Halsey Street

by Naima Coster

After all these years, she still couldn’t control her tongue around her mother. It was Mirella who had first taught her to say whatever would wound most after she herself had been wounded. After she left Brooklyn, she never had someone draw close enough to trade cuts, but it was an instinct she hadn’t lost. This was all her mother had given her—sharpened edges.

Penelope had sent a photograph with her letter to make it plain that she was no longer a girl, to say somehow, Take this so that you will recognize me—it’s been five years, and I am not the same. But Penelope was, and it was her mother who had become different. She felt envious and, also, devastated that her mother’s life had bloomed only after she disentangled herself from the trouble of loving Ralph, of being a mother.

Go back to her precious Ralph, who was still alive. Mirella was more alive than any of them. She had left so that she could live.

If she could have written more things she would have: how we do things we do not mean; we do evil things; if we see an open door, we will dart through it, before we lose our guts, no matter who is left behind, we will move at the chance to be free.

Penelope felt both bewildered and charmed. How did Jon survive this way, with so much ease and brightness? Had he always counted on smiles and his good humor to get him through?

she could have helped someone else understand it; what she couldn’t do was create any of it—not anymore. Maybe if she’d spent the last ten years differently, but she hadn’t.

You go on like the world is happening to you, like you’re not here. But you’re here, girl. You’re here.”

The day you left us, I was happy for you. I was sad for me, and I was happy for you. You needed to go and find your life. Have you found it?

She said she’d spent years trying to make perfect, beautiful things, but that wasn’t real—everything in life could be taken apart. Everything has a seam, and it’s a lie to try and hide it.”

She had never been one for words, and she considered it her best reply to her mother’s last letter and question—Have you found your life?

“I can’t believe she’s dead.” Penelope didn’t know what to say. She believed that her mother was dead, but she still couldn’t fathom what it meant. The only way she had ever known her mother was through her body:

Penelope had long tolerated the idea of Mirella no longer being her mother, but she couldn’t comprehend Mirella no longer being Mirella. She had always been herself, her own woman in her bedroom, in her yard, on her island. Her body had always been somewhere.

This book is for us, for our freedom.