In the car, as they crossed the city neither of them could yet name a destination in, Maya found the words she had rehearsed in the sleepless hours, in case this was true, in case she needed them ready.
"I want to ask you something," she said. "And I need you to really hear it."
"Anything."
"Call me Maya." She said it gently, because she saw Eleanor flinch. "Lily is— Lily was your baby. I understand that. I honor that. But Maya is who I became. Maya is the girl Daniel taught to ride a bike, and the woman who pays her own rent and burns toast and works at Le Jardin. If I lose her too, I don't know who I am in this. I need to be Maya who is also, somehow, your daughter. Not Lily instead."
Eleanor was quiet for a moment, looking at their joined hands, at the birthmark she had recognized across a crowded restaurant.
"You are Maya," she said at last, clearly, as if making a promise in front of witnesses. "My daughter Maya, who I lost as Lily. I can hold both of those. I will learn how, even when I slip. You will correct me, and I will not be hurt, and we will keep going." She raised Maya's left hand, very carefully, and pressed her lips to the birthmark, once, as she must have done when Maya was three months old. "Hello, Maya," she whispered. "I've been looking for you for a very long time."
Maya rested her head against her mother's shoulder as Boston went by the window, and for the first time in three days, in twenty-five years, in two lifetimes, she slept, briefly and completely, like a child being taken home.
Chapter 10: Learning Each Other
The first two weeks were an education neither woman had a syllabus for.
Eleanor's house in Beacon Hill was not a house so much as a statement: five stories of brick and polished wood, a library with a ladder, a dining room that could seat twenty and had seated, for six years, exactly one. On Maya's first visit, she stood beneath a chandelier and said, "I don't know where to put my bag," and Eleanor, who had hosted ambassadors, looked stricken and said, "Neither do I. Mrs. Alvarez, where do daughters put their bags?" and Mrs. Alvarez, appearing with tea, said, "Anywhere they like, ma'am, they're home," and went away wiping her eyes.
Maya's apartment, which Eleanor visited two days later with a bunch of flowers too large for the kitchen counter and a visible determination not to comment on the laundromat hum, was nine hundred square feet if you were generous and counted the fire escape. Eleanor sat at the small table where the envelope from the closet now lived in honorable retirement, drank instant coffee Maya apologized for three times, and said, "This is a good home. You can tell a home where a person has taken care of herself on purpose." Maya, who had braced for pity, felt something in her chest unknot so suddenly she had to look away.
They ate together constantly, as if making up for twenty-five years of dinners could be accomplished by volume. Eleanor took Maya to restaurants where the menus had no prices and learned, delighted, that her daughter judged a kitchen by its bread and a chef by how he treated the waitstaff. Maya cooked for Eleanor in the small apartment: Daniel's pancakes, Rebecca's tomato soup, recipes carried in her hands rather than on cards, and Eleanor ate two bowls of soup and asked whether Rebecca had been a good cook, and Maya said, "She was a wonderful cook," and they let that sit between them, true and complicated.
There were photographs, hundreds of them: Lily at birth, Lily at one month, Lily asleep on Richard's chest. And then, in boxes Chloe helped carry up five flights of Beacon Hill stairs, the other archive: gap-toothed Maya at six on Daniel's shoulders, Maya at graduation with Rebecca already thin beside her, Maya at twenty-three in a black dress at a graveside. They laid the two childhoods side by side on the library floor one rainy afternoon and sat among them like generals over maps of a country that had turned out to be one country after all.
There was music. Eleanor played piano, well, with the unshowy competence of a woman educated to it before she was educated to anything else, and Maya, who had sung in a school choir Rebecca had driven her to twice a week for four years, stood in the doorway of the music room with her arms folded and tears in her eyes and said, "I know this one. I don't know how I know this one, but I do." Eleanor's hands did not stop. "I sang it to you," she said. "Every night. I used to wonder if that was foolish, wondering if some part of a baby remembers." "Apparently," Maya said, "some part does."
The differences were real, and they did not pretend otherwise. Money was the largest of them, a language Eleanor spoke natively and Maya refused to become fluent in overnight. Eleanor offered, in the first week, to pay off Maya's debts, to buy her a car, to speak to someone about a better apartment, and each offer landed with a soft, genuine bewilderment on Eleanor's side and a rising panic on Maya's, until Chloe, over wine, gave Maya the sentence she needed.
"I know you want to give me twenty-five years," Maya said the next evening, as carefully as she had ever said anything. "But if you hand me a new life, I'll lose the one I built, and I'm proud of the one I built. Let me keep being a waitress who is your daughter for a while. Let me keep the job, and the apartment, and paying for the coffee sometimes, even when you make a face."
"I do not make a face," Eleanor said.
"You make a very expensive face," Maya said, and Eleanor, after a moment, laughed so hard she had to hold onto the kitchen counter of an apartment she could have bought eleven times over, and said, "I am proud of you. Do you hear me? Not in spite of the job. Because of the woman doing it. Richard would have—" Her voice broke, usefully, honestly. "We are both so proud, and one of us is just late."
So Maya kept her shifts at Le Jardin, where her regulars simply noticed she looked, as one put it, like someone whose lottery had come in, and Eleanor learned not to send a car, and to text before visiting, and Maya learned to let herself be asked for. Laughter arrived more often than either had dared hope, over Eleanor's hopeless attempts to use a laundromat card and Maya's hopeless attempts to choose a wine for a Whitmore dinner party. Grief arrived too, in the quiet after laughter, when Eleanor would say, "You were left-handed as a baby too, I had it in a notebook, I have missed everything," and Maya would sit beside her and say, "You haven't missed everything. You're missing it less every day. That's the best arithmetic we've got."
On the fourteenth night, over tea in the library, with the photographs now in albums Mrs. Alvarez had bought without being asked, Eleanor grew quiet in a way Maya had learned to recognize.
"James Porter has been my investigator for twenty years," she said. "He is sixty-eight and stubborn and the only person who never once told me to stop looking. I have asked him to come tomorrow. Because there is a question neither of us has said aloud yet, and I think we are strong enough now to start saying it."
Maya turned her left hand over on her knee, the birthmark dark against her skin, and felt the warmth of the past two weeks settle into something steadier and more resolved beneath her ribs.
"Who took me," she said. "And why. And what Rebecca knew."
"Yes," Eleanor said. "Who took my daughter, and why."
Maya nodded, and reached across the space between their chairs, and Eleanor took her hand, the left one, as naturally now as breathing.
"Tomorrow," Maya said. "Together."
Chapter 11: Questions Without Answers