Swimming with Maya Excerpts

EXCERPTS

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When I think of a stranger touching my daughter’s clothes it feels like a violation, so donating them to Goodwill is out of the question. But then several months after the funeral, one of her cousins asks if she can have Maya’s prettiest formal dress. I examine the dress, opulent as a peony, its hot pink bodice and spaghetti straps, the skirt with its cascade of pink flounces. Maya carried a little beaded purse on prom night. I find that too, then wrap the dress in tissue paper, tuck the purse in beside it in a gift box and present it to my niece.

The shoes are more difficult. Maya’s college roommates had shipped them home to me along with her other clothes. I unpack them and set them in a row in her closet with the high heels at one end, the flats at the other. Each time I pick one up and turn it in my hand I can feel my daughter’s missing foot. At last, I decide to call her girlfriends to see if anyone wants the shoes. Jo Anne agrees to take them. I stack the high heels in shoeboxes on the dining room table and Jo Anne and I stand side by side surveying the pile of shoes. “Do you want to try on a pair, just to be sure?” I ask. She steps into a pair of black patent leather pumps and walks a few steps, pivots, and comes back. Now taller than I am because she is standing in Maya’s shoes, Jo Anne opens her arms to me. As I hold her, I feel a tremor in her shoulders. Then she drives away with the shoes, and my daughter’s footfalls echo in my mind.

Grief seizes me by the scruff of the neck and will not let me go. Piece by piece I reconstruct the puzzle of our life together, opening myself to the slow truth of what it meant to be Maya’s mother.

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