“I don’t know,” she says.
“Why’s that?”
She thinks about it. “In the last year, she’s called. Maybe once or twice. But then I didn’t call back, and she didn’t want to be a bother. So she let it go.”
But she says she wonders. She says the thought has crossed her mind a number of times. What did people think when her birthday passed. When she wasn’t at Thanksgiving dinner. She wonders if people are looking for her. If they realize she’s gone. “I wonder if the police are involved or if it’s just gossip. Did I lose my job to another teacher? Was my apartment taken from me when I didn’t pay the rent?”
I tell her that I don’t know. Maybe. But does it matter anyway? It’s not like she can go home. It’s not like she’ll ever return to that job, that apartment. “But she loves you,” I say. “Your mother.”
“Sure,” she says. “She’s my mother.” And then she tells me about her.
“My mother is an only child,” she says. “She grew up in Gloucestershire, in this sleepy little village with old stone cottages, the ones with the steep sloping roofs, with homes that are hundreds of years old. It’s where my grandparents live. Theirs is nothing special, an outdated cottage with so much clutter it always drove me crazy. My grandmother is a pack rat, my grandfather the kind of man who will be drinking beer until he’s a hundred and two. He reeks of it, in an endearing sort of way—his kisses are always slobbery kisses that taste of beer. They’re your typical grandparents—she can bake like no one else in the world, he has hours and hours of fascinating stories about fighting in the war. My grandmother writes me letters, these long letters on sheets of notebook paper, with the most perfect penmanship, this fluent cursive that dances on the page, and in the summer she slips in pressed flowers from a climbing hydrangea I always adored, this amazing vine that’s climbed along the stone wall and now covers the roof of her home.”
She tells me that her mother used to sing “Lavender’s Blue” to her when she was a kid. I’ve never heard of it. I tell her that.
She remembers growing up with her sister, a game of hide-and-seek. After her sister closed her eyes and counted to twenty, she disappeared into her bedroom and put some headphones on. “I was in a closet,” she tells me. “A small, cramped linen closet. Just waiting for her to find me.” She says she sat there for over an hour. She was four years old.
It was her mother who found her in the end, who searched the house from top to bottom when she finally noticed Mia was missing. She remembers the squeak of that closet door sliding open and she, on the floor, half asleep. She remembers her mother’s eyes, deeply apologetic, and the way she cradled her on the floor, saying over and over again, “You’re my good girl, Mia,” letting her mind wonder about that which wasn’t said.
She remembers that her sister was hardly reprimanded. “She had to apologize,” she tells me, “which she did. Albeit like a snob.” She remembers, even at the age of four, wondering what the advantage was of being good. But she wanted to be good. That’s what she tells me. She tried hard to be the good girl.
She says that when she was the only one at home, her sister at school or playing, and her father out, she and her mother would share afternoon tea. “It was our secret,” she says. “She’d warm apple cider for me, and brew herself a cup of tea that she kept hidden for this. We’d share a PB and J that she sliced to finger sandwiches. We’d drink with pinkies raised, and call each other names like dearie and love, and she’d tell me all about life in this magical British kingdom, as if princesses and princes roamed freely down every cobblestone street.”
But she says that her father hated it there. He forced her mother to assimilate. He forced her to become American. To lose any sense of her own culture. She tells me that it’s called imperialism: a relationship based on dominance and subordination.
She grimaces when she says her father’s name. I don’t think she means to. I don’t think she knows she’s doing it, but she does. I think her parents’ relationship isn’t the only imperialistic one.
It’s dark outside, pitch-black without the moon. The truck’s interior lights help us see, but still, there’s just the contour of her skin, the reflection of light off her eyes. She says, “She’s nearly devoid of her English upbringing, having been in the United States since she was younger than me. My father made her stop using words like lorry and lift and flat in place of truck and elevator and apartment. I don’t know when it happened, when chips became French fries to her or when she stopped slipping the word bloody into angry snipes, but somewhere over the course of my childhood it happened.”