened, then. Both of us.
10
Everything about me depends on Greta. That’s what Ada told me, what she needed to be true. With every word and every flick of the wrist, she made me into something as fragile and hard as cut glass. A lens, through which she could see the world she wanted.
“You are the finest creature yet born,” she said to me each morning. We had a rituaclass="underline" Baba Ada woke me up at seven, and the first thing she did was brush my hair. Light spilling through the curtains in the summer, a soft lamp turned on to help us see in the winter, when the sun was barely up by the time she cracked open the door. My baba Ada sat on the edge of my bed and wrapped the comforter around me, drawing me towards her and kissing the top of my head.
“You are my golden girl, złota moja, lalka.”
The brush was brown wood, with many hard bristles, like a horse brush. It brought me into my body. My first sensation on any given day was the sudden sharp pressure of those bristles on my scalp, and the slow tugging that followed them. I let my head fall to the side Ada was brushing, and she tilted me straight with two fingers on my chin.
“You’re growing so beautiful. Every day.”
She said this to me when I was three, four, five; she said it to me on my fifteenth birthday, when I lay in bed with my colt legs tucked under me. At seventeen I decided the routine left no room for my personal expression and began sleeping naked. It made no difference. In fact, my baba never even mentioned it. She came into my room and brushed my hair a hundred strokes, then stood me up on bare and wobbling knees and led me to the closet to choose between my dresses.
“Before me,” Ada told me, “Greta was lonely for a daughter. And when I was born she wept for ten days. As I grew up, she brushed my hair every morning to spin it into silk, and to teach me how to someday brush your hair for you. She understood what a treasure you would be. She dreamed of you even though she had to wake up every morning into a world without you.”
The night before Kara was born — not that I knew it, then — I lay in bed with the covers pulled up to my knees and chatted with her through my skin. I wanted to prepare her for coming into the world, explain that I would be gone sometimes for tours but that someone would always be at home to take care of her. I told her that she would resent the way adults treasured her childhood, would always be indignantly trying to explain that her life was difficult, too, and could we please just acknowledge that?