Page 153 of The Book of Two Ways

I sink down into the seat, Meret hovering beside me. Siobhan clearly doesn’t know if she should ask me why I have half a shaved head, why I have a scar. “Brain surgery,” I explain.

“My God,” Siobhan breathes. “What happened?”

“I was in a plane crash.” I lean back and close my eyes. “I just…Make me look more normal?”

Her eyes widen. She picks up the scissors and assesses me critically. “We’re going short,” she announces.

A moment later, the rope of my braid falls to the floor.

She spins the chair so that I am not looking in the mirror as she works. She uses a clipper to buzz the fine hairs at the back of my neck and to blend where my scalp has been shaved with the parts that haven’t. Twenty minutes later, she pivots the chair so that I can see.

If you approached me from the right, you might mistake me for an Ancient Egyptian. My hair ends just above my jawline, hanging in a sleek bob. But if you approach me from the left, I am buzzed, punk, cyborg. I am history and I am the future, all at once, depending on where you look.

“What do you think?” Siobhan asks, holding her breath.

I burst into tears.

It is not that I look ridiculous, because I don’t. Somehow, as a haircut, it works. It’s that I am split into halves and I don’t know how to put myself back together.

Before Siobhan can react or soothe me, Meret grabs the electric razor from the table and swoops it over the side of her head, clearing a path that matches the one I was given in surgery. “Do me next,” she says, plunking down in the empty chair beside Siobhan’s. When the hairdresser doesn’t move, she challenges her with a look. “You’re not going to let me walk out of here likethis,are you?”

While Siobhan cuts Meret’s hair into a bob on the right, and buzzes the left side of her scalp, I watch, speechless. Meret’s hand snakes out from beneath the plastic cape they’ve settled over her to catch the curls that slip to the floor. “It’s only hair, Mom,” she says softly, meeting my eyes in the mirror. “I know it doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside. But just in case, it’s nice to know you match someone, isn’t it?”

—

WE TAKE THElong way home, my brave daughter and I. We walk around the reservoir, like we did before I left for Egypt. There are leaves floating on its surface like small, jeweled boats.

I feel lighter without the bulk of my hair, like the wind exists just to touch me. Meret and I fall into step with each other. I realize that she is taller than I am now. Not by much, maybe a quarter of an inch, but it’s unsettling. I think of her, fierce as a Valkyrie in that salon.

“I love you,” I say.

She glances at me. “Okay, boomer.”

I laugh. “I just thought I should say it out loud.”

We take a few more steps in silence.

“I like him,” Meret says finally. “I didn’t think I would.”

I stop walking and take a deep breath. “Love is messy,” I tell her. “Sometimes you hurt the people you love. And sometimes you love the people who hurt you.”

This is how I want her to remember me: as someone who told her the truth, even when it was a razor. As someone who learned the hard way, so she would not have to.

I can see Wyatt in her features, and Brian in her mannerisms. I blink, and Meret is no longer just my daughter. She’s someone who is on the edge of becoming a woman, who one day will be subject to the same gravitational pulls on her heart.

“So,” Meret asks. “What are you going to do?”

Maybe this is all love is: twin routes of pain and pleasure. Maybe the miracle isn’t where we wind up, but that we get there at all.

I open my mouth, and I answer.