In her hands, clutched against her chest like a baby, was a small embroidery hoop.
“See this as your last meeting,” Tanner said to me. “Unless, of course, you choose to save her life.” He reached out and clasped my mother’s upper arm, pulling her into the room.
Then he strode out and slammed the door behind him.
I breathed once, twice. “Ma?”
She’d once been so big to me that she’d filled every corner of every room, filled my sleep, her body wrapped around mine, my hand in hers, her apron cleaning my face, her fingers twining through the knots in my hair, pulling me down the lanes, all the way through the first years of my life. Then there was a blanket of empty years where she hadn’t been there at all.
She wasn’t here, either, not really. She’d retreated inside herself.
My throat strained painfully. I’d hated her longer than I’d loved her. Before I’d known what she’d done—what she’d felt forced to do for my betterment.
How long had she worked for the Artisans, I wondered? Cleaning their plates and sweeping their floors, before the secret came to haunt us both?
All that sacrifice, all that suffering. It had brought us only more of the same.
“Ma,” I said more insistently, my voice waterlogged.
Finally, her eyes turned to me.
Slipping from her shaking lips, in quiet repose, came the stumbling chorus of a song I barely remembered. “Sweet girl, Caranina,” she whispered.“Sing sweetly for me…”The rest faded off into a rasp of breath, continuing without voice.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s me.” I wanted to wrap my arms around her, add another layer to her, but I was sure she’d shrink away. Just looking at me seemed to take tremendous effort.
Slowly, she held out the hoop of fabric toward me and pointed to a flower she’d stitched, the petals a deep burgundy. It grew everywhere in Scurry, choking the ground. A weed so resilient, even the soot couldn’t kill it.
“Widow’s lace?” I said softly. Again, she flinched.
In Scurry, she’d sewn clothes for an extra few farthings, I remembered. We’d wash scraps of discarded fabrics and rags, and she’d patch them together, turn them artful and new. She’d embroider embellishments on them and sell them to the neighbors.
When she continued to point at the cloth, I thought perhaps she meant it for me. I approached carefully and took it from her, ran my fingers over the thread. “Thank you.”
She only backed away and hummed softly, as though soothing herself. It was so pitiful I wanted to kill the ones who had brought her here.
Instead, I rubbed away the tears clouding my eyes and said something gentle. Her life had been anything but gentle.
“In the spring, we’ll go down to the river and get the very first flowers,” I said, the way she used to promise me in Scurry. She’d make that promise all the way through the winter. “We can weave the stems into little boats.”
More muttering, louder now.
“And we’ll pretend we’re aboard.” I swallowed, sinking beneath the sorrow of it all. “We’ll pretend we’re sailing away.”
“To a big place,” Rose said, only this time her eyes finally saw my face, taking on awareness.
“That’s right,” I breathed, forcing a smile. “And any door we knock on will open.”
She smiled thinly. “An’ we’ll go dancin’.”
I nodded.
There was an all-encompassing silence, and I thought perhaps she’d returned to the surface. Her eyes fell to the embroidery in my hand, then back to my face.
Hesitantly, she stepped close enough that I could touch her, close enough that she could reach for me. Her fingers lifted, as though she meant to touch my hair, tug on the blond coils of it again.
They stopped short. “I…” she began, floundering. “I’d do it all differently.” She shut her eyes tight, perhaps so she wouldn’t break once more.
I took her hand in my own and found it cold. She squeezed my fingers. A sob broke free.
