after the baby died! I felt her every minute of every day for so long. Reaching for me. I couldn’t climb out of this terrible despair. Aunt Fran used to come and take you, and I would just sit in the rocking chair in Claire’s bedroom and cry and cry and cry. I don’t think I knew my own mind for a long time. Then, after Caroline was born, I told your father I thought I was going crazy. I told him I didn’t love her, that sometimes I felt I hated her, and he said, No, no, you’re fine, you’ve just had a shock, you’ll be fine, of course you love your baby, everybody can see that. And then Caroline was so difficult from the very beginning, such a dark child, so oversensitive and demanding, really, you might not realize this, but she was very demanding. Maybe I had Steve in part to prove to myself that I wasn’t a monster. Maybe—”
“Mom. I think Caroline needs to hear this too. Let’s wait till we get there.” Somewhere, a pinprick of sympathy for her. A memory of her lifting me up, pointing at something she wanted me to see, kissing my cheek, and then gently wiping away the marks of her red lipstick. A memory of her deteriorating handwriting on the tags of the gifts she sent for my last birthday. Finally, oddly, perhaps, a memory of a scene in a movie about Mary Kay, of Mary Kay Cosmetics, where she is sitting on her bed as an old woman, wigless and without makeup, putting blusher on her rapt young granddaughter, telling her in a soft voice why it’s “verrrry important to put it on your chin and forehead as well as your cheeks. Right?” Her old bones and sunken chest. The tenets on which she built her life now outdated and irrelevant, almost foolish. Though not to her granddaughter. Her granddaughter had her own way of seeing her, and her own relationship to her.
I have a friend from college—Anne—who was recently cleaning out her daughter’s room after her daughter left home to move to her first apartment. I’d always thought they had a terrific relationship, and I told Anne that day how much I admired it. But she said, “You know, I was moving some books off my daughter’s shelf and I was looking at all the titles and it was such a wonderful mix of literature: novels in French, texts on physics and Dutch art, poetry by Neruda, and then—the killer—My Goodnight Book.” This was a picture book Anne used to read to her daughter over and over when she was a little girl. She’d had no idea her daughter had kept it. She started bawling, not only because of the engulfing nostalgia but because she had no idea her daughter had read those other books; they’d never talked about a single one. “I always vowed that I would really know my children—and they me,” she said. “You just can’t do all you intend. Every mother fails.”
I felt the quick sting of tears; one rolled down my cheek. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mother handing something over to me. A folded handkerchief, a floral one, lace around the edges, perfumed. “You might need this yourself,” I said, not looking at her.
“I have another,” she said. “I’m never without them. Don’t you know that?”
WHEN WE KNOCKED ON CAROLINE’S DOOR, I was prepared for anything. I accepted that she might carry on for hours, or refuse to talk, or have white bandages wrapped around her wrists that she waved accusingly in front of us. She was completely unreadable when I called and told her we were coming, when I told her about Claire, when I told her that Mom knew I knew everything.
The door opened. Caroline was wearing black pants and a red top, no makeup. She had her hair pulled back, some small hoop earrings on. There were dark circles under her eyes, but her face was blank, noncommittal. From inside, I smelled something chocolaty.
“Come in,” she said, and stepped aside while we went down the hall and into the living room. When we were all seated, Caroline said, “I needed to tell, Mom.”
My mother nodded. She had not yet looked at Caroline.
“It would have been worse to not tell.”
Silence.
It went on and on. I thought of Pete and the kids. I wondered what the dog outside was barking at. I thought of all