Free The Daughters: A Novel by Adrienne Celt Page B

slit in the curtains I hadn’t seen. Her dress green and shimmering with sequins. My mother slunk across the stage, saying hello with her hips. She leaned briefly over the piano, hopped forward with a smiling “Oh!” when the bassist plucked out a few loud notes behind her. She hummed along with the song, audible even though she trapped the music under her tongue, feeling it out like a hard candy.
    “ Mama ,” I said under my breath. She didn’t see me, and didn’t hear me. Instead she sang and tossed her hair—just a lock at a time over her left shoulder, as though keeping inventory or marking time. As the song rose—crescendoed, ascended the scale—she ran her hands, fingers open, down her hips and then lifted them slowly into the air with upraised palms. I felt the song invade behind my shoulder blades. Imagined her fingers on my cheeks.
    “I thought this might be a better way,” Ada whispered. Her breath a distraction, a hot intrusion in my ear. I twitched away from her, but she leaned in and lifted my chin to her face. “Now you understand.” Her voice was firm. “Presentation.”
    She tilted my head back towards the stage, using her thumb and index finger.
    “Presentation.”
    When the song was done, my mother melted back into the curtains, barely moving them as she slipped through. And we all sent our hearts back with her.
    S ome of my memories are like this, half soft, half sharp. My whole small self leaning towards the stage, leaning towards the invisible whatever that lay behind it, hiding my mother. My mother, most beautiful, who is never in my mind without bringing her whole complicated self.
    She is awash in connotation. She is transforming. She doesn’t exist. She is the only real thing in the world. How can I still feel this way when I’m a grown woman, with my own child? It was the hidden truth of my life for so long—this love, this longing. Ada knew better than to let me bring it too close; even the night of her great presentation she kept my love on a string. Led me with eyes closed, ushered me to bed before my mother stumbled home.
    But now Ada is gone. And the doors she guarded are coming unlocked. Who was Greta, really? What did she mean? And where did my mother go, and why?

5
    G reta and Saul married in late fall, in the middle of a rainstorm. Ada told me about it every year on the anniversary of their wedding—November 15. It was important, she said, to understand that Greta and Saul were in love in light of everything that came after.
    The rain that day, according to Ada, was strange. It obscured the entire sky, including the clouds, with its sheer weight and its audacity. People huddled together inside, but the rain infiltrated after them. It slipped through their walls in the form of a mist and clung to their clothes, dripped on the floorboards. Outside the rain fell like sheets of needles, shivering, silver, and sharp. When anyone poked their head through the door to check for signs that the weather might yield, they saw nothing, nothing but those undulating waves.
    Until they saw Greta.
    If her guests were nervous about going outside, the bride was elated. No one could remember seeing an announcement,and certainly no one had been formally invited, but most of the town recalled catching sight of her, and once they did they were enchanted. Greta greeted the water like a friend and raised her nose to the mineral smell, the clean air each peal of rain left behind. With her white dress hugging her closely, she walked along the black dirt road and made no attempt to cover herself up in the face of the storm.
    The pounding of the water on the earth was a drum, and Greta paced its rhythm towards the forest. She didn’t seem to mind that she was alone. The cottage Saul had built for them was at the edge of town, and that was where she knew she’d find him. People peered out their windows and watched her go by: a speck of light, a candle flicker in the gloom. The vision of her drew