Chapter 311: I’m not finished, please, mother
Amara is thirty-four now. Seren had calculated it. She looked the same as Seren remembered and also entirely different, the way a place looks different when you return to it and realize that what has changed is you.
Her hair was pulled back. She was wearing a dark green blouse, and she had one hand on the windowsill, not leaning, just resting. As if she needed to feel the solidity of it.
She did not turn around when Seren came in.
Seren stopped a few feet inside the door. She did not sit down. She held her notebook in front of her with both hands, not because she planned to read from it, but because she needed to hold something.
"I didn’t know it was you, Seren," Amara said. Not a question. Not warmly. Just a fact laid down carefully, like something that might break.
"Yes," Seren said. Silence. Outside, a car alarm started and then stopped.
"The first time," Amara said, still not turning, "Adelaide said a young girl cried in the corridor before you even knocked." A pause. "The second time, she missed me. I was already gone." She was quiet for a moment. "I know I have been away for a long time, Seren, but.."
Amara tries to explain something to a girl who still thinks she was her mother and that all the bad things in the past didn’t happen.
Seren opened her mouth. She had practiced this. She had written notes. Nothing she had practiced came out.
What came out instead was: "Please, you don’t have to pretend anymore or explain why you never came home in three years. I’m turning thirteen next month and I don’t want to turn thirteen without saying it."
Amara turned then.
Her face was careful. The face of a woman who had learned, expensively, to keep her face careful. But her eyes, Seren had her mother’s eyes somewhere in her memory, the exact quality of them, her eyes were doing something that the rest of her face was working very hard not to do.
"Say what?" Amara said.
Seren’s grip tightened on the notebook. She had told herself she would not cry this time. She had been very firm about it on the bus over.
"That I’m sorry." Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it. She made herself push it larger.
"I’m sorry for, I know what I did. I remember now. I remember most of it. And I know it was... I know I was a child, and I know my mother... no, Elara was, " She stopped.
She had told herself she would not use Elara as an explanation. Explanation was not the same as an excuse. She had written that down too. "I remember all the awful things I did," she said. "When she told me to lie, hurt you, frame you. I did."
Amara said nothing.
"I was six," Seren said.
"That’s not, I’m not saying that like it makes it different. I’m saying it because I need you to know. To know that I knew what I was doing."
"Seren."
"I’m not finished, please, mother." The words came out more sharply than she meant. She breathed.
"I’m sorry. I’m sorry I never said thank you. I’m sorry I acted like you were obligated to love me, and I didn’t owe you anything back. I’m sorry for every time I said you weren’t my real mother." Her voice broke on the last word, and she did not stop.
"You were the most real mother I’ve ever had. You are. That’s the truth. I was horrible to you, and you never stopped... you never... "
She stopped. She pressed her hand over her mouth for a moment.
Then she lowered it.
"I know you can’t forgive me for everything," she said, quieter now. Steadier, somehow, for having said the worst of it.
"I know you might never want to see me again. I know I don’t get to ask you to let me back in. I’m not asking for that." She paused.
"I’m asking you to know that I see it now. All of it. I see what you were to me, and I see what I did with it. And I’m asking you to know that I carry it. I’ll carry it. You deserved so much better than what you got from me, and I am so, so sorry."
The room was very quiet.
Amara had not moved. She stood with one hand still resting on the windowsill, and her face was no longer careful in the way it had been careful before. Something in it had shifted. Not opened, exactly. But shifted.
She looked at Seren for a long time.
"How long has your memory been coming back?" she asked. Her voice was neutral. Professional, even. As if she were asking about the weather.
"About a year."
"And you’ve been coming here since, "
"Since December." Seren glanced at the floor. "My first two times, I... I wasn’t ready to say it right. I practiced." She held up the notebook briefly, a little embarrassed. "I write things down again."
Something moved across Amara’s face too fast for Seren to read it.
"You always wrote things down," Amara said. Very quietly. Almost to herself.
"You gave me my first proper notebook," Seren said. "With the blue cover. For my sixth birthday. You said writers needed somewhere to put things." She looked up. "I still have it. I don’t write in it. But I still have it."
The silence this time was different in texture.
Amara looked away, toward the window. Her jaw moved once, like she was working something loose from between her teeth.
"I’m not going to tell things could go back the way it use to..." she said, at last.
"I want you to know that isn’t, I’m not saying that because I’m still angry." She paused.
"What you’re carrying, what you’re bringing here, that’s real. I can see that. You’re almost thirteen, and you’re doing something that most adults never do, and I... " She stopped herself. Another breath.
"But I spent a very long time being very hurt. And I have done a lot of work on it, and I’m still not finished with it. So I can’t give you absolution today. Do you understand the difference?"
"Yes," Seren said. "I wasn’t asking for absolution."
Amara looked at her sharply.
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