Life has moved on since that awful day at the hospital. We’ve been happy and safe and deliriously lucky. We are grateful, but we’ve also stayed unsettled and poor.
On Sundays, Beezie and I go for walks and imagine we’re as wealthy as the people we sometimes pass on the street. We tell ourselves the city is ours. I found a new job at a factory and I work six days a week, but it’s barely enough to get by. And I think about money a lot. It’s what blew Sofia here looking for work and what blows me every day to the factory. I suppose money is partly what powered the lights Lenore went to see in London and so many of the inventions that came before and after. Money made this city grow and bustle, and it also makes it hard. I suppose money is what turned Kansas to dust.
Beezie is made of rubber these days—or elastic. You wouldn’t believe it if you saw her—how much she’s recovered. These days she glows brighter than that ball of light I made her touch.
Part of it is that two weeks ago, she and I got the biggest surprise of our lives. One you must already know of.
The bell had been ringing for a good three minutes, and I was trying to wrestle Beezie into her clothes. A woman we live with was the one who answered it and came upstairs with someone behind her.
“You have a visitor,” she said, and Beezie screamed as if it were a monster and not Mama standing on the landing with her suitcase clutched in both hands. She was such an apparition I nearly fainted myself.
For the first time since she got them, Mama has left her precious Galapagos and her precious farm behind. She’s surprised us by coming after us.
Beezie stuck herself onto her like a slug and has barely peeled herself off since.
Of course, we were eager for news of home, and of you, and that’s all we talked about at first.
I asked about you first, once we’d gotten over the initial shock, and the explanations of her arrival and how she’d come.
Mama looked reluctant to speak, and I knew afterward she must have read my journal like I meant her to, or maybe she had known how I felt about you all along.
She said you moved into town. She said you work at Jack’s. And that you promised to take care of Galapagos as long as she’s away. Of course, I knew instantly what you working at Jack’s could mean.
“I think he’s angry with you, Cathy,” she said. “And Lyla’s a good girl. And he knows that. Her dad gave him a job.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I think he’s waiting to see what you do.”
I nodded. I tried to let the jealousy settle over me all at once. Still, even right now, I am jealous of so many things. I’m jealous of the things you touch, and the blankets you sleep under, I’m jealous of Jack who gets to see you, and of course so jealous of Lyla.
“I feel sorry for that girl,” Mama added.
“Why?”
Mama gave me a look. “She can’t erase you.”
I hope this is true, Ellis, and I also don’t.
We didn’t talk about Lenore at first. But one night after Beezie was in bed, Mama followed me onto the front stoop of the building. We sat side by side and watched people going past. For a while I was too nervous to speak, and my anger, in the reality of Mama’s presence, has dribbled away. Mama broke the silence instead.
“I didn’t plan for it to be a secret,” she began, as if we were in the middle of a conversation we’ve been having for months. “At first you were so young, and then you lost your dad, and I didn’t want to add this other loss too. And then I just got scared, the longer it went. There were things I regretted about her and me, that I couldn’t put into words. And I couldn’t tell you about her without them.”
I rubbed my palms together slowly, back and forth, looking down on the street.
“What do you want to ask me?” she said. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
I thought for a long time. “Why did you stop writing her?” I said. It was strangely the thing I wanted to know more than anything else. “Didn’t you love her anymore?”
Mama, as if exhausted, leaned back against the wall, her brown hair falling in wisps around her face, a little disheveled but still tidy.
“You have to understand,” she began haltingly. “Lenore was brave, and a bit intolerant, and a bit impatient. She didn’t like weakness, especially in herself. But she always stood up for me. She was bold, dazzling. She was a hero to me, larger than life.”
She sighed, and she seemed to want to stop there. She looked at me for a moment, and then went on. “I looked up to her and idolized her. I think half the reason I got engaged so fast was so she’d think I was having this exciting life in America, when really I was lost without her. All that time I was so homesick, but I’d never tell her that.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why. I don’t know why, when we were kids, I had to tell her everything that was wrong with her . . . and always had to act like I had something figured out that she didn’t. It’s like I wanted to pull her back to my level—the level of the small, scared person I could be. I didn’t want her to find out I couldn’t keep up. Even when she was grieving, it felt like she was going through something more important than I could ever grasp. That’s how big she was in my mind.”
“I understand,” I said bitterly. “You were jealous of her.”
“No.” Mama shook her head, her mouth tightening. “Not jealous. I didn’t want to be left behind.” She laid her face against her hands for a moment and then pulled back. “It’s strange, isn’t it, how we can push people away because we want to be near them? Isn’t that the silliest thing?” She smiled ruefully. “All these years trying to change it, and I’ve still been a timid person. What I should have done for Beezie . . . and let you do instead . . .”
“You’re here now,” I said.
She looked away and shook her head. “I hadn’t gotten the letters from the ship, you know, before Lenore arrived. So when she showed up on my doorstep, her pregnancy just beginning to show, it was a complete shock. It was May, but she was shivering from head to toe. You could have knocked me over with a feather.” Her smile grew, and a tear ran down the side of her nose.
“She didn’t even ask me for reasons. She just said, ‘Let’s start over.’ And we did.”
She folded her hands and made a triangle with her thumbs.
“I don’t think you get to pick who your soul mate turns out to be. I was in love with your daddy,” Mama went on. “But the person who knew me best—without glamour, without sparkle, who saw the best in me despite myself—that was Lenore. She loved us, you and me.”
“She died when she gave birth to me,” I said, though it made me afraid to say it.
Mama waited a while, and then just said simply, “Yes she did.”