Excerpt from My Memoir

When I Was Her Daughter:

A Memoir

by Leslie Ferguson

            A knock shook the door. I put my eye to the peephole, and my heart rocked.

            “Leslie, is that you?”

            I opened the door.

            Standing before me was this woman I used to know a very long time ago. I almost reached out to touch her because she might have been a bad dream, or a good one, or the surest indication of my fall from mental stability.   

            It had been more than ten years since I’d last seen her, more than twenty since she’d stood on the opposite side of a door that protected me from her.

            In my youth, I hoped for a scene like this where the person who loved me first in the world showed up for me, transformed into a rehabilitated survivor competent enough to seek me out and initiate a new world for us both—a world that might allow us to put our mutual pasts in a grave and start fresh.  

             “Hello?” I said.

            “Oh, Leslie,” she cried. “I thought I’d never find you.”

            A brown suitcase sat at her feet.

            “How did you get this address?”

            “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” She laughed. “After all these years?” Her voice rattled. She held one hand out towards me as if maybe she also doubted what was real.

             I opened the door wider and stood back to let her in. Could this be my chance to get closure? Or was I making a mistake? Should I move her back, shut the door in her face, call the cops? But what could it hurt? I should at least hear what she had to say.

            I hugged her. Why should I fear her? I was a complete adult now. And I’d had enough therapy to rehabilitate an institution full of broken souls. She couldn’t hurt me anymore. And by the looks of it, I was bigger and stronger; I could fight her off or run past her, out of the apartment, and to my car before she’d make it down the stairs after me. I scanned the counter for my keys just in case.

            “Have a seat,” I said and gestured to the couch. The sun hung low in the sky and sent warmth into the apartment through the slider. “I’ll make us some coffee.” Coffee always calmed me, and holding a mug gave me something to do with my hands—and it provided a buffer between me and her.

            “Ah,” she said as she plopped herself down. “What’s been going on all these years?” She asked the question so casually, anyone might have mistaken us for long-lost girlfriends.

            I gave vague statements about my credentials and victories. I sipped my coffee.

            “What about you?”

            “Oh, you know,” she said. 

            She blinked her ice-blue eyes at me.

            “I know William lives far, but I’m going to visit him. I just need to get the money.”

            I stared at her cheek, her mouth, her jaw, as it moved, shook, spoke such outdated and untimely things. I shook my head.

            She put her mouth on her mug and clamped her teeth down on the rim.

            “Maybe a phone call would be better,” I said.

            “You two will always be my babies.”

            “I know.” I cried the words. I grabbed some Kleenex. Her glossy, bright, blue, almond-shaped eyes flashed—how I used to love those eyes, used to see hope and laughter in them, when light flickered there. I used to see my birthstone in them, opal flecked with sparkle and the colors of the rainbow. But I also learned fear through my mother’s eyes.

            “I’m so sorry. I am. But things can never go back. Nobody can relive the past.”

            She rubbed her left side. I imagined she was relieving the pain from her gunshot wound over thirty years ago. I recalled the time she moved my fingers over her scar with a mother’s determination to teach her children about consequences.

            “Are you okay?”

            “No, Leslie. I haven’t been okay for a very long time.”

            I set my coffee mug on the table and moved closer to hug her. She cried into my hair.

            But that’s not how the story goes.