Clara and I sat side by side at a table in the dayroom. I’d brought the family photo album along on my visit, hoping it might cheer her up a little bit. Even with all of the noise around us from the other visiting families and the scraping of chair legs being moved across the floor, we were able to keep our focus on the pictures pasted onto the black pages.
“Was this Dad’s?” she asked, starting from the very first page.
“Yes,” I answered. “It was in a box in my basement. I hadn’t looked at it in years.”
“Well, I know that this is Mother.” She touched a square in the middle of one page.
Her words slurred, her voice thick and sounding so different from normal. She even moved slower. When I’d asked if she was all right, she’d looked at me as if she had no idea what I was talking about.
“Do I look like her?” she asked, still touching the picture of our mother.
I nodded. “And I think that’s her sister. The girl next to her.”
“Aunt Thelma?”
“Yes.”
“Is she still alive?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know.” I smoothed my skirt over my knees. “I haven’t seen that side of the family since Mother died.”
“And Dad’s side?”
“They’ve all passed on,” I said. “I think we’re all that’s left.”
“Huh.” She held the back of her neck, rubbing it with her right hand.
I watched as she turned the page and then another.
“Why wouldn’t Dad talk about her?” Clara asked after a minute of gazing at a photo of our parents standing under a tree, holding hands but not smiling into the camera.
“It was too hard for him, I think,” I answered.
“I don’t have very good memories of him.” She dropped her hands into her lap.
“He wasn’t the friendliest father.”
“But she was kind, wasn’t she?” Clara asked. “That’s how I remember her at least.”
I nodded. “Most of the time.”
“And so pretty.” Clara touched the picture.
“Mama was a beautiful woman,” I said, nearly choking for the grief of calling her not Mother but Mama. “Even at the end she was beautiful. There was a certain light in her eyes.”
“What else?”
“She was so special.” I pulled my lips between my teeth, biting down and hoping it would keep me from sobbing. “She was an artist and a storyteller and a singer. When she was well, her imagination had no boundaries, and she loved to play make-believe with us. A sunrise was never ordinary to her, she couldn’t walk past a flower without taking notice.”
Clara’s lips parted just slightly, the way they always had when she was paying very close attention, and her eyes softened, tears moistening them.
“Do you remember when she tied an apron around her neck backward for a cape and put an old Christmas wreath on her head as a crown and paraded around the apartment to play Queen of England?” I asked.
“And we wore canning rings on our wrists as bracelets.”
“You remember,” I said.
“What else?” Clara asked.
“Oh, goodness.” I shut my eyes, trying to think of something. “Mama wasn’t afraid of anything.”
I smiled at a memory of my mother luring a mangy, skinny mutt into the tenement with the heel of a stale loaf of bread, convinced that all it needed was a good meal and a thorough grooming. I laughed as I told my sister about how the already balding dog lost even more of its fur in Mother’s hairbrush.
Clara’s eyes widened, making her look a good ten years younger.
“When Dad came home, she hid that dog in the closet.” I shook my head. “Dad screamed when he went to hang up his jacket and found that beast. He thought it was a rat.”
She covered her mouth with a bony hand and laughed, her eyes squinting like they had when she was small and something had amused her.
On and on I went, filling our hour together with every memory of our mother—our mama—that I could think of. As I told them, I could see the light get brighter in Clara’s eyes. It made me dig through my mind for more stories to tell her. More stories to draw Clara back home.
But our time was nearly up. I couldn’t think of a time when I’d resented a clock so much.
“I wish we could have had her longer,” Clara said.
“Me too.”
She turned the page to find a picture of our tall and stunningly beautiful mother standing between us, her arms around our shoulders. Us girls looked into the camera, shy smiles on our faces. Mama, though, had her face turned toward Clara and a toothy smile on her face.
“You’d just said something funny,” I said. “You might not realize this, but you were quite a funny child.”
My sister took my hand, squeezing it once before letting go.
“Did she love me?” she asked.
“Oh, Clara,” I said. “You were the sun to her. She loved you so much it was almost unbelievable.”
When we reached the last page of the photo album, I ran my fingertips along the black paper around a picture of Clara and me taken not long after we’d moved to LaFontaine. We stood at the bottom of the steps to our apartment over the bakery, her arm slung around my neck. I smiled in the photo, but she held her face as straight and serious as could be. “You were so angry with Dad when he took this picture.”
“Birdie, I want to tell you something.”
I lifted my head and realized that my mouth was hanging wide open.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’m afraid that Hugo’s going to forget me,” she said. “Like I’m forgetting Mother.”
“He won’t.”
“I’ll do my best to remind him.” I smiled.
“Do you think he’ll be glad when I get out?” she asked.
“Gladder than any boy ever was.”
A stab of jealousy throbbed in my gut.
I gritted my teeth and denied it.