An Inheritance
words by Jasmine Wang, art by Yasmin Bakhit
The first day she arrived home, it was remarkably a sunny morning. It was a resentful kind of sun though, a rancorous one that threatens to steal your skin for kindling. She squinted towards the screaming sky, eyes shielded. Her mother would’ve hated this heat, which is to say, she taught herself to love it.
Shoving open the scalding front door, a wave of déjà vu and discomfort settled into her skin. She scanned the living room, still lingering in the doorway like a stranger. It all felt foreign now, the dirty laundry strewn across the taupe carpeted floors, the stacks of now useless papers lining the walls covered in peeling wallpaper, the empty cups and trays of half-eaten single frozen dinners littering the lopsided coffee table.
She hadn’t returned in years. And she still didn’t want to be here now. But it was her burden now to purge the house. The will had decreed it. She sucked her teeth, thinking of her mother writing her last words with a flourish and a smug smile. How her mother was so full of spite. She had inherited the house, and in the process, a living damnation.
She finally stepped in, her lungs filling with dust. She kept her shoes on, but she was especially careful to tiptoe around the egregious stains. How would she ever sell this wretched place? She walked over to the couch, sinking into the hollow left by her mother’s body. She studied the coffee table further, picking up worn pages of sheet music with newly scribbled notes, likely the latest of her mother’s string of fleeting infatuations. She glanced at the upright piano, plastered against the corner of the room, and tiptoed over. Her fingers grazed the yellowed keys that were stained with decades of salty, discordant tears. She never was able to harmonize the shrill bitterness of her mother’s screams with her hours of lyrical practice. She jerked back her hand. The house was silent now, and she hoped it would stay that way. With a scoff, she turned away from the piano and tossed the battered sheet music back among the rest of the coffee table’s junk.
She made her way up the narrow staircase towards her childhood bedroom, which she expected was probably now converted into some makeshift writing studio or home gym. Who cared anyways? Her childhood was now long gone. But to her surprise, her room was still preserved, everything the same as the day she left home eight years ago at eighteen.
It was more pristine than the rest of the house—everything tucked in its rightful place, just how she liked it. She strolled carefully through the room, this museum of her childhood. Her fingers grazed old posters of now obsolete boy bands and traced the scratches on her wooden dresser. It was all so uncannily clean, even more so than when she left—not even a speck of dust.
She noticed a comfortable cavity in her duvet—one mirroring the divet on the couch downstairs—and sat down. Why would her mother keep it all the same? Much less, why would her mother clean her room? Grasping the soft sheets beneath her, she remembered her first kiss. Her first rebellion at sixteen. Her mother had always poked and prodded her about boyfriends and crushes, always offered to buy her new dresses if she wanted to go on a first date, always jokingly bothered her best friend, Dakota, about secret boyfriends.
What her mother didn’t know was that nothing set her heart more aflame than that one hot summer afternoon when the AC in their house was broken and Dakota asked to borrow a tank top. What her mother didn’t know was that as Dakota stripped, peeling off her sticky t-shirt, for the first time, the air in her room felt humid and thick with teenage lust.
As Dakota planted a soft kiss on her temple, she understood that love is like a religion you discover on your own and Dakota was hers to worship. Kissing on her checkered duvet, with hungry hands and dimpled laughter, it was the first time she was made to feel beautiful. They clung to each other like it meant survival. Their bodies clashed together, awkward and brackish, yet still they flowed into each other like a river running into an unknown sea. She wondered where Dakota was now with her wild knotted coils that crashed against her delicate collarbones and her doe-brown eyes.
She smirked, thinking about their pact to camp out in the backyard every night for two weeks straight to practice their survival skills in case an apocalypse struck at any moment. They were obsessed with The Walking Dead at the time. She remembered sneaking shots from a bottle of cheap vodka that Dakota’s older brother had traded them for a month’s worth of favors. She remembered how Dakota’s starshadow skin glimmered against the satin of that cold wintry night, and how when she stared into Dakota’s sparkling eyes, the universe felt infinite. She chuckled—they never did finish that vodka. After that first freezing night, they ended up bedridden with the flu for the next two weeks, knuckles purple and noses runny.
Curious, she rose to rummage through her closet. The vodka should still be there, buried beneath all her stuffed animals and other relics from her childhood. And by god, if there ever was a time she needed a drink, it was now. Tunneling through endless pairs of capris and peplum tops, she finally reached the bottom. Yet, to her dismay, no vodka. She slumped back onto her knees. Her mother must have gone through her things after all.
Surrounded by piles of shabby clothes, she stared into the depths of her closet illuminated by a blistering beam of sunlight. She noticed a small wooden box crammed between all the clutter. She reached for it with familiarity, its walnut sides etched with small poppies, and its hem sealed with a weary golden latch. She fiddled with the clasp, but it stubbornly remained shut. Suddenly, memory echoed across her skin. The box was her mother’s.
She jerked her head towards the door, half-expecting her to be there, eyes boiling with rage for fussing with her precious jewelry box. She narrowed her eyes in the direction of where her mother would be. The jewelry box had spent her childhood perched on top of her mother’s wardrobe, always just out of reach. She was never allowed to touch it without explanation—just another arbitrary decree, her mother playing God.
How her mother was such a hypocrite, never allowing her to even come close to her stupid jewelry box. And yet, even now, her mother’s scent had infiltrated the air in her room—a pungent malt, like heavy fermented molasses laced with a punch of allspice.
She let out a sharp breath. She just wanted one swig of her own vodka. Why did her mother sack her room? Couldn’t she just leave her alone?
She dug her fingernails deeper underneath the gold clasp with more urgency, but it would not relent. What else did her mother take? Old letters? Her diary? Of course, her mother wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to rifle through her things. Her mother never understood boundaries—dumb American concept, she had always said. With nails scraping and banging against the box’s perimeter, she refused to surrender to the obstinate box.
Stupid jewelry box.
Why did her mother even bury this stupid jewelry box in her closet? For once, why couldn’t she keep her shit, her mess, in her own damn room?
Stupid jewelry box.
Her mother never learned the definition of privacy, she seethed. After all, English was her second language.
Stupid jewelry box.
With her mother’s fury bubbling in her blood, she gripped the box with a swift arm and chucked it across the room.
Stupid jewelry box.
Its seams cracked against the opposite wall, collapsing to the floor. Finally open.
As the box’s contents spilled out on the floor like splattered guts, she sank into herself, her heart heaving with regret for her own bigotry. Even if her mother was nosy, she had to admit that her mother wasn’t stupid. In fact, it’s what made her hate her mother even more; her intellect made her ignorance all the more frustrating.
She dragged her body over to the jewelry box that was now crumpled on the floor. Guilt weighed her body down like an anvil. She swept the box and its contents into her palms like a wounded bird, gently plucking out a broken gold chain from the pile. She would recognize it anywhere. The now-knotted chain was thin as gossamer, feathery like a fleck of sunlight. It held a lustrous pendant, round like a droplet of water—an heirloom from her mother, a gift at birth. She set the jewelry box in her lap and twirled the small bead in her fingers, as if playing with moonlight.
Caressing the necklace’s quiet glow with the shade of her palms, she thought of the last time she saw the necklace…and her mother. The day she left home at eighteen. Her mother’s words, a flurry of shooting daggers:
It’s just a phase.
You’re confused.
She’s just your best friend.
Not in my house.
Not my daughter.
She remembered yanking the necklace off and hurling it at the floor, eyes wet with feverish despair. Her mother would never understand.
Fine, not your daughter.
She raced to her room with indignance. Her mother’s bellows pounded against her bedroom door, as she furiously stuffed a duffel bag. Then more shrieking, more slammed doors, and then…And then, silence.
She looked back down, taking a closer look at the box’s contents. She knit her brows. The box was filled with identical pendants, all the same as the raindrop that her mother had told her was a “one-of-a-kind family treasure.” She ran her fingers through the charms as they all dripped through her fingers like a small pool of gold. She held up the necklace again, strangely, with no more fury simmering inside her. Instead, she erupted with laughter. Smoldering snorts rained down all around her, singeing the edges of her carpet and her bedspread.
After a stinging fit of laughter that left her head throbbing, she finally sighed. What a shame that the necklace was broken now. It was surely worth a pretty penny. Maybe she’d get it fixed—see how much it was worth.
—
The second day she got to work. She found a small stack of worn sticky notes on the living room coffee table and a loose pen. Three sticky notes. Three piles. Keep. Sell. Trash. She already knew the first item she’d put in that last pile. She skipped up the stairs to her old bedroom to grab the jewelry box. She rolled her eyes, one-of-a-kind. She was ready to be rid of it all, all those cheap droplet-shaped pendants—just another reminder of her mother’s crocodile tears. Before she set the small box down, she picked out her old broken necklace and stuffed it into the pocket of her jeans. She’d take it to a jeweler later today. At least if she made a quick buck, it would make this infernal task worth it.
She decided to start in her mother’s room. She thought that if she stripped it first at least the air would feel less oppressive. Maybe finally she would be able to take a full breath.
Opening her mother’s bedroom door, she was met with a reeking stench. The air was different from the rest of the house, hotter and more humid like the Amazon. She scrunched her nose and held back a retch to assess the damage, almost gagging in disbelief. How could someone even exist in this living death? With the floor completely obscured with rumpled rot, she became an explorer traversing uncharted territory. She hurried downstairs to the kitchen to search for armor, afraid that if she took the wrong step, she would be sucked into all the decay like quicksand. Returning with fortification—trash bags wrapped securely around her feet and cavernous kitchen gloves that gaped at her elbows—she snaked her way from the door to the closet, through the sea of dirty clothes that had swallowed the floor, picking up used tissues and meaningless trinkets along the way.
Her mother had always loved things. A daughter of poverty, her mother was a girl who grew into an ebay addict, a scavenger who couldn’t help but stop by every single yard sale advertised on the side of the road. Her mother spent sweltering summer afternoons, haggling for useless items—tattered clothes, blackened pots, bruised dressers. Unrelentingly thrifty.
As a little girl, she always found it magical, the way her mother could conjure stuffed animals and dolls for her, even as they had “indoor picnic dinners,” where they ate a disparate collection of pantry items that her mother had assembled, on their living room floor. Now she found it all pathological and wasteful, the way her mother blew through their monthly budget meant for groceries and utility bills on chipped tea sets and scratched picture frames.
She looked out the window at the setting sun. A whole day had passed and she had only conquered the floor of her mother’s bedroom. Frustrated by her stagnant progress, she haphazardly swept her arm across the bed to gather all the books, but instead, they all clattered to the ground.
Rubbing her temples, she knelt down to pick up the books, shoving self-help book after self-help book into the trash bag, until she arrived on a bible. Surprised, she began to flip through its pages. Her mother had never been religious. She landed on one dog-eared page, a single verse underlined.
Every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them. — Matthew 7:16-20
The verse shoved a bitter irony down her throat—that they were more alike than she cared to admit. But at least, her mother knew they were both rotten. With a resigned sigh, she shut the bible and stuffed it into the trash bag along with the rest of the books.
—
The third day she tackled the garage, and the fourth, she battled the basement. She sorted through piles and piles of putrefaction. Staring at her mother’s filth, all the trinkets and junk leaking out the seams of drawers and storage boxes, she thought of Hercules, how he cleaned the Augean stables in a single day. But she was not a child of a god and this excavation felt like it would take at least three lifetimes.
The house was crawling with haunted memories. The yard sale bike with a broken basket—once a noble steed that accompanied her and Dakota through imaginary landscapes as gallant knights, jousting for the affection of fair ladies and pedaling tales of valor and love. Among the clutter, there too laid a Rubik's Cube, a silent challenge left unresolved, still heavy with Dakota’s promise to teach her how to solve it. She found stacks of watermarked family photos—some of her and her mom, but even more from families she didn’t recognize. Her mother always loved to collect memories, always more focused on the ones that weren’t her own.
The fifth day as she kneeled on the ground, scrubbing the blackened grime that clung to crevices of her mother’s bathroom tiles, she got a call. It was the jeweler. The necklace was ready, fixed and ready to be sold. She would go pick it up tomorrow.
—
The sixth day she returned to the jeweler’s. The jeweler welcomed her back with kind eyes, shuffling to the back to grab the fixed necklace while heartily asking questions about its origins.
A maternal heirloom, how beautiful, he remarked. I wish jewelry could talk, I know it surely is storied. She smiled awkwardly in return, holding back that she would probably sell it for cheap on Facebook marketplace when she got home.
Would you like me to help you put it back on, he asked. She hastily shook her head and told him that she was in a rush.
Oh, my apologies, here you go young lady, he smiled. Thank you for trusting me to mend it, the marksmanship on this locket is truly extraordinary. You surely are lucky to have a physical reminder of family. Before she turned away, she paused. Maybe he misspoke.
Locket? she questioned.
Oh, I promise I didn’t read the note inside, but I must say, your mother must have loved you so.
Note inside? Her face froze in confusion, she never even knew it opened.
You didn’t know that it opens? The man laughed, Here, let me show you. With a tender touch, he barely tapped the bottom of the teardrop, cracking it open. He was right, inside there lay a wrinkled sliver of paper folded in on itself. She stood there, stunned, as the jeweler carefully extracted the note and placed it in her trembling hands. Trepidation washed over her like a wave crashing against the shore.
Unfolding the delicate paper, she felt a breath catch in her throat. The ink had faded with time, but the words remained etched in her mother’s messy handwriting.
My love, with you always. The words imbued with a gentleness she had never known her mother to express. Tears welled in her eyes, blurring the line of script before her. She quickly brushed her sleeve against her eyes to catch falling tears, as she apologized to the jeweler who softly helped her fold the note back into the locket.
She rushed home, swallowing hot homesick tears. She broke past the front door and immediately sank into the trash piles, digging through to find that cursed jewelry box.
She had been born a daughter of shame. She was born in her mother’s shadow, and spent her childhood trying not to bleed on her mother’s carpet or breathe on her mother’s skin. But it had calloused her own skin, turned it jagged and rough, as though she had lived thousands of lives in just one body, in just one lifetime. She had believed that this was all that her world—which is to say her mother—had wanted for her. But now, this one locket. That note. Now, what did this all mean?
She finally arrived on the jewelry box, prying it open to pilfer the pendants. With renewed fervor, she began tapping the bottom of each teardrop, mirroring the movement of the jeweler. As each locket popped open, each held a small note. All the same messy script, yet each with its own unique message. She rummaged through each note, until she found one locket, more pregnant than the rest. It bursted open, its note longer and more intact than the rest.
Matthew 7:16-20 — The Lord is wrong, you have always been the sweetest, even when I have been rotten. I am sorry, my kind daughter, I love you. I always will. Lord knows I have never been good at letting things or people go.
She had spent years trying not to need her mother. Though loving her mother was not easy, hating her had been harder still. For so long, she had yearned for her mother, longing for a love that always seemed just out of reach. But now, with these heartfelt lines in her hands, she was consumed with confusion. As tears began to drip down into her lap filled with gold, she clutched the notes to her chest, begging her mother’s love to seep into her heart.
She had clung to this grudge like a hand. But now, gripping these weathered slips of paper, she realized it was time to unclasp. She opened her palms to look again at the notes and began to laugh. In the fury of her tear-stained smile, she realized that her mother was dead now and that she would never be able to hug her, or say sorry and I love you all in the same breath. She would forever be corrupt with grief, and she would have to continue living, always just a bit emptier in perpetual yearning. For, there are plenty of ways to die, but only love can kill you and keep you alive in the same breath.
She stood, trudging through the trashed living room to the front door. She stepped outside their home with a hollow heart into heaving heat. Looking up, she pretended not to notice how quiet the sky was on this Sunday morning. And with a last whisper, she confessed that she too hated this heat.
