“I spent most of Beatrice’s growing-up years trying to figure out how to make h
er…less. Not because I didn’t love her. The love part isn’t optional, at least not in my experience. But it’s a terrible sort of love when your child makes absolutely everything difficult. She wouldn’t properly eat, even as a newborn. We had to have the lactation specialist to the house again and again because none of the tricks one is meant to use worked for Beatrice. When she was meant to be eating solids, she wasn’t interested in any of the foods, not yogurt or mash or rice cereal. She liked prawn crisps, though, and chocolates, so it became a battle to get her to eat anything but rubbish.”
“That sounds hard.”
“As a mum, feeding your baby—well, it’s sort of the first thing, isn’t it? You expect to be able to feed them. All the other mums talked about offering healthy choices and their babies would be dipping carrots in hummus in the pram. I was having hour-long showdowns with my daughter simply to get her to consume one small bit of carrot.”
The parrots had stopped fighting. Rosemary had assumed they were male parrots, but given the way one had positioned itself behind the other, she revised her assumption. “Let’s move along.”
“They do look like they could use privacy.”
She and Kal climbed higher. She felt as though she’d been rambling but hadn’t managed to say anything, or to put her finger on what she wanted him to understand.
Beatrice was…Beatrice. She had always been Beatrice. She would ever be Beatrice, and all Rosemary had learned to do was insist on space for herself to occupy, lest she disappear completely.
“There were so many years when she wanted me around every second,” she said.
“Kind of a mama’s girl, huh?”
“It was more that she wanted someone to witness her, as though she couldn’t figure out how she felt about things or who she was without someone to bounce all of her thoughts and feelings and ideas off of. So she bounced them off me, relentlessly, until I felt exhausted. I had to teach her how to stop doing that—how to notice what others were feeling and adjust her behavior accordingly. All these things you don’t think you’ll have to teach children, you think they’ll learn on their own, but that’s not the reality.”
“Some kids are just hard. I’m the oldest of five. Tashi and Tenzing, my brothers, came along when I was already Patricia’s age. First Tashi, I mean, then Tenzing, when I was ten or eleven. I remember them as babies pretty well, but they were easy kids. And then Sangmu, my sister, she was the last kid my mom had with Merlin. Sangmu was terrible.”
“How old is she now?”
“She’s going to graduate high school this year. She was a screamer. Every time she didn’t get something she wanted, she’d scream until she turned purple. She was one of those kids who would make herself pass out, even. She was born screaming. And Sherpa babies, they always say we’re really sweet and fat and quiet. Not Sangmu. She was a nightmare.”
“She seemed lovely.”
“Yeah, she hasn’t screamed in years now.”
“Beatrice is lovely,” she said. “Everyone seems to think so.”
“It’s just you she’s hard on.”
“I don’t know.”
They listened to the birdsong, descending again, presumably toward the exit.
“You know, for so many years, I worked so hard to make her someone I could handle, someone I could be alone with and not feel like I would crawl out of my skin. And then when she became a teenager, it actually began to work. She stopped crying at the drop of a hat. She didn’t insist on being with me every moment. Her school stopped phoning me, and she brought home good marks, and she understood how to eat food and use utensils. I looked at her one day and thought, God. She’s turning into you.”
Her breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t look at Kal, couldn’t look at birds anymore. She counted her footsteps, and hurt.
Rosemary had run away from her daughter in order to have an adventure. The purpose of the adventure, of the book, was meant to remind her of the girl she’d been, to give her back the life she was meant to have, to test her and heal her and fix her.
It had been two years. Nearly three.
She’d hauled herself up and down mountains, shivered at Camp Three on Everest, but Rosemary didn’t feel she’d discovered a single useful thing.
Nor had she healed.
“You’re not so bad,” Kal said.
“I don’t know.”
Kal laced his fingers through hers. His hand was warm, his grip firm. He pulled her close until her hip collided with the side of his leg, and then he did the strangest thing.
He put his forehead on her forehead. He looked into her eyes. “You know how you hurt a kid?”