When she and I are seated at opposite ends of the kitchen table, Todd kisses her temple through the curtain of her hair. Illuminated in the chandelier light from above, it’s not as dark as it seemed in pictures, but a kind of dirty blond.
He sets down a glass of juice in front of my mother (she had no interest in pizza bites or pot stickers) and says, “I’m going out. See if old Mrs. Walters doesn’t need help salting her front walk. You two . . . call if you need anything.” There’s the shuffle of fabric as he zips on layers in the front hallway, and then he’s gone. Aside from gnawing on her thumbnail, my mother’s been frozen since Todd sat her down in her seat, but at the sound of the door she comes to life again. She starts to slide the drawing pad under the table.
“Can I see?” I ask.
She pauses, then hands me the pad, as long as my arm at least, and as I flip through the sketches I try to look as if I don’t care, like I’m just checking eggs in a carton for breaks, the way I do when I grocery shop for me and Dad. They’re good, though none of them are complete. Like, on one page is a woman’s face and breasts and belly, perfectly realistic, then just a brown chalk squiggle where her spine should be. In another, flat blocks of all colors make up a man’s body, and at the end of two straight stalk arms, two beautifully detailed and shaded hands. Here is an older woman’s finely drawn head perched on a simple pear-shaped outline of a body. There, two feet stick out from a long cloud of blue chalk.
“Do you draw?” she asks me.
I close the pad and shove it away from me. “No. I write. Like Dad.” Not exactly true, but I’m going for the wound here.
She nods. “I bet. That’s good. I read his books, you know? A couple of them. You look like him, too.” She stares across the table at me and I know what she sees: the dark, flat hair, the Asian stamp of my features, the downward curve of my lips, like his. She sighs and folds her hands in front of her. They’re small, but not delicate or anything. The fingers are slim, but the knuckles are round like bolts, the skin chapped and callused. They’re the oldest-looking part of her. “Whatever you came to say to me, I deserve.”
“You have no idea what I came for.”
If she’s stung by my words, she doesn’t show it. “I’m guessing it wasn’t to give me a World’s Best Mom mug.” She laughs, and it’s an empty sound. “I know Todd filled you in on my story, but I’m guessing it doesn’t help much. I wasn’t there with you. I should’ve been, but I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t well. I know that now. I wanted to be better for you.”
This is it. My chance to ask the big question, the all-consuming, zero-room-for-anything-else-until-the-mystery-is-solved question, which I always thought would be a simple one: Why did you leave Sugarbrook? But what comes out surprises me: “So why couldn’t you be better?”
She reaches for her glass, stares into it but doesn’t drink. “I don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I want to give you what you need, Imogene, but there just isn’t an easy answer. Sometimes it’s chemicals, or shitty memories. Life wasn’t easy with my mom . . . even before she left. And sometimes it just is. On and off my whole life, it’s been that way. Before you came along, I guess I was miserable. Part of it was Mom’s death. But I hadn’t even really known her. . . .” Here, she looks up at me through her eyelashes, then quickly away. “And it didn’t start with her. Then time went by and there wasn’t even sadness.
“You know how another patient put it? She said this feeling inside her was . . . it was anti-feeling. Like a black hole in space, and everything—happiness, anger, hope, meaning—it would all get sucked in, tipped over the event horizon, and she couldn’t feel any of it. That’s the way it was for me. I walked around like everyone else, and had this wonderful opportunity at the museum, and came home to this brilliant guy who loved me and was nothing but sweet. Your father tried so hard. But I felt . . . empty. If I could’ve filled that space up with anything, I would’ve. If somebody had turned to me and said, ‘It’s easy, just pour some dry cement in there and you’ll be a normal human girl,’ I would’ve done it like that.” She snaps her fingers. “But I couldn’t. And your father couldn’t do it for me. Then . . . then I was pregnant, and it all happened so fast. I was only twenty-one, and we weren’t even seriously talking marriage! But I thought . . .”
“I would fix you?” I finish the sentence, and she doesn’t deny it. “Maybe you should’ve gotten a dog or something. Eased into it.”
Her thin mouth twists.
What did I expect from the elusive Sidonie Faye? One single, perfect answer to all the questions I’ve ever had, all the mother-daughter days I’ve missed, all the nights I’ve stayed up wondering if I was cursed like my mom and her mom before her, if I was doomed to turn into a woman who could be lonely wherever she went?
Those sorts of answers exist, I suppose. But only in stories.