“I long to hold a grandchild in my arms,” her father once said.
When Harriet is eighteen, Frida’s mother will be eighty-four, her father will be eighty-five. Frida will be taking care of them. They’ll be living with her. She thought they’d move here eventually. Three generations living in one household, the way she grew up.
* * *
After another few days of discussions, she agrees to fly to Chicago on a one-way ticket. She’ll stay for a month or two, maybe longer. Her father offers to come to Philly and rent a truck, drive home her belongings, but Frida isn’t ready to make the move permanent. She doesn’t know where she should live. She may want to stay close to her daughter.
Her parents want to get the family together to welcome her home. Her father will cook lobster with black bean sauce, her favorite dish. He’ll go to Chinatown to shop for ingredients, will buy pastries too—coconut tarts, baked pork buns.
She craves these flavors. Craves salt. Her father says they’ll drink champagne. They received a bottle last Christmas that they’ve been saving for her.
The happiness in her parents’ voices makes her nervous. She wonders how soon she’ll disappoint them, whether it will take days or only hours. It’s been one week since the final visit. Yesterday, she looked up the address of Harriet’s school. She thought about driving past Gust and Susanna’s building, considered waiting there, learning their routines.
After she hangs up, she calls Renee and leaves a message saying she’s moving home temporarily. She curls up on the couch and falls asleep for a few hours, waking only when Will returns. Will lets her rest her head in his lap. He plays with her hair.
She imagines it’s Tucker touching her, thinks of the dance, how he took care of her when she hit her head on the slide.
She tells Will about the plan.
“I’ll miss you,” he says. “But this makes sense. Then you’ll come back. Right?”
“I think so. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I want. This is what my parents want.”
Thinking about returning to Evanston, she gets up abruptly and shuts herself in the bedroom. If she’s halfway across the country, she won’t be able to look for Harriet in every park or playground. Harriet won’t be able to hear her signal. What can she do over the next sixteen years to make Harriet proud, to signal to her, to tell her that her mother is still yearning?
* * *
Her parents want her to fly home immediately, but Frida needs more time. She books a ticket for December 22. She drives to her storage unit and collects more clothes and papers, a bin of Harriet’s baby clothes, the baby memory book, photo albums. When she gets to her parents’ house, she’ll build a shrine for Harriet, keep it next to her bed so she can look at Harriet’s picture as she’s falling asleep. If she keeps the memory of Harriet alive, she might be able to endure. She’ll count down the months like she did at the school.
She’s surprised by how keenly she misses the mothers and the dolls. She wants to tell Roxanne what happened to Meryl. She wants to know if the dolls are being taken care of in storage. Emmanuelle must be lonely. She must need her blue liquid changed. If she hasn’t been erased yet, is she thinking of her mother? Does she expect Frida to return?
Until now, Frida didn’t realize how much she relied on Emmanuelle for a daily dose of affection. In the future, if they lose their real children, maybe parents will be given their dolls. Some mothers said they wanted to take their dolls home with them.
It’s a shame, she thinks, that no one has invented grafts or transplants. The school could have replaced the faulty parts of their characters with mother instincts, mother mind, mother heart.
* * *
Frida begins going outside more. She stops spending the whole day in pajamas. She takes walks up and down Baltimore Avenue, watching mothers with their children, the parade of families on their way to Clark Park. But nothing feels true without her daughter, neither time nor space nor her body.
She’s been free for three weeks when the call comes. It’s Saturday morning, mid-December. Will takes a call from Gust. Frida pieces together information from Will’s side of the conversation. How Gust and Harriet just got home from the ER. How Susanna is still there with Henry. They brought him in because he can’t keep anything down. He’s been vomiting all night. The doctors did an ultrasound on his stomach a few hours ago. Henry has pyloric stenosis. He’ll have surgery this afternoon. Gust needs to return to the hospital, stay overnight with Susanna. He asks if Will can watch Harriet. Will hasn’t done bedtime before, but Gust thinks he can manage it. He’ll leave Will detailed instructions. Harriet is used to him. They can’t have someone new watch her. Gust’s mother has returned to California. Susanna’s mother has returned to Virginia. They never had a reason to find a regular sitter.