Her face hasn’t changed. I think her voice must be the same too.
Why you wanna fly, Blackbird?
My mother drops the groceries and puts a hand up to her mouth, and her hair is exactly the way I remember it—soft and curly and shining brown in the sunlight—and I don’t know what to say or do. She walks toward me and puts her arms around me and holds me tightly, and that’s when I start to cry. I clench the back of her shirt and feel my chest shake and wish I could stop, because I would like to have shown her how much of a mature young lady I’ve grown into, but she’s crying too and smoothing down my hair.
She pulls away, wiping her eyes, and asks me to come inside. Kalinda stays standing there. She looks at me, and I know she doesn’t want to follow me—she would rather wait out here. My mother picks up the bag of groceries, and the man opens the screen and stands to the side. She tells me his name is Richard. The little girl is back by the door, staring at us, wondering why we were crying. My mother picks her up and kisses her cheek. I envy this little girl more than I would have thought possible.
My mother leads me into the kitchen with the plantain and asks me if I’m hungry. Richard makes me a plate of plantain and oatmeal, since the salt fish is still stewing. I eat quietly, staring at her nose, her cheeks, her smile. I hadn’t seen it before, when Kalinda told me that I resemble my mother, but I see it now. I see her in the same way I’ve seen my own reflection and stared at myself and barely recognized my own face—as if my bones had transformed overnight. She sits and sips tea and waits until Richard takes the little girl to the living room to watch cartoons. She smiles at me, and suddenly I can’t look at her anymore.
“You’re so beautiful,” she says. “You look exactly like my cousin Idris when she was your age.” She sips more tea.
“I always thought I looked more like my dad.” I still can’t look at her.
“You look like him too,” she says. “You have his long arms and legs. But those eyes—those eyes definitely belong to my side of the family.” She puts down her cup of tea. “I prayed for you. I prayed so hard for you, that you would be happy and be safe. I told Richard—I told him that I don’t think I would ever forgive myself if anything had happened to you. I know that if I hadn’t left, I would’ve made sure you stayed safe.”
“My dad makes sure I’m safe.”
She looks a little surprised that I’m defending my dad. “You’re right. He does. He loves you very much.”
I keep eating. I’m not so sure there’s anything else I’m able to do.
She smiles a little and looks down at her tea. “I know that I’ve hurt you.”
I don’t say anything to this.
“I never wanted to hurt you. That was never my intention, Caroline.”
I can’t stop the questions that come from my mouth—the questions that I’ve been wanting to ask for so long, questions that might as well have existed since the beginning of time. “Then why did you leave?” And “Did you stop loving me?”
She’s quiet for a long time now, and she takes a deep breath, and she isn’t smiling anymore. “I’m going to tell you, because I think you’re old enough to understand. I know you’ll understand that I love you, no matter what. I look at you and think you remind me of when I was young. I think we might be similar. I liked to be alone a lot when I was younger, and I think you might be like that. Katie’s more like her dad—she’s shy when she just meets someone, but get her talking, and she’ll never stop. But I think you’re a lot like me, so I think you’ll understand.” She’s quiet, because I can tell she doesn’t really want to tell me, and her eyes are still wet.
“It’s difficult to be the person I am in this world. I had a difficult time, living with who I was before.”
I’m not sure what this means. “Who were you before?”
“I was a woman who was sure I didn’t have a right to exist in this world,” she says. “But now I know that I do. Just the same as anyone else. I have a right to exist and live and love and be loved.”
She takes a breath. “And so do you, Caroline. I want you to know that more than anything else.”
Hearing these words is like hearing permission to exist. I hadn’t realized how badly I needed to hear this, and how important it would be to hear this from my mother. I can’t help but smile, hearing her say this.
But it’s not lost on me that she hasn’t answered my questions—why she left, if she’s stopped loving me—and these are the only things I care to hear about in the moment, the only things I can listen to her talk about right now. “If you wanted me to know this, then why didn’t you stay to tell me for all the time you’ve been away?”
“Because I couldn’t stay in that house anymore. Being in that house—it wasn’t because of you. Understand that it had nothing to do with you. It didn’t even have very much to do with your father. I was sad, Caroline. I was ill—sick, driving myself insane with loneliness.”
I was always with her. I tell her this.
“I know,” she says, “but it was a different kind of loneliness. A sort of loneliness I hope you never have to understand. I didn’t leave you and your father,” she tells me. “I’d tried to take my own life.”
I can’t understand these words, because I can’t understand why she would
