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“It’s who she is.”
“You don’t know that yet.”
“Fine, then, it’s whoyouare!”
“Not anymore, Mom.”
A heavy silence settled over the kitchen. I could imagine the two of them staring holes through each other through nearly matching sets of gray-green eyes. It was Asteria’s voice that finally cleaved the silence, cutting through it like a sharp and broken thing.
“You truly think it’s that simple, to just walk away?”
“It’s not simple at all. But I’m doing it. I’ve done it,” my mother replied quietly.
“I don’t believe that.”
“Believe what you like. You always have.”
A beat, and then…
“I’d like to say goodbye to her before I go.”
“Fine, but make it quick, and remember the rules. Not that you ever have before.”
A swishing sound signaled Asteria’s exit from the kitchen. I had only seconds before she swept into the hallway and saw me standing there, eavesdropping. I scuttled back to my bedroom door like a frightened mouse and slipped inside. When Asteria opened the door a few moments later, my kitten and I were huddled together on the bed, waiting for her.
Asteria sighed as she floated down to rest on the edge of the bed like a leaf on a breeze. “I’m afraid I have to go, my Little Bird.”
“But you just got here,” I argued. I could hear the note in my voice, that sound that was almost the whine of a younger version of myself, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want her to go.
“I must do as your mother wishes… for now,” she said, and gave me a little wink.
“But why?”
“Because she loves you. And sometimes a love so big can be hard to see around. It crowds your vision; obscures it. But one day she’ll see again. We must be patient.”
I couldn’t help it. My eyes filled with tears. I dropped my head so that my hair swung down over my face, hiding them.
Asteria let me have my moment to gather myself. She wasn’t one of those grandmothers who smothered you with kisses. She gave a kid space to just be. Instead, she reached out and stroked the tiny kitten’s forehead.
“You’ll have to give her a name. Make sure it’s a name that is worthy of what she can become—a name she can grow into, all right?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure what she meant. At last, I had blinked the tears away and it felt safe to raise my head. When I did, it was to find Asteria looking at me, staring into my eyes as though hungering for something she didn’t see there yet.
“You’ll find your way back to who you’re meant to be, Little Bird. I promise you that,” she whispered.
She reached out to touch my cheek, just a gentle stroke of a fingertip, and then she was gone, sweeping from the room and leaving me to fill the absence of her as best I could.
It was the last time I would ever see her.
2
Six years later to the day, I woke up to a room full of streamers and balloons.
I sat up and rubbed the sleep from my eyes, blinking around at the decorations. My mom had even strung up a banner over my computer desk that read “Happy Sweet Sixteen!” in Barbie-pink letters on cardboard cupcakes. Pink wasn’t really my thing, but I smiled up at it anyway.
The decorations weren’t actually a surprise. For the past six years, my mother had crept into my room the night before my birthday and decorated in the dark while I slept. The problem was that she wasn’t exactly quiet, and I was a light sleeper, and so every year I kept my eyes closed and tried not to laugh as I listened to her clamber around on my furniture and whisper strings of curse words as she struggled with tape and scissors and string. Still, I loved her for doing it—even if I knew she was trying to fill the hole of another, now defunct birthday tradition. As though to underscore the thought, my cat Freya leapt up onto the bed to demand scritches, which I happily supplied.
“Happy ‘gotcha day’, Freya,” I whispered to her.
