by Amy Hatvany
“Ha!” Sam said, patting Max on the back. “Me too!”
“Me too!” my mom and Melody chimed in unison.
“Hey now!” I protested, though I was laughing. “Be nice!”
We all chatted for a few minutes, making small talk about how business was going at the Loft and how many new clients Melody had during the holiday season. I kept glancing in the direction Ava had gone, waiting for her to return, but she didn’t. “I’m going to check on her,” I said, placing my glass on the speckled granite countertop. I made my way down the dark hallway, stopping in front of the bathroom door. A thin sliver of light glowed beneath it and I heard the quiet but still audible sound of Ava’s crying.
“Sweetie?” I said, knocking softly. “What’s wrong? Did you get sick?”
“No,” Ava said. Her words were muffled by the door and her tears. “Please go away.”
“I can’t,” I said quietly, placing my palm flat against the door. “I’m worried about you.” I paused. “Is it just being here without your dad? I’m sure you’re missing your mom so much today, too. It’s totally normal to be sad—”
“It’s not that!” she cried out as she flung open the door, leaving me standing with my palm in the empty air. Her eyes were swollen and she was still very pale. I dropped my hand and reached out to smooth her hair from her face.
“Then what is it?” I asked, attempting to keep my tone low and calm.
She dropped her chin down, shaking her head back and forth. “I don’t want to tell you.”
As I considered her symptoms, a realization clicked in my mind. Headache, stomachache, pale skin, and now hiding in the bathroom. “Did you get your period?” I asked in a soft voice, so no one else would hear. She was the right age for it, and as far as I knew, she hadn’t gotten it yet. If she had, I was pretty sure I would have seen the evidence in the bathroom over the last year.
Max chose this moment to pop his head around the corner from the kitchen. “Did she barf?” he called out, and I had to repress a giggle.
“No!” Ava snapped, and reached to close the door in my face, but I stopped her by stepping through the threshold.
“We’ll be out in a few minutes, Max,” I said. “Can you ask Melody to come talk with me, please?”
“Okay!” he said, and disappeared.
I looked back at Ava, who had dropped down to sit on the edge of the bathtub, her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook as she cried. “I miss my mom,” she said.
The muscles in my throat tensed hearing the pain in her voice. I closed the door behind me and put the toilet lid down so I could sit, too. “I know you do, honey. I’m so sorry. This is all so hard.” I paused. “What do you miss most about her?”
She looked at me hesitantly. “I don’t know how to say it. I just miss her. She’s supposed to be here for me. To help me. And she just left.”
“What was your favorite thing to do with her? Cook?”
Ava shook her head. “Dance, I guess. She liked to dance.”
“Ah. So that’s why you’re so good at it.” Her wanting to join the team suddenly made more sense.
“I miss her so much. I want her to come back.” Her shoulders began to shake and I reached over and put my hand on the top of her thigh, rubbing lightly. I wanted to hug her, but it felt like there was an invisible shield between us. I didn’t want to push my luck and have an already fragile link shatter.
I was quiet for a few minutes, just letting her cry. Letting her miss her mother without my trying to make her feel better, which I knew was a pointless endeavor. Like the women I worked with, who came to us with not just broken bones but grief-ridden souls, Ava needed to let the pain out. All I could do was bear witness to her sorrow so she wouldn’t have to work through it on her own.
When she finally quieted, I spoke again, knowing we needed to deal with the more practical issue at hand. “Are you bleeding a lot or just a little?”
“Just a little.” Her voice was small. “I just put some toilet paper—”
“Good,” I said, gently cutting her off. I remember being horrified having to discuss anything related to my body with my mother, so I wanted to save her from having to explain the details. “I don’t have any supplies with me, so hopefully Melody will. I’m pretty sure Sam and Wade don’t keep any around. But we can always make a run to the store, okay? Everything will be fine.”
She gave a short groan. “This is so embarrassing.”
“I know,” I said, reaching out to rub her back. She wore her mother’s red sweater with a black skirt, as she had the day of Kelli’s memorial. “I think every girl gets embarrassed when it happens. I remember when I got my first period. I was twelve, wearing white jeans, and I was at school.”
She looked at me with wide eyes. “Really?” Her hand flew to cover her mouth, then dropped it again. “What did you do?”
“I ran to the bathroom and my teacher sent the school nurse in to help me.”
“That’s awful. I would have died.”
I chuckled. “I felt that way at the time, too, but I got over it. Eventually.” She gave me a small smile and I felt such an overwhelming wave of fondness for her in that moment, I almost began crying myself. But then there was a soft knock on the door, and Melody opened it.
“So this is where the party is!” she said. “Why didn’t I get an invite?”
“Do you have any tampons?” I asked her in a low voice, and understanding quickly blossomed across her face. She nodded.
She took a step toward Ava and leaned down to hug her. “Welcome to the club, darlin’.” She returned less than a minute later with her purse in hand, then pulled out a small blue box and placed it on the counter next to the sink. I stood up, too.
“I’ll be right outside, if you need help,” I said. Melody moved into the hallway and I started to follow her, but then Ava spoke again.
“Grace?”
I stopped and turned to look at her. “Do you want me to stay?”
She pressed her lips together and shook her dark head. “No. I’ll be fine. But . . . thank you.”
“You’re welcome, honey,” I said, giving her a warm smile before rejoining the rest of my family, suddenly feeling like I had a whole new reason to give thanks.
Ava
When we got home from Thanksgiving dinner, I went straight to my room. I couldn’t believe I got my period and Mama wasn’t there to help me—it made me feel like I’d lost her all over again.
But Grace was there. She was actually really nice to me, which just made me feel more confused. When she talked with me in the bathroom that night, I felt protected and safe. Understood. Grace calmed me down, she made me laugh, and thinking about her now, I could feel Mama’s disapproval hanging in the air around me, thick enough to make it hard to breathe.
After I’d shut the door and flipped on the light in my bedroom, I walked directly over to the boxes of Mama’s things. If she couldn’t be here today, maybe at least I could feel close to her by touching the books she’d held in her hands, smelling the clothes that she sprayed with her perfume. With a deep intake of breath, I yanked the cardboard top open and looked inside. Books were stacked together tightly; I picked one of them up, flipping through the pages before setting it aside and picking up another. I didn’t know what I thought I’d find. It would have been easy if she kept a journal, spilling out all of her secrets onto the page, but I was pretty sure if she had, Dad wouldn’t have given it to me. I should have looked for one the day Bree and I were at her house. And soon, he’d hire movers to pack up the rest of the house. Everything would be gone—every trace of my mother erased. I opened the second box, pulled out a wad of Mama’s clothes, and pressed them to my face. I breathed the scent of her in and a few tears squeezed out of the corners of my eyes.
I reached back into the box to see what else my dad had packed. I pulled out another book, this one called Healing After Loss. I vaguely remembered her reading this as she lay in bed, underlining passages and mak
ing notes in the margins. I fanned through the pages slowly, looking at the sentences she’d marked up: You can let go of the pain, one of them read. You can choose to stop hurting, to release it like a tree releases a leaf from a branch. Reading this, I snorted, rolled my eyes, and picked up my cell phone to call Bree.
“Guess what?” I said. “I got my period.” We’d both been wondering which one of us it would happen to first and each promised to let the other know the minute it happened.
“Wow, really?” She waited a beat. “Is it . . . weird?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But not too bad.” She didn’t ask anything more about it, probably sensing I didn’t really want to get into the details. Bree was good like that. “What’re you up to?” I asked, and she sighed.
“Hiding in the bathroom. My dad’s in the kitchen with the Blond Hose Beast,” she said, referring to her father’s gum-cracking girlfriend. “She’s feeding him whipped cream off her fingers.” She made a gagging sound. “How about you?”
“Just looking through some of my mom’s things. You won’t believe the crap she was reading.” I told her about the stupid leaf sentence.
“What did she lose, do you think?” Bree asked. “Your dad?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I flipped through a few more pages, seeing her notes of Yes! This is me! in the margins next to certain passages. “None of this makes any sense.” I threw the book down on my bed, and my eyes caught the corner of a piece of paper sticking out of the pages in the back. “Hold on a second,” I said to Bree. I pulled the slip of paper carefully out from the book, a tiny swirl of excitement in my belly. Maybe it was a clue. Maybe it would tell me what I needed to know. It was small, the size of a bookmark, and only had a few words scratched on it in Mama’s handwriting. “She’s gone,” I read aloud to Bree, “but still, I feel her. I miss her so much.”
“What?” Bree said. “Are you talking about your mom?”
I explained the slip of paper in the book, then read the words aloud to her again. “What do you think it means?” I asked her.
“Heck if I know,” Bree said. “This whole thing just keeps getting more confusing.” I’d told Bree about the letter from the doctor, but now, reading this note, it seemed like she might have been looking for a woman, not a man. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t be a doctor, I supposed. Mama wouldn’t miss a doctor, though. It really didn’t make any sense.
I ran my fingers over the words Mama had written. “I have to figure out who she was looking for.”
“Okay, but how?” Bree asked.
I took a deep breath. “I need to call my grandparents. They know what happened.”
“Yeah, but will they talk with you?” Bree sounded doubtful. “They’ve never even met you.”
“I know, but I have to at least try, right?” I was suddenly determined. “I’ll call you back.” We hung up, and before I lost my nerve, I scrolled through my list of contacts until I came to the one I’d labeled “Grandparents.” I’d dialed their number once before Mama had died, after she’d called them and ended up crying, thinking I could talk with them and get them to stop making Mama so sad. But I hadn’t pressed send, too afraid to hear their voices. Too worried that they’d make me cry, too. I programmed the number into my phone, though, just in case I worked up the courage to try again.
Moving my thumb over the send button, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, then pushed it a little harder than I probably had to. I wondered if they’d answer, and if they did, what exactly it was I wanted to say. I thought about the things my English teacher taught me to consider when doing research for something I had to write: Who? What? When? Where? Why? That last one, that was the real question. The only one I really needed to know.
The phone rang six times before someone picked up. “Hello?” A woman’s voice, frail and crackly. My grandmother.
“Hi . . .” I faltered, unsure how, exactly, to begin this conversation. “Happy Thanksgiving.” God, that was a stupid thing to say.
“Who is this?” She almost sounded scared, and I couldn’t understand why. Then I remembered that Dad told us she was a little confused, that sometimes this happened to people as they got older. I hoped she wasn’t too old to remember what I needed to know.
“It’s Ava,” I said. “I’m . . . I’m your granddaughter.” I waited a moment and when she didn’t respond, I continued. “I’m just calling to see . . . to see if you can help me.” That seemed like the easiest way to put it. Other questions screamed in my mind: Why didn’t you ever come see us? Why didn’t you even care when Mama died? What kind of a mother are you?
“Help you how?” Her voice was still shaky, so I tried to keep mine steady.
“Well,” I began, “I have a photo album. One of Mama’s from when she was a little girl.”
“I don’t know how I can help you with that,” she said, interrupting me.
“The pictures stop when she turned fourteen,” I said quickly, afraid she might just hang up the phone. “I just want to know why. Do you have some you could send me? And maybe her yearbooks, too? From when she was a cheerleader in high school.”
“She was never a cheerleader,” she said. Her words were suddenly sharp. “And I’m sorry, but I don’t have any pictures to send you.”
What? Mama lied to me? Why would she do that? My bottom lip trembled. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to be strong. Just long enough for her mother to tell me what I needed to know. I tensed the muscles in my face and tried again. “There’s something else,” I said. “A letter from a doctor. I think she was looking for the one who took care of her when she was fourteen.” I paused and took in a small breath. “Was she sick?”
“No.” She whispered the word.
“Then why would she be looking for her doctor? Why wouldn’t she just ask you?”
“She did ask me. I don’t remember his name.”
“Okay . . .” I tried again. “Are you sure you can’t just send me her yearbooks, anyway? I really want to know more about her.”
“She didn’t have any except her freshman year. She went away for a while that spring, to an all-girls school so she could focus on her studies.” She cleared her throat. “When she came home, she decided she wanted to go to the community college for her GED.”
An all-girls school? I wondered if she was remembering that wrong. I took a deep breath. “Where was it? Can you at least tell me that?”
She sighed and waited several breaths before answering. “It was called New Pathways.” She coughed, a loud, startling sound. “I have to go now. My husband is calling me.” Her husband. Not “your grandfather.”
“Wait,” I said, my voice flooding with tears. I gripped the phone tighter. “Please. I don’t understand why this is so hard. Why you won’t just talk to me. I miss Mama so much. Don’t you miss her, too?” My chin trembled as I waited for her to respond. She was Mama’s mother—how could she not care about what happened to her?
“Of course I do,” she said softly. “Of course. But it’s in the past, and some things are better left forgotten. You’ll understand that when you’re older.”
“But—” I began, only to have her cut me off again.
“I’d change it all if I could,” she said. She sounded like she was about to cry. “But your mother made her choices and we made ours. It’s too late now.”
“It’s not too late!” I said, pleading. “You can help me. Please.”
“No,” she said, “I can’t.” And then she hung up the phone.
“Damn it!” I said, throwing my cell to the other end of my bed. I tried to process the short conversation. She was never a cheerleader. She never wore a blue and yellow uniform or was captain of the squad. She told me that story again and again, and every time, it was a lie. What else had she lied to me about?
I suddenly felt shakier than ever, more lost than I ever had before. I didn’t know what to believe about Mama. I wondered if her mother wasn’t remembering right. If she had lied to me just to get
me off the phone or if what Dad said about her being confused was true.
My head swam with questions. The more I thought about what had just happened, the more angry I became. It wasn’t fair that Daddy left us. It wasn’t fair that I had to take care of Mama for so long; it wasn’t fair that she might have lied to me, that everything I ever believed about her might have been wrong. It wasn’t fair that she died and I was left with Grace, who might have been nice enough, but she was not—nor would she ever be—my mother. Hot tears seared my eyes and I took a couple of shuddering breaths so no one would hear me. I was tired of crying, tired of feeling so sad. I just wanted everything to go back to the way it used to be.
A few minutes later, I had calmed down just enough to reach for my phone again, planning to call Bree back and tell her everything my grandmother had said, when there was a huge crash in Max’s room. This was immediately followed by the siren sound of his screaming his head off. Grateful to finally be distracted from my own dark thoughts, I leapt off the bed and ran down the hall, anxious to see what my brother had done.
Grace
After we got back from Sam’s house, I waited in the living room for Victor to come home. The kids were in their bedrooms—Max was playing with the Wii system Victor had brought from Kelli’s house and Ava was talking on the phone, to Bree, I assumed. I sat in the relative quiet, flipping the pages of the book I’d picked up on how children process their grief. It talked about how some would shut down completely, coping only by pretending that nothing had changed. They might go about their daily lives as they always had—going to school, spending time with their friends, trying to have fun. They wouldn’t want to talk about their parent’s death; they wouldn’t cry or get angry with the surviving parent. At least Max and Ava weren’t shutting me out. I felt buoyed by the moment Ava and I had shared in the bathroom earlier. Hopefully, she’d remember that I tried to comfort her. Maybe after some time, we’d find a way to be friends.