MOMMY ISSUES | Tamber

24

The tiny kitchenette was a battlefield. Jars of strained baby food littered the counter, their contents smeared in vibrant swaths across the tray of Avana's high chair. Tara hovered at her daughter's eye level, a streak of pureed carrots marking one flushed cheek as she pleaded with her little girl.

"C'mon, sweetheart... just one more bite for Mama, pleeeease?" Tara's tone was cajoling, her expression one of desperate persuasion. She held out a heaping spoonful of orangey mush, hoping against hope. But Avana merely scrunched her button nose and squealed in protest, flailing her miniature fists wildly.

"Avana... why must you make feeding time a battle every single day?" Tara groaned, then tried again, wheedling, "For me? Say 'ma-ma' and open up so I don't turn into a crazy person?"

She emphasized the "ma-ma" with wide, entreating eyes, the spoon hovering patiently despite the futility of her efforts. Avana giggled at her mother's antics, her mouth agape in delight.

The tender moment shattered as a familiar voice cut through the chaotic tableau with the force of gilt razors.

"Dear god, don't tell me you're still struggling with feeding her," Amber's voice came from the entrance.

Tara's head whipped around at the sudden intrusion, her shoulders tensing with each echoing footfall of Amber's approach. Their eyes met, and Tara's breath hitched in familiar, wounded reminiscence. Amber's mercurial beauty never failed to stun—this morning, her platinum waves tumbled carelessly around sculpted features currently arranged in a bemused, vaguely disdainful expression that wounded more profoundly than outright malice.

Tara floundered, self-conscious and frantic. She straightened defensively, lifting Avana from the tarnished high chair and clutching her daughter close. Avana simply watched with wide, adoring eyes as this radiant new presence shifted into her orbit, her chubby fingers instinctively reaching out toward Amber, making RO-RO sounds.

Amber considered the grasping digits. "Well. At least she has the right idea, even if she can't quite nail the syllables." Her tone was aloof, distantly praising a simpleton's effort with hints of her ingrained arrogance. She bestowed Avana with a cursory smile, detached and hollow despite its technical perfection.

"She'll get there soon," Tara said, her voice wounded. "She's... she's got a lot of words already."

"If you say so," Amber replied derisively.

Circling the beleaguered mother like a lioness prowling her prey, Amber inspected the devastated kitchenette with upswept brows. Her silent condemnation needed little enhancement. At last, she returned her gaze to Tara, her green eyes flaying her with a single sweep.

"I'll be brief, because clearly I interrupted yet another charming display of your ineptitude," Amber said.

Tara winced sharply but refused to squirm under Amber's contempt as she once would have. She tightened her grip on Avana, determined to project a serene front against the rising onslaught of acidic mortification.

"I'm on my way to Lyon for an acquisitions summit," Amber continued drily. "I simply thought, if you somehow found your way past these... obstacles—" she gestured widely—"you might like to spend a few days living as a civilized adult again."

It was a barbed offer, doubly goading as Amber intended. But the lacerations were as ambient background noise to Tara now. She merely frowned, lips parting to respond when—

"Ma... ma!" Avana said distinctly, brightly.

Both women froze at the utterance, identical shock rippling across their features in stark mirror-image. Tara gasped quietly, her hands framing Avana's beaming features as she radiated full-watt pride. Hints of relieved tears shimmered in her eyes.

"Oh my god... Vana, you said your first—!" Tara whispered rapturously. She snuggled her daughter fervently, grinning fit to split her face as a freshly liberated stream of "ma-ma-ma-MA!" pealed from Avana in gleeful repetition.

It was the purest, most sanctified joy imaginable. For Tara, that incandescent realization burned away any lingering vestiges of Amber's mockery like a gossamer fog beneath the ascendant sun. She gazed at her child with transcendent, all-encompassing adoration, never more opulent than in this crowning milestone. Avana calmed at last, her amber curls haloed by the earthen splashes dotting her brow, beaming up at her doting mother with soulful recognition.

Tara drank her in with rapturous reverence, utterly oblivious to the fact that beside them, Amber's expression was an equal mask of abject awe. It was a tableau of startling reverence, fractured only as—

"Mama..." Avana gurgled happily.

Amber's breath stilled in her throat with the force of a steel band compressing her lungs. In that pause, every atom of the universe seemed to suspend, binding mother and child and long-estranged wife in a crystalline beat of singularity.

At last, Tara's swimming gaze flicked instinctively toward Amber, registering her deliberate stillness. The silk streams of Tara's dark locks quivered lightly in the periphery, intimating her quiet inhalation as her radiance dissipated beneath Amber's glacial stare.

Though Amber betrayed nothing save that marmoreal facade, tendrils of something inexpressible now wound through the emerald faerie lights gilding her irises, twisting ever deeper into their opaque, lambent shallows. For the first time, Tara recognized that expression, or perhaps simply the pervasive emptiness inhabiting it. Her wounded heart cracked anew, even as Avana blissfully babbled on, unaware of the fault lines splitting her parents' world, yawning wider than ever before.

-

Amber descended the weathered brownstone steps and crossed the cracked sidewalk at a crisp clip. Her footfalls carried her to a parked town car where a uniformed driver waited dutifully beside the open rear door.

"Your bags, Mrs. Freeman?" the driver queried perfunctorily.

Amber paused, struck by the query. The gleam returned to her eye, her jaw tensing fractionally before she shook her head once.

"I won't be accompanying you to Lyon after all," Amber said tightly.

"Ma'am?" The driver's brow furrowed in confusion.

But Amber simply swept past without explanation, leaving the hapless driver and the overture to pale civilization behind as she bore off alone down the bustling Brooklyn street. A solitary siren compelled ever deeper into her self-wrought oblivion, without mooring or destiny to steer her wayward passage through the shrouding mists.

Only an echo trailed her wake, two crystalline syllables intoning the simplest resonance in all existence:

"Mama... mama..."