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The grief left her exhausted. She wrapped herself in her huge terry cloth robe and called in sick to the clinic. Ignoring a number of other phone calls, including one from Pan, she rummaged through boxes she had in storage. She found one of her old dolls - the china doll her mother had given her - and her scrapbook, which held memorabilia from her early childhood: photographs of her and her parents when they were young, pressed leaves and flowers, a crayon drawing.
These, and the framed picture of her mother from before Clara was born, she took into the living room, where she curled up on the sofa with some tea, poached eggs, and whole wheat toast. The next few hours she spent reminiscing, touching old memories, crying some more. Then she slept for a while.
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Clara didn't remember their address - and she didn't want to have to explain to Bradley - but she remembered what block the apartment was on, and wandered around till she saw a doorway she recognized.
"I'd like to speak to Joan van Renssaeler," she said into the intercom, when an unrecognizable voice answered. Her voice was steady and calm. She'd had a lifetime to learn to mask her feelings.
Silence greeted her. Her heart was beating so hard it filled her ears with a great roaring. She rang the bell again.
Perry came out to the front door. He opened it only a crack, blocking it with his body. "I'm sorry, I wish I could help you, but there's been some mistake."
But his eyes held sadness and knowledge.
She shook her head. "No. There's no mistake. I'm Clara van Renssaeler and I want to see my mother."
His pupils dilated. With a sigh and a nod, he let her in. Clara's heart felt packed in ice. She followed him down the hall to the apartment.
He made her wait outside. She heard voices rising and falling, as with the previous night, and then a long silence.
I'll stay here till you admit me, she thought. I won't go away. She folded her arms and leaned on the wall by the door.
Then the door opened a crack, and a face with scales like jewels appeared.
That was her mother's face; those were her mother's eyes.
All the way down from the upper East Side, in the taxi, she'd rehearsed what she would say. Rejection or denial was possible. She was prepared - armed with facts, clear memories, reasons.
But the suave, controlled professional wasn't with her; only the five-year-old child.
"Maman?" she said.
The joker woman covered her mouth with a gasp. "Oh, Clara. Can you ever forgive me?"
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Inside the too-warm apartment, Joan showed Clara her own scrapbook - a more worn version of Clara's - and other memorabilia: photographs, figurines, trinkets. Many, many pictures of Clara as a little girl, in frilly dresses and ribbons. Some shots of her were more recent - a photo or two from her girlhood that Brandon must have given her; several candid shots: two from her years at Rutgers, one at a park a few years ago with a man she'd been dating. And she didn't remember them being taken.
Meanwhile, Joan talked. And Clara wandered around behind her, nodding, dabbing at the sweat that gathered on her upper lip, looking at this snake-woman who had - inconceivably - birthed and raised her, at all the familiar-strange objects. She felt as if her feet and hands were a mile away. Joan's voice flowed over her like water: she didn't hear a word of it.
Then Perry entered with a silver tray loaded with three or four kinds of tea, milk, lemon wedges, finger sandwiches, currant scones, jam and clotted cream. He set the tray on the coffee table with a sharp glance at Joan and Clara, and then left, closing the door. Clara felt relief, and gratitude. Sensitive man. She unbuttoned the top two buttons on her blouse and rolled up her sleeves.
Joan fussed over the tea in a manner so familiar and soothing to Clara that it alarmed her. Clara sat with her hands in her lap. She took the cup Joan pressed on her.
Joan folded herself up onto the couch next to her, coil by coil, and reached for her own cup.
How beautiful she is, Clara thought, watching light reflect off her scales as she sipped her Earl Grey. What an exotic creature. Colors shifted along her coils, her torso and arms and breasts, her face. Like moonlight caught in a waterfall. A cameo pendent, her only garment, dangled between her scaled breasts.
Joker. What a wrong-headed name.
"Why did you leave me?"
The question came out without her even knowing she was thinking it.
Joan gave her a look of surprise and she realized she'd interrupted her in mid-sentence. With a sigh, Joan set her teacup down. She started to reply, but Clara couldn't hold the words in any longer. She sprang to her feet and the words tumbled out, fully formed.
"I thought you were dead, all these years, and you knew the whole time. Five miles away. Five miles! And never once did you even try to reach me."
Joan raised a hand. Her scales had gone a muddy gray, a dirty white. "Darling, I - "
Clara spoke over her. "Why, why didn't you stay? Or at least contact me? Let me know you were alive?" She grabbed a framed, recent picture of herself - it hadn't been on the mantle the night before - and shook it at Joan. "How dare you have pictures and knowledge of me, without my knowing of you? It's a cheat! Don't you know that it killed me when you left?"
She hurled the picture to the floor and ground her boot heel into the glass, glaring at Joan. Then she bent her face into her palms and cried.
Hands landed on her shoulders; she opened her eyes. Her mother's altered face was only inches from hers; those cat-green eyes Clara remembered studied her; all the color had drained from her scales; they'd gone white and clear as gypsum sand.
"How I've hurt you." Joan's voice was soft. "I can never undo the harm I did, can I? Never give you back those lost years."
"No," Clara said She wiped at her eyes. "No, you can't."
Joan enfolded her in a careful hug that included a half-loop of snake flesh - and to her shock Clara didn't feel the desire to recoil. "Dear Clara. You deserved so much better than you got."
Can I forgive so easily? For all that pain?
No, she thought. I can't. She pulled back. Joan released her and handed her a lace kerchief, with the monogram JvR She entreated Clara to sit.
"It's understandable that you should hold a lot of anger toward me. You may never be able to forgive me. I simply want you to understand that my leaving had nothing to do with you. It was me. All me."
Clara's voice was flat. "Does it matter any more?"
"Would you be here if it didn't?"
Clara stared at her and said nothing. Joan sighed and took a sip of tea. Clara caught a glimpse of the fangs, the altered tongue. More than anything else, that made her realize just how physically altered her mother was. How much of the woman she'd been remained?
"I wasn't a nice person, you know. Not at all. I spread nasty rumors about my friends behind their backs; I made a specialty of subtly mocking Brandon, tearing down his self-esteem. What people wore was more important to me than what was in their minds or hearts. All I cared about was money and social position. I was shallow, bigoted and predatory." She gave Clara an owlish look that reminded Clara of herself. "The only thing good about me was you. You were the only one in my life who mattered to me more than myself.
"When this happened to me" - she gestured at herself, at the loose coils of snake flesh draped all over the couch - "it was as if now the outside matched the inside. This change made me realize just how much of a predator I was." She hesitated. "I don't know how much you remember of what happened after I changed."
"Enough." Very little, in fact; Clara only remembered the scene in the hallway.
"Do you remember what happened to Frou Frou?"
"Frou Frou?"
"We had a Lhasa apso named Frou Frou. I'd had him since I was a girl. You adored him. He attacked me, that morning after the change, and I bit him. He died of the venom. Later, I - I ate him."