I thanked her. but I went looking for Mommy. She wasn't in her bedroom. where I had expected she would be, and she wasn't anywhere in the house. Miguel had gone into his office. He had decided to step away and not even be an observer. Maybe wisely, I thought.
Finally I went out to the rear loggia. I looked down at the pool patio and saw her sitting with her back to the house, staring out at the water. She was wearing the shawl she had once given her mother. I started for her slowly, my heart pounding like the surf itself. The day had begun with an almost cloudless sky and now had some puffy globs of marshmallow being carried from east to west on the shoulders of the wind high above us. A sea breeze played impishly with the strands of Mommy's hair. She didn't seem to notice or care. She was so still. I thought perhaps she had fallen asleep.
When I reached her side. I stood there quietly, searching for a way to begin. Somehow, even though I had walked on air. she knew I was beside her.
"I remember the first time I met my mother as my mother, when my true identity was finally revealed," she began, not looking at me, her eyes fixed on the ocean. She could have been talking to herself. "I wanted to burst right out and ask. How could you leave me behind? How could you close the door and forget me? How could someone who was part of you, who had came from your blood and your every breath, be forgotten? I wanted to love her, but at the same time. I wanted to hate her.
"Her first reply came from her eyes. The pain was there in full brightness. Of course, after what she had been through here and at the clinic, she was afraid she wouldn't be able to care properly for a child, a baby. It had been the birth of Linden that had sent her reeling back into her darkness. And then there was concern for my father and far all the possible consequences of their forbidden love. She comforted herself with the knowledge that he would be my father, if not in name, at least in action, providing for me, watching over me. She had no idea what hell my stepmother would create for me.
"What was clear to me was the realization that whatever were her faults and mistakes, she was my mother and I was her daughter, and in the end, in the final moments of this often difficult life, we would not escape that, nor would we want to deny it We would never stop needing each other really. We could pretend we were beyond all that, perhaps, but as oldfashioned as it might sound, the tie that binds would not be unbroken. What we realized, she and I, was that forgiveness was everything, that love grew out of it and was nourished by it.
"We do so many painful things to each other, don't we?" Mommy asked and finally turned to me.
She didn't look sad. She hadn't been crying. She looked like she had most often looked to me, strong, wise, confident, my mother the doctor, my mother.
"Some of it we do deliberately. We can't fully contain our selfishness. We are, after all, only human with our envies and our pride. Some of it we do without fully realizing what we've done. We're careless. negligent. We blunder because we're too anxious or we move too quickly, and we regret that. Some of it we can't help because we've inherited things we still don't understand ourselves.
But in the end, in the very end, when we have our quiet moments and we want to be honest, we know what we have done, and we desperately need to be forgiven.
"I did blame you for little Claude's death. Hannah. It was convenient to blame you and it helped me contend with my own sorrow. Anger brought me a little relief, ironically. Of course, that was ridiculous, but I was not in a good state of mind, and I did not want to be.
"I did not want to understand or explain or justify anything. I wanted to hate God. hate Fate, hate anyone or anything I could. I even hated myself. saw myself as a victim of that curse again and blamed it on my own heredity. Poor little Claude had to have been brought into it.
"Of course, when my reason returned. I understood how foolish and wrong all that was, but it was too late. I had driven you from me."
"Mommy," I said, and she put up her hand.
"No, I did. Hannah. I am not going to deny it. and I don't want you to fool yourself about that. What you felt was real and was true. Your running away helped me see it.
"Of course. I was angry again because you had taken Linden with you, which at the time seemed an even more defiant act."
"I shouldn't have," I admitted.
Of course not, but not because of what I had told you or forbidden you to do.
"You see. Hannah, I never wanted you to love your uncle Linden and become as attached to him as much as you have."
"Why not?"
She turned away.
"A long time ago, as you lalow. Linden developed an unhealthy relationship to me in his own mind. The nervous breakdown that we have told you he suffered was far more severe than we described, What Linden did in the end was try to cage me up in this very house. I could have died before giving birth to you. It was not a pleasant thing. It was true madness, and it has taken all these years of therapy and care to bring him to the recuperation he has enjoyed.
But I never recuperated as I should have. I never forgave him. I pretended I did, I hid behind all the medical and psychiatric activity and terminology I could. but I have never held him lovingly. and I have never permitted myself to care about him the way I should have I know that now, and in a way that is because of you.
"I wonder myself if I haven't been afraid of Linden all these years, afraid not just of him, but afraid of something in me. Maybe some of what happened to him was really my fault. I am constantly interrogating myself, reviewing my past here, and wondering if I hadn't encouraged him, perhaps out of a complicated sense of sibling jealousy. My mother loved him beyond life and I envied that.
"So you see, in a real sense I have to ask Linden to forgive me. too. I don't know if he will ever be capable of understanding why. but I am now and I need it."
'Tie couldn't hate you, ever," I assured her.
"Maybe not or maybe he never will understand why he does. I know that sounds like a lot of psychiatric mumbo jumbo, and perhaps in the end, that's all it is. Perhaps things are simpler than we think they are, and some day we'll all sit here together and share the wonder of our lives and laugh and be loving in an innocent way.
"I suppose that's why we regret losing our childhood. It was a time when blue was simply blue, when stars were simply stars, when smiles and laughter had no other purpose than to make us happy.
"That's all gone for you, too. now. Hannah, but there are ways to replace it Only it all depends on finding someone who will help you love yourself again. Does that make any sense to you?"
"Yes," I said.