What Tears Us Apart

Chapter 18



January 1, 2008, Topanga, CA—Leda

LEDA STARTS HER car, the stranger-in-a-strange-land feeling creeping back, as she goes through the motions of reversing then snaking along the hairpin mountain roads of Topanga Canyon. She tries to imagine what she will say to Estella to comfort her. You’ve beaten it before, she’ll say, you’ll beat it again. You’ll be okay, she’ll say. You’ve got the best doctors, the means... You are so lucky, you don’t even know.

Her hands curl like a skeleton’s on the steering wheel. She still hasn’t heard from Ita. Any thought of him wrings her stomach like an ice-cold washcloth. She pictures him bleeding, moaning in pain and almost veers off a cliff. But she can’t stop—she pictures the children cowering under flames, Ita’s dead body on a pyre, until a wave of sickness brings a cold sweat to her brow. When she reaches the ocean, all she sees is Ita’s face as the police dragged her away—swollen and pulpy like a trampled orchard plum.

Leda implores the sea, the sky above. Please, please, please let him be okay.

She stabs the button to lower her window, begging the cold winter air to whip away her thoughts. He’s a doctor, he can mend himself. Or maybe the doctors at the clinic can.

And he has the envelope I gave him. They will be okay.

It’s ten hours later in Kibera. Nighttime. If he hasn’t called, it’s because he can’t charge his phone, but he’s okay. Or he doesn’t want to talk to you.

Leda bites her lip.

Tears sting her eyes, blurring her vision of the highway. In any case, I will tell Estella nothing. Leda has to pull it together, push Ita from her mind somehow. There would be no point in telling her mother anything, anything that could be wielded against her later, to bribe her, hurt her.

As if she’ll ask.

Leda sniffs and shakes her head as she flies down the road through the gray mist. With the holiday, there’s less traffic than she’s ever seen. The emptiness feels appropriate, but it means she will arrive all the quicker. She puts a hand on her queasy stomach.

She’s been through cancer with her mother before, five years ago. It involved a lot of secrecy and awkward conversations and exhaustion on both their parts. Leda could never say whatever it was her mother wanted to hear, which she should have long ago realized was nothing.

Just before the bend up ahead, there’s a glimpse of the house, towering over the sea, imposing palm trees adjacent to imposing glass. Then, immediately the house is blocked by the massive wall and gate.

Leda pulls up in front of the gate. She still has the opener, only because Estella isn’t much of a greeter. The door swings open and there it is. The silent house of glass and sea.

No lights are on. Just the gray mist trying to get inside. Leda pulls her car into the driveway and parks. When she tries the front door, it’s locked. Taking a deep breath, trying to ignore her shaking hands, she knocks, lightly. She waits but when no answer comes she knows she’s not meant to knock again.

She turns the key in the lock. Inside, the house is quiet, the hum of central air and nothing else.

“Mother?” she calls up the stairs.

“I’ll be down in a moment.” Estella code for I am not ready to see you yet.

Leda puts her key on the marble table and looks out the glass at the careful hedges, the empty yard, then back inside, down at the marble floor. But when she closes her eyes, all she sees is fire and smoke and screaming women and the shuddering bodies of children too scared to cry. She sees the red dust smeared across her bare stomach, Chege’s hands smearing the color across her thighs like war paint. His breath hot and fast, the screams that seared her throat—

“Hello,” Estella says.

Snapped back, she answers, “Hello.”

Leda looks down as Estella descends the stairs and passes her in the foyer, mimicking her mother’s aversion to eye contact. Leda’s not surprised to see Estella’s hair freshly dyed red, her skin powdered, her eyebrows drawn. As she trails her mother’s silk robe to the kitchen, she keeps the flashbacks at bay by cataloguing the house floating past. Velvet drapery in beige, vases with swirling Asian designs she traced with her fingers as a child, wallpaper embedded with gold thread, furniture oiled a dark cherry.

There’s not a single piece of evidence of Leda’s childhood. No framed photos, no handmade art projects. No trace of anything she ever chose, her preferences, her existence.

“So, there’s not a lot more to say, I’m afraid.” Estella sighs and sags into a chair at one end of the long polished table. Leda notices how she winces, how her fingers grip the edge of the wood.

“What do the doctors say?”

“I told you. It’s back. I always figured it was coming back.”

“Okay. So then what’s the plan? The doctors’, I mean.”

“No plan.” This time Estella’s eyes nearly catch Leda’s. But, instead, they come to rest on her jaw, on her scar. “Just time to pay the piper.”

Leda sighs, in reflex, but the air hiccups halfway. She hadn’t really considered her mother dying. Not really. Not at all. She feels dizzy. “Wait. What are you talking about?”

“One kidney, Leda,” she snaps. “If it’s shot, there’s not much else they can do. Surgery is pretty much it for renal cancer. You remember. Radiation, targeted therapy—this time it would just be to prolong or palliate.” Estella looks exhausted from the effort.

“Then can’t you get a new kidney? A transplant?”

“Not if the cancer has spread.”

“Has it?”

“We don’t know yet. That’s why I told you you didn’t need to come over here.”

The words sizzle like acid on Leda’s face, spit with such force she flinches.

“Okay, I’ll go.”

Estella sighs. She puts both hands on the table, stares at them.

Leda doesn’t move. She’s not sure what to do. But there it is—the sinking, itchy feeling her mother’s presence inevitably arouses, turning Leda back into a timid, scurrying child. Is she silently willing her to leave?

“The kidney donor list doesn’t cater to old ladies with cancer. Even rich ones, apparently. My doctor asked if I had any loved ones.”

Leda wonders briefly if she will throw up. Everything about the moment makes her skin prickle just like it does before she vomits. Loved ones. What an ironic turn of phrase.

“Well, I suppose I have my answer,” Estella bites out. “Not that I asked, mind you.”

“No, you didn’t. Maybe give me a minute to—”

“Take all the time you need.” Estella jumps to her feet. Too fast, though, and she wobbles. The color drains from her face and Leda steps forward, her arms open. Estella puts out both hands to prevent her daughter from coming closer. “Well, maybe not that much time.”

“That’s not funny,” Leda says.

Estella shakes her head. “No,” she says as she trudges past Leda out through the kitchen archway. “It’s not.”

Alone in the kitchen, it’s Leda’s turn to slump into a chair, grip the table’s edge and feel herself tremble.

Time to pay the piper.

She looks around the kitchen, remembering how Estella had looked at her scar when she’d said it. Could her mother regret anything? In Leda’s opinion, Estella wasn’t cruel by intention, more by complete indifference. Would it be worse or better if her mother had done all those horrible things with intent?

Leda looks to the stove. They never spend much time in the kitchen, neither she nor Estella, because it’s inevitable that eyes will drift to stare. To remember.

She drops her head into her hands, but it’s too late. The memory always comes the same way, floating on the sound of a little girl humming “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” She’s eight years old, barely the height of the counter. Estella’s been away for days, having left with a man. Leda’s hungry, boiling water for macaroni and cheese. One minute she’s singing, then as she reaches for the handle on the pot, tipping its contents, her song turns to screaming....

In the empty kitchen, Leda strokes the scar on her cheek, turns her head away from the stove.

She was unconscious by the time her mother returned, later that day. They sped to the hospital in an ambulance, Estella whispering in her ear. Leda told the social worker what her mother had coached her to say: her mother was home when it happened, with a migraine, sleeping upstairs. And Leda hadn’t screamed, hadn’t wanted to wake her.

But she had screamed.

Leda looks at her hands on the table.

For a long time, she’s been able to see the memory through adult eyes, see Estella for what she is.

It isn’t the only memory, maybe not even the worst. There was the day Estella passed out before noon and dropped her glass of vodka, and Leda ran right through the shattered glass in bare feet only to get smacked when her mother saw the blood on the hardwood floor. There was the time Estella locked her in her room when one of her boyfriends had come over, forgetting about her for two days, two whole days without food or water. There were the nights Estella shut herself in her own room before Leda got home from school, leaving her to fend for herself—so many instances it was hard to count them.

Looking around the house, listening to the echoing memories, Leda can’t help but ask herself, Is this the kind of mother you give a kidney to?