across her cheeks and nose—sunnier than Suzy would have allowed—but she looked beautiful, freckled, as if she’d been dipped in sunset and rolled in stars. She drifted into the room, dropped the remainder of her burdens in a sandy heap at her mother’s feet, and flopped herself down onto the bed as though exhausted.
“Did you know that in Russia they killed the whole family of the czar, who’s like the king, except for his one daughter who had to lie under all her dead brothers and sisters until everybody was gone and she could get out and escape and nobody knew where she was because they never found her body because she escaped and then people, ladies, all came and said they were her so they could be the queen and they were all lying except the one who was really her but they didn’t have fingerprints back then so they had to tell by your ear who you were because every person has different ears than everybody else . . . And in the band the Beatles they got tired of being so famous and one of the men in the band wanted to take a vacation but he couldn’t so they had to pretend he was dead just so he could go on vacation and everybody thought he was really dead because if you listen to a song backwards it says I buried Paul, and in one album the car has the license plate number of the day that they said he died and also the cover of a different record was supposed to have all of them with aprons like a butcher and knives and meat like at the butcher shop and also broken up baby dolls but then they said they couldn’t have that but they had already made them and the people were lazy so they just put the new covers over the old ones instead of making them all new so if you have one that has the new cover over the old, if you put it in steam and take it off then it would be worth a lot a lot of money . . .”
Mia paused then, seemed to breathe in for the first time since she’d entered the room, and actually took notice of her mother, registered her as a separate being who might also, perhaps, have something on her mind. Suzy’s eyes on Mia were fixed and grave, and Mia’s face in sudden response went tight with concern. With a great emphatic gush she said, “Mommy?”
Suzy felt unable to speak. She just stared at her daughter, the words she’d been preparing, perhaps even unconsciously, all afternoon, were stuck in her throat: sweet coos of milky sympathy, whispered assurances of a future frothy with ease.
Mia was confused. She watched as Suzy stood up from the bed with awkward decisiveness and blurted: “OK, get packed. We’re leaving. Hup to.”
Mia lay there, unsure whether this was a joke. Her face tried to smile but couldn’t because her eyes were so tied up in trying to understand what was happening before her.
Suzy regarded her daughter. “I’m glad you had a good time at the beach, baby. But that doesn’t change anything. Not really.”
“But . . . but I don’t want to leave anymore . . . I changed my mind,” she cried, the tears of frustration on their way.
“Well,” Suzy said, “so have I. I’ve been thinking all afternoon, and I feel like it’s not safe to stay here, and I’m not letting you stay somewhere that isn’t safe.”
Mia wailed: “But it is safe! It is!” She was panicking now, that profound desperation of being misunderstood.
“Mia,” Suzy said in a studied and patronizing calm to which Mia was entirely unaccustomed. “There are some times when you’re a parent when you have to make a decision that a kid maybe doesn’t understand. But it’s my job to take care of you, and there are going to be times when I have to do what I think is right, and now is one of those times, and you can hate me if you want to, but I’m not doing this to make you mad. I’m doing this because I feel like it’s the best option we have right now.” She was softened somewhat by her own speech, and she broke in the end and became, for a moment, the mother Mia thought she knew. “You’ve got to trust me, babe, OK? I’m sorry, but you’ve got