What I remember, my whole life, is a woman with a blue flower on her wrist, carrying me through the dark.”
My mother made a sound I had never heard her make.
“I’ve spent fifty years,” Dr. Okafor said, “looking at every wrist I could. I became a doctor partly so I could see thousands of them. I never found another flower.
Until today.”
He turned his own wrist toward her.
“The people who were saved got the flower too. So we’d know each other, if we ever found each other again.
You’re one of the carriers.
Aren’t you.”
It wasn’t a question.
My mother — my quiet, ordinary mother, who had never once told me a single interesting thing about her youth — began to cry.
“Mom,” I whispered. “What is he talking about? What carriers? Saved from what?”
She looked at me, fifty years of a secret sitting in her eyes.
