The Mothers

The narrative structure in these chapters juxtaposes the public, totalizing voice of the Mothers with the private, fractured consciousness of the characters, highlighting the novel’s tension between communal perception and interior reality. The chapters open with the collective “We,” a narrative entity that interprets past events with the benefit of hindsight. “After a secret’s been told,” they declare, “everyone becomes a prophet” (148). Their perspective is confident, cohesive, and imbued with communal moral authority. In contrast, the interior sections delve into the uncertain struggles of Nadia and Aubrey. The Mothers see Aubrey as an idealized, pious figure who will redeem their church, yet the narrative reveals her anxieties about marriage and her impulsive kiss with a stranger. Similarly, while the Mothers have no access to Nadia’s  life once she leaves Oceanside, the narrative shows her internal battle with grief and the renewal of her romantic hopes with Shadi. This structural choice denies a single, authoritative truth, forcing a negotiation between the communal record and private experience. The Mothers’ voice represents the gravity of community memory and judgment that shapes, and often misinterprets, the characters’ lives.

These chapters demonstrate The Corrosive Power of Secrets, as each secret compels new layers of deception that destabilize relationships. The initial secret of Nadia’s termination of pregnancy is compounded by revelations that reframe its meaning. Mrs. Sheppard’s confession that she provided the money for the procedure reveals her intervention as a manipulative, self-serving act. Her admission, “I helped you do that vile thing and now you need to leave my son alone” (186), shows that Nadia’s subsequent exile was built on a falsehood designed to protect the Sheppard family’s reputation as pillars of the community. Other secrets echo this deception. Luke’s past theft of Elise’s prayer book, which he returns to Nadia, is another resurrected secret used to forge a charged intimacy. Aubrey, in turn, creates her own secret by concealing her encounter with the Marine, an act of private rebellion against the life of submission she is about to enter. The effect is a cascading system of concealment where truth is withheld or weaponized, preventing genuine connection.

The reunion of Nadia and Aubrey brings two divergent paths of young womanhood into focus. Both women are growing into adulthood in the absence of their mothers and in the aftermath of trauma. Their divergent responses to these similar circumstances make them foils to each other. Nadia has constructing an identity of independence, traveling far from Oceanside for college and seeking to leave her childhood community behind. Her return home suggests that a clean break with the past is impossible. Aubrey, by contrast, has sought safety within the structures of the same church Nadia sought to escape, and her marriage to Luke represents the culmination of this quest. Yet her anxiety and impulsive actions reveal an inner life at odds with her pious exterior. The beach scene, where Aubrey remains covered while Nadia is at ease in a bikini, offers a visual metaphor for their differing levels of comfort with their own bodies. Their friendship becomes a site of both refuge and painful comparison, and Nadia’s secrecy about Luke strikes Aubrey as a betrayal of the trust that has been their mutual lifeline.

The re-emergence of Elise’s prayer book functions as a symbol connecting the novel’s concerns with maternal absence, occluded histories, and the fallibility of memory. The book is a tangible relic of Nadia’s mother, but its journey—from Elise, to Luke, to Nadia—mirrors the way secrets and trauma are passed between people. Luke’s return of the book is a calculated gesture at intimacy, a way to re-insert himself into Nadia’s emotional world by offering a piece of her own stolen history. For Nadia, the object becomes a failed oracle. She pores over its pages, searching her mother’s marginalia for an answer to the question of her death by suicide, but she finds only cryptic notes. The book’s opacity symbolizes the ultimate unknowability of other people’s lives. The prayer book, an object of faith, offers no clarity. Instead, it becomes freighted with an emotional weight it cannot resolve.

These chapters culminate in an exploration of Motherhood as Both Aspiration and Burden, Bennet juxtaposes various maternal figures who each embody a different vision of motherhood. Nadia imagines that her mother’s death by suicide means a rejection of her life as a mother, and Nadia herself thinks of motherhood as a trap in part because of her mother’s example. She searches the prayer book for clues as to why her mother ended her life, but also to find out who her mother was outside the role of mother. Meanwhile, Mrs. Sheppard embodies the role of the mother as enforcer of social norms and guardian of her family’s reputation. She sees herself as Luke’s protector, but her protection forces him and Nadia into years of secrecy, with devastating emotional consequences. The most vivid examination of motherhood occurs within Nadia’s consciousness as she imagines her own life as a mother. Her grief is crystallized in a detailed dream of the son she never had, whom she calls Baby. She imagines his life unfolding from toddlerhood to manhood. This dream sequence gives form and narrative to the ghost child she carries. It is not an expression of simple regret but a complex rendering of a persistent, parallel life that exists solely within her. This internal vision refutes any notion that her choice was simple or that her connection to this potential life was severed, illustrating the novel’s deep engagement with the private and enduring complexities of a woman’s reproductive life.