Half Life

as tall as I was now. She must be ten, or was it eleven? Practically all grown. It was what children did, I supposed, grew up. Except for mine, born too early, born blue.
“Marya.” Pani Zorawska was saying my name, and I shook my head. If she’d been talking to me, I hadn’t heard what she’d said. She put her hand on my shoulder. “Let’s you and I go out to the porch and talk, shall we?”
I glanced at Kaz. His cheeks were pink, his eyes beaming, and he was laughing now at something his brother, Stanislaw, was telling him. I rose, and he noticed me again, just briefly. He squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back, then let my fingers trail away. I followed his mother behind the dining room, out onto the covered porch, which had an entire wall of windows that overlooked the cold, reckless sea.
“It’s so beautiful to look at it, isn’t it? It could almost deceive you.” Pani Zorawska pointed toward the bright blue water, but she stared directly at me, raising her eyebrows. I nodded, uneasy here all alone with her for the first time in so many years. She sighed and patted a rocking chair, gesturing for me to sit down. I did, and then she sat in one next to me. We rocked for a little while, staring at the wild expanse of sea, saying nothing at all.
Once, I had admired her, back in Szczuki, when I had cared for her younger children for years and she had treated me with kindness. And when Kaz and I first secretly got engaged, I imagined she might come to treat me as a daughter, that I might have a mother again. But that was before I knew what she really thought of me, that I was not worthy of her son. And here I was all these years later, having not yet achieved my university degree, having failed my husband and myself and my baby girl. It bothered me that perhaps she had not been completely wrong.
“These past years have been unkind to you, haven’t they, Marya?” She spoke matter-of-factly now, without sympathy or derision.
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling a deep need to defend myself, my choices. “I wouldn’t say that.” I had been sad and empty now for months, but somewhere, hovering just behind all that, there had been joy, hadn’t there? Even if I couldn’t quite remember the sweetness of it now—it had been there. She did not know about my Flying University in Loksow, about the way love could supersede hunger, longing, as Kaz and I lay in bed together, holding on to each other so many nights.
“Wouldn’t you?” She tsked softly with her tongue. “You and my son live like beggars, neither one of you educated as you could be.”
I wanted to say that she could’ve accepted that her son loved me many years ago, that I loved him, too. She could’ve accepted us, helped him with his tuition at Jagiellonian. Surely, he would’ve finished his course of study by now, and we could’ve moved to Paris. Kaz might’ve taught at the Sorbonne and I could’ve gone to university myself. But I bit my tongue, said none of that to her. “Why did you invite us here?” I asked instead. Surely, there had been many family trips without us in the last five years. So she had summoned a doctor last summer when I’d needed one, when Kaz had begged for her help, but then she had disappeared again without so much as even a letter expressing sorrow for our loss. So what did she really want with us now?
“Is it so wrong that I would want to see my oldest son? That I would want all my children to be together in one house, after all this time?”
“Of course not,” I said, feeling just the slightest twinge of compassion for her. Kaz had missed his family, and they had missed him too. I wrote weekly letters to my sisters and Papa, and though I could not see any of them as often as I would like, we stayed in close touch.
She looked away from me, off toward the Baltic again. Neither one of us spoke for a few more moments. And then she cleared her throat and said it, what she had brought me here to say all along: “Kazimierz is young still. It is not too late for him to be happy.”
I nodded, agreeing with that much. Kaz would finish his education, eventually. He would get a better job and we would move into a nicer apartment, and even if my body continued to betray me, my mind never would, and I would continue to learn any way and as much as I was able.
“My husband knows a priest who would be willing to annul your marriage, given what . . . happened last summer.”
The distant buzzing finally stopped; her words were sharp and perfectly clear. I felt a stabbing pain in my stomach, a phantom pain, the ache of my empty womb, my beautiful blue Zosia. Annul the marriage?
“In exchange, we would be willing to give you the money you need to move to Paris, attend university like you’ve always dreamed. Or, you don’t even have to attend university—you can take the tuition money and do whatever you wish with it. You could start over, too, close to your sisters.” She was still talking.
I stared at her, unable to speak. I loved Kaz. I would always love Kaz. But could another woman, a woman his mother approved of, give him everything I couldn’t? He could have the education he desired, along with his family’s love, his family’s money, and perhaps, most of all, his own child.
And Paris. Pursuing my education there had been my dream for so very long. But I put my hand on my empty stomach now and wondered if that was really what I still desired most.
“Matka!” Kaz’s voice pierced the room, and I jumped. I