Otherwise, I have nothing.
It’s not that I don’t have memories of her. I do—lots of them, considering how young I was when she died. I remember that when there was fresh snow she would send me outside to pack pans with handfuls of it. Once inside we would drizzle maple syrup into the snow-filled pans, watching it harden into amber candy almost instantly, all loops and fragile, sugared filigree, like edible lace. I remember how much she loved to sing to us as she bounced me in the water at the beach off Eastern Prom. I didn’t know how strange this was at the time. Other mothers teach their children to swim. Other mothers bounce their babies in the water, and apply sunscreen to make sure their babies don’t burn, and do all the things that a mother is supposed to do, as outlined in the Parenting section of The Book of Shhh.
But they don’t sing.
I remember that she brought me trays of buttered toast when I was sick and kissed my bruises when I fell, and I remember once when she lifted me to my feet after I fell off my bike and began to rock me in her arms, a woman gasped and said to her, “You should be ashamed of yourself,” and I didn’t understand why, which made me cry harder. After that she comforted me only in private. In public she would just frown and say, “You’re okay, Lena. Get up.”
We used to have dance parties too. My mother called them “sock jams,” because we would roll up the carpets in the living room and put on our thickest socks, and slip and slide along the wooden hallways. Even Rachel joined in, though she always claimed to be too old for baby games. My mom would draw the curtains and wedge pillows under the front and back doors and turn up the music. We laughed so hard I always went to bed with a stomachache.
Eventually, I understood that on our sock-jam nights she’d closed the curtains to prevent us from being seen by passing patrols, that she’d stopped up the doors with pillows so that the neighbors would not report us for playing music and laughing too much, both potential warning signs of the deliria. I understood that she used to tuck my father’s military pin—a silver dagger he had inherited from his own father, which she wore every day on a chain around her neck—beneath the collar of her shirt whenever we left the house, so no one would see it and become suspicious. I understood that all the happiest moments of my childhood were a lie. They were wrong and unsafe and illegal. They were freakish. My mother was freakish, and I’d probably inherited the freakishness from her.
For the first time, really, I wonder what she must have been feeling, thinking, the night she walked out to the cliffs and kept walking, feet pedaling the air. I wonder whether she was scared. I wonder whether she thought of me or Rachel. I wonder whether she was sorry for leaving us behind.
I start thinking about my father, too. I don’t remember him at all, though I have some dim, ancient impression of two warm, rough hands and a large looming face floating above mine, but I think that’s just because my mother kept a framed portrait in her bedroom of my father and me. I was only a few months old and he was holding me, smiling, looking at the camera. But there’s no way I’m remembering for real real. I wasn’t even a year old when he died. Cancer.
The heat is horrible, thick, clotting on the walls. Jenny is rolled over on her back, arms and legs flung open on top of her comforter, breathing silently with her mouth gaping open. Even Grace is fast asleep, murmuring soundlessly into her pillow. The whole room smells like a wet exhalation, skin and tongues and warm milk.
I ease out of bed, already dressed in black jeans and a T-shirt. I didn’t even bother to change into my pajamas. I knew I would never be able to sleep tonight. And earlier in the evening, I’d come to a decision. I was sitting at the dinner table with Carol and Uncle William and Jenny and Grace, while everyone chewed and swallowed in silence, staring blankly at one another, feeling as though the air was weighing down on me, constricting my breath, like two fists squeezing tighter and tighter around a water balloon, when I realized something.
Hana said I didn’t have it in me, but she was wrong.