Jake cleared his throat. His voice had become a foreigner to him these past few weeks, breaking and cracking without warning like a boy in puberty.
“For crying out loud, it’s a crazy summer to send Molly away, with you sick. But even if she does want to go to camp, let’s send her somewhere else. Any place but Loon Lake.”
“It’s our history, Jake. Her legacy. I want Molly to know where she comes from.”
“Why tear open old wounds? You need to concentrate on getting well.”
Esther took a sip of tea. “Maybe I know what I need better than you. Maybe it’s time to reconnect with my old life. I’ve got to make my peace with her, in case I die.” She put her hand on his. “This is the first step.” “You’re not going to die.”
He didn’t mean to shout, but his voice betrayed him again. Esther murmured calm words, but he felt no calm. He let his head fall into the cradle of his hands.
CHAPTER 28
Rosa
Rosa watched her mother taste the chicken salad.
“Needs salt,” Mama said, then quickly added, “But it’s delicious.”
Rosa shrugged. “My domestic skills are a little rusty.”
Emma patted Rosa’s hand. “I love your cooking. I’ll miss it at camp.”
Rosa laughed. “That’s not saying much—camp food is terrible.”
Emma’s face got serious. “Are you sure it’s okay if I go this summer, Mom? You won’t miss me too much?”
Rosa loved being called Mom. Turned out the women’s collective didn’t know everything, back when they made pronouncements about the politics of family language.
Allen stood up. “Anyone want more iced tea?”
Mama held out her glass.
“I’ll see you on visiting day,” Rosa said. How odd to be the one visiting, after almost a decade of being visited in prison. She shook off those thoughts. “Are you packed, Emma? The bus leaves early.”
Emma shrugged. “No problem. I never unpacked last summer. That’s how Dad and I do it.”
Rosa felt her jaw drop and recognized the same expression on Mama’s face.
Emma looked from her mom to her grandmother, then turned to Allen and grinned. They slapped four hands together in a high five and spoke in one voice, “Gotcha!”
The next morning, Rosa found a free table at an outdoor café near the Port Authority and sank into the molded plastic chair. It was only 10:00 a.m., but she’d been up since four. Mama had insisted on taking the seven o’clock bus back to Detroit. “A week is long enough,” she’d said, “even to celebrate my sixtieth. Besides, you people need to say your goodbyes without me in the way.” Rosa and Allen helped Mama onto her bus, then lugged Emma’s two duffle bags to the Loon Lake charter on the other side of the bus station.
Saying goodbye to Emma had been bizarre, the way so many situations felt warped since her release from prison. She was a mother sending her only child off to summer camp, armed with bug spray and Kotex—just in case—and wishing the bus would never leave. But the air shimmered with ghosts of her own self at eleven saying goodbye to Mama and Pop, impatient for her Loon Lake summer to begin. Esther’s image was there too, a specter hanging on her arm.
Emma had been teary. “Are you absolutely sure you’ll be okay?” “She’ll be fine.” Allen’s hand nudged Emma up the stairs. “Time to go.”
Turning away from Allen’s hovering, Rosa walked along the bus, her fingers marking wavy lines in the dust, until she saw Emma’s face in the window, sitting with her friend Poose. Rosa blew a kiss.
Allen brushed Rosa’s hair away from her face. “Just three weeks to visiting day.”
“I know. It’s okay.” Rosa blew her nose. “You want to get some breakfast?”
Allen checked his watch. “Can’t. I have a client at eleven and a brief due Thursday. You’ll be all right?”
Rosa sighed and closed the menu. Nine months since she got out, and ordinary tasks still felt monumental. Every simple decision was immense. Pancakes or an omelet? French toast, or maybe granola with yogurt and fruit? It was more than being indecisive. She was not in control. She had cried all the way to New York from prison, with Allen murmuring comforting phrases on one side, and Emma leaning forward from the back seat, asking over and over why she was crying, wasn’t she happy to be free?
“Ma’am?” The waitress stood next to the table, pad in hand.
“Pancakes, I guess,” Rosa said. “And coffee, please. Black.”
Of course she was happy, but her brain refused to cooperate. Liberated from the constrictions of prison, it had also freed itself from the confines of the here and now. Pictures from the past—not precisely random ones, she had to admit—elbowed aside the concrete objects in front of her eyes. Horses’ rumps and swinging billy clubs. Puking into the rose bush. Esther’s face in the photograph on the television screen, her eyes closed as if to deny their act. Emma and Didi draped over Maggie’s shoulder, right before the ambulance came. Those images were slippery, sneaky, elusive, then blossoming into full color when she tried to read a novel or write a press release or cook pasta.
The persistence of the images had finally been the clincher, the reason why she told Emma that yes, she should go to camp this summer. Maybe, with a little space from suddenly being a mother to a girl she hardly knew, Rosa could pull herself together. She kept making stupid mistakes as a mother, things she should have known. Allen kept telling her to give herself a break. Nine years in prison. A new city. It all takes time, he said. But she had already lost so much time.
The waitress brought her food and Rosa took a bite of pancake. Should’ve had the granola. She didn’t really like pancakes, but they never had pancakes in prison, so that was in their favor. As a child, the only time she liked them was in the woods, cooked on the grungy old Coleman stove. Pop would drop fat blueberries one by one into the skillet-sized pancakes. Every summer, Mama and Pop would pick them up at camp and they’d have an East Coast family vacation. Camping in the early years, then renting a cottage on the Maine coast or the Cape, so quiet and lazy after the frenetic fun of camp. She would read. Esther would draw. Pop would fish. Mama would nap and write letters to Miriam.
Scraping away the excess syrup and butter, Rosa took another bite. She slipped the yellow pad from her bag and dug for a pen.
Dear Esther,
I sent my daughter away to camp this morning, even though I just got her back a few months ago. Poor Emma. Poor me. I missed out on most of her childhood. Allen toilet trained her, perching on the edge of the bathtub and singing to her on the potty. Would you believe he couldn’t bear to throw out the plastic yellow potty chair—it’s still in the back of the bedroom closet. He taught her to ride the subway and quizzed her for spelling tests. I’m lucky Emma doesn’t hate me, even though our only mother-daughter bonding for nine years was in prison visiting rooms.
Emma’s at Loon Lake. She’s been going to camp for years with Maggie, keeping up the family tradition. Sometimes I wonder how Emma sees the events that shaped her life—our action, our arrest, my life underground and all the rest of it. I wonder how she sees activism, how she’ll choose to act, or not, as an adult. It wouldn’t surprise me if our family history ends up haunting her too. A few moments on a shimmering city street in 1968 and none of us have ever been the same.
“Anything else?” the waitress asked before tucking the check under the edge of Rosa’s plate.
Rosa shook her head and kept writing.
Even with everything that’s happened, I don’t think I would do anything differently, if I had the chance. Except maybe—if I could do it over again—I wouldn’t have banished you so completely from my life.
Rosa put down the pen and looked around at the café, now mostly empty. The butter and syrup congealed on her pancakes. She finger-combed her hair away from her face and captured it clumsily with the wooden barrette clipped to her blue jeans. She shoved the pad and pen into her bag.
Was that true, what she just wrote about Esther? She had no
idea.
CHAPTER 29
Esther
Esther went to bed early, but she couldn’t fall asleep. The next morning Jake would drive Molly to Loon Lake, the place where she and Jake found each other and connected so deeply with Rosa and Allen they believed that nothing could break them apart.
Jake’s and Molly’s voices drifted up from the porch. Molly was unhappy about camp and Esther knew she should go downstairs. But it was day eleven of her chemo cycle, the day she always felt worst. Her oncology nurse said the dip in white blood cells was the reason she felt so easily overwhelmed, so quick to tears, as if her heart were scraped raw and every touch started it bleeding.
The slam of a door startled her, then footsteps running up the stairs and down the hall to Molly’s room. Maybe Molly wasn’t ready for camp. Maybe she should stay home this summer. Jake had been against the plan from the beginning. In fact, he was horrified. Kept asking Esther what good it would possibly do. She didn’t have an answer for that, not really, except that Molly was growing up without her history, knowing nothing about the values that motivated generations of her family. Nothing about their sad legacy and buried secrets.
Last week, Jake had asked Esther outright if she wanted Molly to learn about Rosa, the demonstration, all that. He demanded to know if Rosa’s daughter went to Loon Lake. Esther didn’t know. She didn’t tell him she had asked Mama that exact question on the telephone, but Mama refused to answer, said she was pleading the Fifth. “I know better than to get between you two,” she said. “Talk to your sister.”
No way could she fall asleep now. Esther rearranged her pillows so she could sit up, and reached into the drawer of her desk for the red fabric box. She removed the cover, stroked the graceful arc of the embroidered bridge above the blue stream now faded almost to white. Then she turned it over, looked at the photograph taped inside. The two girls stared at her, frozen in black and white childhood.
It had been a long time since Esther had allowed herself the ritual of the four small inner boxes. From the first box she lifted the tri-colored braid of hair and brought it to her lips. She breathed deeply, but there were no longer any smells clinging to the hair, and she coiled the braid carefully back in its box. From the second and third boxes she emptied a collection of tiny teeth into the palm of her hand. When Molly and Oliver asked what the tooth fairy did with their teeth in exchange for a quarter, she never told them that their baby teeth were disintegrating near the photo of their lost aunt.
The final box held Rosa’s circle pin. The day after Rosa left town during her first trial, Esther had used her emergency key to enter the apartment Rosa shared with Allen. With Molly sleeping warm against her chest, Esther stood in the bedroom looking at the detritus of her sister’s discarded life. There was nothing left of her Rosa in that place, except the small gold circle on the dresser, which Esther had slipped into her pocket.
Esther replaced the red fabric box into the drawer and reached for her notebook.
Rosa, why haven’t you contacted me? Can’t you just apologize, and then I will too and we can be sisters again? I’ve spent a lot of time over the past twelve years thinking about my guilt, and yours, Rosie, and measured it against those mounted cops busting heads. And now it’s possible that we might not have a lot of time left.
The hardest part of having breast cancer wasn’t losing my breast. It wasn’t losing my hair or the nausea either, though all those things are awful. The hardest part was losing my tattoo. Maybe I don’t deserve that tattoo anymore.
No, that’s not quite true. The absolute hardest part is realizing that I could die without ever seeing you again. Without our daughters ever meeting, without us ever reconciling. That’s why I’m doing this thing, this risky, scary, bad-mother thing. I’m sending Molly to Loon Lake tomorrow morning, without telling her anything, trusting her to somehow figure it out and make things right. I know it’s an awful burden to place on a twelve-year-old, but Jake won’t help and I’m simply too sick to figure out another way to do it.
The irony is that I’m doing it for Molly and Oliver, but it could be another very bad decision.
I think this disease is my punishment for everything that happened. After all, you can’t get cancer of the heart. My left breast is the next closest thing.
PART TWO
1980
CHAPTER 30
Molly
The whole four-hour drive to camp, I willed myself not to cry. My father seemed to sense my misery, because even though he was usually very strict about kids in the back seat, he let me sit up front. So I could enjoy the White Mountains, he said. He didn’t talk much, just a halfhearted description of camp traditions and what a good time I’d have.
Usually on long drives I liked to peer into the passing cars, to try to glimpse something private, like a woman stroking the neck of the man driving, her fingers burrowing inside his shirt collar, or a baby sleeping in a car seat with drool glistening on his chin, or a teenage boy squeezing a zit. But driving up Route 16 that early July morning, I stared into the side view mirror, where the clouds froze sharp in the sky and the trees slipped backwards, retreating from the car’s forward motion.
The Harriet Tubman bunk was a dump. Initials and names and drawings carved or scrawled with magic marker on every inch of the walls. Wooden cubbies wedged two-by-two between the beds. Striped mattresses with yellow-brown stains heaped with duffel bags and stuffed animals, inside-out sweatshirts and baseball caps.
A counselor with even more freckles than me introduced herself as Crystal and pointed to the empty cot near the far wall. My name was printed on masking tape stuck to the metal headboard. I let my backpack slide off my arm, scratching the mosquito bites on the way down, onto the trunk of folded blankets and sheets, each with a “Molly Green” label that Esther and I had ironed on.
Jake wandered off while Crystal showed me around the bunk. The worst part was the bathroom. Toilet cubicles without doors, just shower curtains hung on rusty rings, and an outhouse smell. “Remember me?” I wanted to yell at Jake. “I’m the kid who refused to use those stink-a-poo places on family camping trips.” Instead I listened to Crystal tell me about the orientation session coming up and about how everyone got a special shampoo. I told her I had to go find my dad.
“Come back after you say goodbye,” Crystal said. “I’ll introduce you to your bunkmates.”
I found Jake sitting on the grass in the center of the camp buildings, staring at the peace monument. It was even more amazing than the photograph on the camp brochure. Hundreds of shiny metal birds shaped like origami cranes on toothpick-thin steel stakes perched at different heights, exploding out of a thick patch of day lilies. The cranes swayed in the breeze, dark against the summer sky. After a while he stood up and announced he had to leave.
“Just three weeks to visiting day,” he said. “You’ll have a great time.”
He hugged me longer than usual and for a minute it seemed like he wanted to say something more, but he just kissed my nose and walked away. I watched the Subaru jostle down the rutted road until it disappeared behind a cloud of gray dust. Walking slowly back to Harriet Tubman, I kicked gravel and wished I was home with Rachel and our friends. I wasn’t sure how I ended up at camp when Jake didn’t want me to go and I certainly wasn’t interested. Why did it matter so much to Esther?
The night last spring when Esther announced I should go to camp, after Oliver and I had been sent up to bed, I couldn’t sleep. I had walked back downstairs to tell my parents I really didn’t want to go. Their voices seeped out from under the closed kitchen door, so I sat on the dark stairway landing, hugging my knees and trying to follow the argument. I could hear the peepers from the pond, but it was hard to make out the words from the kitchen. I scooted down a few steps on my bum to get closer.
“Anywhere but Loon Lake,” I heard Jake say.
What was so special about Loon Lake? I know my parents met there, but what did that have to do with me? I slipped down to the bo
ttom step, right behind the kitchen door that could swing open at any minute if someone had to go to pee or Esther had to throw up.
“I need to make my peace with her,” Esther said. “In case I die.”
“You’re not going to die,” Jake shouted. Then Esther’s voice got soft and smooth and covered up his yelling. It made no sense. Who was “her”?
I tiptoed back up to my room and re-read the brochure Esther gave me. About how these two Italian guys in Boston were framed for murder a long time ago. After they were executed, some people who had tried to save them bought land at the base of Crooked Mountain in New Hampshire and started a camp to teach kids about justice. On the front cover of the brochure was a photograph of the peace monument, the one I found Jake staring at. For two months I had studied that brochure every night, until the paper crumbled at the fold and I had to tape it together. I liked that a girl my age designed the peace monument, based on the story of Sadako, the Japanese girl with leukemia whose friends folded a thousand origami cranes.
When I was young, like fourth grade, I was seriously obsessed with Sadako. My first research paper was about the belief in Japan that cranes live a thousand years and represent happiness and hope. If you’re really sick and you fold a thousand paper cranes, they will save your life.
Seeing the photo of the cranes monument in the camp brochure when I had been so into paper cranes was a creepy coincidence, but it also made me comfortable. Like Loon Lake Camp and I already had something in common. I was twelve, and the girl who designed the sculpture had been twelve, and Sadako was twelve when she died. The week before camp, I found my old Sadako story on the bookshelf and re-read it a couple of times. But when I packed, I left it at home, and I tucked the brochure back into the frame of the mirror over my dresser.
After that one dinner, there was no more discussion about my going to camp. In my family, we talked about all the things you’d expect from a pediatrician father and a schoolteacher mom. About how masturbation wouldn’t hurt you but smoking would. About the importance of being truthful and contributing to your community. No one argued much in my family, or talked very much about feelings. I always figured we were a pretty regular family, except that my parents insisted that Oliver and I call them by their first names, which my friends thought was way cool. Anyway, it wasn’t a huge surprise when Esther called me into her bedroom a few weeks later.
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