Esther went to bed early, but she couldn’t fall asleep. The next morning Jake would drive Molly to Loon Lake, the place where she and Jake found each other and connected so deeply with Rosa and Allen they believed that nothing could break them apart.
Jake’s and Molly’s voices drifted up from the porch. Molly was unhappy about camp and Esther knew she should go downstairs. But it was day eleven of her chemo cycle, the day she always felt worst. Her oncology nurse said the dip in white blood cells was the reason she felt so easily overwhelmed, so quick to tears, as if her heart were scraped raw and every touch started it bleeding.
The slam of a door startled her, then footsteps running up the stairs and down the hall to Molly’s room. Maybe Molly wasn’t ready for camp. Maybe she should stay home this summer. Jake had been against the plan from the beginning. In fact, he was horrified. Kept asking Esther what good it would possibly do. She didn’t have an answer for that, not really, except that Molly was growing up without her history, knowing nothing about the values that motivated generations of her family. Nothing about their sad legacy and buried secrets.
Last week, Jake had asked Esther outright if she wanted Molly to learn about Rosa, the demonstration, all that. He demanded to know if Rosa’s daughter went to Loon Lake. Esther didn’t know. She didn’t tell him she had asked Mama that exact question on the telephone, but Mama refused to answer, said she was pleading the Fifth. “I know better than to get between you two,” she said. “Talk to your sister.”
No way could she fall asleep now. Esther rearranged her pillows so she could sit up, and reached into the drawer of her desk for the red fabric box. She removed the cover, stroked the graceful arc of the embroidered bridge above the blue stream now faded almost to white. Then she turned it over, looked at the photograph taped inside. The two girls stared at her, frozen in black and white childhood.
It had been a long time since Esther had allowed herself the ritual of the four small inner boxes. From the first box she lifted the tri-colored braid of hair and brought it to her lips. She breathed deeply, but there were no longer any smells clinging to the hair, and she coiled the braid carefully back in its box. From the second and third boxes she emptied a collection of tiny teeth into the palm of her hand. When Molly and Oliver asked what the tooth fairy did with their teeth in exchange for a quarter, she never told them that their baby teeth were disintegrating near the photo of their lost aunt.
The final box held Rosa’s circle pin. The day after Rosa left town during her first trial, Esther had used her emergency key to enter the apartment Rosa shared with Allen. With Molly sleeping warm against her chest, Esther stood in the bedroom looking at the detritus of her sister’s discarded life. There was nothing left of her Rosa in that place, except the small gold circle on the dresser, which Esther had slipped into her pocket.
Esther replaced the red fabric box into the drawer and reached for her notebook.
Rosa, why haven’t you contacted me? Can’t you just apologize, and then I will too and we can be sisters again? I’ve spent a lot of time over the past twelve years thinking about my guilt, and yours, Rosie, and measured it against those mounted cops busting heads. And now it’s possible that we might not have a lot of time left.
The hardest part of having breast cancer wasn’t losing my breast. It wasn’t losing my hair or the nausea either, though all those things are awful. The hardest part was losing my tattoo. Maybe I don’t deserve that tattoo anymore.
No, that’s not quite true. The absolute hardest part is realizing that I could die without ever seeing you again. Without our daughters ever meeting, without us ever reconciling. That’s why I’m doing this thing, this risky, scary, bad-mother thing. I’m sending Molly to Loon Lake tomorrow morning, without telling her anything, trusting her to somehow figure it out and make things right. I know it’s an awful burden to place on a twelve-year-old, but Jake won’t help and I’m simply too sick to figure out another way to do it.
The irony is that I’m doing it for Molly and Oliver, but it could be another very bad decision.
I think this disease is my punishment for everything that happened. After all, you can’t get cancer of the heart. My left breast is the next closest thing.