Look at your daughter.
There was a long period after they died when I could call them up; I could feel like they were holding me in bed. I was able to do this most easily with sleeping pills. When I went to the drugstore with Gosia, she would let me select some off the rack, valerian and passionflower. Vials with beautiful moonlight blooms. Like a scientist, I would make little concoctions out of them, mixing three or more tinctures in one. I used them at night, but sometimes I would drink them very early in the morning to go back to sleep. When I was fifteen and still waking up screaming in the night, Gosia gave me Ambien.
The Ambien helped, but then the early evenings became worse. You would think the middle of the night would always be the worst, the witching hours, the hours I’d found them dead, but strangely these became the most peaceful hours for me. In any case, the better the sleep, the worse the morning. If I slept soundly, in the morning came the job of reminding myself: Your parents are dead. Here is how they died. You are all alone.
—She’s very sick, they kept saying. As though I had the flu. I didn’t feel sick. I felt light. I was hemorrhaging. They ran bags of blood into the room.
Don’t ask men how their day was. If they are tired and look unhappy, say, Oh, too bad, at the very most.
* * *
I WILL HAVE THESE FEW minutes with you, they said to me, before they have to take me into the white room.
Look at your daughter.
The past was everything to me. For that reason, though not that one alone, I don’t want you to have one. Just these words, a small guide. Here is what will happen. I will watch you play soccer on an emerald field at a boarding school that is more splendid than the one where Big Sky will send his children. You will be running down that field and everyone—other parents, younger siblings, the opposing team’s coach—will be transfixed by you, by your long tan legs, by the winner’s gleam in your eye, by your speed and hair and clavicle. You will be faster than the rest. Having come from nowhere, you will be more surely heading somewhere. You will always sleep on freshly laundered beds. You will eat wedges of lemon cake on English country estates and drink iced tea with woolly leaves of mint. You will vacation in the best places, not just the good names but places even the very wealthy barely know about. You will have enough money for most of your lifetime. You won’t outrun it, as I did.
My mother left me all her jewelry. She left it for me in her boxes of hair color, which she hid all over the house. Clairol and Wella and some old stained boxes of Féria from Harmon Cosmetics. There were thick gold chains with crucifixes and emerald rings, ruby and platinum bracelets, and the famous thirty-two-diamond ring, which we used to count together, all the diamonds. Later I learned they were just chips. And not very clear. There were also, I remembered, the little rosebud earrings that Alice had, too. I think that was the part that made me feel for my mother the most. That my father bought her and his mistress the same little rosebud earrings. Perhaps they had been on sale. Two for the price of one.
The whole bounty wasn’t worth too much, but she used to tell me that she’d come back from the grave and bite my feet if I sold it. I didn’t sell it. You may, if you wish. I don’t care if you keep it or not, if you wear it around or never do.
My mother was too much for me and she didn’t even live past my tenth year. I couldn’t stop thinking about all of her things. All the books she read at the town pool, wimpled from the wetness of my dripping hands when I went to hug her. Romance novels with tiny print crowding the pages. The times we went to Amazing Savings. Cartons of cheap things in dusty plastic packaging. Tulips, God, how my mother loved her tulips, and her copper pots. I polished them for months after she died, until the house was sold. Gosia would have let me keep them, anything I wanted, but in the end what I wanted was all of it gone.
Look at her. Your daughter.
They wiped you off and brought you to my breast. You felt vaguely amphibian. I didn’t want to look at you yet. I wanted to savor the feeling. I wanted to delay the gratification because I knew I would keep living until I got it.
They would need to take you away, put you in an incubator and heat you. They were going to take me away, too. We were going in opposite directions. I want to tell you how bad that was for me. But I can’t describe it.
They said, Five minutes, take this time. You should have this time.
Finally I looked at you. And I gasped because I saw that you were her. You were the girl in all of my dreams. You were on the Grecian seaside looking out of portholes, you were in the fast-food parking lot waiting for me to come back. You were two and three and four and five. You were ten. You had been there since the beginning. And since the beginning someone has been trying to take you away.
I told the nurse closest to me that I wanted everybody out of the room. I didn’t want Alice to come in, though at that point they would have let her. I’d been waiting for a long time to meet the daughter of my father’s mistress. And I didn’t hate her. I loved her. But this hard life of mine was not meant to lead me to Alice. I didn’t come here for her. I came for you.
I waited until they were all gone and then I took your body in my hands and held you to my chest. I wanted to put you back inside of me. I ran my finger down the perfect slope of your nose and cried out the way I had after that first date with Big Sky. That primal, unlivable ecstasy. But this time the love was real.
I could already see you wouldn’t need much from anyone. Your mouth rooted around for seconds before your lips sealed around my nipple. Then your eyes slipped open and you looked at me. Your eyes! You have the teal eyes of a mermaid. Your face is indisputably stunning. Nobody will be able to look away from you. The way that I could not look away from you. Now that I’d seen you, I couldn’t bear never having you in front of me.
* * *
NO MATTER WHAT, AT SOME point I will not be there. I see you in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. You are getting out of the Dodge Stratus and cupping your hands over your eyes. You’re looking for me. I know I am here and you are there but still I strain my eyes trying to see inside the store, thinking there is no way I left you in the car. I wouldn’t do that. If I were there.
Please go into the store, I think. Go into the store and ask for me. Tell them I’m your mother. Tell them you can’t go to anyone else, even if I’m dead. You can eat some food if they give it to you, but you can’t go home with any of them. I go inside your ear and whisper, Not even Alice.
I have told you many things, but I have this other memory, it is the best one I have. I was five or six and sleeping in my parents’ bed, on the sheets with the print of the big fat cat. My mother didn’t like cats so I don’t know why she bought the sheets, probably they were on sale at Marshalls. I was sleeping in a butter-yellow dress with lace trim and I was very tan; we had just come back from Italy where I was outside in the sun all day with the boys and the farmers and the little goats and I suppose the most important part of this story is that I don’t have an actual memory of it; all I have is a picture. My mother took the photograph, with her cheap but reliable Minolta. Probably it is the early morning and she thought I looked beautiful. I did, with my dark hair about my face and my pink lips lightly parted and my smooth cheeks. Besides the jewelry and some of her finer dresses, the shower caps and soaps from hotels, and all of the good handbags he bought her, that was the only other item I kept from her things. That she kept it, that she took the photograph at all, was the thing that sustained me for so long. The past, you see, was all I had.