Excerpt: Family Charms

Chapter 1

The Letter

I preferred to believe my mother was dead.
I’d imagined she’d died both tragically and quietly. Over the years, her deaths became my only memory of her, fictional and yet far more real than the ones I really remembered. There was the fire, the first of many heroic deaths I gave her, in which she clawed through the smoky two bedroom house to rescue her three sleeping girls, a baby, a toddler, and me, a preschooler. Only after she’d handed her youngest, my sister Amelia, over to the fireman, the roof collapsed, and she screamed her final breath. There would be a big write-up in the paper and all my life I would hear how lucky I was to be alive. That I had a mother that would risk her very own life to save mine.
As I grew older, her deaths became more vivid, darker, even comical. Like the time she had run off to join the circus and had fallen off the high-wire dressed in her sparkling tutu and splatted next to the grinning clown on the floor below.
In history class, I imagined she perished alongside the nurses who blew up when bombs hit their medical tents in World World I, from the Black Plague in Europe and even in the concentration camps, her blue eyes the last bit of color on her bone-thin face. Even in her historical deaths, she typically played the victim and the savior. As the Titanic began to sink, she placed my sisters and I on a lifeboat with strangers because there was only room for us. As we drifted off into the cold night air, I watched her fall to her death in the icy sea.
So what could I make of this, a letter from beyond the grave, received on my twenty-fifth birthday? It took me a full ten minutes staring at the return address to realize for all the ways I’d killed her in my mind, my mother was very much among the living. No address, only her name. Elizabeth Barnes. Her married name, unchanged after all these years. Could she not bother with the paperwork?
My fingers began to burn so I dropped the envelope onto my painted entry table. She did not deserve my father’s name, a good man who had died a real death, years before his time. How many times I’d prayed for you, Mother, to take his place, I thought. Not because I am cruel, though I have every right to be, but because I didn’t know you, therefore could never love you the way that I loved him. A simple fact: he stayed, you left.
The letter was silent, yet its presence blared through my small historic home like nonsensical rock music. I caught my reflection in the mirror and was ashamed I’d let a single tear fall. I swore I would never cry another drop for that woman.
My husband would be finishing rounds at his medical internship, and besides, I knew what he would say. “Just open it.” I’d married a practical man, a caring but logical man who wanted to fix people for a living. I think this is why he was drawn to me. I’d been broken so long I was certain I was beyond repair. Yet this gentle, handsome man saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself.
I could call my sisters, but they weren’t like me, rational and self-controlled. My middle sister Taryn would blow up, curse until her face turned red and might even tear up the letter before it could be read. Amelia, the fragile one, the baby still, would either cling or run, I was never sure which. I had to protect them, so often from life, and now from this letter. From my mother’s hawkish caw from beyond.
I would open it on my own.