In the silence that followed, I picked up the purple case, turned it once in my hands, and gently closed the lid. “Thank you, Mom. This means so much to me.”
“What are you doing?” she said, laying a proprietary hand on the velvet box. “It’s yours, but that doesn’t mean you can just leave with it.”
“Why not?” I was taken aback.
“Well, it won’t be safe in New York.” Now both her hands were on the box, exerting a mild resistance, suspending it between us.
“Of course it will.” I paused. “Mom, are you giving me the necklace or not?”
“I am. But I still don’t think you should take it.”
“If it’s mine,” I said, freeing the case from Malabar’s grip with a quick tug, “I’m taking it to New York to get it appraised.”
“Oh, Rennie,” my mother said, as if I’d just confirmed her greatest suspicion of me. “You still don’t get it. The necklace is priceless. It’s un-appraisable.”
Back in New York, I did my due diligence and tracked down the contact information of the foremost expert on Indian antiquities at Christie’s auction house. But instead of pursuing the appraisal, I stashed the necklace in the back of my own closet and tried to forget it was there. I suppose that, like Malabar, I didn’t want to know the truth. If my mother was right and the necklace was worth millions, I knew someday I would betray her by selling it; Nick and I were not financially well-off enough to keep possession of something of such value. And if she was wrong and the necklace was worthless, I didn’t think I could bear to know that the fairy tale I’d grown up with had been a figment of Malabar’s imagination run wild.
* * *
The following summer, just over a year into my mother’s widowhood, what she thought was a spider bite on the back of her arm turned out to be something more sinister. Her local dermatologist sent her directly to a melanoma expert at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where I accompanied her on an arduous day of appointments. She saw a dermatologist, an oncologist, and a surgeon and had a PET scan. When the oncologist spoke to us at the end of the day, he told us my mother had an aggressive spindle-cell melanoma and prepared us for the worst.
In a daze, I drove Malabar back to Cape Cod. We inched along in Friday-afternoon rush-hour traffic. My mother was silent, staring out the passenger window into the middle distance. I couldn’t tell if she was absorbing the news or denying it.
On the Cape, Nick and our children awaited my return. We had plans to celebrate our daughter’s birthday that weekend, a date that always marked the bittersweet end of summer. The light had already started to change over the marsh, and in the coming weeks, we’d close up our house, haul in our skiff and mushroom anchor, yank spent tomato plants, scatter mouse traps in the basement. I wondered how I’d leave Malabar to face cancer alone that winter.
“Do you want to talk?” I asked.
Lost in her thoughts, Malabar shook her head.
When we passed Plymouth, the halfway mark, I tried again. “What are you thinking about, Mom?”
She sighed. “Christopher. I was just wondering if my mother was looking after him.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I’m not really sure,” she said. “I just hope my mother’s taking care of him. He was so little when he died. I don’t know. My mother . . .” Her voice trailed off, a frequent occurrence these days.
“Go on,” I said encouragingly, suddenly eager to have this conversation, desperate to feel connected to her.
“How to put it? I know my mother loved me,” Malabar said, carefully choosing each word, “but not so much as she loved herself.”
My breath caught in my chest.
We were about to embark on the conversation I’d been waiting my whole life to have, the one I’d thought we might have on the day my daughter was born. I was the exact same age this summer as Malabar had been the summer Ben Souther first kissed her. How quickly she’d decided to change her life course in that moment, tacking to catch a new wind, with me tangled in the riggings. How I wished I could speak to my mother from the same age, forty-eight-year-old to forty-eight-year-old, to understand what she was thinking the night she woke me up. I thought of my own daughter and tried to imagine circumstances where I might do the same: Wake up, please. Wake up. Not a single one came to mind.
“What you just said about your mother, Mom,” I said, without a trace of accusation in my voice, “is exactly how I feel about you. I know you love me, but maybe not so much as you love yourself.”
I inhaled and pressed my lips together. If Malabar was going to get angry or defensive, it would happen now. She did not. Instead, she seemed to take it in. She was going to give me this at last, our reckoning.
I felt emboldened to continue, even as tears blurred my vision. “I’ve always felt you came first, your possessions and passions,” I said, “and I was secondary.”
I willed myself to stop talking. I waited for her to explain to me how I’d gotten it wrong or, at the very least, to tell me how sorry she was that she’d repeated her mother’s mistakes. Surely her diagnosis of cancer would grant her the clarity to see that family was more important than property.
Miles of highway vanished under our wheels before Malabar spoke again. Then she said this: “Rennie, I know you’re going to be mad at me”—pause—“but I want my necklace back.”
I must have misheard. I had to have.
“I want my necklace back,” my mother repeated.
I stared straight ahead, reeling from the landslide of her simple sentence. My hurt felt bottomless. I pictured every conceivable way I could wound her: I’d never speak to her again. I’d keep my children from her. I’d sell the necklace. I’d throw it into the harbor. I’d strangle her with it.
When Malabar finally understood my silence as rage and realized the gravity of her misstep, I took pleasure in her rising panic. In the months since Ben’s death, I had been there for her as no one else had. I called daily and was a constant source of compassion. No longer.
“Honey, just keep it. Keep the necklace,” she said, backpedaling. “Let’s just be friends again.”
Not in a million years, I thought.
Malabar begged me to forgive her, and in her growing hysteria, she explained that her own mother, dead for over thirty years, was furious at her for giving me the necklace.
Malabar’s mother, I began to see, was just as indomitable a presence for her as she was for me. I wondered what my mother had endured as a child. If Vivian was capable of breaking her adult daughter’s leg in a drunken rage, what fury might she have unleashed on Malabar as a little girl?
By the time I pulled into her driveway, an hour later, my anger had subsided into sadness. My mother was a widow for a second time. She’d just been given what we all thought was a terminal diagnosis. She was increasingly confused. The summer was coming to an end, and my family and I would be going back to New York City soon, leaving her to fend for herself.
I was exhausted, ready to collapse. Enough was the feeling that radiated from within me. Enough. Enough. Enough.
I helped my mother out of the car and she took my arm to steady herself as she climbed the three steps to her front door, the same threshold Ben had crossed with his bloodstained bag of pigeons all those years ago, announcing his presence by calling out How do!
“You know, I’m sorry for all of this, Rennie,” she said. “I love you to pieces. More than anything else in the world.”
I nodded. I knew Malabar loved me as much as she could love anyone.
I said good night to my mother and found my way in the dark to the path that cut through the thicket of brush between our houses, to Nick and the family we’d created together. Upon my return, my daughter wrapped her arms around me, happy to have me home, excited for her upcoming ninth birthday. Nick joined our embrace, enveloping the two of us from the outside, and then our son wormed his way into the middle, his favorite spot.
We swayed in this position fo
r a moment, a tight circle on the deck, the dark sky pinpricked by starlight. All I ever wanted was right here. As I embraced my husband and children, I realized that I’d broken the chain. I was still Malabar’s daughter, of course. And while I knew I would never abandon her—that when she called, I would always answer, until the end—I also knew that I’d escaped her hold. We were not, as I had grown up believing, two halves of the same whole. She was her own person, as was I. And I knew that every time I failed to become more like my mother, I became more like me.
Epilogue
Every summer back on Cape Cod, I take long walks on Nauset’s outer beach in search of sea glass for my collection. I avoid anything sharp or shiny, having trained my eyes to scan for muted nuggets in shades of blue, brown, and green. Imagine, a jettisoned and broken bottle, tumbled by waves, weathered by sand, etched by salt, returning to shore, where beauty is found in its scars. My children and I like to speculate about the origins of each piece, envisioning the moment when it was hurled into the sea.
The question of origins—of where one begins—determines so much. I started this account with my mother’s kiss. How different would this story be if I’d started it on the day my brother Christopher died in my mother’s arms? Then Malabar would have elicited sympathy from readers, admiration for the courage it took to carry on. My mother is nothing if not a survivor. The life-threatening melanoma has not returned, but having been spared one terminal diagnosis, she is now sinking day by day into the abyss of dementia.
I am fifty-three. For all the years I spent burying my mother’s secrets, I’ve now spent at least as many excavating them. There is so much to look at, so much to hold up to the light—infidelities, addiction, a lost child, and, above all, the deprivation that comes from not being known. Malabar is no longer able to help me find answers, but she smiles when I read passages aloud from these pages, relishing those days when she was a powerful woman who went after all that she wanted. I skip over the parts where she failed me, but I know they are there.
It’s said that if we do not learn from the past, we are condemned to repeat it. And that fear—coupled with the desire to be a different kind of mother—has compelled me to wade through the raw material of my mother’s life as well as my own, salvaging whatever plunder and treasure I can before the tide buries the wreck again.
My daughter is almost fourteen, the age I was when my mother woke me to tell me about Ben’s kiss. And although she and I bear a strong resemblance to each other—bone structure, build, coloring—my daughter is fully herself, with a ready laugh and a bright singing voice that neither her grandmother nor I possess. She and her grandmother have always had a special bond, one that is pure, because Malabar is no longer capable of wielding love to her advantage.
Sometimes I want to ask my daughter, Are you okay? Am I getting this right?
The answer came not long ago when she walked into my study, perplexed by an English assignment. She was tasked with writing an essay about a personal challenge she’d had to overcome herself, a time when the adults in her life were unavailable and she’d had to handle matters on her own.
“I don’t get this,” she said, apparently mystified at the thought of parents who were absent or unsupportive.
I thought of all those moments my parents were absent, and I blinked back tears.
“Mom, what would you write if you were me?”
Acknowledgments
For believing, thanks to Brettne Bloom and Lauren Wein, literary agent and editor extraordinaire, respectively. This book would not exist were it not for their advocacy, insight, and friendship.
For taking the time to read and provide commentary, thanks to Julie Costanzo, Kathryn Shevlow, and Leslie Wells. For reading every draft multiple times, heartfelt thanks to Carole DeSanti, Sarah Rosell, and Zoe Thirku.
For love and encouragement, thanks to my modern family: my husband and heart, Tim Ryan, and our children, Madeleine and Liam Brodeur, who tiptoed around our apartment so as not to disturb me as I wrote; Chris Brewster, who verified facts, provided photographs and letters, and was unwavering in his support; his partner, Valerie Due, for embracing the madness; Milane Christiansen and Maggie Simmons, whose love and wisdom guided me through my darkest hours; Bill Brewster and Harry Hornblower, both of whom I adored; Stephen Brodeur, who experienced the other side of this (his story to tell); Andrea and Olivia Brodeur, sunshine in human form; Hank, Hatzy, and Gusty Hornblower, Eleanor Sarren, and Holly Brewster, kind people with whom I shared this complicated clan; Marie and Bill Ryan, exemplary role models; Tim and Nick Ryan, extraordinary young men.
For friendship, thanks to Kenna Kay, who has seen me through thirty years of highs and lows; Jodi Delnickas and Cobina Gillitt, without whom I wouldn’t have survived my teens; Eilene Zimmerman, who’s been writing alongside me since we were in our twenties; Rebecca Barber, Kristen Bieler, and Alisyn Camerota, the mom-friends I didn’t know I could hope for; and the bevy of literary comrades who’ve encouraged and inspired me along the way, including Pinckney Benedict, Lea Carpenter, Isa Catto, Julie Comins, Scott Lasser, Emily Miller, Sara Powers, and Peter Rock.
For their hard work in bringing this book into the world, thanks to the team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Ellen Archer, Helen Atsma, Larry Cooper, Debbie Engel, Candace Finn, Pilar Garcia-Brown, Lori Glazer, Maire Gorman, Hannah Harlow, Bruce Nichols, Tracy Roe, Taryn Roeder, and Christopher Moisan. Thanks also to the Book Group: Julie Barer, Faye Bender, Elisabeth Weed, Dana Murphy, Hallie Schaeffer, Nicole Cunningham; my foreign agent, Jenny Meyer; my legal team, Jesseca Salky and Heather Bushong; and the film team, Peter Chernin, Josie Freedman, Kelly Fremon Craig, Dani Bernfield, and Chris Lupo; and Michael Taeckens of Broadside Media.
For their support, thanks to my colleagues at Aspen Words: Marie Chan, Elizabeth Nix, Ellie Scott, and Caroline Tory; at the Aspen Institute (too many to list): Elliot Gerson, Janice Joseph, Linda Lehrer, Jamie Miller, Eric Motley, Dan Porterfield, and Jim Spiegelman; and on the Aspen Words advisory board (past and present): Tom Bernard, Suzanne Bober, Sandie Bishop, Kitty Boone, Chris Bryan, Tara Carson, Gretchen Cole, Paul Freeman, John Fullerton, Sue Hopkinson, Jill Kaufman, Marcella Larsen, Erin Lentz, Todd Mitchell, Beth Mondry, Sue O’Bryan, Cathy O’Connell, Blanca O’Leary, Arnold Porath, Barbara Reese, Lisanne Rogers, Sarah Chase Shaw, Mark Tompkins, and Linda and Denny Vaughn.
For the time and space to get my footing on this dream, thanks to Hedgebrook.
For daily inspiration, thanks to Brain Pickings.
For attention to body and soul, thanks to Johanne Picard and Katie Dove.
For all else and above all, thanks to my parents, Paul Brodeur, who showed me that a life in literature was possible, and Malabar Brewster, my first and most abiding love.
About the Author
© Julia Cumes Photography
Adrienne Brodeur began her career in publishing as the cofounder, with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, of the National Magazine Award–winning Zoetrope: All-Story. She has worked as a book editor and is currently the executive director of Aspen Words, a program of the Aspen Institute. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
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Footnotes
* The living-history museum Plimoth Plantation takes its spelling of Plymouth from the historical account of the town written by Governor William Bradford.
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