Daughters for a Time Read online

  “Then, just like that, we find out that Mom has ovarian cancer. I remember how we all sat around the kitchen table as she explained it, almost apologetic to Larry, like her being ill was going to inconvenience him in some way. She kept saying stuff like, ‘I’m fine. No one needs to do or change anything. Life will go on just as it had yesterday.’

  “If you knew my mom,” I said, feeling a wave of emotion rising in me, “you’d understand how the cancer was probably easier for her to reconcile than the end of a marriage. At least with cancer you have the statistics screaming at you, ‘Don’t take it personally!’ It taps you on your shoulder whether you’re ready or not. But ending a marriage is a conscious choice, one she wasn’t willing to make. Not like any of it mattered, once she was sick.”

  “Were you angry when your father left?” Elle asked.

  “Mom and Claire were angry, and I wanted to be like them—to be included in their club—so I played along. But I never hated him. I remembered some good times, and I just wanted those good times back. I felt sorry for him, imagining him all alone in some studio-apartment dump, eating cold beans out of the can. I didn’t put all the blame on him is what I’m saying. I was only twelve years old the first time he left, so basically, I still had thoughts like, ‘If we were nicer to him, maybe he would have stayed.’”

  “And now?”

  “Now is a brand-new time period. I’m a mom. He’s an old man. He failed at fatherhood, but he wasn’t the worst thing in the world.”

  Sam started to fuss and that was when I remembered that Elle had come to check up on her, not to hear my life story. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’ve unloaded all sorts of my baggage on you. I’m sure that’s not your job.”

  “Actually, it is,” she said. “Writing home studies is only part of my work. The rest of my practice is counseling adoptive parents, and believe it or not, that involves all of their baggage.”

  After Elle left, seemingly satisfied with Sam’s care and my mothering, I lifted sleeping Sam from her playpen and settled into the sofa. She wiggled and fussed but settled right back down.

  “What about you, peanut?” I whispered, fingering her new wispy hair. “Do you have plans to leave me?” I wondered whether Tim was right, whether I even had the capacity to believe that someone in my life could stay.

  The other night, I had had a dream about Sam when she was older. She was in college, a beautiful, confident twenty-something coed, majoring in math or physics or something else that confounded most people, but that, to her, made perfect sense. I saw her dating her future husband, maybe a grad student: smart, enterprising, and Chinese. He took her home to meet his parents. They served her a traditional Chinese dinner, spoke easily in English, then slipped into Mandarin and back to English again, explaining the meaning of the silk scrolls that hung on their wall. They asked her about the province in which she was born. Coincidentally, they had ancestors and friends who were from the same region. They conveyed more to her about her birthplace in one evening than I had been able to impart to her in twenty years. At the end of the night, Sam looked over her shoulder to find me standing in the doorway. She shrugged and then walked to her new boyfriend, a magnet pulling her toward the life she’d been born to live but hadn’t been able to, due to circumstance. Just as I had once strode headlong into Tim’s family, people who offered to me the security and stability that my childhood had lacked, Sam insinuated herself into this Chinese family’s world without looking back.

  When I woke in the night and replayed the dream in my mind, I was disturbed that Tim was right, that my mind seemed hardwired for being left. Then I turned onto my side and told myself to see it differently, to see Sam coming home during Christmas break, falling into my lap, curling up beside me on the sofa, and yapping all night long about her first semester of college.

  I let that happy image hover, let it sink into my bones, but it wasn’t easy. I was resistant, as if allowing myself to hope in such a manner was superstitious and indulgent. It was better to take it one day at a time.

  As if Sam were reading my thoughts, she stirred, pushed up onto my chest, and looked at me, as if to say, That’s not going to happen, Mom. I’m not going to leave you, as long as you don’t leave me.

  “I’ll never leave you,” I said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The following Monday morning, Claire was scheduled for surgery. She and Ross dropped off Maura on their way. Claire, dressed smartly in her chinos and cashmere cardigan, kneeled down next to her daughter. “Be good for Aunt Helen, okay?” With wide eyes and a stretched mouth, Maura nodded.

  “We’re going to have fun, right, Maura?”

  Maura began to cry, sensing that her mother was vulnerable. She was whiny and clingy and making it difficult for Claire and Ross to get out the door. You’d think that a four-year-old wouldn’t have a clue what going to the hospital meant, her knowledge bank having been filled primarily by Blue’s Clues and Dora the Explorer. But her intuition was right on. You could see the worry in her eyes, and she didn’t want to let her mother go.

  “Please stay, please stay,” she pleaded between heavy sobs, her arms wrapped like vise grips around Claire’s neck.

  “Sweetie,” Claire tried. “I’ll be back before you know it. You’re going to have so much fun with Aunt Helen and Sam.”

  “But I want you!” Maura wailed. Fighting words. A hot knife cutting through butter.

  Claire looked away as I pried Maura off her mother with promises of making a gigantic jaguar bed out of all of the pillows in the room.

  “Aunt Helen,” Maura gulped, her mouth a centimeter from mine. “I want to go to the hospital with Mommy.”

  “Hospitals are boring,” I said. “There’s nothing to do there.”

  “Mommy always has stuff to do!”

  “Yeah, but I’ve got really cool stuff to do. Just wait and see! In fact, want to have a tea party?”

  “Okay,” Maura said, “but Aunt Helen, guess what? X-rays are pictures of your bones.”

  Phew. Back to four-year-old talk.

  “Call me the second you hear anything!” I said to Claire and Ross.

  “Ross will call,” Claire said, and then kneeled down to hug Maura. “I love you, honey.”

  I kissed Claire and hugged her tightly. “You’re going to be okay,” I said, as strongly as I could, though my chest was already heaving.

  “You’re very convincing,” Claire joked. “We’d better get out of here before I start crying.”

  With Maura coiled around my neck and Sam toddling around the room testing her new walking skills, we waved to Ross and Claire from the front stoop as they drove away. In the kitchen, I strapped Sam into her high chair and made a pot of tea. Then I set out the miniature tea set—little white porcelain dishes with delicate pink roses. I placed a cookie on Maura’s mini plate and one on Sam’s tray, filled the creamer with milk, and scooped some sugar into the bowl. Maura and I called each other “Miss” and used our best “May I’s” and even stuck out our sophisticated little pinkies. Sam gurgled and smashed her cookie.

  When we were finished, I changed Sam’s diaper, sent Maura to the potty, and packed the bag.

  “Who wants to go to the park?” I asked Maura in my elevated, enthusiastic voice.

  “I do, I do!” Maura cheered. “Mom said I could bring my bug net.”

  The park was Claire’s idea, and she had sent along buckets and bug nets. She said that Maura loved to wade in the water in the little stream beyond the playground. We eased our way down to the shallow stream. Sitting on the bench near the pebbled shore was Larry, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. His newspaper was folded by his side. I’d called him the day before and filled him in on Claire. He wanted to see her. “Let’s take it slow,” I had said.

  Maura led the way down to the stream, walking right by Larry as she kicked off her sneakers and plowed into the water.

  “Maura,” I called casually. “This is Larry. Can you say, ‘Hi’?”

&nbs
p; “Hi!” Maura hollered.

  Larry looked at me expectantly. “This little peach must be Sam.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Well, I’ll be,” he said. “She’s a beauty. May I?” Larry held out his arms for Sam like a real grandparent would do. Because I didn’t know what else to do, I handed her to him. He lifted her high up on his shoulder, just as she liked.

  “Have a seat,” he said, scooting over to one side of the bench. I did a quick look to see if there was another bench, but there wasn’t, so I sat down at the opposite end, with only a few feet separating us.

  “How’s Claire today?” he asked.

  “She’s acting real tough,” I said. “But we’ll see how the surgery goes. Then she’ll have chemo. I read about it online last night. It says that everyone tolerates it differently.”

  “It did a job on your mother. I remember that,” he said, shaking his head. “Watching her go through that. Pure hell.”

  I nodded, remembering Mom locked in the bathroom, the sound of her being so sick, moaning.

  We stared at Maura kicking at the shallow stream. Occasionally, she would be splashed, but she didn’t seem to care.

  “Maura looks a lot like your mother,” Larry said.

  “Claire and I say that all of the time,” I agreed.

  We nodded, stared ahead.

  “This reminds me of that area behind our old house,” Larry said, slinging his arm across the top of the bench, his fingers only a few inches from my shoulder. “Do you remember that at all?”

  At the back of our yard, a trailhead wound through the trees. There were plank bridges covering the little streams and a giant log crossing a dry bed where we would play “balance beam.” Under mossy rocks, we’d search for frogs.

  “I’d take you and your sister back there and you’d try to fish with sticks.”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling like I was six years old again. “I loved it back there. You showed us the markings on the trees. You said they were from the deer.”

  “That’s right,” Larry said, smiling. “You do remember.”

  I remember a lot of good times, I wanted to say. That’s the problem. Trying to figure out why you left when there was so much that was good.

  I glanced at Larry. His mouth was twitching. God, I’d forgotten about all that twitching. I looked again at Maura. It appeared that she was trying to engineer a boat out of a piece of wood. To watch her ingenuity: the furrowed brow, the mouth falling open in concentration, the intensity of the eyes. She was squatting in the water, not at all aware or concerned that the seat of her pants was wet, as she tried to tie a twig mast onto the makeshift boat. She was a carefree child. I hoped that she’d stayed that way, that her mother’s illness wouldn’t take that from her as I think our mother’s illness had taken it from us.

  “How are you doing?” Larry asked. I hadn’t noticed him looking at me, seeing me wipe a tear from the corner of my eye.

  “Fine,” I said quickly. I stood up and walked a few steps toward the water, fluttering my eyes to stop the tears, wondering how long it had been since I’d cried into my parents’ arms. Over two decades, easily. I wondered if there was muscle memory involved in being consoled, like there was in riding a bike or rolling out pie dough. Did the body know instinctively what to do? Or did some skills, even one as primal as being comforted, wither from lack of use? I was once a daughter. We all were—Sam, Claire, me. We just didn’t know that it wasn’t forever, that we were only daughters for a time.

  I strained my eyes to watch Maura catch minnows and water bugs, toss pebbles, sail her boat in the weak current. It was close to noon. Sam would need a bottle; Maura would need lunch.

  “Maura,” I called. “Five more minutes. We need to go get some lunch, okay?”

  “But we still need to make a fishing pole!” Maura yelled, and then went back to the water.

  “There’s not a day that’s gone by that I haven’t thought about you girls,” Larry said, rubbing Sam’s back gently. “The years kept passing, damn it,” he said. “So occasionally I would search your names on the computer. I just wanted to know what you and your sister were up to, that’s all.” His head hung low. “I wasn’t trying to pry into your lives.”

  Why not? was the bigger question. Why not pry? Why hadn’t he shown up at our doors, pushing his way into our lives with bulldozer strength? Why hadn’t he insisted on it? That would have been fine with me. At least we would have known that he cared. We didn’t need space; we needed our father. Prying into our lives would have been nice.

  “I’ve followed your restaurant,” Larry said. “It sure has done well. And I knew that Claire had retired from her investment business, that she had a baby. Someone had done an article on her.”

  I knew which article he was talking about, a piece written by the chamber of commerce celebrating successful businesswomen.

  I shoved down the emotion that was rising in me. “I’d better get these girls some lunch.”

  “Why don’t you let me help Maura make a fishing pole real quick. Is that okay?” He stood and handed Sam to me. “I’ll be right back.”

  Sam nestled into my neck, and I warmed at the already ingrained familiarity of her touch. We watched Larry open his car trunk and then walk back toward us. With a pocketknife and a piece of twine, he proceeded to craft a fishing pole. He knew enough to get down on Maura’s level, squatting while he worked, simplifying his language for her. It looked as though he’d been a grandfather-in-waiting, having prepared himself for this exact moment.

  While they built the fishing pole, I sat on the bench with Sam and fixed her a bottle, one-handed, just as I had marveled at Amy DePalma doing in China and Claire doing when Maura was small. I was learning to be a mom, but I couldn’t help but wonder why my happiness had to come at Claire’s expense. Like, God forbid, I should get spoiled from not having pain in my life.

  It was only twelve thirty and I was already beat emotionally and mentally weary, like I had just taken a daylong exam. Claire in surgery. Larry at the park with us. Me taking care of my new baby and Maura. The earth was shifting beneath my feet, and not only did I need to hold steady for myself, I had to hold on for everyone else. Buck up! I could hear Claire say. I wiped my face, straightened my back, and turned the corners of my mouth up into a smile.

  When Larry and Maura had mastered the fishing pole, I said, “We really should get going.”

  “Thanks for calling me, Helen,” Larry said, clapping his hands together to get the dirt off. “Seeing the girls—my granddaughters—has been tremendous. Keep me posted on Claire, will you?”

  “I will,” I said. “I’ll call you later.”

  “Give me five,” he said to Maura, holding out his hand.

  Maura smacked it over and over, smitten with Larry, the guy from the park who knew how to make the coolest fishing pole.

  Larry leaned across to me, planted a kiss on Sam’s head. Then he paused, stared at me and then Sam and Maura, and uttered, “Beautiful.” I watched him take a step in the direction of his car.

  “Larry!” I called, hoisting Sam higher on my hip. “How do I know?” I asked. “That this is for real? How do I know that I can trust you this time?”

  Larry looked away. Then he looked back at me and cleared his throat. His mouth was pulled to the side, and it seemed that his eyes had reddened. “I can tell you this,” he said at last. “This hour, today, with you and my granddaughters”—he paused, clearing his throat again—”was the best hour I’ve had in about twenty years. I’ll be damned if I’m going to mess that up.”

  I looked at him. Nodded. “Okay, then.”

  He nodded, too, and we stared at each other for what seemed like minutes. “Okay, then,” he said, and turned and walked away.

  Once Larry was out of my sight, I pressed my palms into my eyes and pushed back a deluge of tears, took a deep breath, and found a cheerful voice. “Come on, Maura!”

  “Aunt Helen, guess what?” she said, sitting on the
embankment picking specks of dirt and grass from her feet. “Minnows are baby fish and tadpoles are baby frogs, but you can also call them polliwogs.”

  The pure innocence of her stabbed at my heart. I knew that it wouldn’t last long with a mother battling cancer. I knew that a sick mother would draw the sweetness from Maura as surely as rice absorbed the moisture in a saltshaker.

  When we got home, I changed Sam’s diaper and Maura’s wet clothes. I put Nick Jr. on the television, placed Sam in her playpen, and put the kettle on for tea. I looked at the clock again, wondered when Ross was going to call. I checked my cell phone, the home phone, and e-mail. Nothing so far.

  Tim had brought some tomato-basil soup home from the restaurant, so I warmed it on the stove while I grilled cheese sandwiches. Maura and I ate while Sam slept. Just as Maura finished and ran off to watch the television, the phone rang.

  Ross, finally. Bad news. The cancer was in the right ovary, as well as the fallopian tubes. The surgeon had had no choice but to do a full hysterectomy.

  “Does she know?” I asked, grabbing onto the edge of the counter. The room had started to spin.

  “Not yet,” he said with a hoarse voice. “She’s still groggy. Will be for a few hours.”

  I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and blew it out slowly. “She’s going to be okay,” I said, trying to lift my words, offer a little hope.

  “You don’t know that,” Ross said, his voice hardly a whisper. “Your mother wasn’t okay.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I said. “The statistics are better now.”

  “How does anyone make it through this hell?” Now he was crying, unnatural harsh sobs.

  “You deal with reality,” I said, understanding that I had a role to play. I needed to be strong for Ross. For Maura. For Claire, soon enough. “This is our new reality. We’ll deal with it.” I sounded like Claire, a graduate of her School of Putting a Strong Face Forward. Though, inside, I was wondering the same thing as Ross: How the hell will we get through this?

  “Reality sucks.”