“What do you mean?” Ada sat down beside her, noting the worry lines etched into her forehead.
“There were men here this morning. They told me that my daughter is a wanted criminal.”
Hearing the word criminal from her mother’s mouth made Ada wince. Her mother had an idea of what she did, of course. Nyah was no fool. But the topic had never been broached before.
“Were they police?” Ada asked.
Nyah shook her head. “They wore suits. Their badges said Hemopath Protection.”
Ada’s stomach turned over. How had they found her mother? Were they following her? She stood up and crossed to the window, half expecting their black cars to be on the street waiting. The street was empty.
“What did they ask you?” she demanded.
“Do not speak to your mother like that,” Nyah said. She went into the kitchen and pulled a brass pan from the cupboard with a loud clatter.
Ada’s mother knew she was a songsmith. She knew what she was capable of, and that iron was anathema to her, but they never talked about it. It was just something that existed wordlessly between them. When Nyah had moved from their old one-bedroom apartment to the newly furnished one that Ada had rented, she did not once ask where the new wealth had come from. Without a word of discussion, she had left behind everything she owned that contained even a speck of iron—including her cast-iron pans and the iron-hinged trunk that had carried all of her and her husband’s possessions into this new country.
Ada had seen the loss like a shadow on her mother’s features, one that had faded over the years but never dissipated completely.
“Mama, please. What did you tell them?” Ada tried to keep her voice reasonable, but she couldn’t fight the rising panic.
“Nothing.” She banged open a drawer and pulled out a spatula, then seemed to change her mind and threw it back. “I told them I know nothing.”
“Did they threaten you?”
Nyah shook her head. Her frown deepened. “They asked about Corinne. They did not know her name, but they described her.”
Ada’s heart stuttered. “Did you tell them her name?”
Nyah shook her head again.
“I told them that you had left Boston, but they only laughed at me.” Her mother swiped a damp rag across the counter in fretful strokes, then flung it into the sink. “The short one—he had a serpent smile—said that they knew exactly where to find you. Then the tall one said they were patient. That they wanted the . . . the whole set.”
“They mean Corinne,” Ada said. And who else? Johnny? Saint? The rest of Johnny’s crew?
Her mother’s hands were hovering at waist level, as if she were torn between pulling out more cookware and pulling Ada into an embrace.
“I should not have let you go to that club,” she said softly. Her eyes were fixed on a distant point over Ada’s head. “Now it is too late. Now your life is ruined.”
“Cor and I will find a way to fix this.” Ada rounded the counter, reaching for her mother’s hands. “We always do.”
Nyah’s expression hardened. “So your father and I must always be afraid for you? We must pretend we don’t know what you are doing at that club? António is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, while our daughter uses her talent to be a criminal. We tried to raise you to give more than you take. I see now that we failed.”
Ada recoiled and dropped her hands. Her mother began to furiously scrub the pan she had just retrieved, even though it was already clean.
“I’m trying to help you.” Ada’s voice, when she finally found it, was feeble and wavering. “I’ve done all this for you.”
But she wasn’t sure that was true.
“It is not your place to protect us,” her mother said. “We should have been protecting you—from that club, and from Johnny Dervish.”
“Johnny saved us, Mama.” Unexpected heat chased her words. “When they took Papa away, Johnny was the only reason we didn’t starve.”
“You do not think I could have provided for us?”
“I didn’t say—”
“I am lonely, and I miss my husband, but I am not weak,” said her mother, throwing down the dishrag. “Sina hofu.”
Ada didn’t recognize the words in her mother’s native tongue. She was quiet, waiting, but Nyah didn’t translate for her. Ada wondered if her mother was tired of translating for a child who never learned, for a daughter who listened to stories and sang lullabies in Swahili but knew nothing else about the world her mother had given up. For the first time, she wondered if she missed more than just her husband.
Nyah turned her head to look at Ada, her palms planted firmly on the edge of the sink, her shoulders hunched like she was a lioness preparing to leap.