Or, maybe she just wanted you to get to know your daughters so you could form your own opinions of who they were as people before you had preconceived ideas about them and put them into boxes. A voice that sounded very much like Billie sounded in my head.
Billie voice might be right. If I’d known that about her this whole time, everything she’d done would have been viewed through the lens of being a genius, instead of the lens of being Andi, the shy, sweet, introspective, generous, loving, compassionate girl she is.
“What was your mom like?” Andi asked, catching me totally by surprise.
“Um, she was funny and she liked to sing.”
“She liked to sing?”
“Yeah, she sang a lot.”
“Did she sing to you?”
“I don’t remember if she did, I don’t think so. I remember she would put music on and sing and dance around and plant flowers.” I hadn’t thought about that in so long. No one asked me about my mom. The last person I’d spoken to about my mom was probably Billie, and that’s when we were kids. “Oh, and she made her own Halloween costumes.”
A wrinkle appeared on Andi’s forehead. “You don’t remember if she liked to sing to you?”
Out of everything I’d said, that’s what she followed up on? Not the plants or the Halloween costumes?
“No, I don’t remember.”
“Why not?”
“She left when I was your age.”
Her nose scrunched in the most adorable way. “She left?”
“Yep.”
Andi sat up and tucked her knees to her chest, thinking hard. “Why did she leave?”
That was the million dollar question, wasn’t it? I’d spent years speculating: maybe she was overwhelmed, maybe she never wanted a kid, or maybe she just… couldn’t do it. But the reasons got thinner the older I got.
I wanted to give her a better answer than the one I’d lived with. “I just think maybe she wasn’t happy,” I guessed.
She looked suspicious. “Do you think she misses you?”
I thought about that for a long time. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
If she did, she hadn’t done anything about it. It’s not like it would have been difficult to track me down.
Andi looked back at the TV and was quiet again. We both were. I could practically hear the wheels in her head turning.
After about five minutes she looked up at me. “Do you miss her?”
The truth was I hadn’t thought about her for years, probably a decade. But after coming back home and having the girls, I had been thinking about her more. I wasn’t sure if I missed her, but I had been thinking about her and I had questions, questions I wished I had answers to.
“For a long time, I didn’t think about her, but lately I have been,” I answered honestly.
She blinked up at me with a wisdom in her eyes far beyond her years. “Do you have a picture of her?”
I hesitated, then pulled out my phone. There was only one photo—grainy, scanned in from an old Polaroid: my mother in the backyard chasing me around the backyard at the age of four, both of us laughing. I held it out to her.
She studied the photo for a long time. “She looks like you.”
“You think so?” I hadn’t looked at the photo in a long time, but now that she said it, I could see the resemblance.
“Where is she now?” Andi asked.
