The Saturday before my fourteenth birthday—MY MOTHER JUST DIED TEN DAYS AGO!—Steph and Caroline headed to the grocery store to buy ingredients for a birthday cake made from boxed mix and two cartons of ice cream, our mother’s recipe. On their way out, Steph shouted, Baby! Baby! from the foot of the stairs to wake me. I recorded in my journal how she shouted like our mother, making her words long. Baaaaaay-beeeeeee. Baaaaaaaaaay-beeeeeeee.
Our mother had a special way of calling for things—animals or us. If she was outside looking for our cat, Moo Cow, she shook a container of treats and bellowed Moooooooooooooooo, Mooooooooo Cow, the first moooo undulating like she was a backup singer whose chipper ooooooooh was the true star of the show. Sometimes she added our last name, Chow, to convey her urgency. Caroline had named Moo Cow. She chose it defensively, when she learned that eight-year-old me wanted to call him something she found corny, like Duke or Prince. Moo Cow soon associated our mother’s call with treats, and it became impossible to summon him without imitating her.
After my mother’s death, I stood every night on the back porch before bed. I hollered the cat’s name and pulled her voice from the bottom of my stomach and threw it at the yard.
Moooooooooooooo. Mooooooo Cow Chow. I scanned the trees. I felt ridiculous, like I was summoning my mother. I imagined her scurrying to the door on all fours with her back hunched. Her eyes were wide and unnaturally golden.
Jesus Christ, Mommy.
In a half decade or so, I will realize that I have all but forgotten how you sound. The only way I recall the pitch of your voice and where your vowels sharpen then soften is when I remember you howling the cat’s name.
I woke slowly, still in the haze of a haunting dream. I listened to my sisters back the van down the driveway en route to the grocery store.
“I had a really odd/scary dream which unnerved me,” I noted in my journal, which had a fake lock and, on the cover, a repeating pattern of stilettos and purses. The recent entries were a mix of recording what my family had done in the aftermath of burying my mother—the cemetery visits, the burning of joss paper—and the tiny dramas of freshman year, including which boys I crushed on, and what they’d written in the condolence card my English teacher had passed around.
“Mommy came back alive, or something,” I wrote, “like she was never dead.”
In the dream, my mother and I were on a road walking toward the barn. It was dusk. We were on foot. She wore loose clothes that hid the weight she had gained in recent years, and her hand cradled her stomach.
“We were walking behind people with horses. They were slow, and me and Mommy were fast, so we passed them,” I wrote. “I wanted to ask, or mention…how strong she seemed. IDK what she said in turn.”
When we reached the stable doors, I glanced over my shoulder, but she was nowhere to be found. I wrote that when I woke, I had a “droopy feeling”—the crash after a high, a heaviness, another wave of loss—as if my mother had died again.
When I was in elementary school, my mother borrowed a library book for me that gave me nightmares for days. I cannot find the title now, but I remember that in the early pages, the protagonist—a girl about my age—watches her mother disappear. Her mother seems preoccupied and unwell. They walk outside somewhere near their home. Suddenly, the air feels different and her mother is gone. She has a mother, and then she does not. In order to explain away her absence, the girl believes her mother has vanished into a parallel world. I was disturbed by this uncertainty and that there was no goodbye. It felt violent and sinister, and reading this book instilled in me a preemptive longing for my mother. I turned to her then as she lay in bed next to me, engrossed in her kissing book. I threw a leg and arm around her.
Mothers provide, she often said. I’m the provider.
She made a fist and thumped her chest to show her strength. She filled such basic needs for us just by being alive. She was the general. She was the one who strategized our futures and led us to win wars. With her, we were safe.
For years, my mother asked Steph about two of her friends—sisters, whose own mother had recently died from cancer.
How are they doing? she’d say, her tone not too different from the lady with the prayer blanket. We knew that she only asked because they were motherless girls. But just the thought of them stirred within me some secondhand panic, like their tragedy could filter into our own lives. These days, whenever I hear those names, I think of them as the girls with the dead mother.
Not you, I wanted to say to my mother at the time, because this worried me. This would never happen to you. But I stopped myself, because saying that sort of thing out loud only invites trouble.
It took me years to realize that my mother had also grown up motherless. By the time I understood this—and gathered that this was a worry of hers, that she would die before all of her children were adults—she was long dead and her fear was my inheritance.
On my birthday, my sisters asked me to stay seated at the kitchen table after we finished dinner. They pushed fourteen candles into the cake, which was frosted with rocky road ice cream and had wedges of pistachio ice cream inside.
OK, don’t look, Sticky, they said as they put something in my arms.
When I opened my eyes, I saw a wooden jewelry box. They’d discovered it when we cleaned out my mother’s cubicle at the insurance company and had hidden it from me for the past week.
It’s from Mommy, they said and helped me slide it from its packaging. We think she was saving this for you.
It was rectangular and made of faux rosewood. It had a single lid that opened like a loose jaw to expose a mouth of velveteen slots for rings and earrings.
All I could see was a casket.
Oh, I said. I tried not to recoil. I was fourteen now, and though I still slept cuddling my childhood stuffed animal—a toucan my mother had mistakenly named Ducky—I considered myself an adult. I wondered if this was a test.
Thank you, I heard myself say. I pushed the corners of my mouth up and I made my voice light. My sisters relaxed.
This is perfect, my mouth said. And then, I began to cry.
Each time I opened the box and stared into its maw, littered with my costume jewelry and a tiny fake-onyx necklace you’d bought for me at a gift shop on that trip to Seattle, I thought of you in your casket. Your hands were clasped on your stomach and your engagement ring was still on your swollen finger. Your coffin, the largest jewelry box. Your body, the gem.
You suddenly are across the kitchen table peering at me over a pile of wrapping paper.
Happy birthday, Chin-na Chow, you as my ghost mother say. You invoke one of my nicknames, a derivative of Chinchilla, which you and my sisters had called me because when I was young, I was so small and, in your eyes, cute. You hadn’t wanted to miss my birthday; you wanted to keep your claim as my mother. I shrink back. You lean closer and make the face. You flip your head back and caw with brutal, bracing laughter. Your teeth are Colgate white.