Chapter 1

My mother returned that summer from an exile both imposed and earned. Nothing had prepared me for her departure. I was unsure how to claim her homecoming. But I share her talent for perseverance, for we are joined by more than I can bear. My mother came back to recognition and reckoning. I thought she came home to me.

At ten minutes after seven the morning of her return, it was already eighty-five degrees according to the deejay on the all-news radio station that woke me up.

All news, all the time, the station promised and delivered, and so even as I lay, partially asleep, poised to wake, I learned that the pollution and humidity made it a bad day for breathing and that the body of a young pregnant Black woman had been found in a park in Northeast Washington the night before. She had been stabbed and bludgeoned.

My cynicism was ornate and entirely deserved so I knew that only someone who thought they loved her could have unleashed such a torrent of rage. What had happened to us, my mother, my father, my grandmother, and me, had not dampened my curiosity about death, but perversely seemed to stoke it. If I saw a traffic accident in which the cars had been reduced to metallic rubble, I'd linger long after others had departed. The yellow police tape enclosing the scene was not a border, but simply a line to be crossed in my imagination. Standing before the carnage, I could never decide who was luckier, the covered, lifeless bodies on stretchers (the white sheets draped but never covering everything so that a foot or a shoe or the top of a head cheated anonymity), or those suffering pain, bruises, injury, but still alive.

Did she and her assailant argue in the park? I wondered of the dead woman as I rolled over and reached behind me to turn the volume down and switch to the soulful early morning gossip, music, and banter of WHUR, or was she murdered someplace else and her body dumped near the picnic tables? Lying on my back, I felt my hands roaming the terrain of my body, as though propelled by thoughts of their own. Once my palms and fingers confirmed limbs, skin, the tautness of my stomach, the veins in my neck, a sigh of relief fled my heart. A storm had awakened me in the middle of the night. The thunder clamored and menaced. But as an aggressive sunlight filtered into my room that morning, I wanted to know if the young woman was already dead when the rain began. Did the storm revive even a moment of her life? Did she open her mouth to whisper for help, only to have raindrops clog her throat?

My lavender sheets were humid and musty and my body grew numb each time I thought of my feet hitting the floor. My mother was coming home. And though I was terrified by the thought, the night before, within the boundaries of slumber, my mother's face spilled forth like a comforting hallucination, one induced by the potent alchemy of desire.

I lay in bed until seven-thirty, the numbers on the illuminated digital clock radio a neon countdown. When I finally got up, it was because I realized that my mother might arrive earlier than she had told us. Delay on my part would give her an advantage. I did not want to be caught, unawares, in the glare of my mother's love. Premeditated affection is what she would offer. I wanted a chance to choreograph my response too.

Drying off in front of the bathroom mirror, I confronted my face. It was then, as it is now, my mother's face. Undeniably hers. We share a curvature around the jawline that defines our visage, in the estimation of others as unremitting, even stern. But for us both, I knew, there was mostly reticence trembling beneath those bones. It was an unremarkable face, the only striking feature being the thick brows we shared, their natural arc softening what the jawline seemed to imply.

I applied more makeup than usual, my hands trembling and unsure as I lined my eyes and brushed on a thick coat of mascara, hoping to erase any hint of my mother's imprint. I had hoped to create a mask. My inept artistry had merely sharpened and clarified just how much I was her child. After I dressed I walked down the hall and knocked on my grandmother's bedroom door.

"Come in," she called softly. A proliferation of plants and flowers, philodendrons and wandering Jew, African violets, even a miniature cactus, made entering Ma Adele's room comparable to stepping into a rain forest. Some days I had heard her behind her door conversing with the plants. She had named the cactus Butch and the azaleas that hung from the ceiling Aretha.

"I just got through talking to your mother a few minutes ago. Didn't you hear me calling you?" My grandmother sat enthroned in the king-sized bed among half a dozen pillows, her white hair uncombed, her purple and green floral robe open, exposing the wrinkled crevice between her breasts.

"I was in the shower," I told her as I sat on the foot of her bed, the gently perfumed scent of the pink hyacinths in bloom on her nightstand, the eucalyptus stationed in the window, making me slightly dizzy. "I didn't hear you."

"Well, it would've been nice if you could've spoken to her," she said, dismissing my defense with a skeptical glance over the tops of her bifocals as she thumbed through The Daily Word. "You come straight home from work this evening, you hear?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Straight home."

The TV remote control, a paperback mystery, an aged, tattered leather phone book, knitting needles, a ball of yarn, and a stack of bills littered my grandmother's bed. I saw as well a pile of letters from my mother. The sight of my mother's handwriting--small, precise, and legible, so unlike my own, ignited a keen spark of longing I could almost taste. The letters lay spread like a fan. The envelopes had been slit open neatly and remained white and crisp. Where had my grandmother stored them?

The letters my mother had written me had ragged envelope tops, for I had impatiently, even brutally, pried them open with my thumb the days I came home from school to find them on my bed. The pages were grimy, laden with fingerprints, and crinkled, as though they had lived a lifetime in my hands. I stored them in my desk drawer with my diary, pens, school assignments, phone numbers, spare change, loose earrings, photos of friends, verses from poems I had written, and a broken Timex watch. There the letters mingled with the other secrets I wished I could tell.

"How do you feel? Now that she's coming home?"

"I'm just glad it's over," my grandmother said, her voice thick with weariness. Yet I heard beneath that familiar sound the simmering, satisfied whisper of anticipation.

"Do you really think it is?"

Each time I looked at my grandmother's face I saw the shadow and the promise of my mother and myself. My grandmother had aged with staunch dignity. Each year her high cheekbones, Cherokee nose, and burnished dark skin grew persistent, more right. I took refuge in that face as I awaited her response, which came convicted and sure.

"Of course it's over." She chided me with a relieved laugh, looking at me in annoyance and returning to the inspirational Daily Word paragraph for that morning. My doubt inspired her to suddenly read quite loudly and with dire oratorical belief "The power of God protects me, the presence of God watches over me," looking up from the page in triumph when she had finished.

In self-defense I thought of but did not dare give voice to the quote from Faulkner I'd read once when I was writing a paper for an American literature class: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Didn't my grandmother know that? Would I be the only one who knew this, even when my mother took up residence in a room across the hall from mine?

"Teresa, it's time to move on."

"Just like that?"

"Your mother's coming home expecting to find a daughter here. Don't disappoint her."

"And what do I get?" A ripple of nausea crossed the plain of my stomach.

"You get your mother back. You're not the only one who suffered, Teresa, she suffered worst of all."

"Do you really think she suffered worst of all, do you really believe that?"

"She lost everything."

"I did too. What do I do with everything I feel?" Clumps of sickness congealed in the pit of my stomach as I bit my tongue and bunched it at the back of my throat to keep from throwing up.

"You let it go. She'll need you to love her, love her to the bone."

"I need the same thing."

"Don't turn this into a contest, to see who needs more. You ought to be glad you still have a mother."

"I haven't had a mother since she left. I won't automatically have one when she comes back."

"Don't bring that attitude into this house tonight, you hear?" she warned me, her hands suddenly implacable, serious, stationed on her hips, a sign I had slipped into deep waters.

"What if it's all I've got?" I whimpered.

"I don't believe that. Neither do you."

My grandmother's understanding edged toward me like a malevolent impulse I dared not trust. Bolting from her bed, I ran from the room, ignoring her pleas for me to come back. Before her there was nothing I could hide. Even in my flight there was nowhere really to run.

On the front porch I closed the door behind me and slumped against it for several minutes. Finally I braved a step off the porch. The grasp of the sun was punishing as I walked down the hill toward Fourteenth Street to catch the bus, wondering not when but if this day would end.

Excerpted from The Edge of Heaven by Marita Golden. Copyright © 1998 by Marita Golden. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.