Rosa watched her mother taste the chicken salad.
“Needs salt,” Mama said, then quickly added, “But it’s delicious.”
Rosa shrugged. “My domestic skills are a little rusty.”
Emma patted Rosa’s hand. “I love your cooking. I’ll miss it at camp.”
Rosa laughed. “That’s not saying much—camp food is terrible.”
Emma’s face got serious. “Are you sure it’s okay if I go this summer, Mom? You won’t miss me too much?”
Rosa loved being called Mom. Turned out the women’s collective didn’t know everything, back when they made pronouncements about the politics of family language.
Allen stood up. “Anyone want more iced tea?”
Mama held out her glass.
“I’ll see you on visiting day,” Rosa said. How odd to be the one visiting, after almost a decade of being visited in prison. She shook off those thoughts. “Are you packed, Emma? The bus leaves early.”
Emma shrugged. “No problem. I never unpacked last summer. That’s how Dad and I do it.”
Rosa felt her jaw drop and recognized the same expression on Mama’s face.
Emma looked from her mom to her grandmother, then turned to Allen and grinned. They slapped four hands together in a high five and spoke in one voice, “Gotcha!”
The next morning, Rosa found a free table at an outdoor café near the Port Authority and sank into the molded plastic chair. It was only 10:00 a.m., but she’d been up since four. Mama had insisted on taking the seven o’clock bus back to Detroit. “A week is long enough,” she’d said, “even to celebrate my sixtieth. Besides, you people need to say your goodbyes without me in the way.” Rosa and Allen helped Mama onto her bus, then lugged Emma’s two duffle bags to the Loon Lake charter on the other side of the bus station.
Saying goodbye to Emma had been bizarre, the way so many situations felt warped since her release from prison. She was a mother sending her only child off to summer camp, armed with bug spray and Kotex—just in case—and wishing the bus would never leave. But the air shimmered with ghosts of her own self at eleven saying goodbye to Mama and Pop, impatient for her Loon Lake summer to begin. Esther’s image was there too, a specter hanging on her arm.
Emma had been teary. “Are you absolutely sure you’ll be okay?” “She’ll be fine.” Allen’s hand nudged Emma up the stairs. “Time to go.”
Turning away from Allen’s hovering, Rosa walked along the bus, her fingers marking wavy lines in the dust, until she saw Emma’s face in the window, sitting with her friend Poose. Rosa blew a kiss.
Allen brushed Rosa’s hair away from her face. “Just three weeks to visiting day.”
“I know. It’s okay.” Rosa blew her nose. “You want to get some breakfast?”
Allen checked his watch. “Can’t. I have a client at eleven and a brief due Thursday. You’ll be all right?”
Rosa sighed and closed the menu. Nine months since she got out, and ordinary tasks still felt monumental. Every simple decision was immense. Pancakes or an omelet? French toast, or maybe granola with yogurt and fruit? It was more than being indecisive. She was not in control. She had cried all the way to New York from prison, with Allen murmuring comforting phrases on one side, and Emma leaning forward from the back seat, asking over and over why she was crying, wasn’t she happy to be free?
“Ma’am?” The waitress stood next to the table, pad in hand.
“Pancakes, I guess,” Rosa said. “And coffee, please. Black.”
Of course she was happy, but her brain refused to cooperate. Liberated from the constrictions of prison, it had also freed itself from the confines of the here and now. Pictures from the past—not precisely random ones, she had to admit—elbowed aside the concrete objects in front of her eyes. Horses’ rumps and swinging billy clubs. Puking into the rose bush. Esther’s face in the photograph on the television screen, her eyes closed as if to deny their act. Emma and Didi draped over Maggie’s shoulder, right before the ambulance came. Those images were slippery, sneaky, elusive, then blossoming into full color when she tried to read a novel or write a press release or cook pasta.
The persistence of the images had finally been the clincher, the reason why she told Emma that yes, she should go to camp this summer. Maybe, with a little space from suddenly being a mother to a girl she hardly knew, Rosa could pull herself together. She kept making stupid mistakes as a mother, things she should have known. Allen kept telling her to give herself a break. Nine years in prison. A new city. It all takes time, he said. But she had already lost so much time.
The waitress brought her food and Rosa took a bite of pancake. Should’ve had the granola. She didn’t really like pancakes, but they never had pancakes in prison, so that was in their favor. As a child, the only time she liked them was in the woods, cooked on the grungy old Coleman stove. Pop would drop fat blueberries one by one into the skillet-sized pancakes. Every summer, Mama and Pop would pick them up at camp and they’d have an East Coast family vacation. Camping in the early years, then renting a cottage on the Maine coast or the Cape, so quiet and lazy after the frenetic fun of camp. She would read. Esther would draw. Pop would fish. Mama would nap and write letters to Miriam.
Scraping away the excess syrup and butter, Rosa took another bite. She slipped the yellow pad from her bag and dug for a pen.
Dear Esther,
I sent my daughter away to camp this morning, even though I just got her back a few months ago. Poor Emma. Poor me. I missed out on most of her childhood. Allen toilet trained her, perching on the edge of the bathtub and singing to her on the potty. Would you believe he couldn’t bear to throw out the plastic yellow potty chair—it’s still in the back of the bedroom closet. He taught her to ride the subway and quizzed her for spelling tests. I’m lucky Emma doesn’t hate me, even though our only mother-daughter bonding for nine years was in prison visiting rooms.
Emma’s at Loon Lake. She’s been going to camp for years with Maggie, keeping up the family tradition. Sometimes I wonder how Emma sees the events that shaped her life—our action, our arrest, my life underground and all the rest of it. I wonder how she sees activism, how she’ll choose to act, or not, as an adult. It wouldn’t surprise me if our family history ends up haunting her too. A few moments on a shimmering city street in 1968 and none of us have ever been the same.
“Anything else?” the waitress asked before tucking the check under the edge of Rosa’s plate.
Rosa shook her head and kept writing.
Even with everything that’s happened, I don’t think I would do anything differently, if I had the chance. Except maybe—if I could do it over again—I wouldn’t have banished you so completely from my life.
Rosa put down the pen and looked around at the café, now mostly empty. The butter and syrup congealed on her pancakes. She finger-combed her hair away from her face and captured it clumsily with the wooden barrette clipped to her blue jeans. She shoved the pad and pen into her bag.
Was that true, what she just wrote about Esther? She had no idea.