The Daughters: A Novel Read Online Free

sing Kara lullabies. I don’t hum in the shower.
    “I know what the doctor said.” Last night, before the storm rolled in, he leaned across the bed where we sprawled with Kara between us. “But she doesn’t understand you like I do. As long as we’ve known each other, you’ve never gone a week without singing. Maybe not a day. You’re going to blow some kind of gasket if you can’t rehearse.”
    I let him stroke my tense jaw for a moment, then pulled away.
    “Technically, I’m going to blow a gasket if I do.”
    “You know what I mean, Lu.” John took his hand back. He looked annoyed, suspicious. I closed my eyes and rearranged my head on the pillow, unsure whether I was collecting my thoughts or feigning sleep.
    “Yes,” I said. “I know what you mean.”
    I thought about Kara’s baptism. The date chosen, the ceremony and the singing planned.
    After a few minutes I peeked out at John from between my eyelashes and found him running the back of his fingers over Kara’s belly. His love for her is so strong that if I squint I can see it issuing off him in ultraviolet rays, a beatific suffusion of light. Part of me wants to take that love away from him right now to make things easier for all involved. He would be a good father. He is, in general, a good man. But it terrifies me to see that he’s ready to give her everything, when he doesn’t really owe her anything at all.
    And it leaves me wondering: am I?

2
    U ntil my mother disappeared when I was nine, the three of us—Ada, Sara, and I—shared an apartment in Ukrainian Village, a neighborhood of Chicago that has since been taken over by the young and the chic, walking their dogs. Then as now there was a Polish grocery store where Ada picked up items she found essential: spiced sausage, pickled herring, water carbonated by a spring in her hometown in Poznań. But in my memory, the differences between past and present are stronger than the similarities. Instead of twenty-three-year-olds with razor-cut hair, I remember the neighborhood porches populated by old men with piercing eyes, smoking cigarettes that they held, pinched, half an inch away from their mouths. The scraps of conversation that whipped by in the breeze were as likely to be in Polish or Russian as English, and the air smelled like wood varnish, and pickles, and wool.
    This is where Ada chose to raise my mother, and then me. In an old world, hidden within the new.
    I didn’t mind. What child minds a home when they know no other? My bedroom in the apartment was small, but it faced the yard. We didn’t have a remarkable garden, since it takes a special sort of madness to do much planting in Chicago, where the winter cold is obliterating and the ground can be covered in snow through April. But on summer nights I could look out the window and see lightning bugs skimming over the lawn. If I sat still, I could hear the murmuration of neighborhood cats as they stalked through the bushes, calling out to prey.
    That window was also instrumental in one of my first conscious realizations about sound—that it changes depending on its environment. I must have been very young, maybe four years old, not yet in any formal training for my voice. But I was big enough to reach the window latch and raise the sash, and proud enough of my independence that I didn’t mind struggling a little bit to do so. I was singing something silly—a little do-re-me, a trill, a scale. I had to shove the weight of my shoulder underneath the sash to get the right height, and when I did I was thrilled with myself: I stuck my head outside and bellowed my song into the open air.
    Immediately I knew: something was different. I was so surprised that I hit my head as I pulled it back in and felt my tongue gulp up against the roof of my mouth. In the safety of my room’s four walls, I turned and sang the same few notes, feeling the air rush up from my lungs and strum through my throat. My eyes widened as I listened. Inside, the