ERICA SITS BACK IN HER chair, reeling. Brokaw is talking, but his voice sounds a million miles away. Susan waves again, beaming. Now Joy Reid is saying something, something about the truth.
The truth is, Erica, your mother brought your daughter to see you.
Jenny has only met Susan once, when she crashed Erica’s wedding. Erica hired a car to take Susan back to Maine that same day and she hasn’t seen her since. Until now. How did this happen? What is going on? Did the two of them conspire to do this? No, no, this can’t be happening.
“Erica, do you have anything to add?” Tom Brokaw asks.
Erica looks over toward Brokaw—he, Couric, Reid, and Hume are all looking at her with concern. She picks up the glass of water at her place and takes a long drink.
Pull it together, you have to get through this.
“Well, um, Tom, with so many different so-called news outlets, including all forms of social media, there’s no central arbiter of what is true and what isn’t. And so lies go unchallenged. And they get repeated. Each faction of our Balkanized society has its own cultural landscape and echo chamber. They’re able to create, in effect, their own ‘truth.’”
Erica can hardly believe she’s capable of speech, let alone thought. She drinks some more water, wills herself not to look at Jenny and Susan, and forces herself to listen to the other panelists, even though her heart is pounding in her chest and her left eyelid is twitching and all she can think is: What now?
Somehow she makes it through the hour without making a total fool of herself. The panel ends and she steps down off the stage as people are filing out. As she walks toward Jenny and Susan she feels like she’s having an out-of-body experience. She was able to stay coherent for Tom Brokaw; will she for her own mother and daughter?
And now they’re all together, three generations, standing awkwardly in the aisle. Jenny seems tentative, maybe abashed. Susan looks like a different woman—she’s shed thirty pounds, has found a terrific colorist, a better dentist, and looks like she gets regular massages and facials. But a little bit of the sow’s ear is still showing—under her too-assertive perfume, she smells like an ashtray.
“So . . . ,” Erica says, “how did this happen?”
“Aren’t you going to give us a hug, honey?” Susan says.
Erica gives her mother a perfunctory hug, mostly because they’re in public and she sees cameras out. Then she hugs Jenny.
“Hi, Mom.”
“How did I do?”
“Joy Reid was better.” Thanks, I needed that. Jenny sees Erica’s stricken look and adds, “But you were okay too. You were good.”
“So, again, how did this happen?”
“Gosh, Erica, I follow you on Facebook and Twitter and everything, and when I saw you would be in Boston, I thought, well, why not just get in my new Intrepid, I lease it, honey, only $259 a month, and by the way I got this sweater at Nordstrom Rack, you see, honey, I’ve changed. Thanks to you, of course.” She leans in close and whispers, “I go to my meetings. I have eight months clean and dry. I don’t want to be a pathetic loser anymore.” She leans back and raises her voice. “After all, I’m Erica Sparks’s mother. That means something in this world. Oh, you should see my townhouse, how I have it fixed up with a sectional and my art glass collection. Maybe someday you and Jenny will come visit.”
Erica keeps looking at Jenny, who is looking at her grandmother with a puzzled and fascinated expression on her face, like you might look at some exotic animal at the zoo. By now the lecture hall is mostly empty. Not as empty as Erica, though. She feels like she’s in some realm beyond shock and surprise and fear and anxiety, she’s just flatlining emotionally.
“So you called Jenny and then picked her up in Dedham, and the two of you drove here together?”
Jenny nods.
“That’s just exactly what happened,” Susan says.
“And your father was all right with it?”
“I told him I wanted to see my grandmother, and he said that was understandable.”
Erica doesn’t have much time, she has to catch her flight back to LaGuardia and do her show. She wanted to go out with Jenny, for ice cream or a sandwich or something, but she’s not sure she can handle the thought of Susan being there. She was thinking about Henrietta’s Table, the nice restaurant in the Charles Hotel, just a block away. But it’s always filled with well-known Bostonians, and no doubt a lot of people who were at the panel discussion will be there. Erica will be fussed over and have to make small talk. And worst of all, she’ll have to introduce this peculiar woman as her mother.
“This is such fun, us all being together,” Susan says with forced brightness. “Oh, Erica, look at my new front teeth.” She smiles too widely and then she tugs at her skirt and frowns and looks around as if she’s lost, and Erica sees how deeply insecure the woman is, how fish-out-of-water she is, sober, in a place like Harvard. This is a distant planet for her. The poor, sad creature never had a chance, really—her childhood with a boozy, illiterate mother and boozy, crude father who was overly affectionate and not in a good way. Erica is glad she takes care of Susan, buys her things, sends her money. The woman is her mother. The only one she’ll ever have.
Erica flashes back on a spring Saturday when she was about six. Her father had been AWOL for a couple of weeks, and with him away Susan had cleaned the place up a little, was a little less manic, took fewer pills, smoked less pot, and it was raining that day, it was a warm spring rain, and Susan took Erica’s hand and led her outside and they played a crazy game of tag in the rain, which turned into a downpour, and they kept chasing each other and laughing until they were sopping wet and then they went inside and stripped their clothes off and Susan dried Erica with a big towel and then made them hot chocolate from little packets she had stolen from the coffee bar at the 7–Eleven.
Erica had loved her mother that day, and on other days too. When she walked her to school or picked her up. She even tried to help with her homework a few times. She was just unequipped to be a mom. She had no example to follow except abuse, poor thing.
“Listen, I don’t have a lot of time, but there’s an IHOP across the street,” Erica says.
“I’m going to get chocolate chip pancakes,” Susan says, taking Jenny’s hand and heading up the aisle.
“Not me, I want peanut butter!”
Susan turns and looks back at Erica, an indulgent smile on her face, and in that moment she almost seems like a real grandma, bemused and loving and . . . happy. Could they all be happy together? Susan does look so much better, maybe she’s aged out of her wild impulsiveness, maybe her anger has dissipated with the years, maybe having a successful daughter has been good for her sense of self and inspired her to clean up her act, to rise to the bar Erica has set.
Standing there in the now empty auditorium, Erica’s heartbeat seems to be echoing back to her and she feels hope for the three of them, the three generations, hope that out of all the chaos and pain and hard work and bitterness and disappointment, they can forge something . . . meaningful, even beautiful.
“Come on, Mom!” Jenny calls from the doorway.
“Coming!” Erica says. Then her phone rings.
“Hello, Erica, it’s Detective Chester Yuan of the LAPD. I’ve been analyzing that photograph you sent me and I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion.”