by Lisa Graff
I feel a bit like one of the elephants at the zoo.
“You’re so late, though!” my mom goes on. “We said six forty-five. I was starting to get worried. Is everything okay?”
I’m sure my whole face is scrunched up, which is probably not very stunning. “You were supposed to pick me up at the theater,” I say. I’m not trying to make her feel guilty about it, but that’s the truth. And anyway, where was she?
My mom looks even more confused than I feel. “I told you I was throwing you a party, don’t you remember, darling?” And when my face stays scrunched, she suddenly gets the most pained look on hers. “Oh, CJ, I’m so sorry. I must have really screwed up somehow. I’m new to all this mom stuff. You’re going to have to help me out, okay?”
“I . . .” I’m not sure what I should be feeling. I thought she was going to come get me. I thought it would be just me and my mom. I sort of wish it was just me and my mom. Only, who gets upset when someone throws them a party?
“Anyway”—my mom squeezes my shoulders tight, and her voice perks up, happy—“you’re here now and that’s what matters!” And then she spreads her arms wide, so excited. “I’m so glad I finally get to show off my beautiful daughter! Now, let’s get you some food, shall we? Did you drive here, with that boy?” She looks around, like Jax might be in the house, too.
“I took the bus.” I wait for the part where I have to assure her that even though I’m twelve, I’m perfectly capable of taking a bus by myself after dark, but she skips right over that, which is kind of nice, actually.
“I bet you’re starved. You like bacon?”
“Yes,” I say firmly. Because this, at least, is one thing I know for certain.
“Fabulous. I made mini bacon quiches. I knew you’d love them.” She leads me into the kitchen.
My mom is a whirlwind of energy as she loads up a plate of food for me, grabs me a ginger ale from the fridge. The whole time she’s introducing me to her friends, laughing, chatting, joking. I feel a bit like when I used to play Ping-Pong at the RV rec centers we’d stop at, constantly having to dart my attention from one place to the next, to be sure I don’t miss something.
“Amazing, right?” my mom asks me, about the quiches. I’ve already stuffed three in my mouth and there’s no room for talking, so I only nod.
“Your mother made those,” says a man with a too-strange mustache.
My mother waves the compliment away, then shouts to one of her friends across the kitchen. “Gloria! Come meet my fabulous daughter!” The woman rushes over with her husband or boyfriend or whoever, and they both give me enormous hugs, like we’re old friends.
“It’s so wonderful to meet you at last, Cara,” Gloria tells me.
“CJ,” my mom corrects before I get the chance.
Gloria smiles. “You were right, James. She’s absolutely gorgeous.” And without even bothering to ask, she runs her fingers through my hair, letting one of my curls spring back to my forehead. “Don’t you wish you could have hair like this?” she says to the man next to her.
He swishes his drink in his glass. “I just wish I had hair,” he replies, rolling his eyes toward his receding hairline.
I step back and adjust my headband. Plop myself down on a stool.
“Your mother tells us you’re an artist, too,” says the man.
“I am?” I ask.
“CJ’s incredibly talented,” my mom replies for me. But before I can tell her that’s news to me, she claps her hands together like she’s just remembered something important. “Okay, I can’t wait anymore. CJ, I have to show you.” And same as before, she grabs my hand and speeds away with me.
We dart past the crowd in the living room, into the hallway, me clutching my messenger bag to my side. “This is my room, the bathroom, linen closet, laundry,” my mom says, and I realize that she’s pointing out things I’ll need to know because I live here now. My buzz of excitement returns. “And now . . .” We come to the door at the far end of the hallway, and she throws it open. “Voila!”
“Is this”—I can tell my mom’s expecting a reaction, only I’m not sure what that should be—“your, um, art room?” There’s an easel in the corner and huge scraps of cut metal piled up on a sheet in the open closet. There’s a futon against the far wall, with stacks of boxes and books and who knows what on top. The air is thick with the smell of something strong—paint? Cleaner?
“Up until yesterday, it was my studio,” she explains. “But I figure a teenager needs a space of her own. So now it’s yours.”
I’m trying to figure out the best way to tell my mom that I’m not quite a teenager, because I don’t know if my mom doesn’t know that twelve isn’t teen, or if she doesn’t know how old I am, and if it’s the first thing, which it probably is, I don’t want to be rude and make her think that I think she doesn’t know her own daughter’s age, because how bad would you feel if your daughter thought that? But while I’m busy with all that, it takes me a while to notice that my mom’s face has gone droopy-sad.
“You don’t like it.” She says that like a fact, not a question.
“No!” I say, trying to explain. “I mean, yes. I do. It’s awesome. I’ve never had my own room before, so this is great.”
She squints at that. “Your aunt never gave you a bedroom? I thought she was loaded now.”
“Well, I have a loft. But it’s not the same. This room”—I look around, trying to find the best thing to say about it—“has a door.”
I can tell she was hoping for more excitement, though, so I step closer to the futon, where five oil paintings in thick black frames hang on the wall. One is an owl with huge, huge eyes. One is half of a hat. The others are mushrooms, painted in the same swoopy style I’m getting so used to. “Did you make these? They’re great.”
“Sometimes I dabble in oil,” she says, like it’s so easy to paint something. “I know the room is a mess, CJ. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to tidy more before you got here. I wanted everything to be so special for you. But now that you’re here, you can make it yours, right? I know you said you wanted to pay for things yourself, so we can pick you out a fabulous new dresser, and a cute bedspread, maybe a desk? And we’ll put some of your artwork up on the walls, make it totally ‘CJ.’”
“I don’t have any artwork,” I tell my mom. “I don’t, um, paint or anything.”
“Oh, I’m sure you have the art bug in there somewhere,” she says, laughing again. “You’re my kid, right? We’ll put a paintbrush in your hand, and you’ll make Picasso look like a hack, you watch.”
For just a second, while my mom is straightening a stack of books on the futon, I close my eyes and try to picture myself in this house, this bedroom. Making oil paintings and eating quiche, and probably coming home from normal-kid school on the normal-kid school bus, walking past all the stucco homes. The thing is, I can picture every single part of this new life—but I can’t picture me there. It’s not how I thought it would feel, at the end of this journey Spirit led me on. I thought it would feel . . . Well, I don’t know, exactly. But I thought it would feel different.
When my hand brushes the soft buttery leather of my messenger bag, I remember how, as soon as I opened up that gift box, the bag felt like mine, felt like me, in a way this strange house doesn’t. And I’m mad that Aunt Nic gave me something that felt that way, when it should’ve been my mom who did. It should be my mom who knows me, and it’s Aunt Nic’s fault she doesn’t. My skin burns with rage all over again, so I push the messenger bag to hang behind me so I won’t have to see it. Still, I can’t quite bring myself to take it off.
“Okay,” my mom says after a minute. “We’ll have tons of time to make this place work. For now, we should rejoin the party, hmm?”
We’re walking back through the hall when something catches my eye that didn’t before. I stop dead in my tracks.
“Whoa,” I say.
It is another oil painting. But this one’s not of mushrooms.
“You like it?” my mom asks. “It’s you.”
“I know it’s me.” In the painting my face is bathed in light, curls framing my face as I hold a black-and-white cookie in one hand. The tiny heart-shaped cherish is perfectly placed on my cheek. I’m grinning like a maniac. It’s a very good painting. Only . . . “Did you paint this last night?” I always thought oil paintings took forever.
My mom laughs. “Hardly. I made that one, oh, a year or so ago? Worked on it for a good month, probably.”
“But you just met me yesterday.”
“I worked off a photo I found online,” she says. “I saw it and I thought, ‘My Cara is a truly gorgeous child. I must paint her.’ It’s good, right? Looks like you.” She’s darting her eyes from me to the portrait, to check her work, maybe.
“You found the picture online?” I say. My insides are buzzing again, but I’m not sure with what. Because I recognize it now, the image. My mom cropped Aunt Nic out, for her painting, but the original photo was one of the two of us together. It was taken after a baker Aunt Nic did a reading for gave us these incredible cookies as a thank-you.
My mom nods. “There are all sorts of photos on Nic’s website. Some of them are very good. Who does her photography?”
I know there are photos on Aunt Nic’s website. I help Cyrus post them. I know, too, what else is on the website.
“We did a show in El Cajon last year,” I tell my mom, “right after Tucson.” The tour schedule is posted on the home page of Aunt Nic’s website. You can’t miss it. “We were thirty minutes from here.” Buzzing. I am buzzing. “The year before that, we hit up Hillcrest. That’s even closer.”
My mom is half listening. She’s still looking at the painting. “The chin’s a little off, I think. I’ll have to do a new one, now that you can model for me.”
Jax said it yesterday, only I didn’t want to hear him. He said that even if I thought my mother was dead this whole time, she knew I was alive. Aunt Nic was never hiding me away. My mom could’ve found me, easy. She could’ve come to get me anytime she wanted.
“Why didn’t you ever come to a show?” I ask her. “Didn’t you want to see me?”
“Oh, CJ!” My mom turns fully away from the painting then, to look at the real-life me, and her eyes are big. Hurt. “Of course I wanted to see you. I was dying to see you, darling. But your aunt . . .”
“Right,” I say. Feeling stupid I asked. Feeling guilty I made my own mother look the way she looks now. “Right.” That’s what I told Jax, even. I knew that.
“Let’s get some dessert,” my mom says, wrapping an arm around my shoulder. “Harvey’s rhubarb crumble is to die for.”
As she leads me away, I take one last backward glance at the portrait, suddenly remembering why I’m grinning so big.
That cookie—the amazing one the baker gave us—there was only one left, and I offered to split it, but Aunt Nic said I could have the whole thing myself. She said seeing me that happy was worth missing out on half of any cookie.
“You coming, CJ?”
I turn back to follow my mom.
* * *
• • •
The rhubarb crumble is pretty good.
And I get to talk to my mom about lots of things, even more than we talked about at the zoo. Her latest cooking experiment, and what it was like to grow up with Aunt Nic, and more about her exhibition.
But she keeps having to bounce between me and her friends and do things like restart the music when it stops playing and clean up a spill in the kitchen.
I wait and wait for her friends to leave, but they don’t. I think it’s been ages, but when I look at the clock not even two hours have passed. I pull out my atlas just for something to look at, tracing the route I’ve zigzagged the past few days. It’s several hundred miles, all added up, but it feels like even more.
“And what kind of art do you do?” asks some man I haven’t seen before, who’s settling beside me on the couch with a dessert plate. Aunt Nic is off helping someone find ice. Who can’t find ice?
“Huh?” I ask, looking up from my atlas.
“Your mother says you’re quite an artist. What medium do you use?”
For a second, I hang up on that word, “medium,” because I think he means somebody who talks to the dead, like Aunt Nic. Or somebody who Aunt Nic is pretending to be, anyway. But then I realize he means “medium” like the kind of materials an artist uses in her work—oil paints, pastels, metal.
“Pig intestines,” I say so he’ll get up and leave me alone with my atlas.
He does not.
“Pig intestines?” I can tell this guy’s never actually spoken to a kid before, and he has no idea how seriously to take me. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah. I like to smear ’em all over the canvas with my bare hands. It smells awful, but once it dries, you should see the color.”
The guy sticks out his lip, considering. “How modern,” he says at last.
A woman I haven’t met yet offers me a wink. “Don’t mind him,” she says. “He doesn’t get ‘jokes.’” She puts air quotes around the last word, and I can’t say I know why. “I’m Lucia.”
Lucia seems nicer than the pig-intestine guy, and anyway, I have no one else to talk to, so I say, “CJ,” even though I realize she probably already knows that.
She nods politely, and then, like she’s trying to make conversation, she asks me, “What does ‘CJ’ stand for?”
“Caraway June.” Lucia gives me the that’s unusual eyebrows I’m pretty used to getting after I tell people my full name. So I give her my usual short-version explanation. “My mom gave me my first name, after the seed. Then my aunt gave me my middle name, after my mom.”
“Hold on,” I hear my mom call from halfway across the room. She rushes my way. “Nic gave you your middle name? Is that what she told you?”
“You picked June?” I ask my mom. I guess I shouldn’t be totally surprised that the story behind my name is a lie, along with everything else.
“What, I’m gonna let someone else name my own baby?” My mom makes space for herself next to me on the couch, then tucks one of my curls behind my ear, the way she did at the zoo. I love when she does that. “You want to hear the story?”
I set my atlas in my lap. “Of course,” I say. It’s my name, after all. My story.
“So the nurse hands me this tiny, wrinkled thing, right?” my mom begins. I glance at the grown-ups around us. Some are busy with their own conversations, but some are suddenly paying attention, like anything my mom says is worth stopping to listen to. “And honestly”—she raises a hand in the air—“all I could think when I saw this baby was, I didn’t know they made them that ugly.”
She laughs, and most everyone else does, too. Lucia and the pig-intestine guy and Gloria and the mustache weirdo and at least a dozen others.
I do not laugh.
This one woman, who’s wearing a single feathered earring, must notice me not laughing, because she leans across the back of the couch to put a hand on my arm, and she tells me gently, “All babies are ugly, you know, right when they’re born.” Like I must be so upset or something, that my mom said that.
I shrug my arm away from her.
When my mom catches sight of my face, she suddenly goes serious. “Oh, CJ!” she says, all sorry—but there’s a hint of laughter still in her voice. “I didn’t mean that to sound cruel. You’ve turned into a stunning young lady. But good God, when you were born, you were so skinny and shriveled, and hair like you wouldn’t believe. I’d thought of all these baby names, for months, but I just couldn’t bring myself to call you any of them. That’s the truth.”
She must be bad at telling stories, I realize. Aunt Nic uses words for a living, so she knows how to s
tretch them and squeeze them, how to use them to make you feel good. My mother, that’s not her job. So she’s just telling it badly.
“And then Aunt Nic gave you the caraway pudding,” I say, to help her out. “And you realized that I looked like a little seedling. So that’s what you decided for my name. Caraway.”
“You named your daughter after pudding?” the pig-intestine guy asks.
My mom wraps an arm around me tight. “I did. I looked at that pudding, and I looked at this thing in my arms, and I said, ‘I don’t have a baby, I have a seed!’”
The woman with the earring is the only person who doesn’t seem to find the story hilarious. She doesn’t put her hand on my arm this time, but I think she’s trying to comfort me with her words when she says to my mom, “It must’ve been overwhelming, I’m sure, becoming a mother so young.”
My mother takes a long sip from her wineglass while she thinks that one over. “It was hard,” she says after a moment, a deep breath in, then out, “for someone like me, with so much life to live. It was hard putting all that on hold, for a baby.”
What I think then, I wish I didn’t. What I think then, I wish I could unthink. Only, thoughts don’t work like that.
I liked my mother a lot better, I think, when she was a spirit.
While my mom and her friends take up a new conversation, I turn back to my atlas, trying to squash the thoughts in my head and the buzzing in my belly. All these routes, I think, studying the lines on the map before me. So many ways I could have traveled. And I wonder why Spirit chose this route for me, of all the millions out there.
That’s when the doorbell rings.
“Another guest!” my mom shouts happily. She’s already rushing across the room, reaching for the doorknob. “Welcome, welco—” She stops short as the door swings open, and she sees who’s on the mat.
It’s Aunt Nic.
SIXTEEN
WHEN I SEE Aunt Nic on the doorstep, it’s like I’m suddenly a cannonball. Without any thought in my head, I shoot off the couch and straight into Aunt Nic’s arms. Her grip is warm, safe.