Mothers and Daughters by Rae Meadows

Author:Rae Meadows
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

SAM

Iris had once said, “You will be a good mother because you want to be a mother.”

Sam pulled her car into the parking lot behind the Sunrise Inn. She wondered now if her mother’s cryptic pronouncement had meant she had not wanted to be a mother. Or maybe ten years after Theo, Iris had not wanted to be a mother again. But she hadn’t been a bad mother, had she? Distant, perhaps, preoccupied. It’s true that Sam had often felt lonesome as a child. Iris had seemed much more comfortable with Sam as an adult than Sam as a little girl, whom she had looked at with perplexity, as if to say, How did you get here?

Up close, the beige bricks of the motel were dirt- and water-stained in the exposing light of the afternoon sun. Grim, Sam thought. A young father in low-slung jeans, a tank top under an open North Face parka, herded two little boys, also in puffy jackets, inside a bottom-floor room, and she wondered if the Sunrise, like many of the cheap motels in the area, was used as backup for an inadequate shelter system.

She couldn’t say why she had returned to this place. Maybe the starkness of the life she imagined for the girl was the dark draw. The fragility of our trajectories, Sam thought, the downward momentum of a few bad breaks. She made fists with her hands to warm her fingertips.

* * *

Unlike other pregnant women she had known, Sam had not felt overheated, had not thrown off covers at night or walked around in shirtsleeves as temperatures dipped. Her hands had often been cold. This made her nervous that there was something wrong with this pregnancy, too, despite the fact that the chorionic villus sampling test done at twelve weeks—she would not wait for an amnio—had shown that the baby, a girl, was genetically fine. So she was glad for the soft heat and the blurry humidity of Florida after the early mean freeze she had left in Wisconsin. Despite the circumstances, she was glad to be warm.

When she and Iris drove from the airport en route to Sanibel Island, they passed a small billboard on I-75 with the smiling moon face of a Down syndrome baby, his almond eyes with the characteristic epicanthic eyelid folds. In childlike writing it said, “I deserve to live!”

Sam—driving so her mother could rest—shook her head faintly and felt a cold wave creep down to her toes. She had hoped that when she became pregnant again the first pregnancy would somehow reshape in her mind, fading into the miscarriage everyone else thought it had been. She hated that she felt guilt about a choice she had defended the right to make her entire adult life. But it had not been an unwanted pregnancy, and eighteen weeks was not five weeks, and when it came down to it, she had put herself first. She had not wanted the life of taking care of a special needs child, whatever that entailed.

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