Carmen gave Elena a rueful look. “I haven’t taken a day off from writing in decades.”
“I know that,” Elena said.
“And you?” Carmen demanded. “Have you stopped writing?”
I’ve stopped writing anything of value, Elena thought.I haven’t written a single word that mattered in years.
Instead, she said, “I still write every day.”
“It’s because you’re my daughter,” Carmen said, leaning against her pillow again. “It’s in our blood. It was in your grandmother’s blood, too. God rest her soul.”
Elena blinked back tears, remembering the old story. Her grandmother Rosa had died in a car accident on Christmas Eve. Carmen had only been two years old, which meant she’d come to know her mother through reading her old articles —her writing.But Elena knew there was never enough material. Carmen always craved more of the woman she’d never gotten to know.
Sometimes, Elena wondered if Rosa’s death was one of the reasons Elena and Carmen couldn’t fully get along. Carmen didn’t understand what a genuine mother-daughter relationship was supposed to look like. She’d put too much stock in Elena, had needed too much from her. Elena had failed her. She’d failed everyone.
“You know, I don’t think you should go back there,” Carmen said suddenly, stiffly. She tightened her grip on the bedsheets. Her face looked petrified.
Elena furrowed her brow. “To Queens? It’s fine. It’s not like it was twenty years ago.”
“No! I don’t think you should go back to Syria,” her mother said sternly. “There’s plenty to write about here. There’s plenty of news, of stories, of connections. I don’t know why you have to run off and chase glory all the time. It’s unbecoming. More than that, it’s dangerous.”
Elena’s heart dropped into her gut. It was the same sort of stuff Carmen had said to Elena years ago, before everything had fallen apart in the Middle East, before Elena had had to return home. She swallowed.
“I understand,” Elena managed to croak, too frightened to ask her mother why she didn’t remember what she’d done.
The word “Alzheimer’s” rang through her mind again. But it was impossible that her mother had such a ravaging and horrendous disease. Carmen had lived an active, healthy, and academic life. She’d stretched her mind to every conceivable limit. Alzheimer’s wasn’t meant for her. It was too unfair.
Chapter Four
It wasn’t long after Carmen’s comments about Syria that she fell back asleep, leaving Elena jittery but heavy with doubt. It was early afternoon, and sunlight made the snowdrifts outside the hospital glow. Elena bundled up and left the hospital, thinking about her car at the garage, James Murphy, and the freelance articles she needed to write that weekend. Did she really have it in her to sit at her computer and write meaningless drivel while her mother drifted in and out of consciousness at the hospital? More than ever, Elena’s life felt on the brink of collapse.
It hadn’t always been this way.
There was a bus stop near the hospital, where she waited for the minibus that took her back downtown. Once there, she paused in front of the massive Christmas tree, the same one that had been lit last night. Standing there, the winter wind blustering around her, she tried to imagine the chaos. One minute, her mother had been stoic and sure and seemingly healthy, and the next, the night had filled with the sounds of ambulance sirens.
Elena walked the few blocks from downtown to the house where she’d been raised. It looked the same as ever: ivory siding,dark-green shutters, a front porch with a swing. Elena walked up the steps and sat on the swing for a second, her thoughts swirling. Funnily enough, she still had a house key on her keychain—something she’d kept there “just in case” and then let herself forget about. When she shoved the key into the knob, she turned it and felt the familiar smells of her childhood envelop her. She closed her eyes against the wave of nostalgia. If this had been some other year, she might have heard her father’s laugh like dark honey, her mother singing upstairs. Because her parents had loved to work and had given almost everything to their careers, they’d decided to have only one child.
Elena had been lonely as a kid until she’d met Maxine and they’d become best friends. She couldn’t remember why they’d stopped speaking in college. There’d been no argument. They’d just drifted apart.
There were differences in the house. In the front room hung a photograph of Carmen holding an award for excellence in journalism. The award was regional and maybe not as “important” as some of the bigger journalism awards worldwide. But in the picture, Carmen looked terrifically pleased, as though everything she’d done in her life had been leading to this moment.
Elena still remembered what Carmen had said when she’d first told her she was going to the Middle East. “Why do you think you have to prove something over there? We’re doing good reporting right here in Millbrook! This is your lifeblood. This is where you belong.”
But Elena had been a rising star at her university. There, she’d uncovered a story of campus corruption and been instrumental in taking down several high-ranking staff members. As a result of her back-breaking work, she’d achieved recognition from numerous journalism master’s programs. Still, instead of studying even more, she’d decided to go overseas—first to Paris, then to London, then to Rome. She’d spent her mid-twenties in the throes of European life, eating croissants and walking next to frigid rivers and dating men who made up nicknames for her in their own languages. It had been a sort of fairy tale. There, she’d also broken stories, writing about everything from police corruption to student protests to political campaigns, trying to see it all through the lens of an American abroad.
At the beginning of her thirties, she returned to the United States to work for CNN. It was around this time that she first began writing about war. Eleven years ago—when she was thirty-one—war raged in the Middle East, and she was fixated on it, eager to become a master, to understand the nuances of who hated whom and why, as well as the dramatic history behind each of their ancient cultures.
Her theory was that if we didn’t understand the pain we wrought, how could we end all this pain in the future? And it felt up to her to understand that pain.
In the living room of her childhood home, Elena changed into a sweatshirt and a pair of sweats and put on a pair of thick socks. She turned up the heater, then went to the kitchen to make herself a mug of tea. In many ways, she felt like a trespasser, as though her mother or father would storm into the room at any moment and ask her what on earth she was doing. The water boiled, and she popped a tea bag into a mug and stood at the window. In the backyard stood her old playhouse, which her father had made her from trees he’d chopped himself. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she had to turn away.
Out of the blue, the phone rang.
Elena wasn’t sure if she should answer. This house wasn’t hers, so the people contacting it weren’t trying to reach her. Then again, didn’t everyone in Millbrook know that her mother was ill? She tiptoed to the phone, unsurprised to find it stillthere, hanging on the wall, because her mother loved old-fashioned technology. It was probably part of the reason she still worshipped physical newspapers and the art of the printing press.
Elena took a breath and answered it. “Hello? Vasquez residence?”
“Elena, hi.” It was James Murphy's calm voice. “I wanted to check in. I hope that’s okay.”
