By eleven o’clock, we’d been hiking for almost two hours, and the morning chill had transformed to a humidity that settled thickly on my skin. The canopy of trees blocked any chance of a breeze, and I was feeling more out of shape than usual. My daughter wouldn’t walk next to me, or even near me, but that was okay. After nineteen years, I was used to following her.

I could see the red flash of Delaney’s ponytail bobbing about fifty yards ahead of me on the trail. She’d started coloring the tips of her hair when she came home at the end of the semester, trying to make her new self easier for everyone else to see. She kept applying the temporary color until it was a permanent thing. The collars of her least favorite t-shirts stained to a milky pink even after a little bleach on the warm cycle. I washed them although she insisted she could do her own laundry. Every few minutes, that red ponytail would stop swinging as she paused. She was looking back, making sure I was still behind her.

The sun-faded map posted at the trailhead had warned in bold letters to keep the river on our left on the way out and on the right after we turned to hike back. Just like channel markers when we went out on the boat. Red right returning. I’d committed the directions to memory, nervous about the places with natural bridges where we’d have to cross side creeks and streams made from mountain runoffs. I always liked to know exactly where to go. 

But the river was really just a tame thing. It swept past rocks without churning white froth or making more than polite gurgles. The falls we’d been heading toward, though, were wild. Feral. Something to hear long before we could see them. They rumbled through the slices of light between trees like far-away thunder. It had been hoodie-cool when we set out, but now I had the sleeves tied around my waist, resenting even that much extra fabric touching any part of me. Drips of sweat coursed down my back, soaked my bra.


When Delaney first suggested this road trip to see the Georgia waterfalls, I rearranged the mail on the kitchen island and counted to five before answering. Her attention was a doe that appeared from nowhere and could vanish just as quickly. I had to be careful not to scare it away with big gestures or quick answers. “We could go the second week of July if you want,” I said finally. She nodded, our business concluded.

I’d always made a point to spend time with my daughter. I did the same for her older brothers, but they were easy, pleased with a stop for fries or ice cream or going to pick out a new shirt or pair of shoes. My husband and I split the duty of getting them to Taekwondo and lacrosse practice. When they leapt from the car without saying thank you, it never hurt.

Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that she was the only girl as well as the youngest, Delaney’s company was harder to come by. She’d shrug off walking the dogs with me, riding to the grocery store even with a shameless bribe of candy, or, as she got older, an offer of a shopping trip or pedicure. She’d head upstairs and close a door between us while I held my keys at the bottom of the steps. My gestures grew grander: she said yes to seeing Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and even Wicked on Broadway. Her excitement and appreciation were always prompt and sincere, but so was my sense of having to earn my time with her.

Home from college for the summer, Delaney’s readiness to return, her desire to get back to the world she’d built for herself, was a constant vibration that coursed through the house. When she went to work and barely breezed a goodbye in my direction, when she started packing before she’d even gotten an email to make a move-in appointment, when she sat reading the textbook she’d already bought with that look of furious concentration she always had, I felt strangled silent. I hoped the trip would be a break in a dam, a flow of words and confidences and memories and feelings, but I knew—I really knew—I wouldn’t hear the words I most wanted from her. I’d exceeded an amateur level of managing my expectations, but hope was always a persistent thing.

After huffing up a little hill, I paused with my hands on my knees, looking up to spot the red ponytail like a flag in the distance. “It’s only hair,” I’d told my mother. “It’s not a battle worth having.” But Mom was always one to force things, to wrestle for control, to celebrate Pyrrhic parental victories.


She wasn’t the one who taught me to be generous with words. Mom said, “I love you,” when she wanted to, not when it was what I most needed. I had to teach myself how to find her love in the car when she drove me to meet friends at the skating rink on Friday nights, in the clean sheets that appeared on my bed every single Saturday, in the hours she worked to make sure I didn’t have to take out student loans, in the cool hands on my feverish forehead. But I resented having to search.

Much later I learned how hard it could be to know where and how to look at your children and how sometimes you were peering at them through the filters of marriage and work and the feelings of never doing the right thing at the right time. I learned that, really, words were just words. There were lessons Mom was teaching me all along, and there was so much love as well. Still, I wanted to be a different kind of mother, pouring love like liquid, soaking my children. I wanted them fully and completely and at all times hydrated. But Delaney didn’t say the words back, and I was the one left thirsting.

When we brought her home from Moscow, a skinny red-cheeked baby who twisted and stiffened in my arms, I’d whispered Ya lyublyu tebya over and over. No one in the orphanage would have cradled her in the blue-black hour before dawn, leaning close to her little seashell ear to murmur to her heart. But I wondered if the Russian words, thick and clumsy in my mouth, would strike some native chord in her, unlock something that the flat English, that my hands, my heart, couldn’t. Russians are not known for being demonstrative, so maybe there was some soil in her soul where that stoicism took root. Maybe it was passed through the umbilical cord from her biological mother, a bond that could never be ours.

My toes tucked under a root, and I stumbled down on a knee. A red drop welled up and poised on the sweaty surface, and I wiped it off with my thumb and paused with my other hand against a tree, oozing its own life blood. I balanced my way to the river and dunked my hand in the icy water. I rubbed and rubbed at the sap, but it was still sticky. I brought my palm to my face and inhaled the inside of the forest, a hidden interior world so rich that it could perfume everything.

“Mama?”

Her voice reached me, and I heard the concern, wrapped it around me for a moment. If I didn’t answer, how many times would she call for me? How long before she retraced her steps to find me? Would she run?

“Just catching my breath!”

“We’re almost there. I’ll meet you at the top.”

A chorus of crickets filled the silence, and a persistent breeze finally reached me through the trees as I climbed the bank to return to the trail. It was almost a six-mile hike to the falls, and I knew the way back would not be as difficult because it was downhill on now-familiar terrain. I knew the slippery spots, the places I could stumble. Returning home from a turning point is supposed to be easier.

            She was waiting for me at the end of the trail where a wooden fence barricaded the way forward. “It looks like we can get closer to the falls if we keep going,” she said, looking at the narrow path beyond the fence. I felt her wondering if I would keep following her if she ducked under that barrier. Despite always being sensible and pragmatic, she’d learned how to push past fears and take calculated risks to avoid regret. “I don’t want to wish I’d done it,” she’d said about jumping off the high-dive, parasailing, going to the dance alone. There was something so naked about her when she measured the risks against her desires. I could taste her fear now of falling, of bones hitting rocks, of lungs filling with water. I could feel her spine trying to stiffen.

I moved past her and ducked under the fence, leading the way, moving slowly, knowing not to hold my hand back for her to take even though the way was steep. She might have taken it because it was offered, to be polite, not because she wanted to and certainly not because she needed me to steady her steps. Other feet had made this path past where it was safer to stay, to look at the falls from a distance, and I followed that groove in the dirt and didn’t look back. She would call out if she needed me. She’d know I’d always turn back for her. She’d know I’d run.

We climbed up from the path onto an outcropping of rocks overlooking the midpoint of the falls. Vertigo tipped the world for a second as I looked up and then followed the water to where it crashed into the pool about a hundred feet below where we stood side by side. There was no guardrail, no rope cordoning off a safety zone. I kept my distance from the edge, sprayed wet and slick, and forced myself not to hold out my arm to keep Delaney from moving past me. She stood next to me without touching.

The water roared over anything we might have said, but there weren’t any words to raise up over the noise. We didn’t take out our phones for pictures; what was right in front of us was way too big to cram into a small space. I was wondering when she’d turn, ready to start the hike back to the car, but Delaney moved closer and leaned her head on my shoulder, her sweat mingling with mine. In our silence next to the water’s thunder, I could hear everything she’d never said.

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