by Kennedy Ryan
It’s taken me years to be as healthy as I am now. What if seeing my mother, revisiting that place and that time, sets me back? What if all the ground I’ve gained over the summer, I lose chasing some idealized peace that seeing a dying woman won’t actually give?
My mother gave birth. Whoop-de-do. Cats and dogs give birth to entire litters. There is no miracle to birth, from what I’ve seen. The miracle is what follows. The miracle of selflessness. The phenomenon of nurturing self-worth and sacrificing for a child—feeding not just their bodies, but their souls. Oh, I know what a mother is, and it is not May DuPree. I had a mother. When I was dead inside, a walking, catatonic open wound of a child who refused to even speak, MiMi gave me life.
That’s a mother, and mine is already dead.
“You have to do what’s right for you,” Marsha tells me over the phone.
“Yeah, but what should I do?” I ask. “How am I supposed to know what’s right for me?”
“I think—”
“Yes,” I cut in. “Please tell me what you think. I don’t need your professional distance, Marsha.”
“I’m your friend and a professional,” she reminds me. “I think if you go, you need to know why you’re going and manage your expectations. What would you want from her? For her?”
“I don’t want anything for her,” I spit, shifting to bring my legs under me on Kenan’s couch. “She was basically dead to me anyway. We haven’t spoken since the day she gave me away.”
“Okay, that’s fair. Then what would you want from her? For yourself?”
I think about that for a moment and ask honestly what I’d want from her if we were in the same room.
“I’d want the words—for her to tell me,” I answer in a rush of indignation and long-corked rage. “Why’d she give me away? How could she choose him over me?”
My chest rises and falls with heaving breaths, like I’ve been running.
“But what could she say that would make it better, Lotus?” Marsha asks. “What could she possibly say that wouldn’t sound like a pitiful excuse?”
Nothing. There’s nothing she could say to make it right, and anything she came up with would feel like an insult.
“So why go?” I ask, shrugging, feeling helpless and furious, like something is boiling in my belly with a tight lid. Like I could blow at any moment.
“What if the words you need aren’t from her,” Masha says, “but to her?”
“You want me to forgive her?” I ask, choking on the concept.
“Not necessarily. If you can, great, but if you can’t, not forgiving someone else doesn’t mean you can’t heal. I don’t agree when people say a survivor can’t really move on until they forgive the people who hurt them. The key, from my perspective, is releasing the hurt. Moving on in your life without the hurt holding you back. Maybe it’s not words you need to hear from her, but words you need to say to her that will help you in this situation. If you think that could be the case, then that’s why you go. Not expecting anything she could ever say to make you feel better about the inexcusable thing she did.”
Her words land with the thud of truth in my belly where MiMi used to say your “knower” lives. Your gut.
For a long time after Marsha and I hang up, I sit there on Kenan’s couch and wonder what I would say to her. Marsha suggested I write it down, but I’m not sure I know where to start.
Kenan comes in from practice and drops his gym bag on the floor, watching me with a concerned frown. He walks over, flops onto the couch, and pulls me on his lap. I burrow into the clean smell of his neck.
“Aw man. You showered,” I say, affecting disappointment. “I was hoping to lick the sweat off your body.”
“I could go back and sweat again,” he offers hopefully.
“Maybe next time.” I kiss his jaw and twine our fingers, enjoying him, his silence for a few moments. “I’m going to New Orleans.”
He stiffens under me, pulling back to peer into my face. “You are?” he asks. “You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn the timing,” he grumbles. “If I didn’t have to go to China for this exhibition game, I’d go with you.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“And with the new baby, Iris can’t go,” he goes on, like he’s turning it over in his head, searching for a solution. “Maybe Billie or Yari?”
“I’ll be fine by myself. Really.”
“Call me.” He presses his lips into my hair. “I want to be there for you however I can.”
I nod against his chest and wrap my arms around the broad torso.
“Can I ask you something?” I ask after a moment of us wrapped up in each other.
“Anything.”
“Well, you have this reputation for being kind of surly.”
He chuckles. “How do you know that? Remember you don’t even follow basketball.”
“It doesn’t take much digging. And I didn’t google you. My friends were very quick to tell me all about how intimidating you are. How you don’t talk much to the press. How everyone thinks you’re all hard and enigmatic.”
“Okay, your point?”
“You’ve never been any of that with me, Kenan.” I glance up. “From the start, you were open and curious about me, and you told me things and—”
“I wanted you,” he interrupts. “I hadn’t ever wanted anything or anyone the way I wanted you almost from the beginning. I saw you in that hospital room, and that was it. I’m not saying I fell in love that day, but you wouldn’t leave me alone.”
He’s quiet for a beat and then glances at me, a flicker of uncertainty foreign on his strong features.
“You didn’t feel anything that first day we met?” he asks. “Or at that awards show? At the Christmas party last year? Any of the times we ran into each other?” He gives a quick shake of his head. “It doesn’t matter. You feel it now.”
I take his chin between my fingers and direct his eyes to meet mine. “You’re asking if all the times I fled the room as soon as possible, all the times I pretended you weren’t there or was a smartass to put you off, if I was feeling anything?”
He lowers his face until our noses touch.
“I told you before you scared me to death,” I confess, licking my lips. “I should still be scared. Love is hard. Trust is hard.”
“Well I have no choice now,” he says, kissing one of my cheeks and then the other. “You have something of mine that I’m not sure I’ll ever get back.”
“Oh, yeah?” I ask huskily. “And what do I have of yours, Mr. Ross?”
He tells me in the way he knows melts me into a puddle—with a song.
“You have stolen my heart with one look of your eyes.”
38
Lotus
In the hospital room, I search for my mother through the tangle of wires and tubes. She’s unconscious, giving me time to study her without the awkwardness of what I should say. Of what she could possibly say to me.
“You came.”
Aunt Priscilla’s voice is a mix of sweet tea and Sazerac, the French Quarter cocktail; an old Haitian family recipe of bitters, Cognac, absinthe, and the peel of a lemon. That’s the bitter edge Aunt Pris’s voice carries from scratching out her living in the Lower Ninth. With Aunt Pris, you gotta take the bitter with the sweet.
I don’t know how she does it, but Aunt Pris never ages. She looks like Iris’s slightly older sister, not her mother. A shade darker than Iris and a few shades lighter than I am, she is more beautiful than us both. Her hair hangs in a fluent wave to her waist, and her eyes, still unlined, could make a man jump from a cliff to get to her. I’ve seen it happen, figuratively at least. Men who left their wives, abandoned their kids, lost their jobs for a taste of Aunt Priscilla. She, however, was wiser than my mother, and never developed a taste for them. She never got caught up on one particular man—never gave herself so fully to one lover that she would excuse his sins against her own flesh and blood. That she would turn her back on her
daughter with no regret. No, she committed different sins, and those are for her and Iris to sort. I’m here to deal with my own demons.
“Yeah. I came,” I reply.
“Thank you.”
Her voice actually trembles, and when I look at the ageless beauty, I see real vulnerability, real fear. Seeing anything sincere on her face is new to me. She and my mother knew all about armor—about shiny façades to draw a man close enough to pay, but to keep him at arm’s length so he couldn’t inflict pain. They cared less about keeping their daughters safe apparently.
“She’s in a bad way, Lo,” Aunt Pris says anxiously, clasping her hands in front of her. “They say it’s a stroke.”
“A stroke?” I ask. My mother had me when she was seventeen and is barely forty-two years old.
“It’s not unheard of,” Aunt Pris says. “Unless . . . you don’t have anything to do with this, do you?”
“What?” For a moment I’m completely at a loss. Clueless. “Me? What do you mean?”
Aunt Pris licks her lips and considers me with careful speculation.
“Well, I know MiMi taught you things,” she says, then rushes to clean it up. “Not that I’m accusing you of doing this. I just wondered if, considering how young she is, this might be some black magic. If it might be a root, a spell, something you could maybe break?”
God, I’m such a fool.
Here I thought Aunt Pris wanted me to come make some kind of peace—to see Mama before she passes on—but she believes I can save her.
I swallow my anger, my resentment, and decide to play along.
“I’m not sure what I can do,” I say with appropriate solemnity. “I need to see what we’re dealing with here.”
Aunt Priscilla’s eyes brighten and she nods eagerly. “Yes. See what we’re dealing with. It could be anybody behind the spell. You know she’s got a . . . a mess of wives who hate her— husbands, too, truth be told. Is there anything I can do to help? Anything you need?”
“Yes.” I frown, pretending to think long and hard. “Go to the house.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, nodding.
“And bring to me . . .”
“Yes, what do you need?” she asks, breathless with hope.
“A piece of her jewelry,” I finish, meeting her eyes for a second and then looking away.
“Jewelry?” Aunt Pris’s brows draw together. “Just any jewelry?”
“Something she loves preferably and would want to take on her . . . her journey.”
“To the afterlife?” Aunt Pris whispers, blinking back tears.
I feel bad for a moment, but that passes. If I’m to have any kind of time alone with my mother, Aunt Pris has to go.
“If it comes to that, yeah,” I say in a rush before my guilt stops me. “But I may be able to use that before it does.”
“It won’t take long.” She heads toward the door, pauses, and looks back at me. “Thank you for coming. I didn’t think you would.”
“Neither did I,” I mumble. “You better go on so you can get back with the jewelry.”
I haven’t allowed myself to look at my mother lying prone in the hospital bed, not really. Once Aunt Pris is gone, I do.
I’ve seen her twice in thirteen years, both times when death was near. Once at Ron’s gravesite, and the other at MiMi’s. And the last word she ever spoke to me was goodbye. Now, when it feels like the only thing that will make this right is her words, she can’t speak. The beep of the machines, the only sound in the room, may be the bell tolling. Death may be with us again.
If Aunt Pris looks like Iris’s sister, my mother looks like Aunt Pris’s aunt. Yet, Mama is the younger. Life has been harder on her, or maybe she just never figured out how to shed the years like Aunt Pris did. We look more alike than I realized. I get the tilt of my eyes from her, the shape of my mouth. People used to say I looked like her, and she would tilt her head, studying me like l was a stranger and say, “Really? I don’t see it.”
“How do you think that made me feel, Mama?” I ask the silent woman. “You didn’t want to look like me. You didn’t want to see the resemblance, but there is one.”
A bitter twist masquerades as a grin on my mouth. “I work in fashion now, and I wear beautiful clothes, and sometimes people actually want to take pictures of me and hang them in galleries because they think I’m pretty. You never saw that, though, did you?” I ask her. “Is that why you did it? Is that why you chose him over me? I wasn’t light enough. Pretty enough. Did you always wish you could send me back, and first chance you got, you did?”
Tears flood my throat, floating the inevitable question to my tongue.
“Why did you let him hurt me, Mama?”
I sniff, impatient with my own tears. “Why did you choose him, knowing he was rotten? Knowing he had hurt your baby girl? Why didn’t you ever come for me?”
The question is harsh and raw in the sterility of the hospital room. “Did you never miss me? Did you ever go back to that day and reconsider giving me away?”
The line of futile questions stacks up around me, going nowhere, bouncing off the walls. Aunt Pris will be back soon with whatever jewelry she thinks I can use in a spell to save my mother.
I didn’t come here to save May DuPree.
I came to save myself.
Maybe not “once and for all,” because trauma doesn’t work that way. There may not ever be a “for all” to my healing. It may always be that the smell of pressed hair sets me off. There may always be days here and there when I can’t shake the sadness, the uncertainty that comes from being abandoned and betrayed. I may see trace amounts of this in my life forever, like a bloodstain on the floor that shows pale pink, but is never again spotless.
Oh, the blood of Jesus that washed us white as snow.
The line from one of MiMi’s hymns we used to sing on Sundays when no church would have us rises up to meet my pain. She rises up to meet my pain, like she always did. Head on. Fearlessly. With wisdom. Compassion. Unconditional love. The things she taught me got me this far. She was the first to lay bandages on my wounds. Today, I close them.
“I thought I needed your words, Mama,” I say, my voice hushed. “But my friend says the words that help me more may be the ones I say to you, so here goes.”
I reach in my purse for the journal I used to write the trauma narrative Marsha guided me through. The last page I flip to is where I begin.
“You had your chance,” I read the first line in a strong voice that doesn’t waver. “You had your chance to love me unconditionally, but you chose to change me. You had your chance to protect me as a mother should, but you chose to betray me for the man who split me in two. I was a little girl before Ron raped me, and after that day, I knew things I shouldn’t know. Had questions it wasn’t time for me to ask. He stole my innocence.”
The shock of that pain fills the room like floodwaters, rising all around me and over my head. I hold my breath. I gasp for air. The panic batters me in waves, but I draw air into my lungs by little sips at a time until I can take deep breaths. Like it has so many times before, this pain tries to drown me.
But it can’t. I won’t let it.
“He stole my innocence,” I pick up where I left off, my voice trembling and fainter, but still loud enough for me to hear—for her to hear if she can. “And instead of punishing him, instead of seeking justice for me, you chose him. And I’ve asked why almost every day since. Oh, I may not have said it aloud, but every time I doubted myself, thought I wasn’t pretty enough, light enough, needed to be different, needed to be more, I was asking why you did it. Trying to get to the bottom of what was so wrong with me.”
My spine straightens and I push against the weight of old pain and faded nightmares. I square my shoulders, finding the strength to toss them off like a cloak. “But you know what?” I ask rhetorically, because I already know the answer. “There ain’t a damn thing wrong with me. The problem was with you. The sin was his, and the shame, the guilt, the dirt
I carried around for years, that was his, too. That was yours, and I refuse to keep it.”
I shake my head, tears streaming over my cheeks, into the corners of my mouth, collecting at the base of my throat.
“The only good thing you ever did for me was give me away,” I say, stroking my gris-gris ring. “I didn’t come here to see my mother before she died, because my mother is already gone. MiMi was the best mother I could have asked for. Anything good about me finds its way back to her, and anything that’s not, she taught me how to accept or change.”
I fold the letter because I’ve memorized the last line. It is the truth that I came into this room knowing, and I’ll leave this room having said my piece.
“I came here not to blame you for giving me to her,” I tell May DuPree, “but to thank you for giving her to me.”
The hospital room door opens, and Aunt Pris rushes in with a jewelry box.
“I just brought the whole thing,” she says, handing it to me. “In case you get a . . . a vibe from one piece instead of another.”
“A vibe?” I ask, lifting one brow.
“I don’t know.” She shrugs elegant shoulders. “Whatever you and MiMi do, just do it. Just save her.”
“I can’t.” I shake my head and pass the box back. “I don’t know how to save anyone.”
“No, you can.” She clutches my hands between hers, desperation making her grip painful. “You have to. MiMi said you were the strongest.”
“What? When?”
“Always,” Aunt Pris says impatiently. “Even when you were a little girl, five, six years old, she said you were the strongest of us all. She said all the power we didn’t want passed on to you.”
“What? I . . .” I falter and process that. “Well, I can’t save a dying woman.”
“You have to,” Aunt Pris says, tears turning her dark eyes even more luminous. “They say she may not have much time.”
And like her words were an invitation, death comes. It’s not some cloaked figure that only I see holding a scythe. Not a dark angel or a creature with horns and a tail. It’s the sudden cold and the goosebumps that spring up on my arms.