Mothers and Other Strangers

by Gina Sorell

  “Do you still have it?” he asked, wheeling toward me.

  “Yes. But I don’t understand what’s in it.”

  “She will.” He grabbed a piece of paper off the table and fished a pen out of his shirt pocket.

  “Who?”

  “Your mother’s sister, Ingrid.” With his hands shaking, he wrote carefully on the paper and handed it to me.

  I stared at the address he’d written on the paper, too stunned to say anything. It was another secret he’d kept for my mother, until now.

  “Go,” he said. “It’s what your mother would have wanted.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because it was the last thing she said to me, that you deserved to know the truth. And if you don’t go, you’ll never know.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me?”

  “Because I don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle. Clearly your mother was smarter than that. It’s up to you to put it all together.”

  I knew he was right. I looked at Philippe, at his small twisted body, his eyes full of tears. After all these years of hate, it had to come to this.

  “And Elspeth.…”

  “Yes?”

  “It probably means nothing to you after all this time, but I am sorry.”

  Seeing Philippe filled me with confusion and sadness I hadn’t expected; his decades-late apology and admission of guilt didn’t give me the satisfaction I’d always longed for. Maybe I should have forgiven him; maybe it would have given us both a sense of peace. But that’s the thing about an apology—it’s the responsibility of the wrongdoer to deliver it, but there’s no rule that the one who was wronged has to accept it.

  I walked back in the direction of the hotel as quickly as I could, until I came to the Seine, where I stopped to catch my breath. The city seemed sadder to me now. Steeped in history and full of stories that held no happy endings. I thought of my mother coming here for the first time, full of life and idealism, committed to the Seekers and their work, the very opposite of how she left.

  In the end it seemed that my mother had finally chosen me, and she died alone as a result.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I had never believed in fate or that things happened for a reason, and yet my mother’s death had saved my life. It had filled me with purpose and given me the strength to face my own past as I struggled to make sense of hers. I didn’t know what fate awaited me at the end of this journey, but if I wanted answers I was going to have to go back to the place where it all began: Africa. I quickly packed my bags at the hotel and headed for the airport.

  I asked the driver to go as fast as he could. Now that my mind was made up, I didn’t want to waste another minute. I hadn’t checked the flight schedules and had no idea what it would cost, but I didn’t care. When we arrived, I headed straight for the ticket counter.

  “Where to, madame?”

  “Capetown.”

  “And the reservation is under what last name?” The attendant looked up from her screen and smiled.

  “No reservation. I need a ticket on the first flight out of here. I don’t care what it costs. One way.” I shoved my credit card across the counter to her. I was breathing heavily from rushing, and she looked startled. “Please. It’s urgent,” I said.

  She looked back at her screen and began typing. “There is a flight in forty minutes, but you’ll have to hurry.”

  She swiped my card, checked my luggage, and handed me my boarding pass, and I grabbed it and ran. I couldn’t remember the last time I moved so quickly. My chest was pounding and my legs ached, but I kept on running. People were moving out of the way and turning to stare but I didn’t care—I was going to make that flight.

  As soon as I landed in Capetown, I felt the heat from the earth go right through my feet and up my shins. The air was hot and dry, and I licked the dust from my lips, twisted my hair up, and stretched my arms high above my head. I’d gone from winter to summer in twenty-seven hours, and I could feel my muscles start to soften under the pulsing sun. I made my way over to the car rental agency, walking into welcoming waves of heat that made each of my movements feel as if they were happening in slow motion. The kid who worked at the rental agency said it was only a ninety-minute drive along Route 62 to Robertson Valley and suggested I get a convertible for the trip, so I did. After winter in three different countries, and a color palette of varying shades of gray over the last few weeks, I was grateful for South Africa’s summer weather, for crisp blue skies that touched down on lush green fields, and for the striking pink king proteas, the country’s national flower, that blazed along the edges of the road. I gathered my thoughts, putting together the pieces of my mother’s puzzle and taking note of the empty spaces that remained, spaces that had left their holes in me. I hoped Ingrid would be able to fill in these spaces. I was tired and wired all at the same time. Although I hadn’t slept for more than a few hours in a row since my mother passed away, it wasn’t sleep my body ached for, it was rest. The kind of rest that comes with the peace of knowing, a desire so strong it had brought me here.

  I thought of Ted, another piece of me that was missing. Ted wasn’t Henri, he had never lied to me, and he hadn’t betrayed me like Philippe, but he had hurt me unintentionally, and I needed to tell him so. I knew he was still livid about our last conversation, and it might not change anything between us, but if we never talked again, I’d feel better knowing that I’d told him the truth. I found a gas station with a pay phone and pulled over.

  “Hello?” said Ted, sounding half asleep.

  “It’s me.”

  “What do you want, Elsie?” The sharpness in his voice caught me off guard. He was angry, but he wasn’t the only one.

  “I lied to you,” I said, gripping the phone tightly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I lied to you. I didn’t divorce you because I couldn’t stand what it was doing to you; I did it because I couldn’t stand what it was doing to me. I couldn’t stand to see how disappointed you were with me, that I wasn’t pregnant, that I wasn’t fixed, that you hadn’t made it all better.”

  “Elsie, I wasn’t disappointed with you, I was disappointed for us.” He sounded irritated, as if he shouldn’t have to explain anything so obvious.

  “So was I, but you wouldn’t let me be.” I spat the words out as angry tears welled in my eyes. “I wasn’t able to get pregnant, I wasn’t able to control my body, I wasn’t able to make a baby—not you Ted, me. I wanted to mourn that and accept that we’d done our best. But you refused to allow it. Instead, somewhere along the line, I became your project and not your wife and partner, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take you trying to fix me anymore.”

  “I just wanted us to be happy.”

  “We were always happy with each other, Ted, weren’t we? I married you, not the father I thought you could be. You. And I wanted you to say the same. I wanted to be enough for you.”

  “And I wanted us to be a family,” he said, exasperated, as if I didn’t know that. As if I didn’t understand, which I did. I wanted the same things. But I wanted us more, and I needed him to hear me.

  “We were a family,” I roared. “You’re my family, Ted, and I’m yours, and that may not be everything we ever wanted, but you don’t always get everything you want. And that has to be all right.”

  I pictured him sitting on the floor, his back leaning against the wall, knees tucked up against his chest. We had been here before. An ocean of hurt between us that seemed impossible to cross, until one of us reached out and touched the other. I imagined his hand in mine and sighed.

  “Say something.”

  “What happened, Else?”

  I leaned my head against the phone booth and exhaled deeply. “I saw Henri and he didn’t apologize, and I saw Philippe and he did, and you know what? It didn’t make me feel any better. It didn’t undo what happened, nothing can. But it didn’t destroy me either.”

  I’m still here, Luc had sai
d to me in Paris. And he was right.

  “I’ll always be broken in some way, Ted, and I’ll always wish that some things could have been different, and I’ll always want the mother I never had, but I know I can’t keep pining for the things I don’t have, and missing out on the parts of my life that are wonderful…or used to be, anyway.”

  He was silent for a moment, and when he spoke his voice was low and gentle. “Look, I can’t change what I want. I want a family, and I want it with you. And maybe it will still happen if we try again, and maybe it won’t, but I don’t want to do this life with anyone else, and I know that now.”

  I felt a calm wash over me, and my whole body softened. It was everything that I wanted to hear, but I needed to be sure. I needed to hear him say it.

  “I need to be enough for you, Ted.”

  “I think we both know that you are more than enough for any one person.” He sounded full of mischief when he said it, and warm, and I felt his smile traveling across the phone, giving me one of my own.

  “What about Julie?” I felt a twinge of guilt as I thought of the phone call I’d had with her.

  “Julie is a great woman who deserves to be with someone who isn’t in love with someone else. After your visit to the set she accused me of still needing you. And she’s right, I do. And no amount of time apart from you is going to change that, so she moved on.”

  We were both quiet, and as I closed my eyes, I could feel his body against mine, our arms and legs wrapped around each other. I wanted to reach through the phone, grab hold of him, and never let go.

  “Where are you, Else?” he asked, and I felt a small piece of me return to where it was supposed to be.

  “Africa. I’m on my way home. I don’t know what surprises are waiting there for me, but I’m going to find out. And when I do, you’re the one I want to share them with.”

  I stopped the car at the end of the property and looked at the little handwritten note Philippe had given me: 1421 Bowers Lane. This was it. My mother’s family farm. I recognized the small house behind the large metal gates from the photograph, and saw that a much larger house had been added onto the back. I felt like I had been here before, that some part of me was on the other side of the driveway ready to meet me. It was like I was returning, although to what and whom I didn’t know. South Africa hadn’t been my country for most of my life, and yet something in my very cells told me I was part of this place, that a piece of me had stayed here, waiting for me to return and reclaim it.

  I tried my best to smooth out the wrinkles in my clothes from the car ride, and with my mother’s box of photographs in hand, made my way to the security booth. I hadn’t thought of what to tell the guard, but as I got closer he nodded and opened the gate, and that’s when I saw the camera that had been watching me since I first pulled up. My heart was beating so strongly it was making the front of my T-shirt flutter. I took the three steps up to the front door and before I could knock, it opened.

  “Elspeth.”

  “Me.…” I whispered. The face was older, but I recognized the large beauty mark on her cheek. Here was the Me in the photographs, the younger woman who stood by my mother’s side and held the baby in her arms. The woman who in the final photos was alone, without parents, and who, I was sure, had sent the obituaries with the handwritten note that said, Thought you’d want to know.…

  “Ingrid,” she said, introducing herself and opening the door wide for me to come in. “She said you’d come home.”

  I remembered Mrs. David telling me about a phone call she had overheard my mother making from the hospital before she died. My mother must have spoken to Ingrid that day, and the conversation had been about me.

  Ingrid was smaller than my mother, and darker, her skin weathered from the sun and covered in freckles. Her bare face was lined like dry earth, crackled and grooved around brown eyes that matched the long braid that she wore over her shoulder. I could tell by the thick, bare calves that stuck out from her knee-length cotton dress that she was strong and a walker like my mother had been, although judging by her flat bare feet, it was not from exercise, but from a way of life, from working on the huge property visible through the windows at the back of the house.

  “Thank you,” I said, walking ahead of her and straight to the back windows. As far as the eye could see were rows of vines with green grapes being tended to by workers. “Vineyards?” I asked.

  “Yes. If only my father had known that it wasn’t strawberries these fields wanted but grapes, he could have been a very rich man.” She came and stood next to me, and this time it was her turn to take me in.

  “You look like your father, Elspeth,” she said, studying my profile. “Same long nose and sad eyes.”

  “You knew him?” I asked, turning toward her.

  “I knew them both. They used to have the farm next door, and their family would come up here on the weekends when I was a girl.” She pointed to an area to the left of the vineyards that looked identical to the land in front of us.

  “And now they’re both dead,” I sighed. “First, Leo in the car accident, and then Howard of a heart attack.”

  A strange expression passed over Ingrid’s face and she moved toward the center of the room, where she sat on a large leather couch with her back to me. It was a magnificent room, with hardwood floors, stone walls, and wooden beams that ran the length of the ceiling. To my right was a fireplace and to my left a heavy wooden staircase that led to a wide landing and the second floor. I followed Ingrid and sat in one of the wingback chairs facing her as she poured glasses of iced tea for us from the pitcher on the table.

  “I didn’t know about you or any of this,” I said, placing my mother’s wooden box on the table and taking out the family portraits. “I only saw these after my mother died. She left them with a neighbor for safekeeping, along with a note. I don’t know why she wanted me to follow her clues, why she couldn’t have just told me what happened.”

  “I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer for that. Perhaps she wanted you to walk in her footsteps? Perhaps she thought it would help you understand why she did the things she did? The Rachel I knew always believed she was right, even if others thought otherwise. I can only guess she hoped you would see things as she did.”

  Ingrid took the small stack of photographs and began to look through them slowly. Her eyes lingered on the picture of her and Rachel as children, standing with their parents in front of the original house that stood where we were now. She sighed heavily and held the picture against her chest.

  “The Seekers seem to believe my mother was a wealthy woman, yet as far as I know, she died penniless and alone. I want to know why, I want to understand her.” I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself down.

  Ingrid leaned forward. I felt her eyes on me, deciding what she should say next. I didn’t want her to sugarcoat any of it, so I pressed harder.

  “Ingrid, please. Philippe said only you could tell me the whole truth. What was Rachel hiding? And why was she hiding it?”

  Ingrid hesitated a moment. “My dear, she’d been hiding truths and telling lies from the moment she could talk. Our mother taught us to hide from day one.”

  “Hide what?”

  “That we were Jews.”

  Ingrid told me that my grandparents, Samuel and Hannah, had fled the pogroms in Russia and started over in South Africa. Samuel was a farmer who had believed there were fields of strawberries there, and Hannah had agreed to go anywhere there was no snow and that Jews were safe. They’d been practicing Jews back in Russia, but when Hannah saw how blacks were treated in South Africa, she was convinced it was only a matter of time until the Jews were next and she would be hunted again. She saw apartheid coming years before it did, and it scared her. So she changed our family’s last name from Milevsky to Mills, forbade Samuel from practicing the Jewish holidays, and tried everything she could to make the family seem like gentiles. Only it didn’t work—Samuel no longer went to synagogue, but he still pra
cticed at home, and no matter what the family name was, they still looked like Jews. Except for Rachel, who they called Ray. She was fairer than the rest, her hair lighter, and my grandmother made her take elocution lessons to sound British.

  “Mother dressed Ray better than me,” said Ingrid. “She sent Ray to a better school and told her over and over again how she could be different, have a better life, how her beauty would help her find a rich man and her body would help her keep him. Our mother was a fearful woman, always looking over her shoulder and full of doom. Rachel was her favorite. Although I’m not sure what was worse, being ignored by her like I was or being the object of her obsession.”

  She stood and walked over to a small bar next to the fireplace. She opened a bottle of wine and brought it and two glasses back to the table.

  “I think we’re both going to need something stronger,” she said, pushing aside the iced tea and handing me a glass.

  “Thank you,” I said. I drank half my glass in one gulp and refilled it. “I don’t know what to say. I mean it’s true, she always used her looks, but her own mother made her that way? That’s unspeakable.”

  “Not everyone should be a mother,” Ingrid said.

  “I guess not,” I said, feeling my eyes sting.

  And the people who should be don’t always get the chance. I thought of all those years Ted and I had tried, knowing in my heart I would have been a thousand times better at it than my own mother.

  “No children?” asked Ingrid.

  “No.” I paused for a moment, taking note of a small flicker of hope inside myself. “Not yet. We’ll see. You?”

  “Not my own,” she said, taking a drink. “I did raise my baby brother, though, after our mother passed away and Rachel left.”

  “Does he live here too?”

  “No, Isaac died years ago. Polio.”

  “Polio. My mother told me that Howard had polio. Did he?”

  “No.” She was quiet for a moment. “But I don’t suppose that would have been as interesting.”