“I had to draw a line,” Rose said.
Julia found it difficult to bear her mother’s distressed face, so she looked up at the hot, low sky. She searched her mind for the right thing to say, words that would make her mother feel better. Before she’d found them, Rose said, “I only asked one thing of you girls.”
“That we go to college.”
Rose glared. “No. I asked you not to mess up like I did. Was that too much to ask?”
Julia shook her head, even though she couldn’t recall her mother ever making that specific request. Rose had repeated, over and over: You have to go to college. She’d never actually told them not to get pregnant before marriage. That expectation was unspoken, but it turned out to have the highest stakes.
“You girls were supposed to do more than I did,” Rose said. “I wanted you to be better. That,” she said, her voice as gravelly as the soil at her feet, “was the whole point of my life.”
“Oh, Mama,” Julia said, taken aback. In the heat of the news the day before, she hadn’t considered that Cecelia was repeating their mother’s history. Rose had gotten pregnant with Julia when she was nineteen and unmarried, and Rose’s mother had stopped speaking to her. The mother and daughter never spoke again. The girls had never met their grandmother. Charlie always said that it wasn’t a loss, because their grandmother was an unfriendly, bitter woman. But when the subject of her mother came up, Rose always turned away. She never said a word. Now Rose was the mother turning away from the daughter, and the grandchild. Rose was axing a branch off her own family tree, which meant she was both inflicting and experiencing pain.
“I failed,” Rose said.
“No, you didn’t. You were a great mother.”
“I failed.” This time she said it in a soft voice that sounded like Emeline’s. Julia had never heard her mother speak in that tone before and wouldn’t have believed she was capable of it. Julia wondered if all four girls’ voices lived inside their mother. Emeline’s earnestness, Julia’s clear directives, Cecelia’s excitement about the palette of colors that made up the world, Sylvie’s romantic yearning. Perhaps Rose simply masked her daughters’ voices with her own gruff tone, her own twist of anger and disappointment, but they were all there, buried within her.
“Look at me,” Julia said. “I’m married, with a college degree. It didn’t mean anything that you got pregnant with me before you were married. It doesn’t have to mean anything.” Julia had never been bothered by the fact that she was conceived before her parents’ marriage. It wasn’t uncommon in their neighborhood, and she’d always felt a thrum of pride that she had started their family. Without her, Charlie and Rose might not have married. Sylvie, the twins, this house, would not have existed. Julia was the catalyst.
“At least Charlie married me,” Rose said. “Your sister is pretending the father doesn’t exist, doesn’t matter. She refused to tell me his name, so I couldn’t call his parents and set this right. Do you know who he is?” Her eyes flashed with sudden hope.
“No, I don’t.”
“Fiddlesticks,” Rose said to the dirt.
Julia couldn’t see how pulling another person into a mistake did anything other than make it a bigger mistake, but she kept this opinion to herself. “Cecelia has all of us,” she said. “She has our family. We can give the baby everything he or she needs.”
Rose’s face darkened. “The baby might be fine,” she said. “But Cecelia’s life is over.”
She might as well have said, My life was over when I became pregnant with you. Julia wasn’t offended, though, because her mother was seeing everything wrong. Rose was in a black mood, and so she only saw darkness. Rose scanned her garden, and Julia could tell that her mother was seeing only what was wrong with it: the chewing bugs, the leaves with holes, the possible rot, the weak stems.
Rose said in a dull voice, “How’s William?”
“He’s good. He’s barely using his crutches anymore.”
Rose nodded, but Julia knew that she hadn’t heard her, couldn’t hear her. Rose had failed, and so she was a ruin: a cracked statue like the Virgin Mary leaning against the fence in the corner of the yard. Julia wanted to say, Don’t worry, Mama. I’m going to get pregnant. I’ll make sure our tree branches remain intact. But she couldn’t say that. Her plan was just that, a plan. Not yet an answer to her mother’s heartbreak. Julia thought about Cecelia’s baby and how, unless she fixed this, that child would arrive the same way she had, on the heels of scorn and outrage. With a mother and daughter’s separation. She felt a warmth toward Cecelia’s baby, a kinship, for the first time.
When Julia left, she was worn out, as if she had grabbed a shovel and assisted her mother in the garden. On the bus ride home, she wondered what the point of her own life was. She’d never considered it in those terms before. Her father had called Julia his rocket ever since she was a little girl—I can’t wait to watch you fly, he’d say—and she was the one who fixed problems. A large challenge lay before her now, though: her largest yet. It was a ball of yarn with her entire family woven into it, which meant everyone she cared about was at stake. Her sisters, her parents, William, the babies who weren’t yet here. Julia felt a wave of fear that she wouldn’t succeed, and then quashed it. She had never failed at anything she’d put her mind to, and this would be no different. It couldn’t be any different.
* * *
—
CECELIA WENT INTO LABOR in late October, when Julia was almost four months pregnant. Mrs. Ceccione drove Cecelia to the hospital, and her sisters met her there. Only one person was allowed into the delivery room during the birth, and the nurse, gowned and masked, announced to the waiting room that the young mother had asked for a woman named Julia.
Thrilled, Julia tugged on a hospital gown and did her best to contain her hair beneath the shower cap she was handed. When she entered the room, she found Cecelia crying. “I want Mama,” she said. “I want her so much, and you remind me of her.”
“Baby girl,” Julia said, and smoothed Cecelia’s hair off her flushed face. This was what Rose called her daughters in times of sickness or sadness.
“I miss her so much.” Cecelia looked wild-eyed at her sister. “You wouldn’t believe it. Every day, I’ve had to fight not to go home. It’s like the baby wanted to see her. My body hates being away from her.”
“Do you want me to call her now?” Julia said. “She would come.” She wasn’t sure this was true, but she knew it was what her sister wanted to be true, and in the face of Cecelia’s anguish, Julia would try her best to alter reality.
Cecelia twisted her body under the sheets and cried out. She grabbed Julia’s hand and squeezed so hard that Julia gasped. How was her sister this strong? Julia experienced the waves of contractions with Cecelia for the next twenty minutes, feeling the magnitude of creating and meeting a new human wash over her. She wiped sweat off Cecelia’s forehead with a cloth and allowed her hand to be throttled. She was certain their mother was wrong to turn her back on this: on her own baby, on the arrival of her first grandchild. Julia promised herself that she would never be that stubborn.