“Aaaaaaah!” I yell as Tess flings herself, beaming, onto my mattress, all giggles and smiles, her blond hair brushing my cheeks. “Mama!” She laughs. When Tess laughs, my heart wells up with joy, light and giddy with the love I feel.
When the time comes for her to fly back to the U.S. to begin a new semester at the University of Wisconsin, we drive to Lisbon airport. And after every visit, as she proceeds to passport control, she turns back for one last look, and I glimpse the sadness and regret on her face.
This time, though, the departure is different.
“It is what it is,” Tess says, her suitcase in the hall. We are ready to leave for the airport. Fall semester begins next week.
“What does that even mean?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer. I just know it’s nothing good.
Like it or not, and as hard as you may try to avoid it, the past will always catch up with you—an ugly hag clawing at your door, coming to reclaim what you hoped you’d forgotten.
And I remember. Long ago, when we were still a family in Deer Creek Falls:
Tess is in the pool, turquoise waters sparkling amid the dense dark firs. She floats and laughs. The laughter tinkles and skips across the gleaming water like a polished pebble.
We go up to the deck overlooking the pool. I hold ten-year-old Tess in my arms. She smiles directly at the camera. The sun casts a shadow on my face.
This is what I had forgotten. But the old crone carps on mercilessly, dragging the slimy residue of memory behind her. I don’t want to remember. Tess is on my bed, shaking me. “Wake up, wake up!” I hear her words and flounder helplessly, struggling and failing to wake from my self-induced stupor of medications and alcohol.
“That’s why I wrote that story!” She exclaims. On the cusp of darkness I hear her words.
That winter, Tess’s story, the tale of a motherless child, won first prize in the Suffolk county writing contest.
B.A. and M.A. in English and Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures. Taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook as an adjunct professor and later moved to The Hague, Netherlands to work as a translator for the UN War Crimes Tribunal. Now living in Portugal.
Anita Lekic‘s articles are published in Counterpunch and in The Local Germany, and her short stories can be read in The RavensPerch, Streetlight Magazine, The Dark Ink Press, Typishly, Cagibi, The Bangalore Review and Wanderlust. One of the short stories was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.