My own experience was slightly different. I spent the entire nine months terrified, trying to hide my expanding belly. All Rory knows about her sperm donor is that he was someone I didn’t love and don’t think mattered. “It was harder for me.”
“I know, Mom,” she says. “I hope you know that I’m grateful.”
“Oh, baby!” I rest my palms on the counter, pausing so that she knows I mean it with my whole heart. “You changed my life in the best possible ways. I’m grateful to you.”
She blinks, my blue-eyed daughter, and I see the shimmer over her irises. “You don’t say that very often.”
“I know. I’m sorry about that.” I score the papery outer layer of a yellow onion. “But one has nothing to do with the other. Your sister has a very serious alcohol use disorder, and she needs to heal.”
“Yeah,” Rory says. “She does.” Her expression grows pointed. “Look, I know you’re struggling as much as I am with Dad’s death, but you can’t funnel all your emotions into running Maya’s life.”
My hands freeze and I gape at her. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”
“Maybe.” She inclines her head. “From the outside, it kinda looks that way.”
“When I got there this morning, she was playing backgammon with that doctor who lives a few doors down, the one with the wife who drowned.”
“Oooh,” she says. “Backgammon! What’s next? Chess?”
“It’s not the game.” I start to dice the onion, fiercely. “He’s a widower and she’s newly sober and they’re both in a vulnerable place. I don’t want Maya to get hurt. Again.”
“Okay, Mom,” she says, standing. “You really need to get the focus back on yourself. You can’t save her.” She shoos me away from her counter. I relinquish the knife, wiping my hands on a paper towel, a hole opening in my heart.
“I’d like to cook,” I say.
“I know. I’m just agitated and this will calm me down. Do you want a glass of wine?”
“No.” I’m not sure, just this minute, if I’ll ever have another in my life. The specter of Maya, wine soaked, like a strange version of Carrie, haunts me.
Rory says, “You can pour me one, if you will. Bottle on the door in the fridge.”
The small task is one I can do. The wineglasses are on the sideboard, and I pour a measure into one of them. “It’s a bit early, isn’t it?”
“It’s three p.m., already six in New York,” she says without missing a beat. She takes a long swallow of the cold wine, and sighs. “That helps.”
I watch her drink it down. When I was a child, the women around me never drank, ever. Not my mother, not any of her friends, not teachers or anyone else. I’m sure they must have sometimes, but I didn’t see it. I knew about “cocktail hour,” when people drank cocktails and looked sophisticated, from books and movies, but that was not the reality in my blue-collar world.
When did women start drinking so openly, so heavily?
How much drinking is too much? Where is the line? I really have no idea where a person falls over the edge, and that raises my anxiety, too. Have we all been drinking too much, all their lives?
“Listen,” Rory says. “You can’t save Maya from her own choices, not with the baby, not with a man, not with her alcoholism. You just have to love her and show up for her.”
I sink down on a barstool. From the first moment I saw Maya, with her unbrushed hair and wary eyes, I was caught in the desire to protect her, and perhaps by extension the boy her father had been, and later, the children I wished we’d had. “How do we keep her safe?”
She shakes her head, pointing with her knife to the girls playing outside the back door. “We can’t even keep those two completely safe.”
“Mostly, we can.”
“Not really. Believe me, I run the scenarios constantly. What if a killer bee flies in from Mexico? What if one of them falls down the stairs and breaks her neck? What if somebody snatches one of them?”
I press a hand over my belly. “God forbid.”
“I know.” She leans on one hip, facing me. “You need to find your life, Mom, instead of trying to run the world for everybody else. Now that Dad’s gone, you really need something to give your focus to.”
“We’ve been divorced for eight years. I was hardly living for him.”
She nods in a way that makes me feel patronized.