She raises her eyebrows but says nothing. She is not surprised, I realize. She already knows. Maybe Marcella has told her.
“Someday,” she tells me, “I’d love to hear about it.”
I set down the Scotch. “I feel like I betrayed her,” I say. “Both of them.”
“Did they not betray you, too?”
I look at Sylvia. She is watching me closely.
“She thinks I’m the only one who hasn’t been truthful about my ticket, but she was never truthful with hers,” she says. “Not really.”
“Did you know?”
“Not right away.” Sylvia takes another sip. The ice in the glass rattles. “She knew your father had a heart condition. She knew eventually, most likely, they would end up here. She chose to save you.”
It feels like a house is being erected on my chest. I feel the pounding, the weight of wood and steal and cement.
“You didn’t want her to?”
Sylvia sighs. She holds her glass between her fingers. They are long and thin with age—bony in many wrong places.
“Since you were born,” she says, “I loved you. You know this. In some ways, more—althoughmoreis not the right word, but—I loved you easier. The love for you was easy for me. You didn’t need me in the same way she did. You were your own person, and you were a force—so confident in your body, even when you were very young.”
She tips the glass from side to side. I watch the amber liquid roll like waves.
“But she needed me to be something I wasn’t. To live with caution, maybe even regret. She wanted me to sacrifice myself for her.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” I tell Sylvia now. Because I know it isn’t. “I think she just wanted you.”
She sets down her glass, hard. It reverberates on the side table.
“It was the sixties! There was no such thing as not sacrificing yourself for motherhood. And I refused to do it. I refused to put motherhood before my own life path.”
Looking at Sylvia now, it’s like I’ve missed this piece of her before. I’ve never before known her to be a mean woman, but her train of thought seems almost cruel here. For the first time in my life, I feel protective of Marcella. I feel like taking up my mother’s side.
“But you had her,” I say. “She was your responsibility. You made that choice, and then you didn’t care.”
“I cared!” Sylvia roars. “Of course I cared.”
“Part of motherhood is need,” I say, and as I say it I feel the need,myneed, unhook and come loose inside me. I feel the relief at everything we’ve felt the past two months, at giving up, transform into a free fall. There I am, descending the well, nothing to hold on to. I plummet faster and faster. I feel breathless with this fall, with everything my body cannot and will not hold.
I pitch forward, my head in my hands. All the grief I feel, all the grief of this future, this baby, my father. The crash of reality on that cold, hard stone bottom.Why?I want to know.Give me an answer.
“There isn’t one, sweetheart.”
And it’s not until I hear her words that I realize I’ve spoken the last part out loud. That I’ve screamed it. My prayer, my reprimand, of the heavens.
Deliver him to me.
“I wanted her to save you—selfishly, intensely—because I loved you and because the gift of the past twenty-two years would have been impossible without you. But I knew it would cost her something. I knew that she’d live timidly from that point onward.A superpower is only super if it can regenerate. A single token is a curse as much as it’s a blessing.”
“But she got to save my life.”
Sylvia nods. “She did. And that’s why I told her about the ticket. Because that was her choice to make, not mine. Just like yours was your choice, not hers.”
“I was stupid,” I said. “I spent it on a guy.”
Sylvia laughs. It feels out of place here.
