Avery shook her head.
“You don’t get to do that.”
“What? What am I doing?”
“Take our accomplishments as proof of your competence as a parent. They’re ours, not yours.”
“I’m saying they’re yours, darling!”
“And you don’t get to tell me how my childhood was. I know how it was.”
“Oh god, this again. Were you beaten? Were you starved? Did you sleep in the garden shed?”
“We didn’t have a garden.”
“You know what I mean. Do you know how good you girls had it in comparison to so many others? To me? And now you come here to tell me all the ways we let you down? No, I’m sorry, darling. You’re too old to be blaming your parents for your problems. That get-out-of-jail-free card has expired.”
But Avery was not ready to back down. All the resentment, all the recrimination, everything she had spent years trying to work on and move through came rushing back. Clean house, trust God, help others. That’s what she’d been taught in program. But she looked around herself now and she was surrounded by filth.
“Where were you when I went to detox?” she demanded. “Where were you then? Why do you always support him? Why not us?”
“You didn’t tell us you went to detox! You didn’t want us to know. We didn’t know where you were for over a year, Avery!”
“You could have tried to find me!”
“I did! I went to the police! But you were twenty-one years old and you’d left of your own free will. We didn’t have any legal rights. You, of all people, should understand that.”
Avery had not known this, and the pain this knowledge brought now was far worse than the self-righteous fury she had felt for years. For her mother never to have looked for her was maddening, but for her to have tried and failed was heartbreaking, too heartbreaking for Avery to bear. She wanted to press her palms into her eyes and cry like a child. She wanted to shrink until she was small enough for her mother to pick up and cradle against her chest. She wanted to be a baby again, to go back to the beginning, to the time when she was her mother’s only child and there were no sisters to let down or lose. Before she found drugs, before she left home, before she met Chiti, before she ruined her life. But she couldn’t, none of them could, so she set her jaw and glared straight ahead.
“How could you not come upstairs?” she asked.
“What?”
“Yesterday. You knew we were all there, why would you not wait to see us? They know you came by the apartment. How do you think that made Bonnie and Lucky feel?”
And me, she thought but did not add. Her mother hung her head.
“I wanted to,” she said quietly.
“Then why didn’t you?”
“I know it must seem weak to you, but that apartment, all Nicky’s things…I can’t go in there, Avery.”
She came and sat across from her at the table, resting an open palm between them.
“She was my girl,” she whispered.
Avery nodded. Nicky was her mother’s favorite; it wasn’t right, but it was true. She was the only one of them who had managed to penetrate her mother’s heart, not with force but with a gentle and persistent attention. Avery thought of Aesop’s fable of the sun and the wind competing to make a man remove his jacket to prove who was stronger; the wind blew and blew, but it only made the man wrap himself tighter in his coat. Then the sun gently shone down upon him, warming him until he willingly slipped it off. Bonnie and Lucky had known better than to even try, but Avery had always approached their mother like the wind, willing and wanting her to change through force. Only Nicky had been the sun.
“I know she was,” said Avery.
Her mother knotted her hands in front of her.
“What happened to her,” she said, “was too much. For all of us. But please understand that I cannot accept what you’re suggesting: that it was all my fault.” Avery tried to interject but her mother raised her hand. “I can’t, I couldn’t…I couldn’t live with myself if that were true.”
Avery looked at her across the table. She looked small in all that black fabric, smaller than she had ever seen her.
“Did you want to be a mom?” Avery asked.
She had not planned to ask it; the question was plaintive rather than accusatory. Her mother cast her eyes to the ceiling as though the words could be found up there.
“Honestly?” she said eventually. “I wanted to be a wife. I’m not sure if I wanted to be a mother.” She smiled ruefully. “But one sort of came with the other.”
Avery looked at her. She realized, with a jolt of fear, that her mother was describing her own feelings.
“Then why did you have four kids?”
Her mother shrugged.
“Catholic.”
“That’s it? One word to explain our family’s entire existence? You’re not even religious.”
“Well, I’m not Catholic, darling. My family’s Church of England, which hardly counts, as you know. It was your father’s thing.”
“We barely went to church!”
“I’m speaking culturally as opposed to denominationally.”
