“Mama?” I say. I rarely call her Mama anymore. Not since she was with Hervé, and I got used to saying Kai. I wouldn’t have called her by that name if there was a chance in hell that Candace was nearby to hear. It is a sacred word to me and Joya. “Mama, are you crying?”
“No, baby,” my mother lies. She’s good at it, but no one’s that good. There is a pause, and I clutch the phone hard, leaning into it. I am so attuned to her breathing, to the quality of her silence, that I can sense her bringing herself in hand. Miles apart, I feel my mother’s spine straightening, and it straightens my own. I feel her sad mouth willfully re-form into a smile. When she speaks again, her voice is brisk and cheery. “Baby-mine, my phone time’s more than up. I love you. Take care of yourself, and I will see you soon. So soon. These last few months will go by in a blink.” A lie, but such a good one. In that moment, she makes herself sound so sure, we both believe it.
I hadn’t seen my mother for a year and a half. I’d had a birthday, grown three inches, and started my period. She had shrunk, emptied of my brother. Ganesh was truly gone by this time, already remade into a Julian.
Had she seen the baby? Held him? Nursed him? When they took him from her body, did they have to say he was a boy, or had she already known it, the way she knew I was a girl?
You had such a female energy, she always said.
Odd to think of myself that way, small and blind and tethered to her. In that time before memory, everything I touched was hers. I heard her voice from the inside, with no idea that she was a separate person. Back then, she had simply been the world.
This boy sitting in my passenger seat began his life there, too, in my abandoned room. When Kai told the new ending to “The Red Seed,” had he been the baby she imagined? I didn’t think so. By the time she told that story, she’d already sent him to the parents she had chosen, carefully, using Kai-centric criteria.
The Bouchards had been solidly middle class—a kindergarten teacher and an insurance agent—because Kai didn’t trust the rich. In love, because Kai was big on love. A mother with a medical condition that precluded bio kids and pushed their name down on adoption waiting lists, so Kai’s boy would likely be their only, the single son that they revolved around. I glanced over at him, earnestly reading in the passenger seat. I took in his smooth pink cheeks and his curls. His eyes were wide and bright. He looked like the poster boy you’d pick to represent whole milk, or organic peaches. No baby had ever been set down in a place less like a battlefield.
We came abreast of a southern-style colonial McMansion, and my GPS announced we were at Oakleigh’s. I pulled in, glad to see my car was the only one in the long drive. The cops weren’t here yet, and it was a good thing, too. I needed to get my game face on. All the way to Oakleigh’s, watching my half brother trying to decipher the mud-thick legalese of the internship agreement, I’d been thinking of Hana and of Kai’s story of the Red Seed.
That baby on Kai’s battlefield was me. In reality, I’d been all gangly limbs and bitchiness, with a rash of pimples on my forehead and my hip near permanently cocked at an insolent angle. But to Kai, I had been the beloved thing heard crying on a heap of corpses, tiny and cold. She had signed away the baby in her belly; I was all the baby she had left. She wanted to come for me and save me. I would fill her empty mother’s arms, saving her right back.
I’d never understood that story fully, not until the boy she lost asked me what I’d do with Hana when I found her. Julian, wise in the ways of the nuclear family, had seen the situation from angles that did not exist for me. What the hell would I do?
My half brother stole a nervous peek at me as he flipped to the last page. I didn’t have his frame of reference, especially for the word family. When I was a kid, family meant me and Kai, freewheeling through a revolving cast of lovers and friends who ultimately did not matter. I hadn’t owned baby dolls or Barbies, but sometimes, when I was small, I had played house with Kai. I would be the mommy and feed her with my spoon. I must have thought that one day I would be a mother. Then I made the 911 call that put a crack in us. The crack spread and widened until my family fell into two parts, me alone, and her. I’d never tried to make another.
I was halfway through my thirties, and biology had yet to trouble me with even a mild urge to reproduce. I couldn’t imagine that it would. I’d always joked that if my biological clock went off, I’d skip the snooze button and yank my whole alarm system out by the roots.