Page 247 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

hand when we walked. Sit me up on her lap, read bedtime stories, kiss my face

good night. Those things were true enough. But, all those years, I’d been blind to
a greater truth, which lay unacknowledged and unappreciated, buried deep
beneath my grievances. It was this: that my mother would never leave me. This
was her gift to me, the ironclad knowledge that she would never do to me what
Madaline had done to Thalia. She was my mother and she would not leave me.
This I had simply accepted and expected. I had no more thanked her for it than I
did the sun for shining on me.
“Look!” Thalia exclaims.
Suddenly, all around us—on the ground, on the walls, on our clothing—little
shining sickles of light have materialized, the crescent-shaped sun beaming
through the leaves of our olive tree. I find a crescent shimmering on the coffee

inside my mug, another dancing on my shoelaces.
“Show me your hands, Odie,” Thalia says. “Quick!”
Mamá opens her hands, palms up. Thalia fetches from her pocket a square of
cut glass. She holds it over Mamá’s hands. Suddenly, little crescent rainbows
quiver on the wrinkled skin of my mother’s hands. She gasps.

“Look at that, Markos!” Mamá says, grinning unabashedly with delight like a
schoolgirl. I have never before seen her smile this purely, this guilelessly.
We sit, the three of us, watching the trembling little rainbows on my mother’s
hands, and I feel sadness and an old ache, each like a claw at my throat.
You’ve turned out good.
You’ve made me proud, Markos.

I am fifty-five years old. I have waited all my life to hear those words. Is it
too late now for this? For us? Have we squandered too much for too long, Mamá
and I? Part of me thinks it is better to go on as we have, to act as though we
don’t know how ill suited we have been for each other. Less painful that way.
Perhaps better than this belated offering. This fragile, trembling little glimpse of
how it could have been between us. All it will beget is regret, I tell myself, and
what good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
And yet when my mother says, “Isn’t it beautiful, Markos?” I say to her, “It
is, Mamá. It is beautiful,” and as something begins to break wide open inside me
I reach over and take my mother’s hand in mine.