by Nicole Seitz
I enter the living room again and see my closest friends in the world. Ronnie and Marlene are beaming at me, arms around each other, tea glasses in hand. I’m so glad they could make the trip from Atlanta. Ronnie leaves Marlene’s side and comes to take my hand. “You look beautiful,” he says. “Better than I’ve ever seen you.”
“Yes,” I say. “I feel beautiful right now. Oh, Ronnie, I’m shaking. I’m—I’m . . .”
He grins. “I’m shaking too, you know. I used to lie there in bed at night and listen to you cry yourself to sleep. I used to pray for you, just for the pain to turn bearable. I never imagined in my wildest dreams a miracle like this could ever happen to a person. What you’re going through, Al, it’s changed my whole life, I’m telling you. Me and Marlene? We just can’t believe we get to share this day with you. Thank you for letting us be here. I’ve been in such a good mood, I told Marlene I’d buy her that fancy sewing machine she’s always wanted.”
“You are a dear sweet man, Ronnie Stits. The best husband I ever had.” I wink. “And I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t married you. You saved me. I was a shell of a woman and a terrible wife, I’m sure. But I probably wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for you.”
Ronnie kisses me on the cheek and then looks me hard in the eyes. “I’m happy for you. Really.” He walks back to Marlene and hugs her tight.
Margaret comes up to me now. She is wearing an understated outfit of black pants and a soft yellow blouse. This woman, who has never been understated, is today for me. She wants me to shine. She put me in this outfit from Gwynn’s and insisted on buying it for me. She cried when she saw me wearing it in the store. She is a good friend, no matter what she was like when she was younger. We’re all different, aren’t we? Morphed into something better, I think. I am thankful to have her in my life all these years later. She is officially my oldest friend now, and to me that’s something I don’t take lightly.
“You’re gonna do fine,” she says to me. Dimples line her cheeks. “I promise we’ll try hard not to scare her off. We’ll stay way in the background, all right?”
I shake my head okay, but words are failing me. This moment feels like destiny.
“They’re here!” Graison yells from the front door. She’s peeking out the sidelight, bulbous and positively glowing from pregnancy these days. I inhale and the room grows deathly quiet. I smooth my dress and clear my throat and run over to the coffee table, pulling out a handful of tissues. I close my eyes and fold them in my hand. I blot the corners of my eyes. Oh Vesey, Mama, Daddy, are you seeing this? Are you here? How I wish you could have lived to see the day.
Sunila
I turn and look out the window of the rented car. “What if my English is not good?”
“You have been working very hard, Sunila. You will do just fine.” Mr. Assai turns the keys and the car goes quiet. My heart beats.
“It is very good to meet you,” I say, practicing my English. “My name is Sunila. I am your daughter.”
“Good, that is very good. Shall we go now?”
Mr. Assai gets out of the car and comes around to my door. He opens it and helps me out by holding my hand. I want to keep holding his hand, but I do not. I walk slowly over brick and moss and climb the stairs, holding my sari. I stand there facing the red door, and I turn to look at Mr. Assai one last time. He is nodding. The door opens and I feel I may fall to the ground. My head is light and my heart is lighter. There is a woman at the door in black and yellow and I see her, though I do not recognize her. I had always imagined that if I met my mother I would know her instantly in my heart and from the pictures she drew. But I do not know this woman. My heart begins to tear.
Ally
Margaret opens the door and stands there waiting. She steps out onto the front porch. I hear her talking, but I cannot move. My legs and feet are positively frozen. My daughter is outside that door. My daughter is outside that door! Something grabs me and I run, arms outstretched, all polite demeanor vanished. I am a ravaged mama tiger and I see my child. There she is! She is a woman now, not a baby, with dark hair pulled back neatly and a beautiful blue sari to match the glory of her big blue eyes. She is nearly glowing, a gold aura around her. Yes, this is my child! I would know her anywhere. She is even more beautiful than I ever could have dreamed of, and I melt, simply holding my arms out to her, shaking. “You are here, aren’t you? Is it really you?”
Sunila
The woman in the milky dress with hair to match down to her shoulders is lovely. She is truly lovely. She is my mother; I know it in my heart.
“Hello,” I say in my best English. My voice is shaking. “I am Sunila. I am your daughter.” She says something to me but it is too fast and I cannot understand. She is holding her arms out to me.
Ally
Oh, heaven have mercy, I want to grab her and squeeze her up! I want to erase all the years and miles between us. But I am afraid to scare her off. She doesn’t know me. I am just a sixty-year-old American woman, a stranger to her. But my arms will not return to my sides. I have entered some tunnel where all I can see is her. She looks at me with tears in her eyes and her hands go up and press her cheeks. She wipes her tears, sweet thing. Then she looks to the man standing beside her and he nods.
Sunila
Mr. Assai smiles at me encouragingly and motions for me to move forward. So I take a step and take this woman in my arms, a warm, lovely woman who gave birth to me, who suffered all these years for me—and feeling her in my arms, I no longer feel my own sorrow for the past but hers. She is in my own skin now, and we cry and wail to the sky as a flock of geese honks above us and scatters our joy until it rains down upon us and washes us as one to the river. There cannot be more to life than this moment.
Ally
I could die a happy woman right now. I could. All is right with the world because my daughter’s in it. She’s finally home. And so am I.
My daughter is wrapped around me, squeezing tight. I can barely breathe. I am laughing and crying. We hold each other and rock and wail, and as we stand there on the porch with all my precious people watching, we become one again, flesh to flesh, and I know in my heart, if I ever had any doubts—this is the reason I was put here on this earth, for this moment, for this child. For such an amazing time as this.
FIFTY-SIX
Crossing Over
Mount Pleasant
Sunila
IN NEPAL, WHEN A PERSON DIES, HE IS CREMATED AND the ashes taken to the river to scatter in hopes that the soul will be cleansed as the Baghmati River turns into the Ganges. I am watching my mother do something similar for a friend of hers. He lived across the river and was very special to her. It has been some time since he died, but she is only now taking his ashes to scatter. She says she is finally ready.
“This is what he wanted,” she says. “I told him I would do this.”
The urn is a small round porcelain container. She holds it to her chest and I can see the pain in her eyes. She looks at me and smiles. “It’s never easy to say good-bye to someone you love, is it?”
I shake my head. I am thinking about Amaa. I am thinking of her having to work every day of her life . . . without me. I do not know how she can bear it or how she can remain with Buba. But Amaa has never seen the likes of the Shangri-La Hotel. She has never seen America with its trees and people and houses pushed apart. She has never been able to walk out of the place where she slept on a warm bed, filled her belly, and laughed happy tears, to go out back to a river flowing with birds and grass and green and blues. There is no dust here. No dust on my soul.
I am also thinking of Mr. Assai. How sad I was to see him go. How much I care about him still. I wonder if this is what love feels like, but I do not know. What do I know about love? I am learning about it. I am learning that two people can be from different sides of the world, speak different languages, look different from one another, but still, there can be love. In a deep, deep place. I can say that I already love my
mother. I loved her before I met her. It is a true and binding love.
Mama, she has me call her Mama, is climbing into the boat. I step from the dock and she helps me on board. I find a seat and straighten my sari. “Hold on tight,” she says. “We don’t have far to go.”
My hair tangles in the wind. I will never get used to the glorious feeling of wind in my hair, of water beneath me or sunshine above me. I have found the most beautiful place on earth. Truly, I am a child of the gods if this is the land in which I was born. I do not remember it. It is all foreign to me, but every so often, I have a feeling of destiny as I am walking down the lane, looking at a tree, washing my hands in the creek.
We are happy here. Mama has made a wonderful room for me and we are both learning how to batik. She is as amazed at my skill as am I, though I see her work and I know my skill came from her. I am holding the Book of the Gods, which contains my mother’s drawings and words. It is my most prized possession. It saved me when I was a child and allowed me to work beneath an umbrella, allowed me to use my mind and soul to create instead of crushing gravel, a mindless, thankless job. It is no wonder Buba is unhappy. He will always be a crusher. He has no skill, barely a soul.
“Here we are, Sunila. You see that? That piece of land that juts out with the grass and that lovely huge old oak tree? This is where he would point when we were children and say he was going to build a house.”
Mama is quiet, remembering. Her eyes dance and glisten as she stares at the tree. “He never did build a house here, did he, but that’s okay. He’s in a better place.” She looks at me and says knowingly, “Vesey’s in heaven right now. If anyone is, it’s him.” She opens the container and closes her eyes. Her mouth moves. When she opens her eyes, she stands to see which way the wind is blowing. A breeze has picked up and the marsh grass is leaning. With a flick of her wrist, the white ash spills into the air and is lifted up over the grass, over the water, and I watch it travel far away out beyond this creek, Molasses Creek. A tear falls down my cheek for a love lost, for this man I never knew, for this woman whom I love so dearly, for Amaa and Mr. Assai. Let it all flow out to the river to be sanctified. Let it all flow. It is our destiny.
Ally
I feel strangely better after letting go of Vesey’s ashes. I imagine he’ll become part of this Lowcountry pluff mud and oysters and grass and fish we buy down on Shem Creek. He is given back to the earth he loved. In a crazy way, it all makes sense.
I wish he could have met her.
My daughter is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen. She is unlike any person in America. She is humble and has no idea of her beauty. She is kind. She always thinks of others and goes out of her way to make my life easier. She is talented beyond belief. When I found out she worked practically as a slave in a quarry her whole life, I nearly died all over again. How criminal can some people be? How real that there is evil in this world. Yet how real that there is good in this world too. I see it everywhere now, in every conversation I have with Sunila, in every memory I have of Vesey and Daddy, even in that sweet little Graison having a child at such an early age, I see good. And I have another chance to do good. I have a daughter again and I am here for her. I feel as if I have purpose. Real purpose. Imagine.
Vesey’s ashes are washed away and I have fulfilled my debt to him, though it will never be enough. I will always strive to be the mother I should be because of how I was loved by Vesey, by Daddy, and by Mama. I am better because of them.
And I’m easing into everything with Sunila. I know all this, all of me, even, can be overwhelming, and the last thing I want to do is to make the girl more homesick than she really is.
I tell her Vesey’s in heaven now as we watch the white settle and turn back in the boat for home. We are quiet for a few minutes, strangely no tears on my part, just as Vesey had wanted, and then she opens her sweet little mouth and says, “How do you know that he is in heaven now? He has reached enlightenment? Might he come back in another life in a better caste?”
“Oh, honey, we don’t have the caste system here. Everyone in America is afforded the same rights.”
I say this and I know it is a lie. This is not the time to lie.
“I take that back, Sunila. I want you to know the real America. It is a lovely place with lovely people who have a history behind them that is sometimes hard to shake. There are different races here, one big melting pot, and I think in many ways we are melting quite nicely—but some still choose to see our differences and use them against one another, between race, between class, rich and poor.”
“Your friend, he was poor?”
“Not poor at all. He was rich in life. He was rich in integrity and character and family and friends. He was rich in intelligence and heart and humility. He wasn’t poor at all.” We are quiet awhile with the breeze blowing past us and the oyster bed safely out of reach. Then Sunila asks, “And my father. Was my father a rich man?”
She has not yet asked of her father. My heart stops. I think of Robert. I don’t even know where he is now, if he’s even alive. I imagine he’s still a playboy or an aging pilot with growing girth and thinning hair. I haven’t a clue. I don’t really know what to tell her about her father. The poor thing has been through so much, having to figure out who she is now, where she fits in the world. Not to mention her memories of that awful man who stole her. It’s a lot to handle. More for her than for me.
So I consider something.
My father once told me a lie. He told me that people could write notes from heaven to people here on earth so I would see it was a real place, not something he imagined. It was a lie. I know that now. And I wasn’t very happy about it for a good long while. But now that I have Constance—Sunila—in my life, now that I know what it’s like to hold your child’s precious heart and mind and understanding in your very hands, I know Daddy did it because he loved me more than anything in the whole wide world. And you know what? I’m glad he did it. Understanding that sacrifice means the world to me now, as backward as that may seem. My daddy loved me enough to know I would be taken care of after he was gone. He worked so hard putting those notes up on the ceiling . . . worked so hard to continue the lie. And goodness, how I love him for it.
So when my daughter asks me if her father was rich, I hesitate for only a second before I begin my own white lie.
“Your father was very rich in all those things, Sunila. It’s probably where you get it from.” She smiles and puts her head down. “And honey, there’s something I haven’t told you yet. Something I think you should know, especially if you’re trying to figure out who you are in this world. You see that house right there? Your father lived right there. Your father and I were the closest friends two people could be on opposite sides of the river. His name was Vesey Washington, and you were born out of love, child. I fell in love with your father the very first time I laid eyes on him. See there?” I take the sketchbook from her and flip to a page with nothing but Vesey on it. “See how handsome he was? And kind, and thoughtful? And you know, he would have been happy you were here with me today to give him back to the earth.”
Sunila dabs at her eyes. “So the man in this book is my father? This man here?” She turns the page and shows me another drawing of Vesey when he was a boy.
“The very same. Isn’t he adorable?”
She presses the book to her chest. “I have memorized every line in his face. Though he is not here, I feel that I know him.” Sunila looks heartbroken.
“Don’t be sad, sugar. I know you won’t get to meet your daddy in this life, but I can tell you everything you want to know. And you know, your daddy left something just for you, something very special.”
“For me?” Guilt pricks me, but seeing her face, it only lasts for a second.
“For you. Now, here we are.” We hop up on the dock and I tell Sunila to wait right there for me. Then I head to Vesey’s shed and rumble around in there. I come back with a gift in my hands.
“You told me ab
out sitting under a rainbow-colored umbrella all those years and how it saved you from the sun. I know your father would want you to have this. This was his very own rainbow-colored umbrella he used to sit under out at his stand. You see, you’ve always had a connection with him. Isn’t that something?”
Sunila takes the umbrella in her hands and runs her fingers along the colored stripes. “Your father was very interested in education and helping people to read. That’s why he sat out there and labored hard.”
Sunila’s eyes light up. “I will learn to read. In English. I will speak well and I will learn to read.”
“Yes, I have no doubts, honey.” Then her eyes fall and a cloud comes over, casting a shadow over her face. “What is it? Don’t you want the umbrella?”
“No. It is not that,” says Sunila. “It is only . . . I am thinking of Amaa when I see this. It makes me very sad to think of her in the quarry crushing gravel. I know what she and Buba did was terrible, but I cannot help my feelings. Do not be angry.”
“Angry?” I set the umbrella into the boat and take my child’s face in my hands. “Sunila, my heart, you are my child. I know how badly your . . . well, how she must be feeling now. She loved you. I believe that. Which is why I have something else to tell you.”
“About my father?”
“No. Not about him.” I pause for effect. “I have been in contact with Mr. Assai.” At this, a light enters my daughter’s eyes and she stands up straighter. I smile. I’m already learning my child.
“He would like to make another visit to come see us here. I wonder, is that okay? I told him that would be okay. I assumed anyway.”
“Oh yes! Yes, I would like that very much.”
“You like this fella, don’t you.” Sunila goes sheepish on me and her face turns beet-red. “That’s what I thought,” I say. Then she turns crestfallen.
“I do like Mr. Assai. Very much,” says Sunila. “But . . . it is not possible. He is Vaisia, and I am outcaste.”