June 2019
Helen got off the plane and caught a cab home from LaGuardia.
Once in her apartment, she sank into a chair, her head still throbbing. The whole plane ride home, she realized she had made a mistake, that she should have stayed in Ann Arbor and worked things out with Ella. She shouldn’t have let her anxieties get the upper hand. She reached for her cell to call her daughter again, to apologize, when she heard her buzzer. She looked out her window and there was Mouse. She felt weak with relief and let him in. When he reached her apartment door, she tried to fling herself in his arms, but to her surprise, he stepped back. His face was white, a mask.
“What happened?” she said, alarmed.
“I think that’s what I’m asking you—”
“Asking me what? Mouse, please, I just got back.”
“Who does this to their own child?” he said. “What kind of person does this?”
“Does what?” she said. “What happened?”
“Who does this to someone they pretend to care about? To keep secrets this big! I thought we told each other the truth, that honesty was what our relationship was all about.”
He paced, mapping out her living room floor until she grabbed him. “What is this about?” she pleaded, and then he stopped walking.
“You know what it’s about. It’s about you. You go into a bar and get drunk, and you tell some reporter everything about your daughter—”
The air squeezed around her.
“What?” she said. “What?”
Mouse swallowed hard. “Your daughter, the one I never got to meet. Your daughter I knew nothing about except what you told me. And it turns out you told me nothing—you didn’t trust me. It turns out she’s a felon, that she tried to kill someone. And you just out her to a reporter?”
Helen’s legs collapsed. She fell against a chair and stumbled upright again. “What are you saying?” she said.
His face hardened. “You don’t read the papers? You don’t get the news on your phone? He was a prominent judge here. You think that isn’t news?”
“Why would I talk to a reporter?” she said. And then she couldn’t breathe. Suddenly she remembered how woozy she had been at the bar. How much she’d had to drink, how that man in the fedora had been flirting with her, urging her to talk. And she had. She had given him her real last name. Ella’s first name.
At least she hadn’t mentioned Ella’s child.
She wondered if he had been following Ella, somehow suspecting that she might be the anonymous help columnist. It might have been a minor surprise of a story, until she, Helen, had given him something explosive instead. No wonder he had left the bar so quickly.
Helen tried to swallow, but her throat was locked. She thought of the last argument she had had with Mouse, about how things were never black and white, and here it was again. She couldn’t see anything now but gray. Mouse used to look at her as if she were a treasure, as if he had won the lottery with her, but now his eyes were hard, like glass.
“I tried to tell you. But you wouldn’t let me.”
“Then you didn’t try hard enough,” Mouse said. He turned from her. “I thought I knew who you were.”
She watched him leave the apartment, heard his steps going down the stairs, and he was gone.
I did this. I did this.
Helen finally swallowed. She turned on her computer and there it was, story after story after story. A felon writing advice columns. How the information had come from Helen, whom the story insinuated was no angel herself—a single mother who had been kicked out of the Hasidic community she had been born into. And even though it was all secular news, the gossip could reach her community and bring shame to her family once again.
We have no daughter anymore. She could call her mother now and her mother would probably hang up on her. But maybe her mother would just listen silently, her presence the only way she could express any love for her daughter. She could call her siblings, but who knew if they even remembered her.
Helen wept as she shut off the computer. She had lost one world and gained another. And then she’d lost this one, too.
HELEN CALLED THE dress shop to ask if she could come back early from vacation.
“Sure, why not?” her boss said kindly.
“You know why not,” she replied. “I don’t want to make trouble for you. You’ve been so kind.”
“No one even knows you work here, right? You can come in through the back. You are not your daughter.”
Helen drew back, stung. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. Wasn’t she her daughter? Hadn’t they been through everything together?
“You’re welcome here,” her boss said, and there was nothing for Helen to do but thank her.
Helen tried to bury herself in work, staying in the backroom, squinting down at her tiny, perfect stitches. At least that was one thing she could get right. She sewed hems and bridesmaid dresses for breathless, goofy young women. She beaded the hem of a satin dress, each bead sewn with the care she couldn’t put into words.
She called Ella every day, always with the message: Forgive me. We need to talk. Please. She emailed her and texted her. There was never any response.
Mouse had once told her that he loved the lilt of her voice, her faint Yiddish accent. She called him, too, hoping that hearing her voice might bring him back to her. How could she make it up to him? And how could she stand it if he didn’t want to see her? He didn’t answer.
The Dear Clancy column, along with the Facebook page she used to read just for the comments praising her daughter, were both gone. Another hole in her heart. Every online reference to Ella contained the scandal once again—fixed firmly in place, the torrid history of her life and her child’s.
Some days she felt as if she were in a blizzard, all this anger swirling around her so that she couldn’t see what was true or real anymore.
She thought about how when Ella was very little, she had sometimes had tantrums, falling to the floor, kicking her legs and banging her arms. Helen used to tell Ella about anger, how it was like a snowstorm she might feel caught in, but snow melts. “We don’t have to live in that rage forever. We may be stuck in it for the moment, but poof!—then our path is clear and we can always find our way out.”
But Helen didn’t really follow her own advice. She had felt the same way—buried in an avalanche—when she had been kicked out of her community as a girl. Even though she had slowly dug herself out and her life had gradually changed, the inescapable yearning she still had for her past threatened like another blizzard.
If she had built a new way of being once, maybe she could do it again.
Two nights after Mouse stormed out, Helen made herself some strong oolong tea, then sat by the window. She could hear her mother’s voice, confirming how every joy, how every trouble, was always from Hashem.
Well, she wasn’t Hasidic anymore. She hadn’t been to a religious service since before Ella was born. Her mother used to tell her that the most important forgiveness was God’s, but to get it you had to first get the forgiveness of the person you had wounded. You had to ask once, then twice, and then a third time, and if you weren’t forgiven by the person, then God, at least, would forgive you.
But her parents hadn’t forgiven her.
Back then, Helen had been a fist of misery. She had thought that if her parents could just see their granddaughter, they would have embraced her. But she didn’t have the courage to take Ella to see them until Ella was two. She had dressed her daughter in a frilly yellow dress she’d made herself. She had brushed her curls and put a bow in them. She just wanted them to know her, for her to know them. Who could resist such a beautiful little girl?
It turned out that her parents could. Her mother had stared at them from the open door and Helen could only stammer that here was her granddaughter. Then silence. Her mother blinked back tears.
“Who’s at the door?” a voice had cried, and then Helen’s sister Adah had flown into the doorway, stopping in shock when she spotted Helen, her eyes growing round.
“Adah!” Helen said, and then little Esti had come up behind them. Before she could say anything else, her mother firmly shut the door.
ELLA HAD BEEN sweet and solemn and precious on her mother’s doorstep. But in the subway on the way home, something snapped. Ella began to scream, flailing her arms, seemingly overcome by fury. Helen wondered if she understood, if not in action, then in feeling, their rejection. The other passengers had thrown disapproving looks as though the child’s distress had been Helen’s fault. As though she were a terrible mother.
She had bowed her head, but she made her prayer directly to Ella: My darling girl. And then Ella had stopped screaming and the subway car relaxed. Helen whispered into her daughter’s hair: We will be our own family, we two. All we need is each other. And with a start, she realized that she hadn’t mentioned God, that she no longer believed in Him. No, she believed in Ella. God had abandoned her, her community had abandoned her, but her Ella never would.
Except that Ella had indeed abandoned her, and it was all Helen’s fault.
Now, Helen grabbed her cellphone. She hesitated and then called her daughter. The voice message kicked in. She wondered if Ella was even listening to her messages. Perhaps Helen had been cut out completely. Undeterred, she left a message.
“This is your mother,” she said, as if she had to remind her. “Forgive me.” Her voice cracked. She hung up.