Mother’s compact whacks against my trash can.
Pack? Sob? Scream? I dig my fingernails into my palms. I pace my room shaking and sweaty, listening to the house. Any minute Mother will slam the front door, get in her car, and go . . . run away from me.
It’s done now—all secrets out. The raw truth of our mistaken starting point revealed.
Look for my bright pink sweater, Lily, that’s how you can always find me.
Two moms gone.
I lie gathered up in a ball facing the wall. I sob and shudder, wiping my cheeks on the sheet. The room gets dusky. The doves coo in the eaves. My eyes sting. My throat burns. I drift, unhooked from everything. . . .
I awaken to a tap on the door. “Ralph?”
I roll over in the dark, stretch to click on my lamp, and look straight at my mother standing in the opening at three o’clock in the morning.
“It’s one of the Girdles,” she says, bumping in the door.
My eyes pop wide.
She sets a tray on my vanity, walks over, sits on my bed, and does something miraculous. She leans over and pushes away a strand of hair stuck to my face. We both burst into tears. The mattress creaks under the weight of us.
“I brought you some lima beans,” she says, straightening up and pointing to the tray. “Suffocated to perfection.”
“Thanks,” I croak. I glance at her ivory robe. I don’t reach out and touch it, but I could. I look at the straight side of her nose, her pale mouth, the creases under her eyes, the shadows under her skin. She looks real and ragged.
“It’s ham and egg rolls, actually. And popcorn and bridge mix. I was starving. How about you?”
I nod.
In my mind the bodhisattva floats through the window, faces us across the room. “I have something I was going to give you in the basement before we loaded our weapons,” I say. I get up and reach in the wastebasket. Mother’s eyebrows shoot up. I hand her the felt bag.
“My compact,” she whispers. There’s a trace of something in her face—distrust, disdain?
“I know it’s real sentimental to you.”
“Yeah, temporarily. Sort of like how Dad hid my box from me.” My mother nods, an I can understand that nod. “It was handed down from your grandmother, wasn’t it, and then your mother gave it to you?”
Mother’s face darkens. She twirls her wedding rings and draws out the word. “Wrong.”
“But you’ve said a million times—”
“I know what I said.” Tears slip from her eyes. “But they didn’t!” Her voice is flat. “I made that up. I wanted it to be true. But it isn’t. I bought it for myself at an antique store! I didn’t inherit my crystal, either. I bought it too.” Mother doubles over, with her fingers knotted together, and sobs. I get Kleenex. I know that this outpouring is not about me. “I hid the truth about it from everybody, except your father, and myself sometimes.”
“You made up that story about your mother and grandmother?” She nods. “Like how you created that story you wanted to believe about my birth father still being in China?”
“That was to protect you.”
“That was to protect you . . . and Dad.”
She nods. “Protect all of us, I guess.” She looks exhausted and wrinkled in a way that Vivian Firestone is never wrinkled. “But it didn’t work, did it?”
“So you and Grandma didn’t . . .”
Mother holds up a hand. Her voice shakes. “My mother and I never chose each other, even though I was her naturally born daughter. We were not a good match.”
“So I don’t know your true story either,” I say slowly. Mother stiffens, looks off. “I barely remember Grandma. Ralph didn’t know her at all.” Shadows from the streetlight play off Mother’s face. She shakes her head, as if answering a question inside. I need to add Grandma and my great-grandmother to my family tree. Someday I am going to get her to talk more truth about them and herself. “I guess I don’t know very much about you, do I?”
She nods. “Not everything.”
“Should I get the Ouija board?” Mother smiles, touches my hand. “Mr. Howard, the janitor at school, who is my friend, says we can never replace a person who has gone. We can only face it, feel awful, and move ahead. That’s it.” My mother looks at me, so sorry and sad. “Then after lots of screaming and heartache the popcorn can start to pop and we feel better in the life that we do have.”
I realize I have just strung more sentences together talking with Mother than ever before. Thank you, Mr. Howard. Joy comes in, hops on the bed. “I wasn’t born the day you chose me, or I chose you, or we chose each other. I had almost four years already. You and Dad were the keepers of my little life story, my provenance, until I discovered your version wasn’t true.”
“I was doing something wrong for what I thought was the right reason.” She sighs, slides off the bed, walks to the vanity, and comes back with the tray. She puts a plate on my lap and one on hers. She puts an egg roll and a pile of popcorn on each. We bow our heads a moment, then bite into the sandwiches.
“Where are Dad and Ralph?”
“Father-son overnight.”
“Oh, yeah, right. I guess I forgot about them.”
Mother gets the bowl of bridge mix. “What’s your favorite—raisin, nougat, caramel?”
We sit together pawing through the bowl, chewing, pawing. Ralph’s doves sleep to the faint hollow chatter of bamboo wind chimes from the attic.
“I think that Gone Mom protected me by leaving me with the sisters. She wouldn’t tell my birth father about me. She knew I couldn’t go back to China with her. I’d die there—a half-breed girl. It took courage. She wasn’t a Communist or a spy or a tramp or a heathen. I believe she was smart and decent.”
Mother looks off. Says nothing.
I am not ready to talk about my cloud slipper. I may never be. I feel protective of my first parents’ true story. But I do say, “It helps me to know the truth about her and him. I am not white, Mother. I’m not brown, either. I’m golden!”
Golden.
My mother looks at me a long moment, nods, polishes her compact on her robe, and wipes her eyes. “Where was this? It’s been missing for months.”
I could make up anything but I don’t. Her original story about the compact isn’t true, but I have a true one.
“Ralph took it because he needed a little mirror at the art museum.” I tell her about the parts of the bodhisattva on the table and his idea of sleuthing using strategic mirror placement and how we forgot it.
Mother almost laughs, which I haven’t heard in an age, and I glimpse a little girl in the dim prism of her. Her provenance must be a patchwork of rough stories—some true, some not. I have no idea. But I bet Dad does. It’s why he’s so careful with her, why he dances around, talking out the sides of his mouth, cushioning her from everything. But, of course, it didn’t work. As Mr. Howard said, if you look square at the gut-crushing loss, you can start to find your true self and get free.
Mother says, “Where did it turn up?”
“What?”
“My compact!”
I look her square in the face. “It turned up at the information desk in the lost . . . and found.”