I thought of my mother, young and in love, newly married, desperate to get back to her husband and stepdaughter. But I was prematureand she was dying. We were both too weak to leave the house, much less the real world. Every waking moment, my mother must’ve ached for the family she’d found in the pages ofThe Secret of the Old Clock,the book in the photograph of us on the mantel. That was my mother—even sick, even dying, even lonely and trapped in a world that was not her own anymore…she still read to me.
The story of my life was a story.
“I don’t think it’s meaningless,” Nancy said. “But it is a mystery, one we’re all trying to solve. How do you turn something terrible into something meaningful? I dare say it’s the greatest mystery of them all.”
I nodded but said nothing.
“Rainy?” she asked. “Are you all right?”
“Can I tell you something? Without you hating me for it?”
“I could never hate you,” Nancy said. “Remember, if you were a worm, I’d rescue you off the sidewalk—”
“—and give me a leaf for an umbrella.”
She nodded. “What is it, Rainy?”
I sighed. “I have a father now and a sister. I have answers to questions I’ve been asking my whole life. I even know how Duke and I can be together.”
“All good things, I hope.”
“All good,” I said. “So why isn’t it enough? I should be thrilled. I should be dancing in the streets. But I’m…I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m being greedy.”
Nancy moved to stand in front of me. She searched my face. “Rainy, what are you saying?”
“I guess I’m saying…I want my mom.”
“Oh, Rainy.” Nancy put her arms around me. It felt like something broke in me, a dam of words. Like a child having a tantrum, hammering fists and feet on the ground, I said it again and again.
I want my mom. I want my mom. I want my mom. I want my mom.
I said it for every birthday party she missed, for every Christmas and Halloween and Easter. I said it for every boo-boo she never kissed, for every fever I ran that she never soothed with the back of her hand and a Popsicle in bed.
I want my mom. I want my mom. I want my mom.
I said it for every fight we never had over something stupid we laughed about later. I said it for the homework she never reminded me to do and the tests she never helped me study for and for every assembly where I’d won a dumb child’s prize or attendance certificate without her in the audience to cheer for me.
I want my mom.
I want my mom.
I want my mom.
I said it for Duke, who would never meet her.
I said it for the grandchildren she would never hold.
I said it for Pops and Grandma, who’d had to pick out their daughter’s gravestone the same week they took their granddaughter to her six-month checkup.
I said it until I couldn’t say it anymore, until I could only feel it, like a child’s deepest, most primal need—not food or shelter but to reach out her hands and have her mother take them in hers.
“I want my mom, too,” Nancy said. “My writers never even let me mourn her. I had to do all my grieving between the lines.”
We looked at each other.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Today should be the happiest day of my life.”
“The best days are the worst days,” she said. “Because she’s not here.”
