February 2019
Helen was going crazy missing Ella. She had hoped to spend Thanksgiving with her, and then Hanukkah—either in Brooklyn or Ann Arbor—but Ella had put her off, claiming she was drowning in work, that she could neither take time off to travel nor host her mother. Not yet. Always not yet.
“You know I love you. You know I wish I could,” Ella said, and something tight in Ella’s voice made Helen know not to press her.
Meanwhile, Helen’s new joy was Mouse. After the New Year, they went to see the giant Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, their noses nipped with cold. They went to more concerts and readings where they sat holding hands. Helen loved it all; it was such a strange and exciting time.
“Tell me more about you,” he kept prodding, but Helen could only dole out pieces of her life for fear he might leave if she told him all of it at once. She couldn’t help being afraid.
And, too, she couldn’t help feeling how even though this might be a new start, it could be a bad start, too. Sometimes she thought she should back out of this relationship now, before she was too deeply invested. She began studying him, trying to find fault, justification. But the few things she found seemed so trivial. He sometimes spoke so fast, he spoke over her. He sometimes scraped his fork on the plate without even knowing it.
“Tell me about you,” Mouse repeated.
Hesitantly, she told him more about raising her daughter, skimming the story, revealing only that Ella was now in her early twenties and living in Ann Arbor, writing a column for a weekly newspaper.
“She sounds interesting,” he said. “I hope I can meet her sometime.”
“You will,” Helen said, but she couldn’t help wondering if it was a mistake to make that promise.
One night, during a snowstorm, they were at his place watching the news, and it was followed by a ripped-from-the-headlines movie about Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a wheelchair-bound, chronically sick teen who discovers, to her horror, that her devoted mother had fabricated her illnesses to get attention, sympathy, and medical procedures that would keep Gypsy sick. In an attempt to free herself from her mother’s clutches, Gypsy Rose and her secret boyfriend brutally murder her mother.
“All those secrets,” Mouse said. “Nothing good ever comes from keeping a secret.”
“Sometimes people feel they have no choice,” Helen said.
Mouse shook his head. “Secrets have weight, and they just keep getting heavier and heavier. And anyway, Gypsy should have gone to the authorities first,” Mouse insisted.
“And what if they wouldn’t help?” Helen said. “And look at what she suffered! She felt helpless. You can’t say she was guilty—she was out of her mind and desperate.”
Mouse shook his head. “People like that are crazy. Yes, she should have had justice, but what she and her boyfriend did to her mother was far worse than what was done to her. It was murder. Sometimes things actually are black and white, you know. There’s a right thing to do and there’s a wrong thing.”
“And how do we know what the right thing is?” Helen said, her voice rising.
“Right is right,” Mouse said. “It’s as simple as that.”
“What about shades of right?” Helen said, practically shouting now. “What about that? What about circumstances we know nothing about? Gypsy’s mother might have done terrible things, but she loved her daughter! And Gypsy loved her mother even though she got her boyfriend to help kill her!”
Mouse looked at her with concern. “Wait, wait. Why are you getting so upset?” He tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away. “Why are we talking about this terrible case?” He shut off the TV. “There. Now, how about if I make us some tea?”
Helen stood quickly and got her coat.
“I don’t need tea,” she snapped, and fled his apartment.
She saw his texts on the subway but didn’t respond. They kept coming that night and she ignored them. She didn’t calm down until the next day, and even then, she felt as if the brightness and hope she was finding in their relationship had faded a little. He was judgmental, she decided. That meant he would inevitably judge her, and maybe she had had enough of that.
Men. They had never done her any good in life. Certainly not the man who had violated her. Not even that boy Jude. All that talk about how he’d do anything for Ella. But her daughter had been sentenced to twenty-five years, and he got off scot-free. She had misjudged Jude so badly. And she was beginning to understand that she had misjudged Mouse, too. Who needed any of them? All these men were so nice at first, you didn’t notice the danger. Thank God she hadn’t told Ella about Mouse, because Ella would surely be asking her all sorts of questions.
Yet, despite herself, she kept expecting him to call. She sat at home waiting, but she heard nothing. She was furious with herself for getting into an argument she could never win, because she could never explain herself to him. A thousand times she had picked up the phone to call him, but she always put it down again.
She missed him. She missed how he smelled like pine, and even though she knew it was his aftershave, she liked thinking it was just how he smelled. She liked waking up and seeing his head on her pillow.
Well, all that was in the past now. She could yearn for him all she wanted, but she’d have to fill the time now with something else.
AS MORE WEEKS passed, she kept busy. It was a snowy winter, making it hard for her to even imagine braving the outside except for going to work. So, she did things indoors. She spent long evenings putting together five-hundred-piece puzzles, and when those grew too easy, one-thousand-piece puzzles. She rearranged all the photos in the house so that wherever she looked she would see Ella and herself. She often traced those faces with her finger.
After that, she was cleaning her sewing space, gathering embroidery threads and bits of fabric to put them in some order, when she had an idea. She carefully embroidered a message on a thin strip of orange linen: Dream Big. Then, she took one of the dresses she was working on for the shop and carefully picked open the hem, tucking the cloth inside. She wouldn’t tell the shop what she had done, but she loved the idea of the secrecy, how someone might feel that strip of cloth and read her message. And even if they didn’t, maybe the message would act as a talisman.
She began doing this more and more. The next day, she bought pale yellow wool and made Ella a dress, long sleeves with fake pearl buttons at the wrist, a V-neck that would graze her clavicle. She embroidered a strip of cloth: I will always love you and always be proud. She was about to sew it into the hem when she took her tiny gold-plated hoops from her ears—the ones she always wore because she thought they were lucky—and put them in the hem, too. They’d add weight to the dress. Ella might feel something in the hem and open it to see what it was, and then she’d find the message. She thought of Ella wearing her earrings, carrying that luck. She was packaging it up carefully to send to her daughter when her cell rang.
“Ella,” she said happily. “I was just thinking of you. What synchronicity.”
“I need to ask you something,” Ella said, and Helen settled in her chair. Maybe she wanted to find a day for Helen to visit. Maybe she needed money—and of course, any money Helen had was Ella’s.
“Did you get to see my baby when she was born?” Ella said abruptly. There was a strange current in her voice.
Helen felt as if a crack were forming along her spine. “Why are you asking me this now?” she said quietly.
“Because I want to know. Because I was thinking about it. They wouldn’t let me see her when she was born, so the only way I knew her was through my belly. Shouldn’t a mother get to see her baby?”
“I think you know it isn’t a good idea to talk about this.”
“Why isn’t it?” Ella said. Helen could hear Ella’s ragged breathing.
“It’s the past, honey. All we have is our present. Our futures.”
“Well, I’m doing some wondering in my present. Why did you make me give her up? Why didn’t you take her? Don’t you regret that?”
Helen pressed the cell against her ear. She didn’t know what she was supposed to say. She had always thought that when Ella was married and giving birth she would be there, holding her hand, and then holding her grandchild. But those dreams had been crushed, along with her daughter’s. She had never seen the baby, let alone held it, which was a good thing, because if she had, she would never have let that child go and that would have been a mess that neither she nor Ella would have been able to handle.
“Why can’t you tell me the truth?” Ella said. “Why can’t you just say you didn’t want to? That it wasn’t that you couldn’t, it wasn’t because of time or money, the way you said. Was it because it was Jude’s baby?”
“You were going to be imprisoned for twenty-five years! What happened that you’re asking me this now?” Helen said. “I didn’t have the resources to be a single mother. Not again. And I wanted something better for you.”
“Better.” Ella snorted.
“And you got it. You have a new life now and you should be happy living it.” Helen swallowed. “Are you looking for someone to blame?”
As soon as she said it, she felt ashamed, because if anyone was pointing fingers at anyone, it was Helen, blaming herself.
“Fine,” Ella said. “I made a mistake calling you.”
“Wait—” Helen said, but Ella hung up.