‘I admit, when I arrived here, there was no thought in my mind that there might be a future for us. But, well, I have so enjoyed being with you and find myself dreading the thought of leaving you behind. After all we’ve been through, surely we owe each other some time together? Unless, of course, these past few days have been utter hell for you and you’re just waiting for me to go? If that is the case, then yes, you’d better tell me, but if it isn’t . . .’
Cecily lowered her eyes. ‘It isn’t.’
‘Good. Then we have a plan. I must say, coming here was just about the best decision I’ve ever made.’
Then Bill bent down towards his wife and kissed her for the first time in twenty-three years.
June 2008
‘So, when a suitable nanny and housekeeper had been found, Bill took Cecily back home to Kenya with him,’ Stella finished.
‘Well, that was a happy ending, and it sure sounds as though she deserved it,’ I said. ‘Especially after having to deal with my mom. I hate to admit it, but she sounds a lot like me when I was a child.’
‘I can’t say, Electra, because I wasn’t there to see you grow up, and I will never forgive myself for that. Or for the fact that I wasn’t there for Rosa in the ways I should have been either.’
‘You were a single working mom, which must have been seriously hard.’
‘It was, yes, but millions of women across the world manage to do it successfully. Sadly, I didn’t.’
‘Did Bill and Cecily ever come back?’ I said, wanting to know the answer before we moved on to what I felt from Stella’s expression were far murkier past waters.
‘No, they did not.’
‘Why not?’
‘At first it was for all the right reasons; it was obvious from the moment Cecily got back to Kenya that she was as happy as I’d ever heard her. And that she and Bill had finally managed to find the moment in time when they could actually enjoy each other. Sadly, like anything, it didn’t last forever.’
‘Did Bill die from his heart condition?’
‘Eventually, yes, but it was my beloved Kuyia I lost first. They extended their stay to six months and went travelling through Africa. They were on their way up through the Sudan towards Egypt – Cecily had always wanted to see the pyramids – when she began to feel unwell. Their medical boxes and other supplies were stolen and they were in the middle of nowhere. By the time Bill managed to get her to a hospital, it was too late. She died a few days later.’
‘Oh no.’ I winced as I watched my grandmother’s eyes fill with tears. ‘What was it?’
‘Malaria. If they’d have gotten her treated sooner, there’s no doubt she would have lived, but . . .’ Stella swallowed hard. ‘She died in Bill’s arms . . . She asked him to tell me how much she loved me . . . I . . . sorry.’
I sat there watching the grief that, even after all these years, was obviously still so raw for my grandmother.
‘When I heard the news, all I could think was that I wanted to die too,’ Stella continued. ‘I can’t explain to you what that woman was to me. What she did for me, everything she sacrificed for me . . . The only thing that comforted me was that she was with Bill and that they’d at least had six wonderful months together. She died where she wanted to be, with the man she loved.’
Even though I’d never known this remarkable woman who had affected both of our lives so dramatically, I felt a lump in my throat too.
‘Bill came back to the States for a while and we took her ashes and spread them out by the Statue of Liberty. Because she was born in Manhattan and had done so much to give me my own liberty, I thought it was fitting. He stayed with us for a while; he’d aged so much in those few months, but he couldn’t make urban Brooklyn his home, so he went back to Kenya, sold Paradise Farm and bought a cottage near Lake Naivasha. Five years later, I got a telegram to tell me he’d died too. And that he’d left me everything he had. The will said it was what Cecily would have wanted.’
‘I think he was right,’ I agreed. ‘Can I get you another cup of tea maybe?’
‘No, I’ll be fine, thanks, honey.’
I sat quietly while Stella composed herself. And as I watched her, I understood the lesson her grief was teaching me: that motherly love did not necessarily have to be biological. So many times I’d railed against Ma – I remembered once when I was in a rage screaming at her that she had no right to tell me I had to go up to my room, because she wasn’t my real mother anyway. Yet I understood now that any ‘real’ mother would have reacted in exactly the same way to my unacceptable behaviour. I felt a sudden huge burst of love for Ma, who had only ever shown me endless patience and compassion.
‘Forgive me, Electra, I’m ready to go on now, if you are.’
‘Sure, but only if you feel up to it. I can always come back.’
‘I think I’d prefer to keep going, if it’s okay with you. We’re very close to the end of the story now.’ Stella took a deep breath. ‘Nothing much changed in my life during those five years after Cecily died. Rosa had a succession of nannies, all of whom left after a few months. They were unable to deal with such a difficult child. Then when Bill left me his legacy, it meant that I had the choice to stay home and care for Rosa myself. To my shame, I knew that I just couldn’t do that. Coffee mornings and PTA meetings . . . after the kind of stuff I was used to dealing with every day, I knew I couldn’t cope with all that. The truth is, Electra, I just wasn’t born maternal. Not that I’m using it as an excuse or anything; lots of women aren’t, they just have to get on with it, and I did my best to do that.’
As Stella paused, I wondered whether I was maternal; it was a question I’d never considered up to this very second. I’d certainly never felt the urge to have a baby, but then I thought of my nephew, Bear, and how I’d enjoyed the smell of him and the weight of his body in my arms, and thought that I just might be.
‘Electra? Are you okay?’
‘Yeah, sorry, you lost me for a few seconds then.’
‘Anytime you just want to stop, please say the word.’
‘No, I’m good,’ I said.
‘The situation got especially bad when Rosalind told me that they could no longer keep Rosa at the school. She was a disruptive influence, unable to settle and concentrate on anything. That really burnt me. Rosalind was Rosa’s godmother, and if she’d lost faith in her, then I knew I had a serious problem on my hands.’
‘Hey, from what you’ve said, this was a very academic school. Maybe it just didn’t suit my mom,’ I said, suddenly feeling defensive of Rosa. ‘I know because I’ve been there too.’
‘That’s pretty much what Rosalind said, so I found her another school, one that was run on more holistic, relaxed lines.’ Stella gave a little chuckle. ‘Rosa took the lack of rules to an extreme. I remember arriving home one weekend with her new nanny waiting for me in her coat, with her suitcase ready by the door. Apparently, Rosa had spent the entire week at home, watching TV and eating cereal. She’d told the nanny she didn’t have to go to school that week and when the school had called to see where she was, Rosa had recited one of their own guidelines: that the students were there of their own free will to learn and that no penalties were enforced if the child didn’t attend class.’
‘My mom sure is sounding more and more like me. I would have done the same,’ I grinned.
‘The difference is, Electra, that you had a family structure around you, and from what I’ve heard, a loving mother figure and a father who caught you when you fell. Rosa didn’t have that, which was partly to do with circumstances, but also a lot to do with me. When Cecily died, I felt even more fire in my belly to become the success she’d always dreamt I’d be. And then when Bill left me the legacy, I was on a trajectory I just couldn’t’ – Stella checked herself – ‘or didn’t want to halt. Rosa was ten by then. She had gone through I don’t even know how many nannies and four or five schools. To give myself some credit, I did take a month’s leave and stayed home with her to organise he
r tutoring, but I nearly lost my mind, and Rosa was completely out of control. I spoke to Rosalind and she suggested that maybe the best thing to do was to send Rosa away to boarding school. We found a great place up in Boston that was used to dealing with kids like Rosa.’
‘You mean, like, rejects?’
‘No, Electra, the way they phrased it was “challenging behaviour”. Rosa seemed to like the idea at first – I was going stir-crazy but she had also had enough of being stuck at home with only a tutor and her momma for company. While she was there for her interview, they tested her for all kinds of things, including her IQ. And, of course, it was off the scale. The school told me that often went hand in hand with disruptive children. They developed a programme of accelerated learning for her and off she went to Boston. She seemed happy there for the first three years; the school gave her the stability and security that she needed and she made some friends. At the same time, I received a call out of the blue from the United Nations. They’d read a paper I’d written on apartheid in South Africa while I’d been at Columbia. They were developing something called the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid. I was called in for an interview – you can imagine my excitement, Electra; the thought of being at the hub of the most powerful human rights organisation in the world was the stuff that my dreams were made of. This new department would be collating statistics and factual evidence of the effects of apartheid. They were looking for a team who would write up what they had found into a paper, which would then be published. In one sense, it was a sidestep from what I’d been doing, but in another, I knew it would open up a whole new world to me. And it sure did. Those years were relatively calm; the UN was based in Manhattan, which meant that when Rosa was home for vacations, I was there every night to cook her supper. All finally felt calmer, until, of course, puberty hit.’
‘Yeah, that old thing; your cute little girl turns into a bunch of raging hormones,’ I nodded, remembering how my own had not only rebooted, but surpassed any temper tantrums I’d had when I was very young.
‘Put it this way, the entire apartment used to shake under the weight of Rosa’s stamping and hollering and the slamming of her bedroom door. Next thing I know, I get a call from her school to tell me she’s disappeared – a friend of hers said there was a boy in town whom she’d met on an outing. She was found eventually, smoking and drinking bourbon in a park. The boy was almost twenty years old, but your mom was probably even more beautiful than you, if I dare say so. She had these incredible eyes that were simply mesmerising, and obviously contained the kind of witchcraft needed to attract any alley cat in the neighbourhood. She looked – and dressed – as if she was eighteen instead of fourteen. It wasn’t long until the school wrote me to say they could no longer contain her, so she was sent back home to New York. None of the good day schools would take her because of her track record, so I was reduced to sending her to the local high school. Of course, she got in with the wrong crowd – she always did love bad boys . . .’
‘Don’t we all?’ I rolled my eyes.
‘By the time Rosa was sixteen, I’d lost control of her completely – she wasn’t attending school, and spent most of her time hanging around downtown Brooklyn with her new friends. At first I just thought she was smoking dope when she came home high, but then she started to stay out all night. I had no idea where she went. I began to notice she was losing weight – this was when crack cocaine was beginning to appear on the streets. Electra, I swear, I did everything I possibly could to talk to her about drugs, but she just didn’t want to listen.’
‘I understand,’ I said quietly. ‘Look at me, I didn’t want to hear either.’
‘Anyway, she then got brought home by the cops a few times, and was finally charged with petty theft – she’d been shoplifting and selling the stuff on the streets for cash. I paid her bail, and found a lawyer to represent her in court. The threat of jail calmed her down for a while and she stayed home. She drank some, but I think for that time the drugs stopped. The court gave her a caution, with the threat of juvenile hall if she got herself back into trouble again. And then . . .’
I watched Stella as she paused, her hands clasped tightly together, her eyes full of pain as she remembered.
‘She disappeared. A week after the court hearing, she went out one night and just never came back. And that was the last time I ever saw her.’
‘Did you search for her?’
‘Of course I searched for her!’ Stella turned to me, her eyes blazing with anger. ‘I turned Brooklyn and Manhattan upside down looking for her! There wasn’t a precinct I didn’t visit with a photograph, a neighbourhood where I didn’t stick a poster on a lamp post. I went to all the ghettos, the crack dens, all the damned places I could find where the lowlifes of the city hung out. I went up to Boston to search for her there, thinking she may have gone back to one of her exes, but nothing. Absolutely nothing. She literally vanished. Over two years I searched for her, working at the UN by day and walking the streets by night. It sounds impossible that someone can truly vanish off the face of the earth, but that is exactly what your momma did. And I swear, Electra, there was no stone I knew of that I left unturned.’
‘It’s okay, Stella, I believe you. So’ – I knew we were heading for the denouement of the story and braced myself – ‘when did you find out she’d died?’
I watched Stella swallow hard. ‘In truth, only just over a year ago, when your father got in touch with me and asked to meet me in New York. He told me that he’d spent time trying to trace your blood family, because he knew he was dying and he wanted to be able to leave you a letter that would tell you where you’d come from. He’d gone back to Hale House where he’d found you, and spoken to the daughter of Clara Hale, who’d put him in touch with one of the women who’d worked there at the time. Turns out, it was her who took you in that night. She was able to find the register which documented your arrival. As always, there were no details left about your mama, but the woman apparently remembered the man who brought you in. She’d seen him around the neighbourhood and knew he was a junkie. So your father asked for his name, and the woman said she thought he’d been known as Mickey. Your father scoured the area and eventually, he managed to find him through the Abyssinian Baptist church in Harlem. He was apparently a reformed man who had found God and was a lay preacher at the church. You must remember, Electra, that I knew nothing of this at the time,’ Stella clarified. ‘Anyway, Michael, as he’s now called, was able to tell your father what he remembered of your momma.’
‘Was this Michael my father?’ I asked eagerly.
‘No, he just happened to live in the same crack den when your momma was pregnant with you. There were constant police raids so the junkies were always moving on to find different hiding places in abandoned buildings around Manhattan. He was there when she gave birth to you, admittedly out of his mind on crack, but he said that you were starting to scream the place down, which would have alerted the cops. So he scooped you up and took you to Hale House.’
‘And . . .’ – I swallowed – ‘what happened to my momma?’
‘I . . .’ My grandmother reached for my hand and held it fast. ‘Bear with me, Electra, and forgive me for what I have to tell you. Mickey said he came back to find Rosa bleeding out. It was obvious she was dying, so he and the others just . . . left. He said he went into a phone booth and made an anonymous call to 911, but that he guessed that Rosa would be dead before they found her. God forgive me for having to tell you this . . . and for not being there when I should have been for my beloved daughter.’
‘But you didn’t know where she was, Stella.’
‘Thank you, Electra, for saying that, but when your father told me the story, I swear, it nearly broke me. The thought of my little girl being left to die alone . . .’
‘Yeah.’ We both sat in silence for a while. So,’ I breathed eventually, ‘I guess there’s no happy ending to this story.’
‘Not for Rosa, no, but I hope – I really ho
pe – that the fact that you and I were able to meet because of it can bring us both some comfort. I’m just so sorry I’ve had to share this terrible story with you, at a time when it’s the last thing you need.’
‘But how did Pa find out you were my relative?’
‘Because of Michael. He’d lived with Rosa for a few weeks. For a start, he remembered her name, and he also remembered her talking about her momma, who had an important job at the United Nations. He thought that she was called Stella – he remembered because it was his favourite imported beer.’ She gave me a watery smile. ‘So, armed with that, your father began to do his research. He knew the year of your birth through Hale House, and contacted the UN in New York and asked them to look back through their records to find out if there had been a Stella working for them in 1982. I’ll thank Cecily forever for giving me a relatively unusual name – there were only two of us on the records, and one was dead. By this time, he had my surname, looked me up online and wrote me. The rest you know.’
‘I . . .’ There was one thing I didn’t know, but even though I could hardly bear to ask the question, I had to.
‘When she was found and . . .’ – I gulped – ‘taken to the place where they take dead people, they must have tried to search for relatives?’
‘At the time, Electra, there were bodies of young crack addicts being found all over Manhattan. And legally, the authorities only have to hold on to a body for forty-eight hours. If it’s left unclaimed, they can go ahead and bury it.’
‘Jeez, that’s fast,’ I breathed. ‘So where was she buried?’
‘Your father and I visited the vital records office in Worth Street to find out. We had the date of Rosa’s death because it was the same day you were born, which was marked on the register at Hale House. Sure enough, the clerk was able to confirm that the body of an unidentified young black woman had been transferred to the city morgue that night. Since . . . since I was unable to claim her at the time, it’s New York state policy that unidentified bodies are buried on Hart Island in the Bronx. In truth, I haven’t been able to bring myself to go there.’
The Sun Sister (The Seven Sisters) Page 68