“You can have some of my clothes, after your bath. I think these are ruined, don’t you?” She frowned again at the sweater and then bundled it up, ready to throw away.
I nodded and gazed at my mother. I wanted to launch into a flurry of questions, ask her all the things you wish you’d asked your mother before it was too late. But I didn’t want her to think I was nuts or nosy; I wanted her to like me. Also, that normalness, just being around her, was addictive. It was the luxury of taking a privilege for granted. Despite the events that had preceded this moment, I was wallowing in just being around this woman—a woman, frankly, I did not know. A list of facts about her didn’t seem important just then.
I guess it’s like this when you get out of prison and see a loved one for the first time in years. You feel a frantic urge to make up for lost time, but it’s not doable, so you just ask if they want a drink and inquire how they are, as if you’d just seen them yesterday. A person can’t stay in a perpetual state of excitement, no matter how exhilarating or profound the situation is. At some point, maybe quite soon after the monumental moment, the world settles back into a reasonably normal state. I thought of sand in a clear bottle of water, being shaken so the grains flew about and spun, only to settle before long into the place where they started at the bottom. We all return to some equilibrium—it’s natural, homeostasis. I guess the moment we stop finding an inner balance in response to extraordinary events is the moment we go mad. But please don’t think for a moment that the gravity, the sheer enormity of what was happening, escaped me.
And anyway, you know, I didn’t necessarily want all the big questions answered. Not yet. It was the little things that fascinated me, like how she bit the corner of her thumb when she was pondering something. How she liked to cup Faye’s face when Faye was telling her something. How sometimes she would interrupt Faye when she was talking, to tell her she loved her. “Mummy,” Faye would say, “listen to me!”
And I was learning how my mother treated a stranger; I was seeing her through the eyes of an adult. And that was a new experience for me.
* * *
WE SAT AT the kitchen table. I traced with my finger the outlines of small pink flowers and tendrils of green that decorated the tablecloth, and my mother dabbed my face with warm water and Dettol disinfectant on some cotton. The concentration in her eyes allowed mine to roam her features. I watched her hands working and urged myself to dedicate all details to memory so that I could, in the future, recall the white half-moons at the base of her nails. I observed her face as though I would be quizzed about it later: eye color; the flare of her nostrils when she sniffed; her perfect ears, with dangling silver chains in them; the peach tone of her skin; the freckle southeast of her left eye; the healthy white teeth and big easy smile. She smiled as if it was easier to smile than for her face to be at rest. She spoke as she worked, lifting my hand to examine it more closely, her face animated. She looked as though she were talking directly to my hand, and it gave me the opportunity to simply drink her in.
She poured tea. “You said you have children?”
“Yes. Two girls, Esther and Evie.”
“Good girls or bad girls?” She winked again. My mother was asking about the grandchildren she would never meet.
“Esther is so sensible, she’s like a teacher at home,” I said. “She sets our dining room chairs out as if we’re in a little schoolroom and makes me and Evie sit in them and calls the roll, and asks us questions. She even checks our fingernails like an old-fashioned schoolmarm, and tuts at us disapprovingly.
“Evie is so funny. She looks like an angel,” I continued, “but she burps like a beer-drinking dockworker. She likes to shock old people by belching loudly when they’ve already said what a little darling she is. She’s younger than Esther, but will thump anyone who hurts her sister’s feelings.”
Jeanie smiled wide. “I wish I had a sister,” she said.
“Do you have any brothers?” I asked, knowing the answer already.
“No,” she said, “I have no one.”
“No family at all? Mum and dad?” I knew there was nobody, but I didn’t know why.
“No one.” She got up and walked to the fridge and opened it, sighing as though the emptiness there were part of the wider emptiness of her family. She swung the door shut and leaned against it. Her slender figure cut a striking image, her flowing skirts and floppy top not doing anything to hide her almost frail frame. “They’re dead. Long time.”
“How?”
“I was very young, my mum went into the hospital with an illness and never came out, she died; and then apparently my dad got sick straightaway, and he died too.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“My thoughts exactly. I’ve got a couple of old photos of them, but I honestly can’t remember them. When I think of them, I just see the photos, not really them, and when I took Faye to the hospital once, the smell—oh God, did that remind me of them. And not in a good way, just reminded me of loss, confusion.”
“And you were fostered?” I said.
“Yeah, just one place after another. You can’t grow up quick enough when that happens to you, you just need to survive long enough to get out, and then, well, get out. And that’s what I did.
“Anyway, Miss Journalist. How about you, where are your parents?”
My throat tightened to stop me blurting out anything ridiculous. “No brothers or sisters. My mum’s around.” I stared at her meaningfully. “I don’t know my dad.”
“What’s your mum like?”
“Oh, I don’t know her very well, which is such a shame. I don’t see her very often.”
“Pah,” Jeanie said, batting her hand as if at an imaginary fly and pulling out a chair to sit down in front of me.
“What?”
“You don’t need to know her, don’t worry about that.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“People all make the same mistake, and I’ve given this a lot of thought.” She took a long sip of tea and assumed the posture of an expert on the witness stand. “You cannot know your parents,” she said. “And so you mustn’t waste time thinking it’s the most important thing. You can spend your whole life trying to know them. It’s a total waste of time! Only three things matter when it comes to your parents.” She stopped dramatically and drank more tea, very slowly.
“And they are…?”
Her eyes sparkled. “So glad you asked. The first, most important thing is to know that your parents love you. Some parents go wrong here and assume that their children know it. But you have to be clear, tell your children you love them, and how much, and why. And if you’re the child and you don’t feel loved, you can forget bothering to know them. Love is the baseline.”
I thought of little Faye upstairs, and my eyes went to the ceiling, where we could hear her moving about and playing in her room.
Jeanie pointed upward. “That girl knows I love her; if she knows nothing else, then she’s going to be okay with me.”
My eyes filled in an instant and my chin creased up. I tipped my head and clasped my hand over my mouth to hold in a sob, shaking my head to deny the flow of tears, to keep back the flood. But the cork in the hole in my heart popped out and with it came salt water and emotion like lava, hot and spilling down my face.