My grandmother sighs again. “Who is to say? I have lived my life the best I could live it, but not without my share of mistakes. You have made them, too, and will continue to make them. Most of them won’t kill you,” she says. She smiles and adds, “If what happened between me and the brothers is so important to you, then why did you cut them out of your story?”
I laugh. “The story wasn’t really about them.”
“I suppose not.”
She reaches into her pocket. She pulls out a pouch, and from that, a string of red jewels that it takes me a minute to understand is the ruby necklace she had been talking about all along. The one that had been stolen from her grandmother. The one that led the woman to go completely mad and end her life.
“But how did you…” I say, staring at her hand, the bright jewels in it that look cartoonishly lavish, sparkling like crazy. Before I finish asking the question, I realize I don’t want to know the answer. Or, rather, that I can figure out what happened without my grandmother telling me, without her confirming she had stolen the rubies from her grandmother out of spite. How can I blame her for hating the woman, after all she had done to her father? And as she herself had just said, who am I to judge?
At last I hear it, the train chugging toward the platform, and see it snaking around the bend in the distance.
“I have made my share of mistakes,” she says again. “At least this one was valuable. Please, take it. It can give you the freedom you seek.”
I slowly take the necklace out of her hand just as the train comes to a halt and opens its doors. It’s even heavier than it looks and it makes my hand tremble, either from the weight or the thought of touching something that my great-great-grandmother had worn for years like a second skin, something that the woman in the photograph on my wall had loved best of all.
“What should I do with it?” I say.
“Be careful with it,” my grandmother says, closing my hand around it and kissing my fist. “It is a very precious thing.”
And with that, she gives me a big hug, strokes my daughter’s cheeks, and disappears through the jaws of the train.
I give Tally a bottle after the train pulls away, and then we keep walking, walking, walking. The girl is smiling, cooing, staring at everything with her mouth open in unabashed wonder, like it seems impossible that all of these things can exist: the two red-haired children trailing their mother, the woman in the pink dress smoking a cigarette on the street corner, the leaves on the trees fluttering in the wind, the two tired men entering an Irish pub, the light hitting the store windows, the big garbage trucks and their loud, loud roar as they pummel down the street. As we wait to cross it, my girl looks so perfect sitting there in her little green jumper, the light in her reddish curls, that I bend down and take a picture of her, and capture her smile perfectly.
I open my Instagram but decide against posting it, and send the picture to Yuri instead. I wait a few seconds to see if he answers, but he does not; he’s probably too busy packing for his trip anyway. I scroll and see that I got more likes on my play post—I’m up to four hundred—and try to remind myself that I’m not going to get any validation or love from the Internet, that those likes didn’t translate into asses in seats. Fucking social media is like a bad boyfriend who won’t change his ways, no matter how much I beg him to, and the only real love I can try to get right now is from the sweet little lump in the stroller.
My phone dings with a text from my agent, not Yuri. He’s telling me I have been cast as the orphaned sister killer in L.A.—filming starts next week. I assumed I didn’t book it because I sent in the tape weeks ago and forgot all about it. I can’t help but laugh and laugh, which makes my girl smile hard. After being my grandmother and great-great-grandmother, do I really want to stoop to being a murderer, as Stas would put it? I straighten Talia’s little barrette and stroke her face. I do, I do, I do, I know that I do. Somehow, I—we—will do it. I can’t turn it down. And it may just be the break we need. And after that—what do I do? Return to life with Yuri? Ask Mel if I can pick up a few shifts at the Lair? See if I can enroll at the community college? Take Stas by the hand and ride off into the sunset? Pawn the necklace and leave them both for good?
When we stop at a streetlight, two women look down at Tally and coo, because having a baby is apparently an invitation for everyone to talk to you.
But then, from the confused smile on one of the women’s faces, I think she might recognize me.
“Tampon commercial?” I say to her. “You know, it’s as easy as—”
“That’s not it,” she says, cocking her head at me. “Russian prostitute?”
“Is there any other kind?”
“Good work. I loved Seeing Things.”
“Thank you so much,” I say. “Really.”
The other woman seems to have no idea who I am, but she’s interested in Tally.
“How old is this darling?”
“Almost six months.”
“They’re already a lot of fun at six months, aren’t they? Watch out, the next thing you know, she’ll be going off to college,” she says.
“You spend the early years being like, when will she walk, when will she talk? And then the next ten you just want them to sit down and shut up,” the other one says.
“I’ll try to slow down,” I tell them, and as I push Talia ahead of them, not even that annoyed by the assumption that everyone will go to college, I hear her say one more thing.
“Congratulations!”
I thank her and push on, past a father and his two sons. It’s been a while since I was congratulated for having a daughter. I thought she was too old for that, and it feels nice. Tally paid the woman no attention, or me, really, and continues to stare out with her mouth half-open. Over the last few months, my daughter has gotten more entranced by the outside world than by me, not as desperate for me to hold her anymore.
She’s becoming less like the baby I was, if Mama described me correctly. “Always wanting to be held,” Mama had said, shaking her head. “If I left the room for a moment, you would scream bloody murder! I don’t think I emptied my bladder until you were two. It was awful.” But I see now that she didn’t think it was awful at all, that maybe she even longed for a time when I needed her like that, or at all.
Talia does give me a smile, though, when we pass the dog park, probably more at the big shaggy gray dog than me, but it does melt me like they said it would, her smiles always melt me now even though there was a time when I didn’t think this would ever be possible, when I was convinced I must have been immune to her. How did it happen? As Baba would say, it’s something unbelievable. This sweet little girl, who just months ago felt like a gooey alien in my arms, became my favorite little person, the only one I can really talk to besides said grandmother, the only one whose eyes hide nothing and who understands me. I pull her little blanket up to her chest, mostly so she can suck on it more easily. Baba is probably boarding her plane by now. The sun is rising but it’s still pretty crisp, too crisp for early September, but I’m ready for the change, the summer has been endless.
“Endless summer, am I right, Tally?” I say. “Though I guess you’ve never known another season, have you? You have nothing to compare it to. Well, I promise you’ll have some good summers ahead, but this one has just been weird.”