This was the woman who’d watched me take my first steps, I told myself, who’d no doubt held my hand to steady me, to keep me upright.
“Except somehow I missed that my younger granddaughter is a prima ballerina.” She winked at Olivia. “Now I wonder what other secrets you’ve all been keeping from me.”
Olivia chuckled. “We don’t have any secrets.”
Now it was my mother who chuckled. “Everyone’s got secrets, my love.”
“Families don’t keep secrets from each other,” Olivia said, parroting back what Mark and I always told her, “except at Christmastime. And on birthdays too!”
“Christmas secrets are the best sort of secrets, aren’t they, Olivia?” my mother said.
Olivia practically squealed with delight. “Christmas is my very favorite holiday.”
“Mine too,” my mother told her.
My jaw clenched. Since when? My father had always been the one to celebrate; there were years after he died when our mother didn’t even bother getting us a tree. Christmas was a thing other families did. Families like Mark’s who were happy to be together.
Paul went around to the back of the SUV and opened it up, grabbing a large wheeled suitcase and my mother’s leather purse.
“Would you like to take this in for me, Olivia?” he asked, handing her the purse. She nodded enthusiastically and reached for it, then led us inside.
“It’s this way, Grandma! And wait till you see the sign I made for you.”
As my mother let go of my arm and followed, hiding my daughter from view, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a fresh start or a terrible mistake.
NINE
PAUL GOT MY MOTHERsettled in her bed and gave her a dose of pain meds while Olivia and I unpacked her things. She’d brought a few nice outfits, but mostly pajamas and nightgowns, comfortable loungewear, and two pairs of slippers. There were a couple of paperback mysteries, her cell phone and charger, a sketchpad and art supplies.
“Ooh, a tiny watercolor set,” Olivia said as she pulled it out of the tote bag.
“Do you like to paint, Olivia?” my mother asked.
“I like it but I’m not good at it.” She frowned. “Not like Mom and Izzy are.”
“Maybe I could give you some lessons,” my mother said. “I used to give your mother lessons when she was your age.”
Olivia beamed. She reached back into the tote bag, pulled out some pastels, colored pencils, then a wooden box. She opened the box and looked inside. “Pretty!” she said. She drew out what was tucked into the box and held it up to the light, and my first thought was:Oh, hell no. She didn’t actually bring that stone, did she?
But of course she had. Of course she’d brought it into my house, to keep right next to her as she lay dying. She and the stone shared a complicated history; they were inextricably linked.
It was a piece of clear quartz crystal streaked through with little needlelike bands of black tourmaline. It was jagged and roughly the size and shape of a heart—not a silly cartoon Valentine’s Day heart, but an actual human heart shaped like a fist.
It was impossible to think about my mother without thinking of the stone; impossible to separate the two of them. When I was a child, I was fascinated by it, but I also hated it with a vengeance I didn’t realize it was possible to feel for an inanimate object.
I connected it, consciously or not, with my mother’s cruelty. The stone appeared around the time she really started drinking.
And maybe, just maybe, I was envious of its ability to capture her attention at a time when I could not. The stone came, and we, her family, were pushed aside, viewed as an annoyance, a target for her fury when she chose to acknowledge us at all. She kept the stone beside her in her bedroom, fawned over it, even spoke to it with love and admiration as if it were a living thing, perfect in its beauty. And me, I was just a nuisance, a useless ugly duckling of a girl; how could I compare?
When I was a child, I’d look at the stone and think that the black strands running through it were like the black strands inside my mother, the little bits of darkness hidden deep within.
She kept it on a wooden stand on the dresser in her bedroom, amid her perfume bottles and jewelry boxes, her jar of cold cream, the beige cake of face powder she used, the waxy lipstick the color of overripe plums. Next to it was a framed photograph of her and her best friend, Bobbi, both of them looking impossibly young and happy.
I wasn’t allowed near the stone. (In fact, my mother’s entire bedroom was deemed off-limits.) The tourmalinated quartz was too precious, my mother always said. She didn’t want the grungy fingers of children marring it in any way or carrying it off for show-and-tell, stuffed at the bottom of a crumb-filled backpack. I’d made the mistake of asking if I could bring it to school once, and my mother had howled with spiteful laughter, then sent me to my room for being so idiotic.
But sometimes I’d sneak into her bedroom just to touch it, run my fingers over its rough surface. And I’d think about its history, about where it had come from and all the reasons it was so sacred to my mother.
The stone had been Bobbi’s once; that was the first compelling thing about it.
