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Perhaps we crumbled under the pressure at our private school. Maybe it was some kind of suicide pact. Maybe we'd filled our pockets with rocks and walked slowly into our watery graves like Virginia Woolf.
But then, where were our bodies?
It took six weeks and four days for the story to stop leading the news shows. My celebrity mother went back to being plain old Judy Martin—or Mrs. Jonathan Martin, as she preferred to be called—formerly Mrs. Owen Tanner, formerly Judith Luanne York. It's not as complicated as it sounds. York was her maiden name before she took the names of her two husbands. Two husbands are not a lot of husbands these days.
Emma and I came from the first one—Owen Tanner. Emma was named after my father's mother, who died of a bad heart when he was seventeen. My name, Cassandra (Cass for short), came from a baby book my mother had. She said it sounded like the name of someone important. Someone people admired. Someone people envied. I don't know about any of that. But I remember her brushing my long hair in front of her bathroom mirror, admiring me with a satisfied smile.
Look at you, Cassandra! You should never be without a mirror to remind yourself how beautiful you are.
Our mother never told Emma she was beautiful. They were too much alike for words of affection to pass between them. Praising someone who looks the same or acts the same or is wearing the same clothes is like praising yourself and yet it doesn't feel that way. Instead it feels diminishing, like that other person has stolen praise that should have come your way. Our mother would never allow Emma to steal something as valuable as praise.
But she said it to me. She said I had the best of both gene pools. She was very knowledgeable about these things—things like how children got blue eyes or brown eyes or math brains or music brains.
By the time you have children, Cassandra, you might be able to choose nearly every trait! Can you imagine? Oh, how different my life could have been if those scientists had worked a little faster! [sigh].
I didn't know what she meant then. I was only seven. But when she brushed my hair like that, when she shared her secret thoughts, I listened with great interest because it would fill me with joy from my toes to my eyebrows and I never wanted it to end.
But it always did. Our mother knew how to keep us hungry for her.
When we were young like that, she would ask us if she was pretty, the prettiest girl we'd ever seen, and if she was smart, the smartest woman we'd ever known, and then, of course—
Am I a good mother? The best mother you could ever want?
She always smiled big and wide eyed when she asked. And when we were young, Emma and I, we would tell her yes in our most sincere voices. She would gasp, shake her head and finally squeeze us so hard, like the excitement at being so wonderful was too much to contain, like she had to wring it from her body with some kind of physical exertion. After the squeezing came a long sigh to exhale the excitement she'd freed from her bones. The excitement would exit her body on hot breath and fill the entire room, leaving her quietly satisfied.
Other times, when she was sad or angry at the world for being cruel to her, for not seeing how special she was, we would be the ones to say it, knowing it would bring her back from her dark place.
You're the best mother in the whole wide world!
And we believed it, Emma and I, when we were young like that.
I remember these moments in bits and pieces that won't fit together anymore, like sections of shattered glass that have been weathered, their edges smoothed. Strong arms squeezing hard. The smell of her skin. She wore Chanel No. 5, which she told us was very expensive. We were not allowed to touch the bottle, but sometimes she would hold it for us while we inhaled the fragrance from the top of the sprayer.
Excerpted from Emma in the Night by Wendy Walker. Copyright © 2017 by Wendy Walker. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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