She gave me just enough space to hang from, to convince myself I could wrestle back onto the ledge. For a while, anyway, until I was reminded once again of where I belonged in her small but orderly world.

When she was three, after we came home from a weekend away at your friend’s wedding, I had snuck into her room without taking off my coat.

It was after midnight. I had wanted to smell her. I had felt an unfamiliar panic on the plane that something was wrong, that she would choke in her sleep and your mother wouldn’t hear her like I would, that the carbon monoxide detectors weren’t working, that the plane would hit the runway in the wrong kind of way and blow us both up. I needed her. I rarely felt this yearning for her, especially when I should have, but when I did, I couldn’t remember what it was like not to want her. Who was that other mother? The one who brought me so much shame?

The face of a sleeping child. She fluttered her eyes and saw me hovering above. Her lids fell down, disappointed. Her sadness was genuine. She rolled over and pulled the periwinkle duvet to her chin and looked out the dark window. I leaned to kiss her and felt her muscles tighten beneath my hand.

I left the room and saw you in the hallway. I told you she was asleep. You walked in anyway and I heard smacking noises on your cheek. She told you your mother had let her watch a movie with a mermaid. She asked you to lie down with her. She had been waiting for you.

I felt like I would never have with her what you had.

“It’s all in your head,” you said to me whenever I brought it up. “You’ve created this story about the two of you, and you can’t let it go.”

“She should want me. I’m her mother. She should need me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with her.”

Her. There was nothing wrong with her, you said.

In the morning, over breakfast, your mother recounted the lovely weekend they’d had. You beamed, being back with your daughter, bouncing her on your knee.

“So everything was fine?” I asked your mother quietly afterward, as we filled the dishwasher together.

“She was an angel. She really was.” She rubbed the small of my back for a moment, as if to soothe an ache she knew I carried. “I think she missed you both.”

26

In third grade, our class spent a week making flower bouquets for our mothers, buttons glued to the inside of pink and yellow muffin cups, stems made of chenille pipe cleaners. We stuck them on thick construction paper and used our best cursive writing to copy the poem from the blackboard: Roses are red, Violets are blue, You’re the best mom there is, and I love you! I was the last one to finish. I couldn’t remember making a craft for her before, not one as nice as this. The teacher took it from my hands and whispered to me, “It’s beautiful, Blythe. She’s going to love it.”

The teacher sent us each home with an invitation to a tea party. I threw mine in the garbage when I left school that day—I didn’t want to invite my mother. Or more specifically, I didn’t want to invite her in case she didn’t want to come. I was nine, but I had already learned how to manage my own disappointment. On the morning of the party, as I ate breakfast alone in the kitchen while my mother slept in as usual, I rehearsed what I’d say to everyone when I got to school: my mother was ill, she had food poisoning. She couldn’t come to the tea.

That afternoon we decorated the classroom with tissue-paper flowers before the mothers arrived. I was standing on a chair with a tack in my hand reaching for the bulletin board when I heard:

“Am I early?”

I nearly fell off the chair. My mother. The teacher greeted her kindly and said not to worry, she was just the first to arrive. That she was glad to see her feeling better. My mother seemed not to pick up on my lie—she looked too nervous. She waved quickly from the doorway. She was wearing something I had never seen her in before, a pretty peach suit and pearl earrings that couldn’t have been real. I wasn’t used to seeing her look so soft, so feminine. My heart pounded in my chest. She came. Somehow she found out and she came.

She asked me to show her around the classroom while we waited for the tea to begin. I pointed out the weather station and the counter beads and the multiplication times tables. She laughed as I explained how to do it in the simplest way I could, as though she’d never seen numbers before. As the other mothers came through the door, their children running to them, my mother looked up at each woman and studied her—her outfit, her hair, the jewelry she wore. I sensed even then that my mother felt self-conscious and this shocked me—she never seemed to care what the other mothers thought. She never seemed to care what anyone thought.

Mrs. Ellington came in the door next and Thomas called to her. He was carefully setting up the teacups and saucers the teacher had brought from home. Mrs. Ellington waved to him, but first walked over to where I stood with my mother on the other side of the room. She held her hand out to my mother.

“Cecilia, it’s so nice to see you again. That color is lovely on you.” My mother took her hand and then Mrs. Ellington leaned in, a sort of touch on the cheek that I’d seen other women do with each other, but never my own mother. I wondered what she smelled like to Mrs. Ellington.

“You, too.” My mother smiled. “And thank you. For this.” She lifted her chin toward the room, full of miniature tables with doilies and plates of crumpets. Mrs. Ellington brushed her hand through the air as though it were nothing. As though they liked each other. I had never heard them speak that many words to each other before.