by Caela Carter
“No,” Mom says. “I said we were going to see your grandmother.”
My eyebrows lower. Nanny is my grandmother.
“You assumed it was Nanny.”
I’m so stunned all the words, all the questions in my brain freeze. I have another grandmother.
Suddenly Mom shakes her head, like she’s shaking something off. A few strands of hair find their way out of her bun. She hugs me.
“You’ve been asking to go to Portugal since you were a little girl. I’ve been working all summer to surprise you . . . Of course I didn’t want to tell you in the most stressful moment with your things all over the airport floor. I feel like the worst mom for letting that happen.”
“You aren’t the worst mom,” I say, my words all muffled by her hug.
There are words I owe her. There are hugs and promises I give to make up for the way I fail her. For the many questions I can’t stop from rushing out of my lips. For the secret obsession I harbor that would make her more upset than anything in the world.
She wants to take me to Portugal. I asked to go. She’s surprising me.
I have another grandmother.
All of this should be good. So why is it hurting?
“Can I borrow your phone?” I say. “After we get to the gate? I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to Julia.”
“Of course, sweetie,” Mom says. She hugs me quickly and plants a kiss on my head. Then we’re at the front of the line and I have to take my backpack off and put it on a moving belt like they have at a grocery store. Behind me my mom is taking off her shoes. I look up at her and she looks worried. But when she catches me studying her face, she smiles.
“Here we go!” she says.
At the gate, Mom hands me her phone. Then she falls into the silver metal seat right next to me. I squeeze the phone in both my hands.
“Can I have some privacy, please?” I ask.
“Oh,” she says, sounding surprised. “Sure. I’ll just go to that newsstand right there.” She points. It’s only like ten feet away. Still basically in the gate. “I’ll be able to see you but not hear you.”
“OK,” I say.
“Tell Julia how excited you are,” Mom says. Then she sweeps away from me.
I don’t dial Julia’s number. I dial the one I have memorized and I mumble-beg to the universe that he’ll pick up.
“Hello?” he says.
I miss his voice so much I feel like crying almost immediately.
“Hello?” he says again. He sounds different than he has this summer. There’s an easiness to his voice that I think I missed even when I ran into him at Julia’s house. Maybe I make him nervous.
“Adam?” I whisper.
“Alma!” he says. It sounds like joy. I want to believe it’s real. But then he sounds worried. “Where are you?” he says. “That sounds like an airport.”
“It is . . . I’m . . . Mom’s . . . I don’t have much time.”
“Is your mom with you?” Adam asks. “Are you safe?”
“Yes. Yes,” I say.
I breathe slowly in and out. Adam thinks I’m safe because Mom is with me. And he knows way more about Mom than Julia does.
“We’re flying to Portugal,” I say. “We’re moving there.”
There’s nothing on the other line. I can hear him breathing. Finally I say, “Adam?”
“Sorry,” he says. “I’m just . . . surprised. So she . . . she told you?”
“That I have a grandmother?” I say. I see Mom look up at me. I lower my voice. “She just told me like a minute ago. Do you know about her?”
“Oh,” Adam says. He clears his throat.
“What do you know about my dad? Do I have other family?” I ask. “Do you know where he’s buried?”
“Give me a minute, Alma,” he says. “Let me think of the right words.”
“I don’t have much time,” I say.
“OK, ah, here goes,” Adam says. “No matter what, I want you to remember three things. Got it? First, your mother loves you. She loves you more than anything. She has always and will always love you. She does everything she does because she loves you.”
I don’t know what to say but my throat makes a weird up-and-down noise. My mother is flying me to Portugal, which has to be because she loves me. Still my eyes get hot listening to those words. No one has ever spelled out the way my mom feels about me like that before.
“And secondly, everyone messes up sometime. No one is perfect. And third . . . Alma, you there? This one’s important.”
“Yeah,” I manage
“Third, you can always, always call me. I can’t answer anything right now. I can’t . . . I have to leave the answers up to your mom. But . . . I’ll always listen.”
This is so different. This is the opposite of what he said when I caught him packing his bags. I’ve gone from Call me when it gets really bad to Call me always. I wish he had said that in the first place. I would have called him a long time ago. “OK,” I say. “Oh, Mom’s coming!”
“You have to tell her you called me,” he says.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because you’re calling on her phone and she’ll see it on the call history.”
My face gets hot. Why didn’t I think of that?
“And because you love her,” he adds. “Just get in the habit of telling the truth to the people you love. Always.”
He doesn’t say what I think he means: You love her, but don’t be like her.
It makes me think about Julia and how I let her leave my house. Well, my old house now. It makes me think about how I let Julia disappear as soon as things started to get complicated. I am a lot like my mom.
“I love you, Alma,” he says. And those words in his voice are in my memory so many times but I haven’t let myself think about them in so long. Now there really are tears. They’re pouring down my cheeks and into my mouth.
I was going to say yes to the Bold Idea. I didn’t even have to think about it, really. That’s my big secret from both Adam and my mom. But an offer like that shouldn’t have disappeared so quickly. I’ve been missing his love so badly.
“Oh!” he says. “I forgot one more thing. So that’s four. These are four important things to write down once you get on the plane, OK?”
I nod, which is stupid, but he doesn’t wait for an answer.
“Have fun,” he says. “Don’t forget to have fun. Not every sixth grader gets to go to Europe!”
“I have to go now,” I say. Mom is standing over me.
“I’m so glad you called me, Alma,” he says. I hang up without saying goodbye.
Mom takes my face in her hands. “Oh, Alma,” she says. She kisses my tears.
There are announcements that first class should be boarding now. There aren’t as many people in the seats around me. I wonder how many announcements went on while I was on the phone. I wonder how much time went by. I wonder how long until I’m in a totally different life.
Mom puts her thumbs on my cheeks and wipes some of the tears away. “It’s hard to say goodbye. I know.”
I take a deep breath, remembering what Adam said. “I didn’t call Julia,” I say.
“I saw you talking,” Mom says.
“I know,” I say. “I wanted . . . I wanted to say goodbye to Adam.”
It’s still not the truth exactly. I wanted Adam to know where I was. I wanted to do what Julia said and make sure there was another grown-up watching out for me.
But I could never tell my mom that.
I wonder if lying to her makes me just like her. Maybe I should have told her everything. Maybe she should know about every gravestone I’ve read this summer.
“Oh,” Mom says. Her face twitches about a thousand ways in half a second. Before she says anything, the announcer says, “Boarding rows twenty-four to thirty-eight.”
Then she smiles. “That’s us!” she says. She squeezes my hand. And we walk toward the gate.
Eleven
What Was Mom Like Before She Had Me
?
AS SOON AS WE’RE ON THE plane, I pull out my noise-canceling headphones, cross my arms, and look at the darkening sky through the window. I don’t look at my mom, who is squished into the seat next to me. I’m mad at her. She’s flying me to Portugal and I’m mad at her. It doesn’t make any sense.
It’s a long time before my mom taps me on the shoulder.
“They’re serving dinner,” she says. “Put down your tray.”
“Oh,” I say. I stretch forward and turn the little knob so that my tray falls down almost in my lap. I know that it’s not the most comfortable thing in the world, especially if you’re as big as my mom, but I love my airplane seat. It’s so organized and well designed. Everything you need fits into two square feet of space: a chair, a cup holder, a tray, a movie screen. It’s perfect.
A flight attendant drops two meals onto our trays and moves on to the next seat. I start to put my headphones back on but Mom says, “I thought maybe we could talk,” so I leave them resting around my neck. We are surrounded by people but we’re the only two in our little row. The whirr whirr of the plane engine makes it impossible to hear anything anyone else is saying. Out my window is nothing but the black night sky and the blinking green light on the end of the airplane wing. It feels like we’re completely alone.
“OK,” I say.
Mom shakes her salad dressing packet and puts the corner in her mouth to open it with her teeth. I unfold the foil around the rectangle of butter and start to spread it on my roll with a plastic knife.
“We’ll be eating better than this in Portugal,” Mom says. “Portuguese food is delicious.”
Those words alone make me ache for Julia’s family. Her father’s fancy meals. The way her dad would analyze them the whole time we were eating.
“Cool,” I say, but it comes out flat.
“Are you excited?” she asks me.
I know I should be excited. If I had known this trip were coming, I’d be so excited. Instead I’m just angry.
I think about what Adam just told me. I have to tell the truth to the people I love. So I say, “You should have told me.”
It comes out shaky and nervous. I hate that I have to feel nervous with my own mother.
I’m sure she’ll say something like, “You were too young for the details. I didn’t want you to worry. I just wanted you to have fun.” Or something.
Instead she says, “I know.”
I freeze with a bite of bread halfway to my mouth. “You do?” I say.
Mom sighs.
“Then why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.
Mom takes a while to answer. She eats almost her whole salad. She takes many sips of her ginger ale. She shifts her weight around in the chair she’s squished into.
I start to think maybe she’s not going to answer me. Maybe that’s all the talking I’m going to get.
Finally she says, “Did you know that when you were four, you had seventeen ear infections?”
“Huh?” I say. I have no idea what that has to do with anything.
“Yes,” Mom says. “And I was only twenty-three. We had just moved away from Nanny and PopPop. I was all alone with a kid who kept getting ear infections. And when you were six, you needed to have your tonsils taken out.”
“I remember that,” I say. Days and days of ice cream in bed and Mom or Nanny showing up any time I rang a little bell. We lived in Pittsburgh by then, but Nanny came up to help.
“You got strep so many times. After all the ear infections, the antibiotics wouldn’t work anymore so you needed, like, a super antibiotic. That always upset your stomach. You were home from school so much I lost job after job.”
This is not quite how I remember it. The way she’s saying it all, it almost feels like I’m supposed to apologize. But it wasn’t my fault I kept getting sick. And isn’t taking care of me what she’s supposed to do?
“And then there was your PE teacher in elementary school. Do you remember him? Mr. Perkins.”
I nod. “I hated him.”
“He was awful to you. So awful. There was that one time you were sick and he wouldn’t let you go to the nurse. He called you a baby. You were only seven.”
“I remember,” I say.
“So I had to storm into the school and have a meeting with the principal. Of course, schools cannot meet you at night. Teachers even refuse to call you at night. Everything about raising a kid happens during work hours. Eventually I had to change my entire profession just to be a good mother.”
“I didn’t know you did that,” I say. I didn’t know she switched from insurance to starting her own business translating for international professionals in order to be a good mother. I didn’t know she had a meeting with the principal about Mr. Perkins.
This all feels like the Portugal trip. Stuff she should have told me sooner.
“Well, things got better when Adam was around,” Mom says. “He was so . . . helpful. And he loved you.”
Loves me.
“But you know, it wasn’t his job to step up like that. And it wasn’t Nanny and PopPop’s job either, even though they did a lot. So the whole time I always felt this insecurity. I felt like I was teetering on a balance beam, you know? I had you so young, Alma. I was basically still a teenager. I had to be strict. I had to pull it together. You deserved a real grown-up for a parent, and I had to turn myself into one. I didn’t have a choice. Of course, that made me too strict and too controlling.”
She pauses. My mouth is hanging open, stunned. She knows she’s strict and controlling.
“All I had for help and advice were Nanny and PopPop. They were all I knew about parenting and they were all I had. I had to accept all this help in order to be a good mom, but I also wasn’t a good mom because I couldn’t do it without help . . .” She pauses. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Now this is too much for you. I don’t want to make you worry.”
“NO!” I say, too loudly. Maybe so loud the rest of the airplane can hear. What she’s telling me doesn’t answer my question. Not at all. But there’s still relief in her finally telling me something. Anything.
“I know I didn’t do everything right. And I’ll never do everything right. It’s impossible to do everything right because when you’re a parent you are sometimes doing the right thing and the wrong thing at once.”
“Huh?” I say.
“So you’re right I should have told you sooner, Alma,” she says, barreling on. “But also, there was so much to do. And I had to get it all done. And I wasn’t sure I could go through with all of this if you said you didn’t want to go. But, baby girl, you need to get to Portugal. So I had to do what I had to do.”
“I would have told you I wanted to go,” I say.
And even though I already miss Julia and her family and Adam and Mr. Hendricks who I’ve never even met, and my bed, and the piles of questions in my old room, I mean it when I say that.
The flight attendant comes and takes our trash. When she’s finished I put up my little tray and turn to my mom. I say it again.
“I would have told you I wanted to go.”
Mom puts her hand on my cheek, soft and cushy and warm. She looks so deeply into my eyes I’m sure she’s about to say something even more real than before. She’s going to say something about my dad.
But she doesn’t. She opens her mouth, closes it, then moves her hand.
“Let’s try to get some sleep,” Mom says. She pulls the blanket that’s been on her lap up to her chin.
“OK,” I say.
I pull on my blanket too, and put on my headphones. But I don’t turn them on. I watch Mom close her eyes and shift so that her right ear is resting on the headrest and she’s facing away from me. I look at her bun and her left ear and cheek for a long time.
My whole life my mom was this force. Or a source. A source of hugs that came freely and information that came slowly and love that came confusingly.
Suddenly, she’s more than that. She’s a person.
Mom sa
id we were flying all night but that’s only half true because when we land it’s 7:00 a.m. in Lisbon but it’s only 2:00 a.m. in Pittsburgh, making it the middle of the night in my brain. I follow her zombie-like through line after line. We show our passports again; she answers questions about where we’ll be staying; she shows them some other papers. It takes a long time but we get through customs and to the bag-conveyor belt. Except it’s not moving and there aren’t any bags on it.
Mom glances at the sign above our baggage carousel and says, “Oh, our bags are delayed.”
I look at the same sign. It’s glowing in both Portuguese and English but it still takes me a while to read it. It looks like the letters are swimming all over the place. I’m not sure why I’m having such trouble staying awake. You’d think I’d be used to it after all those middle-of-the-night graveyard trips. Maybe the bright lights are bothering my brain. Maybe it’s the mess of people shifting in every direction around me. Maybe it’s how unfamiliar everything is. I don’t even know what to focus on.
“You look exhausted, sweetie,” Mom says. “Go sit right there.” She points to a row of metal chairs with thin black cushions that look about as inviting as the biggest, most pillowy king-sized bed in the world. That’s how tired I am. “I’ll get the bags,” she adds.
As I sit on that chair my head starts bobbing with exhaustion. I don’t want to fall asleep in the airport. I look around to try to keep myself awake.
I see so many kinds of people. There are a lot of people who look like me, more than I’ve ever seen before. But I think I was expecting everyone to look like me. There are black people and white people. There are a handful of Asian people. There are Muslim women in hijabs and Jewish men in kippahs. There are lots of people who don’t look like me, but are like me in that they don’t have an easy category. There are old people walking with canes or hanging on to younger people. There are lots of babies and little kids. There are people my age.
I recognize the sounds of Portuguese and Spanish and French around me from hearing my mom speak those languages when she’s working. There are a few English conversations peppered in, most in thick accents. And there are languages I know I’ve never heard.