so alarmed, so fugitive, that my eventual recovery only made me angry: Where had she been? Did she not at least feel obliged to protect her granddaughter? Well, no. After all, long ago, she had not felt obliged to protect me.
After Georgie was born, she sent a little white linen suit, terribly cute and expensive-looking. It made me furious. White linen? It betrayed a total misapprehension of my domestic priorities. It was clear that my mother no longer knew who I was. Maybe because I had survived Gil, as well as my parents’ divorce, and still did well in school, and wrote poetry, and had friends, and got into college, that I appeared immune to difficulty.
But isn’t it the responsibility of human beings to be curious about one another? Aren’t we required, as humans, to do that work? Turn around, I would call to my mother in my dreams. Turn around, come closer, look at me. And she would come closer, this dream Lucinda, through the dream-rain, the dream-light. I’d sit upright in the middle of the night with satisfaction on my tongue, as if I’d eaten a rose.
All this might explain the shock of receiving her email in Cartagena.
Dear Juliet, it began.
It will be surprising to get this letter out of the blue. I got your email address from your cousin JoAnne and I wanted to be in touch with some news. Gil Ingman has died. He died early in the morning on Tuesday and I thought you would want to know. He got a diagnosis of stomach cancer just after the New Year and died very quickly.
The letter went on to inform me that, as he was dying, Gil had unburdened himself of some secrets. Namely, the fact that he had “interfered” with me when I was little. And not just me, but a niece of Louise’s, and another little girl from the neighborhood, whose family Gil had been paying for years to not report him, but eventually they did anyway, and Gil was under criminal investigation when he died. My mother assured me that Louise never knew, and that she was shattered by the news, that she was confined to bed and no longer wanted to live. But it was my mother herself, she was careful to say, who deserved the blame.
I did not listen to you back then. I told myself you were always such a dramatic kid (after all you are named after a Shakespeare character). Now I see that I never even considered believing you because I was a coward and I couldn’t face the conflict that would result. I needed them too much.
And then she wrote:
I know it doesn’t put a dent in the pain, but I am, I’m sorry.
Forgive me.
It’s funny, because even though I’d been hobbled by the experience my whole life, and even though I suspected that it was at the root of my depressions after each child was born, I did—I forgave her. Instantly. I was dying to.
As for him, he was dead. I pitied him.
Dear Lucinda, I wrote.
It’s so good to hear from you. Even though it’s an email, I can “hear” your voice. I write to you from the deck of our 44-foot sailboat, the Juliet. Michael, your grandkids, and I are currently anchored in sight of the mind-blowingly beautiful city of Cartagena, Colombia. It is cloudless and a cool 82 degrees…
April 3. Bloody hell. Harry Borawski is here. We are due to set sail tomorrow.
The old guy is turning into quite the pain in the ass.
Calls me like 3 times in a row while I’m working on deck, then finally I answer.
Harry, old man! I say, very friendly.
Then he tells me a hard-to-follow story about how he was delayed in Miami, & somebody tricked him into taking a later plane, then he had to spend two nights in a cheap hotel, the gist being that it took him a long time to get to Cartagena but now he’s here.