It was all her mother had left her: the box and a choice of whether to open it or wait. Her memory was fuzzy, but she remembered that her mother would carry out a nightly ritual of opening the small box. She never saw what it held.
She convinced herself that her mother would have wanted her to open the box on her twenty-first birthday, which was the age her mother had been when she took her own life.
She looked at the box again, then back at her own daughter. She caught her little girl’s eye and smiled at her reflection in the mirror. She wondered if her little girl could see the soft tears dotting the corners of her eyes. Her thoughts shifted to the room around her. She was fascinated by how closely it resembled the kind of bare, lifeless, boxlike rooms she and her mother had to live in when she was young. She felt ready to open the small box, ready to find a lifetime worth of answers inside.
She opened it. Gleaming in the dark was a silver charm bracelet. She lifted it with two fingers and inspected it. The bracelet had twelve linked charms. Each charm bore an engraved astrological sign. The bloodstone Pisces symbol glimmered. This charm stood out, she knew, because she, her mother, and her daughter--all born on dates within a week of each other--were all Pisces. Like her mother, she had birthed a child at the age of fourteen. Her own daughter would turn seven years old, seven days from today.
This was what she had carried for fourteen years, to the day. Her mother’s bracelet.
She couldn’t resist the urge to slip the cool metal onto her left wrist. As soon as it made contact, it attached itself, becoming uncomfortably tight, squeezing so hard that her pulse throbbed. She doubled over, but it loosened, the pain dissolving into a phantom lightness. She looked at herself in the mirror: She could see herself clearly and her daughter at play on the bed.
Back in her body, she remembered. There would be only a few moments. She spun away from the mirror to look at her daughter directly. She knelt down to her daughter and kissed her on her forehead, mouthing the words:
“I love you. Break the cycle.”
The little girl did not understand the words, but she would always remember the way each word felt as her mother pressed them into her forehead.
The little girl watched her mother walk to the dresser, slide something off her wrist and drop it into the special little box she kept there, as she did every night before bed. The box was an object she wasn’t allowed to touch, even when mommy would let her play in her makeup.
Her mother walked into the bathroom and locked the door. When mommy came back out, several hours later, she was being wheeled away on a stretcher, eyes wide, staring into oblivion, dead.
Do you see?
Yes, I see.