“No. I’m sure. Her note says, Weeks, if I am lucky. So. The first two months were hard, I’m not going to lie. Every day, I wondered if my mother was off planet yet, or reincarnated as a lab rat or a meat cow—something suitably pejorative.” Or somewhere in pain, still dying inch by inch, still not wanting me to come. “Now, I don’t think about it.”
Or when I did, I mostly felt a terrible relief. Truly terrible, like a person who’s been told they no longer have to carry the weight of their own gangrenous and rotting left arm. It smells, it hurts, it’s literally killing you—but it’s still the only left arm that you’ll ever have.
“I would have found her for you,” Birdwine said.
“I know,” I said, acknowledging it as a kindness. “But then what? Fly to Texas and let her kick me in the teeth in person? She’d kicked them plenty hard enough from a thousand miles away.” And yet, in this brave new world that held a lost Ganesha, how much could I blame her? I wasn’t sure yet.
Birdwine still had the check turned sideways. He scanned the line again: (Obviously I don’t want you to come here).
“Damn,” he said at last, and put the check back in the envelope.
“Yeah, it’s hard to take in,” I said. “But I had years. Long before she died, she’d reinvented herself as a person who never had a daughter.”
“No,” Birdwine said instantly, flat and certain. He put the envelope back on the shelf, leaning it against the books in the exact spot it had been in before. My feet, boosted on the pillows, blocked my view of it again. “A parent can’t just do that.”
“Kai can. Look at what happened today, Birdwine. I’ve apparently got a brother, and she never even hinted he existed.”
Or had she? The Kai who came home from prison was a different person. I thought it was because the terms of her parole pinned her to Atlanta for eight more years. She was legally bound to a history that had soured for her. I’d cost her almost two years of her life, her freedom for eight more, and Dwayne. But those things had only camouflaged the larger loss. Postprison Kai drank more, sang less, told fewer stories. She was no longer the Kai who’d cuddle up to me and whisper. She didn’t even fall in love much, dating stolid Marvin, who helped with rent and slept over every Tuesday. But sometimes, on afternoons when she was sad and drinking wine, she would still tell a Ganesha tale. Long ago, right now, baby Ganesha and his mother are playing in the river.
Birdwine waved a hand between us, shooing away the topic altogether, and came back to his chair. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“De nada.” I opened my feet to reveal the envelope. Now you see me. I closed them. Now you don’t. “You’re the first person I’ve told, actually,” I said, still surprised I’d said it to him. Maybe it was a matter of positioning. I was prone on the sofa and Birdwine’s chair was in the shrink spot, by my head.
“You mean, that she’s gone?” I nodded, and Birdwine’s eyebrows went up. “But it’s been months.”
“Yup.”
Birdwine leaned forward in his chair toward me. “You didn’t tell anyone?”
He sounded skeptical, and he came down hard on the last word. Maybe we should have had that relationship postmortem last winter, because he was asking me if anyone included my best friend, William. It usually didn’t. Back when Birdwine quit me because we “couldn’t talk,” I’d said that neither one of us was big on sharing. He’d laughed, a bitter sound, and said, You talk to William. I talk at my meetings. But you don’t know me, Paula, and you don’t want to. If you did, you wouldn’t like me much. We might as well go ahead and call it.
I shrugged as best I could, prone. “I only told you. Just now.” Which was true. But the whole truth was, William and his wife were at home with their newborn son, after a pregnancy that had been touch and go from the beginning. I wasn’t going to heave big scoops of My Dead Mother or I’m Having Panic Attacks onto William’s plate. It was full, and Kai would still be dead when he emerged from brand-new-baby fog. “I’m pretty much on my own with this, Birdwine.”
Birdwine looked like he was ruminating. I let him, and a small silence grew between us. I thought about rehooking my bra, but my chest still felt tight. Instead, I reached under my shirt and began working myself out of it while staying flat. I’d done it plenty before with Birdwine in the room. Back then, I’d done it under more cheerful circumstances. Hell, back then, I’d done it under Birdwine.
Maybe he was thinking the same thing, because he looked away.
“Sorry, this thing feels miserable. How’d you know to unhook it?” I asked him, trying to make the scene feel a little less Flashdance.
“My sister gets like you did, when she’s under stress,” Birdwine said. “She sheds anything binding and gets her feet up higher than her head.”
I pulled my bra out through an armhole and flung it over my jacket. It was a sleek, white, simple thing, meant to be invisible under silk.
“I didn’t know that, about your sister,” I said.