You’re doing great. I’m proud of you. You would sometimes whisper this to me in the dark while I fed her. You would touch both of our heads. Your girls. Your world. I would cry when you left the room. I didn’t want to be the axis around which you both spun. I had nothing left to give either of you, but our lives had just begun together. What had I done? Why had I wanted her? Why did I think I would be any different than the mother I came from?
I thought about ways to get out. There, in the dark, my milk flowing, the chair rocking. I thought about putting her down in the crib and leaving in the middle of the night. I thought about where my passport was. About the hundreds of flights listed on the departures board at the airport. About how much cash I could take out from the ATM at once. About leaving my phone there on the bedside table. How long my milk would take to go dry, for my breasts to give up the proof she had been born.
My arms shook with the possibility.
These are thoughts I never let leave my lips. These are thoughts most mothers don’t have.
14
I was eight years old and it was far past my bedtime. I’d been standing in the hallway in my nightgown listening to my mother and father fight in the living room.
There had been the sound of breaking glass. I knew it was the figurine of the woman in the full Southern dress holding the sun umbrella. I’m not sure where it had come from – a wedding gift perhaps. They’d been arguing about something he found in her coat pocket, and then my mother’s trips to the city, and then someone named Lenny, and then me. My father felt I was becoming too quiet, too withdrawn. That I could benefit from some more attention from her once in a while.
‘She doesn’t need me, Seb.’
‘You’re her mother, Cecilia.’
‘She’d be better off if I wasn’t.’
When my mother started sobbing, really crying, something I hadn’t heard from her before despite the vitriol they flung at each other on a near nightly basis, I turned to go back to my room; my face was hot and the strained shrill of her voice made my stomach clench. But then I’d heard my father say my grandmother’s name. He said, ‘You’ll end up just like Etta.’
My father’s footsteps headed for the kitchen. I heard the heavy bottom of two glass tumblers hit the counter and then the splash of whiskey. The drink calmed her down. They were done. I knew this part of the routine – the point where she tired herself out and my father drank himself to sleep.
But that night she wanted to talk.
I slid my back down the wall and crouched on the floor. I sat there for the next hour and listened to her speak to him, those fragments of her past burning my mind for the first time.
That night, my father slept in the bedroom with her, which he rarely did. When I woke up in the morning their door was closed. I made myself breakfast and went to school, and that night they didn’t fight. They were calm, civil. I did my homework. I saw my mother touch his back as she put the plate of overcooked chicken in front of him. He thanked her and called her ‘dear.’ She was trying. He was forgiving.
This would become something I did often over the next few years after that night. In my bed upstairs, when I heard Etta’s name and I knew something had set my mother off again, my heart would race. I barely breathed as she spoke so that I could hear every word she told my father. Those rare nights were like gifts to me, although she would never know it. I was desperate to know who she was before she became my mother.
I started to understand, during those sleepless nights replaying the things I’d overheard, that we are all grown from something. That we carry on the seed, and I was a part of her garden.
1964
Cecilia couldn’t sleep without her doll, Beth-Anne, even at the age of seven. She loved the doll more than anything – the smell, the feeling of the silk hair between her fingers as she fell asleep. She searched for it frantically one night, trying to remember where she’d seen it. Etta shouted angrily from the bottom of the basement stairs and Cecilia knew she was irritated by her stomping all over the house when she should have been in bed.
‘She’s down here, Cecilia!’
There was a small pickle cellar in the basement, about the size of a dog kennel. Etta had stopped canning pickles years before, and they’d almost eaten what was left. She crouched at the cellar door, her bum sticking out toward her daughter.
‘Way at the back. You must have put it in there.’
‘I did not! I hate that cellar!’
‘Well, I can’t fit in. Go in and get her.’
Cecilia whined that her nightshirt would get dirty. That she
