The Song That Didn't Fit

My knees pressed together beneath my hands. “What did you need to save me from?”

Dad drew in a breath that seemed to scrape on its way out. “Your mother was lovely, Emma. She was also very sick. After you were born, she suffered from terrible postpartum depression, but she wouldn’t accept help. She thought admitting she couldn’t cope would make people decide she was a bad mother.”

He turned his face toward the dark fireplace, as if the truth might be easier to say to the cold grate than to me.

“She began drinking, Em. She ordered pills from the internet and used them to make it through the day. Sometimes she’d pass out on the sofa while you were still awake, moving around the house by yourself.”

My belly knotted. In my mind, Mom was smiling over a pan of apple crisp. I couldn’t make that picture fit with the one Dad was giving me. Listening felt almost like betraying her.

“Nora was a pediatric nurse,” Dad continued. “She knew something was seriously wrong. She pleaded with Maya to see a doctor and offered to pay, even to take time away from work and help at home. But Maya’s fear convinced her Nora wanted to take her place.”

Nora brushed her cheeks with her hand. “Filing the custody papers was the worst thing I’d ever done,” she said, her voice breaking. “I went to see Maya and found her unconscious on the kitchen floor. The stove was still burning, and a towel had caught fire. You were nearby, screaming. I put out the flames, then called Tom.”

I stayed rigid in the chair. I remembered Mom keeping matches and candles in an old tea tin in the laundry room. She’d said she was afraid of fire. Maybe she’d been afraid of what she herself might do.

“The petition wasn’t meant to punish Maya,” Dad said softly. “Nora was trying to make someone step in. She hoped that if the court made the danger impossible to ignore, Maya would get help. Somehow, it worked.”

He faced me again. Tears brightened his eyes. “Realizing she could lose you shook your mother awake. She stopped drinking and taking pills. She went to therapy. She became the wonderful mom you remember. But she couldn’t forgive Nora for making her private trouble public.”

“Maya told me I had to cut Nora out of our lives,” he went on. “She said she’d take you and leave if I ever contacted her again.”

I tried to understand the grown-up choices that had been made before I was old enough to talk. They tangled together until I couldn’t tell where love ended and hurt began.

“Then why didn’t you tell me who she was?” I asked, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear myself.

“Because you adored your mother,” Dad answered, leaning closer. “I thought you’d see Nora as the enemy Maya had described, the person who tried to break up our family. I wanted you to have someone caring in your life. I hoped you could meet Nora as herself, without the past deciding everything for you.”

“The bookstore story was mine,” Nora said, laying her hand over his. “Tom wanted to explain. I was terrified you’d hate me before you had a chance to know me. I wanted the chance to love you, Emma—to know my niece.”

Her words stayed between us, tender and painful at once.

I remembered the song from the night before. “You sang the wrong words,” I said.

Nora’s eyebrows drew together. “Which words do you mean?”

“The lullaby. Mom sang ‘freckles and grays’ because of my nose. You sang ‘blacks and bays.’ If you were her sister, how could you get it wrong?”

A sad little smile crossed Nora’s face. “Maya and I learned that song when we were girls. Our mother sang it to us. But Maya changed the words for you years after she sent me away. I never heard her sing her version, so I didn’t know about it.”

That answer fitted into place like the last piece of a puzzle. Mom had made the song ours alone. She’d changed it after Nora was gone, closing a door between her sister and me.

“And the pictures?” I asked Dad. “The ones somebody cut out of the album downstairs?”

He looked honestly puzzled. “What pictures are you talking about, Em?”

“In the blue album from before I was born, there are pages missing. They’ve been cut out with a knife. There was a little scrap left behind, with you and Nora in matching blue dresses.”

Dad glanced toward Nora. She looked back at him, and something changed in both their faces. I watched the answer arrive before either one spoke. It hadn’t been Thomas who removed those pages. Maya had taken her sister out of the family albums herself.

I looked from Dad to Nora, trying to find where the story went next. “If you’d been apart for so long, why did you get married so soon?”