I couldn’t even say when my relationship with Patrick began to change. We worked side by side as colleagues over the year that followed, engaging only around family life, each of us playing the role we needed to play. I’d gradually developed a healthy admiration for Patrick—a man who bounced back from the depths of grief, a man who was clearly willing to do whatever it took to keep his family together and to raise his children well. He worked harder than anyone I’d ever known—and he’d clawed his way back out of a financial pit that, once upon a time, had seemed insurmountable.
We had our squabbles. Patrick could be hotheaded and proud, and so could I. Every now and again, we’d clash over some issue big or small—how to discipline the children, which school to send them to, how the repairs to the house should be done, whether it was time to move out of public housing and into our own place. I knew in theory that all these things were Patrick’s domain and that I should let him make his own decisions, but I couldn’t help express my thoughts whenever he came to a crossroads. We’d shout at one another, I’d storm off into my bedroom and then we’d both sulk around the house for a few days, refusing to be the first to speak.
But eventually, he always took my opinions on board. And over weeks and months, we started wearing one another down, because the ferocity of our arguments faded. Instead, we started coming to each other for advice...and a sense of true partnership began to form.
Once upon a time, I would hand off responsibility to Patrick the minute he walked in the door—even if I was halfway through a story with the children. But gradually, I started to linger in the family life each night, and this naturally lent itself to me and Patrick sharing dinner once the children were in bed. He told me about his day, about supplies that came late and laborers that frustrated him. He told me how embarrassed he was by his own work ethic over the first few years of his professional life.
“I hate to say it now, but I always felt like I’d been dealt a bad hand, being an orphan from such a young age,” Patrick said one night as he reflected on the behavior of one young apprentice. “Aunt Nina is an odd sort. She was so much older than any of my friend’s mothers, and she had some funny ideas about how men and women should be. I’m not blaming her, of course, but when I look back at my life with Grace, I really took your sister for granted. I grew up in a house where I was the only man, even long before I was a man. And being the ‘man of the house’ didn’t mean that I had more responsibility. It meant that I had less. Aunt Nina built her whole world around me and I expected that Grace would do the same. Even at work, when my boss would get on me for doing something wrong, I’d feel this—” he gestured toward his chest in frustration, fingers stretched out “—this burning indignation. This entitlement. Of course, now life has beaten some sense into me, and I realize no one owes me anything. I see that same behavior from the young guys at work, expecting that things are just going to be made to happen for them. It’s frustrating as hell to manage, and I don’t know how Grace or Ewan ever put up with me for so long.”
“She’d be so proud of you,” I remarked. “I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks, Mary.” He smiled. “I think we’re doing okay.”
It had become an incontrovertible truth that the more time I shared with Patrick, the fonder I felt toward him, and instead of resisting those quiet dinners once the children were asleep, I began to eagerly anticipate them.
Patrick and I didn’t do anything by the book. We started out with a forced partnership, then married and then became friends. I think that’s why, at first, I didn’t recognize the urge to spend time with him as affection. I thought it was the natural combination of proximity and a sense of me being out of place and a little lost there in Yesler Terrace, away from the life I thought I’d live. The fiercely arrogant young version of me had died a painful death after the loss of my sister. I was not the same girl I once was, but I had yet to figure out who I now was. And as I wandered around learning the landscape of my new life, I did so with a now treasured partner and friend in Patrick.
The first anniversary of Grace’s death came and went, and we celebrated a birthday for each of the children without her. I mastered the art of keeping the house clean, and I set up a system for the laundry that I adhered to religiously. I even learned to cook—a little. The children still ate an awful lot of dishes that involved toast and eggs, but rarely complained. We really were doing just fine.
When I walked Tim through the gate for his first day of kindergarten, he was adorable in his little outfit, startlingly young, ready to face the world. I crouched right at his eye level and said, “You’re a kid now, got it? School is about learning, and learning is fun. You don’t have to look after anyone while you’re here.”
He kissed my cheek and ran off to play, and as I walked the other children back to the car, I bawled like a bewildered baby, and when he settled in without so much as a hiccup, I was proud as if he were my own.
By the winter of 1959, Patrick and I had a well-established habit of sitting by the fire each evening for a drink and what was often a hearty conversation. Patrick was becoming well versed in early feminist ideology, and as much as I knew he still struggled with the idea that traditional gender roles might actually be limiting for women, he was open to discussion. He had revealed a surprising potential for intellectual depth. I loved debating him, and he seemed to love it, too. He’d offer me his thoughts, always prefacing his ideas with, “Well, Maryanne, you know I’m hardly an expert, but...”
I came to look forward to those nights. I came to long for them. Even so, I refused to let myself dwell on how good it felt to spend time with Patrick. I tried to convince myself that all I felt for him was admiration.
“Do you wish that you could have gone to college, Patrick?” I asked him one night, and he gave me a startled look.
“A fool like me? What would I have done at a college?”
“You are no fool, Patrick Walsh,” I laughed softly. “I have a feeling you could have done anything you set your mind to.”
“I barely scraped by in school,” he said. “College wasn’t in the cards for me. Aunt Nina wasn’t big on education. My mother worked in a factory during the war, and my father was a mechanic. I suppose, if I’d had the option, I might’ve liked to study science. But I’m happy working with my hands. These hands earn me an honest living, and there’s no shame in that.”
He held his hands up as he spoke, palms toward the sky, fingers outstretched. That’s when I saw the splinter in the pad of his right forefinger.
“That looks awful,” I remarked, motioning toward his finger with my drink. Patrick rubbed at it ruefully.
“Occupational hazard. I thought my hands would get banged up less now that I’m in management, but I still seem to be wielding the tools a lot. It’ll come out on its own.”
But I could see that the splinter was starting to fester, and so insisted that he allow me to help him pull it out. We shifted into the dining room and Patrick sat at the table while I fetched the tweezers from my sewing kit. I cupped his big hand in mine to hold it steady, extracted the piece of wood without too much trouble and then dropped the tweezers onto the table.
We were supposed to part then, to go back to a conversing side by side. But neither one of us made any attempt to move. We were sitting at the table where we’d shared so many meals together, in the room where so many hours together had caused our partnership to turn to friendship and now...something deeper. Something more.
We were friends and companions and as far as the law was concerned, spouses. But for everything that we shared over the year and a half that had passed, we’d rarely had physical contact. A hug here, a consoling pat there, but never like this. We were still sitting at the table with my hand cupping his. And then, in a rush, he exhaled unsteadily, and turned his hand over and linked his fingers with mine.
My heart started to race, an incessant pounding against the wall of my chest—warning me of dangers untold. Someone had sucked all the air from the room, and when I raised my gaze to Patrick’s, he was staring at me as if he couldn’t bring himself to look away.
“Patrick,” I started to say, but he snatched his hand back as panic flared in his eyes.
“We shouldn’t,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
He left me sitting at the table alone, heart pounding against my chest, feeling strangely stung that he’d walked away.
I barely slept that night. I turned the odd moment with Patrick over in my mind a thousand times—thinking about what it might mean, thinking about what it might cost. When Beth climbed into my bed at 3 a.m., I was still wide awake. She cuddled into me, sucking her thumb and mumbling something about monsters in the hallway, and her presence became another reminder of all I had to lose.
I tried to convince myself that Patrick and I simply would continue on as we had been. I told myself that it was nothing more than a moment of madness, one that he would want to avoid talking about, and so would I. To name something is to give it power, and I only wanted to starve whatever had happened between us of oxygen.
When my alarm jarred me awake the next morning, I did as I always did—clamored over Beth’s sleeping form and stumbled to the kitchen. I was startled to find Patrick was waiting for me. He’d already prepared a cup of coffee for me, something he did most Sunday mornings. But this was a Wednesday, and it was already past six.
“What are you doing? You should be at work,” I mumbled, and Patrick motioned towards my chair, indicating that I should sit.
“Take a seat, Maryanne,” he said quietly.
Butterflies in my stomach sprang to life as I took the seat opposite him. I wanted to run back to my room, to pull the covers over my head and to pretend that none of this was happening. But cowardice was not my style, so I braced myself, picked the coffee cup up and gulped half of it down without pausing for breath.
“I think I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said. I nearly choked on the coffee, and he rose hastily, thumping me on the back. “Sorry. Shit. I should have... I just thought it was better to come right out and say it.”
“That’s okay,” I managed, still spluttering coffee as I tried to wrap my head around his declaration. Love. It made sense, in some bizarre way. Our family had been born in Patrick and Grace’s love, but for well over a year, we’d been operating as a unit without her—Grace was gone, and the family survived because of the love that Patrick and I shared. Our love persisted when we were apart, it intensified when we were alone and it linked the six of us in a way I’d never thought possible.
If I were just in that house for the children, I wouldn’t have been finding excuses to spend every spare minute with their father. The sight of him coming down the path wouldn’t fill my heart with an incredible lightness. His gentle gestures, like making me coffee on Sunday mornings and including me on his outings with the children, wouldn’t have meant so much. The way he complimented me as I cared for his children wouldn’t have buoyed my very soul. The way he smiled at me for no reason at all wouldn’t be enough to make my stomach flip.
“She’s only been gone for eighteen months,” he whispered now, dropping his hands from my cheeks. The words dripped with misery and guilt. “Whatever would she say if she knew? I’m letting her down again, even in her death.”
I closed my eyes for just a moment and pictured my sister’s beautiful face. I could only see her smiling, perhaps even smirking knowingly to discover that she’d been right all along. I thought I knew love, and I thought it was a creature I could tame and control. But it had snuck up behind me and pulled the rug from under me, just as she’d told me it would.
Even more miraculous, I felt in my bones that my sister had, inadvertently, given her blessing to this astounding twist in our fates.
I wish you would fall in love. I wish you’d love a man the way I love Patrick. I know you only see his flaws, but I still see his potential... If you could see each other the way I see you, I just know you’d love each other.
I rose from my chair and turned towards Patrick. I leaned in slowly toward him, until our foreheads were touching. I paused, waiting for guilt, but none came. I was somehow certain that if my sister could see everything Patrick and I had been through since her death, she’d feel only joy that he and I might find happiness in each other.
“You’re wrong, Patrick,” I whispered, heart racing. “If she knew that we took the mess that was left after she was gone and turned it into something beautiful, Grace would have been delighted.”
He pulled away slightly. I opened my eyes and found him staring at me in wonder. It was magical and marvelous and somehow miraculous that we had taken a relationship so fraught with resentment and pain and turned it into something even deeper than affection.
“You feel it, too?” he asked me.
“I think I do.”
And we stood like that in the kitchen, looking at one another like we might have on any other day, only this time we really were seeing each other for the first time.
Patrick and I found ourselves in the exceedingly odd position of being married and sharing the care of four children while courting one another.
In reality, the months of our courtship looked a lot like the months that had preceded it. We juggled daily life with the children together—arranging for the twins to start school in the spring, helping Tim with his homework, managing the house. When the children were in bed, we spent time alone, learning one another as individuals instead of parents. Life in those months was like a wonderful gift, and while Patrick openly talked with me about his guilt at finding love so soon after Grace’s death, I only felt blissfully freed by this new phase of our relationship. We talked for hours each night, learning the depths to one another and exploring the connection between us. I even told him about that conversation Grace and I had in the car the very last time I saw her.
“She wanted me to fall in love,” I told him. “I told her that I was never going to marry, and she told me that she wanted me to know how wonderful it felt to fall in love with someone. She thought that would change my opinion of marriage. To be honest, I think Grace felt a little sorry for me that I saw the world in a black-and-white way.”
“And now?” he asked me quietly.
“Well, I still think inequality is a problem and I still think that marriage is an anchor around the neck of my fellow women sometimes, and I still think society should change...that society will change.” I shrugged, but then I shot him a cheeky smile. “But I also think that the way you and I are together only makes me stronger. So maybe, things aren’t as clear-cut as I always assumed they were.”
“It surprises me that Grace would say such warm things about marriage,” Patrick mused, frowning. “I wouldn’t have thought she’d have had a positive opinion of it...after being married to me.”
“She loved you,” I said simply. He gave me a sad smile.
“Even when I didn’t deserve it.”
“Everyone deserves love, Patrick.”
“I made so many mistakes,” he sighed. “You were in California so you didn’t have to see it. But I was a child with a man’s responsibilities. I don’t really know what it was about Grace, but every time she had a baby, she’d change. With Tim, neither one of us had any clue what we were doing and I really just thought maybe she didn’t like being a mom. But with the twins, I could see it was more than that...some kind of mental problem she couldn’t control. And it was worse than ever with Beth. And wouldn’t you think her husband would see her struggling and step up to help? But I didn’t. I didn’t know how to, and after I took her to the doctor one time and he just told her she had to tough it out, I guess I panicked. It was easier to stay out with the boys from work than it was to come home and face the reality that I kept getting her pregnant and those pregnancies damaged her so much.”
“I didn’t know how bad it was for her, either,” I admitted, throat tightening. “Not until...”
“Not until?”
I cleared my throat. Patrick and I had shared hundreds of hours of conversation by then, but rarely about Grace. It wasn’t that we’d forgotten her; rather, we quickly realized that life would just keep marching on, and we had to look forward, not back.
“She told me about how depressed she had been,” I said softly. “Just before she died.”
“I don’t know the full story and I probably never will, but there was one morning... I woke up and Grace looked as though she’d been hit by a bus. She had bruises all over her, and scratches even on her face, and somehow between me going to bed and waking up, she’d used all of the gas in my car. I think... I really think she tried to hurt herself that night. I tried after that to be around more. The thing is, she always perked up once the babies were a bit older, even if she was already pregnant again by then. It was something about that first year after she gave birth that messed her up.” He glanced at me, his gaze intense. “You’re sure you don’t want kids, aren’t you?”
I laughed quietly, then motioned toward the bedrooms.
“I’m sure I already have plenty of kids, actually.”
“I mean it, Maryanne. I couldn’t bear to see you suffer the way that she... I just mean, if we...when we... I’m not being presumptuous, but—”
“When we move into the same bedroom,” I finish for him, laughing softly, “I’ll get a diaphragm. Will that be okay with you?”
“I’d be fine with that.”
“I truly don’t want children of my own, especially now.”
“But you love those kids. I can see it.”
“I do. I feel lucky that I get to experience a taste of motherhood with your children. I just wouldn’t want to start all over again with a newborn. Tim and the twins are at school now, and Beth will start next year—I’ll be able to go back to studying after that. If we were to have another child together, that would mean still more years when I couldn’t study.”
“Good.” Patrick nodded, satisfied.
“When are we going to...” I trailed off as the flush crept up Patrick’s cheeks.
“...move into the same bedroom?” He finished the sentence for me. We flashed one another a slightly awkward grin. “I know you aren’t one for tradition, but it still matters to me that we do this right.”
“We’ve been married for over two years now, Patrick,” I said, then I teased him. “What is your plan, then? Do you divorce me so we can remarry?”
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” he said, and he ran his hand through his hair and looked away. “And I do mean a lot.”
I laughed, delighted at his bashfulness, then turned him back to face me so I could kiss him. But all too soon, he pulled away, and said quite seriously, “I think I rushed your sister into life with me. I won’t do that to you. When you’re ready to marry me—properly this time—just let me know, and I’ll figure out how we can do that.”
“What does properly entail here, exactly?”
“The church. With Father Willis, not a registrant at the court house.”
“Christ Almighty, that sounds dull.”
“Maryanne.”
“Okay, okay,” I laughed. “But I’m already committed here, Patrick. Why do we need to wait?”
“It’s not the arrangement I want you to commit to,” he murmured. “It’s me. This isn’t you promising to help me out with the kids for the foreseeable future. I want to promise that you’re mine, and I’m yours. That really means something to me, and despite your determination to blow up all traditions, everywhere, I have a feeling that this kind of promise will mean something to you, too.”
“So now you’re blowing up traditions.”
“I am?”
“Well, now you’re going to wait for me to propose?”
“I’d propose to you right now if I thought it was what you wanted.”
I tilted my head at him.
“Patrick, I love you. I’m ready for this to be our life together.”
Everything seemed to fall into place. Patrick and I were happy—happier than I’d ever expected to be. We were talking about “our” future, and the truth was, it had been a long while since I’d been able to imagine my life without him and the children in it. But at the end of the day, the man I loved also loved his traditions. If we were to be together as man and wife in every sense of the word, he wanted us to be married in the church.
This was what I failed to understand about love before I experienced it myself. Love doesn’t just need compromise to survive—love, to its very essence, is compromise. It’s genuinely wanting what’s best for the other person, even when it trumps your own preferences. The idea of donning a white dress and walking down some aisle for a celibate man in robes to formalize our union in the eyes of his religion did not appeal to me at all. But it meant something to Patrick, and Patrick meant something to me.
So we set a date, and we planned a second wedding. Father Willis agreed to perform the service, and he made room for us in the church timetable just a few weeks later.
“There’s no time to waste,” he said, looking between Patrick and me with his lips pursed. “You two are already cohabiting, unmarried in the eyes of God. We’re busy, but I’ll fit you in.”
I found an ivory lace shift dress in a store near the city, and we scraped together enough money for a new pair of shoes, too. Mrs. Hills insisted on baking us a cake. That was about the extent of what we’d planned for the celebration, but Patrick was counting down the days with obvious glee. I still thought his insistence that we marry again before we shared a bed was nonsense, but this did at least give me time to purchase a diaphragm and to pay attention to my cycle so we could avoid intimacy midmonth.
And in the meantime, we sat the children down and explained to them what was happening.
“But you’re already married,” Jeremy said.
“Can I wear a pretty dress?” Ruth asked.
“I want to wear a dress!” Beth protested.
“Why do you need to get married again?” Tim asked, bewildered.
“It’s so Maryanne can be your mom now,” Patrick said, scratching his head and giving me a pleading look.
“She’s already our mom.” Ruth blinked at him.
Patrick sighed.
“But... I mean, she is, it’s just that...”
“Sweeties,” I said quietly. “This wedding means I’m never leaving. It means I’m here forever. And I always was, but sometimes grown-ups need to do these things just to make an arrangement official. So that’s what it’s about. And we get to have cake—everyone likes cake, don’t they?”
The kids all nodded, and apparently that was just enough to satisfy them and they were ready to go back outside and play. Patrick puffed out a frustrated breath.
“I love how they’ve taken to you,” he said. “But...”
“I hate it, too. I still want to remind them that Grace was their real mom and I hate that they’ve forgotten her. But if I do, they have to grieve her all over again,” I sighed and met his gaze. “They are still so young, my love. It’s too hard for them to understand that she was here, and then she was gone, and now I’m here instead.”
“What do you think Grace would have wanted?”
“I think she’d have hated to miss any of this...any of their happiness, any of these years. But I also know she’d have wanted them to be happy,” I admitted.
“That’s what I think, too. We will tell them one day...”
“But just not yet.”
We smiled at one another, as if that settled it, neatly stepping around the guilt that we both knew could not be avoided forever.
Whether we liked it or not, in the children’s minds, I had replaced Grace, and we would just have to learn to live with it until they were old enough to understand.
Patrick worked a half-day on Saturdays, and that weekend when he finished for the week, we took the children for an outing to Alki Beach. I had packed a picnic, and Patrick and I sat on the sand while the older kids frolicked at the edge of the waves, and Beth built sandcastles nearby. It was a delicious, sun-drenched day, but when the children’s cheeks were pink, and the sun was in the sky behind us, we packed up to go back to the car.
“There’s a store we need to have a look at on the way home,” Patrick said. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going—instead, we drove in silence for a while, and then he parked the car and winked at me. We each took two children’s hands in ours, and the six of us crossed the busy road toward the stores.
“Which do you like?” he asked me quietly, finally coming to a stop by the display window at a jewelry store. I peered through the glass at so many sparkling rings and then I laughed.
“The cheapest. Come on—”
“Seriously, Maryanne. We need to get you a set of rings, and we’re never at the same place at the same time when stores are open. At least give me a clue what style you prefer.”
I sighed, but looked through the window to scan the rows of rings.
“I like simplicity. I don’t want something huge that will bankrupt us. Just get me a plain gold band—” But my gaze snagged on an engagement ring. It was a small oval aquamarine in a simple silver setting. It was hardly the most elaborate ring in the window, but I loved it on sight, even as I suspected it would be beyond our budget. I forced myself to look back at Patrick. “Just a plain silver band, okay? Whatever we can afford. Nothing more.”
Patrick looked back into the window, then nodded, then offered me a smile and a peck on the cheek.
“Two more weeks, my love,” he murmured softly near my ear, sending shivers down my spine.
“Two more weeks,” I murmured back, and we shared a knowing smile before we turned the children back to the car and headed home.
Mrs. Hills and Aunt Nina insisted on taking me out for a bachelorette party the weekend before the wedding. I protested furiously at this, mostly because I wasn’t exactly excited by the idea of suffering through two octogenarians offering me sex advice. But in the end, Patrick convinced me to go.
“You never go anywhere,” he pointed out.
“I go to the park. And the library. And the grocery store.”
“Okay. Correction. You never go anywhere fun.”
“The library is fun.”
“Christ, woman! Take the night off, get dressed up and go out for a nice dinner somewhere.”
It was actually an uneventful meal in the end. I think my elderly friends probably figured out for themselves that I wasn’t actually as innocent as they might have been just before their own weddings, and so instead of bombarding me with advice about marriage and sex, we talked about knitting and the weather and later, the way the world had changed over the decades since they were girls.
I went home, a little tipsy from the wine at dinner, and as happy as I’d ever been. It was a beautiful place to be. It was a miserable height to fall from.
As I stepped into the house, I skipped my gaze around the living room, looking for Patrick. I expected him to be waiting for me in front of the television, but the set was off. He wasn’t in the dining room, either, so I peeked in on the children. I kissed Timothy’s forehead, and put away the metal trucks that littered Jeremy’s bed even though I’d told him a thousand times not to play with them when he was supposed to be asleep. I tucked Ruth in—she was forever kicking her blankets off. And Beth was missing from her bed, but I knew I would find her in my own bed instead. I was right—there she was, resting against my pillow, those beautiful dark eyelashes against the pale curve of her cheeks. I bent and breathed her in, soaking up the scent of soap and toothpaste and Beth.
And then I put the blanket up to her chin, and I left my room to find my love. There was only one place he could be: his bedroom...our bedroom, in just a few nights.
I was smiling as I walked to his room. I thought he’d be asleep, too; maybe he’d be under the blankets and I could pull them up to his chin, then kiss his forehead as I’d done for his children. But the light was on. Patrick was sitting on the bed.
His face was beet-red, his cheeks wet with tears, his eyes wild. I knew then. Even before I saw the wedding album on the bed, even before I registered the letters all over the bed cover, even before I saw my sister’s handwriting on the piece of paper he clutched in his fist, I knew he’d found Grace’s notes.
In the silence, I took the scene in, and my heart nearly broke when I realized that the “last place on earth” Grace expected her husband to look was in their wedding album. She was almost right—it took Patrick over two years to look at those photos.
“Where was that?” I asked him stiffly.
“In the bottom of the chest in the living room. I built it... I built a cavity so we could hide money. I went to hide your ring there last week and found the wedding album, but I didn’t look at it until tonight,” Patrick said. His voice was hoarse, but the words were wound so tight with fury that I winced and turned away. I’d watched him fight an attempt to take his children, but I’d never heard him so angry. I’d seen him lose his wife, but I’d never seen him so hurt. “I promised myself I’d say goodbye to her tonight. I wanted to look at those photos one last time and say goodbye.” I’d checked the chest, but I didn’t know to check the base. How could I? He raised his eyes to me. “Did you know she wrote these?”
Patrick barely looked like the man I loved. He didn’t even look like someone I knew. But I wasn’t about to lie to him, and although I knew he held my future in his hands, I didn’t think he would hurt me. I still trusted his love for me. I still thought that after everything we’d been through, we’d get through this, too.
“Yes. I knew.”
“Did you look for them?”
“Yes.”
His brows shifted down, then up and then he closed his eyes.
“Is this why you stayed?”
“I stayed for the children,” I said, but that was half a lie, and I was determined to tell him the truth. It seemed the only way we’d survive. “Wait. Yes—I did hope to find the letters, and that’s why I stayed at first. I mean...” I was flustered and confused, bitterly regretting that last glass of wine as I tried to clarify. “Patrick, all that I knew was that she had written a note about the abortion. I knew you’d be angry and I was scared of what you’d do if you found it, but I also didn’t think it would do you any good to see whatever else she—” I scanned the notes on the bed and my heart sank. “How many are there?”
God only knew what else was in those notes. If that last conversation I’d had with Grace had been any indication, her mental state over the years had been dire. I looked at Patrick again, and there were fresh tears in his eyes.
“So what really happened that day? I deserve to know that much.”
I didn’t want to tell him, but I knew that I had to. The time had come for honesty, and there was no avoiding the truth—no matter how ugly.
“It was exactly like I told you, only I lied about... I swapped our roles. Grace was pregnant, not me. I found her someone who could help, and I lied so I could borrow some money from Father, but it wasn’t enough. That’s why...that’s why she asked you to get an advance from Ewan.”
“She didn’t ask me, Maryanne,” Patrick spat out. “She insisted upon it. She manipulated me. It was so unlike her—I should have known it was all your idea.” I winced, and he scrubbed a shaking hand over his face, then demanded, “And then?”
“I waited for her—”
“Where? Where was this?”
“On the alleyway. Downtown.”
“And who did it?”
“An unregistered doctor. A man picked her up and she went with him.”
“You didn’t even go with her?”
“I couldn’t. I wasn’t allowed—”
“So you sent her off with a stranger who may or may not have had any idea what he was doing.”
“He said he was a doctor, Patrick.”
“Do you honestly believe a doctor would have met you in an alleyway?” He caught himself and dropped his voice, nostrils flaring. “Go on. What next?”
“Well... I mean, she just never came back. I looked for her everywhere. I tried to contact the man she went with, but the call didn’t connect the first day and by the next morning the number had been disconnected. I assume something went wrong with the procedure and—”
“Procedure? You’re calling the murder you ordered a procedure?” Patrick was bawling now, swiping hopelessly at his eyes.
“Patrick...” I started to cry, too, and I took a step toward the bed. “She couldn’t handle another child. She just couldn’t. She begged me.”
“You knew I would never have allowed this—”
“It was her life!” I exclaimed. “Her body. Her sanity. I’m telling you now, she wouldn’t have survived another pregnancy—”
“Well, Maryanne, nor did she survive the abortion that you arranged for her,” Patrick interrupted me. The room fell heavily silent after that.
“I’m so sorry.” What else could I say to that? He was absolutely right.
Patrick’s emotions were now completely out of control. I hadn’t seen him like this since the immediate aftermath of the discovery of her body. His grief and guilt were fresh and raw and all of the healing and progress we’d made over the years seemed to have disappeared in an instant. I had no idea what was in those letters, only that the last of them was something of a confession, and that Grace had found the experience of writing her thoughts down to be cathartic. I took a step toward him—wanting only to offer him comfort, but he raised a hand at me in warning.
“You need to go,” he choked out.
“What? Go where?”
“I don’t know. But I need to think...” He waved his hand around the bed, then wiped at his eyes hopelessly. “I just need to think this all through. I can’t think with you here.” He glanced up at me, then looked away and squeezed his eyes closed as a fresh burst of anger resurged. “Jesus, Maryanne! I can’t even look at you knowing that you took her from us! You sent her with that man. You all but murdered her yourself!”
I’d been wary and remorseful since I stepped across that doorway, but as Patrick’s distress turned to anger, I felt the first hot flash of my own temper. I was far too angry to shout; instead, I spoke with deathly, furious intent.
“What else is in those notes, Patrick? Does she talk about how she thought about ending her own life because you let her down? Does she talk about how your marriage was such a burden she could barely stand it? Does she talk about how she almost killed herself one night, while you slept in your bed, oblivious to her pain?” I crossed my arms over my chest and my temper ran free. “If anyone murdered my sister, it was you.”
I regretted it as soon as I said it, but I was far too proud to apologize, especially when Patrick didn’t even flinch. Instead, he scanned the notes on the bed, then scooped one up and waved it toward me.
“This letter alone would be enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough to prove that you arranged an abortion for her. She died alone at the hands of strangers, and you made that happen. Maybe you should pay the price.”
We were getting nowhere, and things would only escalate if we kept speaking from our pain. I took a step back and tried to take a deep breath.
“This is absurd. I’m going to go to bed. We’ll talk tomorrow—”
“Maryanne,” Patrick said suddenly. His hand dropped to his side, taking the note with it. I glanced at him warily.
“What?”
“I don’t care where you go, but you will leave this house tonight, or I will call the police and have you removed.”
Patrick held all of the cards, and we both knew it. I had no idea how seriously the police would take a note like this, but I couldn’t risk him trying to get Grace’s case reopened.
“You said you loved me,” I whispered.
“I...” He broke off, then ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “Don’t you understand? How could I just carry on with you—letting you take her place in my life...in our lives...when you did this to her?”
We fell into silence after that. I didn’t know how to make things right, but I was still sure there would be a way I could. We both needed time to think it through.
“I’ll go,” I said heavily. “Just for tonight.”
I glanced back at him, and Patrick nodded, but his gaze was on the notes scattered all over his bed.
I told Mrs. Hills that Patrick and I had quarreled, and she made up the sofa. I stretched out and closed my eyes, but I slept very poorly. Somehow I knew Patrick wasn’t sleeping, either.
Even so, I eventually talked myself around to hope that night. I wondered if Patrick’s fury was rooted in guilt and shame, just as mine had been. Grace probably had revealed a depth of pain he wasn’t aware of in those notes. I just hoped I’d get the chance to sit him down and to talk it all through in the cold light of the new morning.
“You’ll see,” Mrs. Hills said sagely as we nursed cups of coffee as the sun rose. “Young love is always volatile, but today you two will sort this out and everything will be fine.”
“I hope so,” I said. I knew our situation seemed simpler to her than it really was, but she was probably right. Patrick and I were both quick to anger sometimes, and as passionate as we were about one another, we also could be impulsive and temperamental.
There was a quiet rap on the glass in the back door, and I turned my head sharply to see Patrick standing there. As I feared, he looked so weary, but the exhaustion and sadness on his face renewed my hope. A man doesn’t sit up all night torturing himself over a woman he doesn’t love.
I flashed Mrs. Hills a knowing smile and almost ran to the back door.
I expected him to embrace me when I stepped outside. I actually expected an apology and a plea for a fresh attempt at a conversation, but what I found was something different. Patrick stood among a collection of boxes and bags that I immediately knew contained my possessions. My heart sank all the way to my toes.
“We can get past this—” I started to say as my vision blurred with hot tears.
“I won’t go to the police. But you need to do something for me in return.” He sighed heavily, then pleaded with me, “Maryanne, I need you to go quietly.”
The idea of it was unbearable. To leave was already too much to ask, but to leave quietly? Without even saying goodbye to the children I’d come to love as my own?
“But I need to say goodbye to them—”
“You’re not their fucking mother, Maryanne!” he snapped. I flinched as if he’d slapped me. He sucked in a sharp breath, then whispered fiercely, “Even if I could forgive the secrecy and the lies, I can’t get around this one simple fact—you knew the truth about what happened to Grace that day, and you kept it to yourself. Who knows? If you’d gone to the police right away, maybe she’d still be here.”
“But...honestly, Patrick, I thought she’d come back, and then I was so scared—” I was weeping now, barely resisting the urge to throw myself at him and to cling to him so he couldn’t walk away. It wasn’t just us he was tearing to pieces—it was our family, and I couldn’t bear it.
“Last night you accused me of murdering my wife,” Patrick said suddenly.
“I was angry—”
“And I accused you of murdering your sister.”
“Patrick—”
“We can’t just ignore this,” Patrick said, his voice breaking. “Maybe we did the wrong thing all along, just pretending it never happened. But now that we know what we know, we can’t just carry on, Mary. We have to go our separate ways.”
He turned around then, and walked back across the front lawns and into the house.
I was far too stubborn to give up that easily, and I lingered at Mrs. Hills’s house for several days. I got up early and watched out the window to see what he was doing with the children when he went to work. I was startled to see him loading all four sleepy children into the back of the car each day, and them disappearing down the street. After two days I had Mrs. Hills go to Patrick’s house to ask him what he was doing for childcare. She returned with the news that he had temporarily arranged for the wives of the work crew to watch the children while he worked.
“He’s still so upset, Maryanne,” she muttered, shaking her head. “I don’t know what you’ve done, but this isn’t something he’s going to get over quickly. I think you should consider looking for somewhere else to stay until you sort this out with him.”
It was the last thing in the world I wanted, and so I resisted for another day. But the weekend was coming, and when Mrs. Hills pointed out that it was only a matter of time before the children came for a visit and saw me, I finally realized I had no option but to look into temporary accommodation elsewhere. With very little money on hand, there was only one place I could go.
“Maryanne?” My mother gasped when she opened her front door and found me and my meager belongings on the doorstep. “But—”
“I just need to stay a few days, maybe a week,” I blurted.
She stared at me, mouth agape, then peered around me toward the drive.
“But where is Patrick? Where are the children?”
It was my turn to look at her incredulously.
“You actually thought I would bring them for a visit after what you tried to do?”
Mother’s nostrils flared.
“I had their best interests at heart.”
“No. You and Father were grieving and you felt guilty about how you’d cut yourselves off from Grace, and you tried to alleviate that guilt by taking her children. That wasn’t fair. Patrick is a good man, and he was and is doing the very best he could with them.”
“If that’s true,” Mother said slowly, “then what on earth are you doing on my doorstep today?”
To my horror, I felt hot tears in my eyes, and then the sobs just would not be suppressed. I hadn’t cried on my Mother’s shoulder since I was tiny, but even her stiff, perfunctory hug only reminded me of the children. Of Beth...sweet little Beth...who would surely be wondering where her “Mommy” was. Who was hugging her? Who was wiping away her tears? I resisted that job in the beginning, but I’d come to treasure it.
“Mother, I don’t have anywhere else to go. But I swear to God, if you and Father try to disrupt that man’s life again, that’ll be it—I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Did you marry him?” Mother asked, and that’s when I remembered that I’d never actually gotten around to sending her the photo of our wedding day. Life had moved on so fast.
“I married him,” I whispered miserably. “And then we fell in love. But...we’ve had a falling out, and I can’t go home until he calls for me.”
I moved back into my family home that day, shifting my things into my old bedroom. To their credit, my parents didn’t ask too many questions about Patrick; they simply allowed me to shift back into their lives as if we’d never argued. After a few days, Mother even opened up to me.
“What happened with Patrick after we lost Grace was my fault, not Father’s,” she admitted. “I wanted those children for myself. I was grieving and miserable, and I thought they’d offer me a distraction. It wasn’t right, and I promise you, I’ll never do it again.”
“But...why, Mother? Why distance yourself from Grace like that when she needed you, then try to take the children as soon as she was gone?”
Mother stared into her teacup as she whispered, “I visited her a lot after she had Timmy, but I just couldn’t stand to see her like that. It reminded me of what happened when you girls were born.” She looked up at me, cheeks flushing. “I never wanted you to know. But... I had to stay in the hospital for a long time after I had you.”
“After you had Grace, you mean. I know you had the hysterectomy—”
“No, Maryanne. After you were born. I...” She cleared her throat, then looked at the table. “I tried to harm myself. It was the strangest thing—it was as if I’d lost my mind, and then I took too many pills and...the housekeeper found me, luckily. We weren’t going to have any more children, but then Grace came along, and it seemed I couldn’t handle her, either.”
“Mother,” I whispered, looking at her in horror. “Are you saying you were depressed after Grace and I were born?”
“Depressed? No, that doesn’t sound right at all. I can barely remember either of you before your first birthday. They said the electroshock therapy would probably damage my memories of that time, but it was more than that, I think.” She stared at her lap, her expression pinched. “I wasn’t just sad. I could barely function. I just wanted to be...gone. I was completely broken. Hopelessly broken.”
“But maybe Gracie felt like she was broken, too, Mother,” I whispered thickly.
“Father and I agreed we’d never tell you girls what happened. Heavens, he went to great lengths to hide what I’d done from our friends and family so I had at least a chance of coming back to normal life one day. And I suppose, when Tim came along, I couldn’t bear to even consider the possibility that Grace was suffering like I had. It was easier to blame Patrick...easier to blame her for choosing that life, especially after I tried to help her leave him.” Mother gave me a sad look. “It was a test, you see. I thought if she was as mentally unwell as I had been, she’d rush to come here for a rest. So perhaps she wasn’t going through what I went through,” Mother said, and for a moment she looked almost hopeful, but it passed quickly and her expression soon sank again. “Or perhaps she was, and I just underestimated her loyalty to him.”
Mother rose from the kitchen table to walk, as if on autopilot, toward the medicine cabinet. She withdrew her little bottle of pills, swallowed one dry, then looked back to me.
“It’s a good thing you don’t want children, I think,” she whispered, gnawing anxiously on her bottom lip. “I can’t even tell you how frightening it is when your own mind turns against you. I really should go to bed now.”
“Mother,” I said as she went to leave the room. She glanced back at me uncertainly. “Do you think that maybe it wasn’t your fault that you got sick after you had us? That maybe it was something biological?”
“The psychiatrist told me that it was just nervous tension. He said that I was simply too sensitive...simply too anxious. That’s why they gave me the hysterectomy.”
She then wandered out of the kitchen, leaving me with the feeling that I understood her, perhaps for the first time in my life.
I waited around for days hoping to hear from Patrick, and after a week, I couldn’t bear it anymore. I called Mrs. Hills and asked how he was doing.
“They’re moving, Maryanne.”
“What? Where would they go?”
“I don’t know. He won’t tell me. But he doesn’t look good at all. Now, you know I don’t like to stick my nose into other people’s business—” I’d have struggled not to snort, if it all wasn’t so awful “—but if you were planning on trying to convince him to see sense, you’d best be doing it quickly.”
I knew that by nine o’clock, the children would all be deeply asleep. That had been our magic hour, the time when the world rested and Patrick and I were alone. I was sick with dismay when I arrived at the house and glanced through the front window to see moving boxes in the living room, and then somehow felt even sicker as I approached the front door—uncertain about how I might be received. I knocked quietly, and then I walked to sit on the chair on the porch. Patrick opened the door, peered outside, and bathed only in the light from inside the house, I watched his expression shift.
There was frustration. Weariness. And then, to my surprise, an undeniable shame. For just a moment that shame gave me hope.
“Give me just a minute,” he said heavily.
Patrick walked back inside, then came to sit on the porch chair beside me, leaving a gap between us that felt like an ocean. In his hands he held a folded piece of paper, but he made no move to offer it to me. Instead, he drew in a deep breath, and stared out at the road that ran past the house as he spoke.
“Grace was right about so many things...she was so much smarter than she knew. She said that I had been running from responsibility for my whole life. She said that I was a child in a man’s body. I’ve read those notes so many times over this past week, and I finally understand just how badly I let her down.”
“You were young...”
“Don’t make excuses for me! You and your family do not get to pass judgment on me, and you sure as hell don’t get to absolve me.” He was frustrated, but so much more self-contained than he had been when we argued the previous week. Patrick drew in a deep breath, then glanced at me. For a moment he seemed to hesitate and I rushed to plead with him, feeling a delicious hint of hope that I might still change his mind.
“Please, Patrick... I love you. I love them. Please don’t make me leave.”
“You lied to me for two years. How could I build a life with you based on a foundation like that?” he whispered brokenly. “I’m absolutely certain that we’ve both made mistakes, and perhaps we temporarily outran the consequences, but we both have to pay for those sins now. Your penance is that you have to live with what you did, and you have to live without your sister and my family.” A sob broke in my throat, and he turned away, his face set in a mask of agony. “And I have to be the man I couldn’t be for Grace. I have to do it for my kids and for myself. And I have to do it without you, because that’s my penance.”
He passed me the note, then. Our fingers brushed, and I felt a shiver along my arm. Maybe I knew that was the last time I’d feel his skin against mine.
“What’s this?” I whispered through my tears.
“It’s the last note. The one where she talks about the...” He swallowed, then finished with obvious difficulty, “This is the note where she talks about you arranging the abortion.”
I looked at him in shock.
“But why would you give this to me?”
Patrick looked back to the road.
“You need to read it. You need to face what you did to her.” He sounded furious, but then he choked up, and he glanced at me, his gaze swimming in tears. “I’m so angry with you. I’m so hurt that you let things get as far as they did with this secret between us. But God help me, I love you, Maryanne. I want you to go back to the life you were meant to live, and not waste the rest of your years worrying that some note is about to bring it all down around you. And...her other notes were about how I’d let her down. This one...this is the only one that wasn’t about me. It just feels right to give it to you.”
We sat in silence for a while. I held the folded piece of paper between my palms, my fingers interlinked around it. Locking my hands together was the only way I could stop myself from reaching for him.
“How will you juggle it all?” I asked him eventually.
“I’ll manage,” he said. It was a calm statement of fact, and it was a promise I was instantly certain he’d keep.
“But where will you even go?”
“That isn’t your problem anymore.”
“Just tell me one thing,” I choked, tears finally spilling over onto my cheeks. “Are the children okay?”
“They are grieving their mother,” he whispered miserably. “Just as I should have made them do in the first place.”
“I remember how it felt when you hugged me,” I choke out, eyes suddenly brimming with tears as Maryanne finishes her story. “I remember how safe I felt. How you smelled so beautiful. How you read me so many stories and let me sleep in your bed when I was scared.”
“Sweet girl,” Maryanne whispers unevenly, “I remember those moments, too. How could I forget them? I’ve done some extraordinary things in my life, but those times with you are some of my very best memories.”
We’ve been talking for hours. Maryanne got up at one point to make a call back to her office to tell them she was taking the afternoon off, then returned to the table. She talked until her voice was hoarse, and then she kept on talking while I fed Noah and we walked to the restroom so I could change him. Now we’re walking around campus to stretch our legs.
And she’s right here. She’s real, and she’s alive, and it’s not too late.
“Could you really have been charged?” I ask her when I’ve composed myself.
“Who knows?” she sighs. “Abortion was a felony offense, and people had been jailed for arranging them. I’m not sure how much an unsigned letter would have counted as evidence in a court of law, but the climate was so hysterically antichoice at the time, I may well have faced serious consequences, especially since Grace died during the procedure. At the very least, the letter might have ruined my academic career, and without your family, that’s all I had left.”
“You kept it for all of these years.”
“Well, yes. Because what Patrick read as proof of my guilt, I came to see as absolution. I made so many mistakes, but my worst was lying to him. If I’d come clean and he’d read this with an open mind, perhaps he’d have focused on what Grace was really saying here—that she wanted this desperately, that perhaps she even needed it. I was only helping her to do what she wanted to do. But in giving me this note, he gave me a gift, because at times my guilt at her loss would crush me, and I could go back to reread this note and be reassured that Grace’s mind had been made up long before she called me home to help.”
“What did you do after you left us?”
“I stayed with Mother and Father for a few months. I didn’t want to—but I had no alternative. They then gave me the money to set up on my own again, and I moved to the city so I could study. I finished my master’s, and then eventually my PhD and I built that career I’d always dreamed of,” she says sadly. “Father died suddenly later that same year, and Mother and I gradually rebuilt our relationship. When she got sick some years later, she came to live with me and I cared for her until she died.”
I swallow a sudden lump in my throat, and my voice is small as I whisper, “I missed you all of these years.”
Maryanne gives me a sad smile.
“I missed you, too, sweet girl.”
I raise my gaze to hers, blinking rapidly as I ask, “Why didn’t you try to track us down?”
Her gaze is surprisingly gentle as she murmurs, “You love your husband, don’t you, Bethany?”
“Of course.”
“I loved your father enough to let him go. I don’t know if you can understand that, but it’s the simple truth rooted in an exceedingly complicated situation. He always felt guilty that he’d fallen in love with me so soon after her death, and then learning just how badly he’d let her down and that I of all people had organized the procedure that killed her... I realized that I’d always be a reminder of what happened to Grace. I simply had to walk away to let him move on.” Her gaze becomes guarded as she asks, “Do you blame me now that you know what happened?”
“Of course I don’t.” I frown. “And...I don’t think Dad did by the end, either. Just before he died...” My voice breaks. Those moments are still too hard to talk about it, but she’s been so generous sharing with me—I have to tell her about them. “He thought I was you, and he was obviously trying to apologize to you.”
“When Ruth called,” Maryanne sighs, “I thought perhaps Patrick was ready to clear the air...”
“Maybe if he’d remained well, he would have someday.”
“He had a good life?”
“A wonderful life. We had to hire an event space for his wake because so many people adored him and wanted to pay their respects.”
“I’m so glad,” Maryanne says, offering me a sad smile.
“And what was life like after he asked you to leave us? Did you ever fall in love again?”
Maryanne straightens, smooths a hand over her hair, then raises her chin.
“Make no mistake, sweet girl—I’m not the victim in this sad tale. I’d never intended to marry in the first place. I only married Patrick to help him, and he was the last man on earth I ever thought I’d fall in love with. The five of you absolutely won my heart, but it was your family I loved. I’ve missed you all dreadfully and your sister’s call felt like a dream come true, but even in my heartbreak, I wasn’t about to go tie myself to another man in order to replace you.” She shrugs in a way that reminds me of Jeremy when he’s feeling self-conscious, and adds quietly, “The thing is, Bethany, if I couldn’t be with you and your family, I had little choice but to go back to Plan A—change the world. And that’s exactly what I did.”
Maryanne tells me about her amazing experiences in the 1960s and 1970s, earning her doctorate and fighting for women’s rights. She tells me about landing the job she’d always dreamed of, and explains how her time with my family softened her once very rigid opinions on the dynamics between men and women and their children. She tells me about her work campaigning for abortion law reform, and her pride that in 1970, a referendum to legalize abortion passed with a 56% majority, enshrining the right to safe, legal abortion in Washington State law years before Roe vs Wade.
But most of all, Maryanne tells me about my mother, about a woman who struggled against the darkness just as I have, but who had to face those demons alone, again and again. The idea of this chills me to the bone, because even with the support I’ve had this year, I’m increasingly aware that I’ve only just made it through.
“It’s hard to believe how different things were for her. I mean, I’ve been sexually active for...” I pause and do the math, then grimace. “God. Over twenty years. I was on the pill for more than half of that time, until Hunter and I started trying to conceive. It was actually quite easy for me to avoid a pregnancy until I was ready.”
“Society moved on so fast. That’s what we wanted, of course,” Maryanne says and sighs as she pats my son to sleep. With her other hand, she smooths down her wind-ruffled hair. “But there’s a cost in rapid progress like that, because women your age don’t always understand how lucky you are. Don’t want a baby? Go to the doctor and get contraception that’s cheap and reliable, or go to the damned corner store and buy a packet of condoms for a handful of change. Develop depression? Take some Prozac, see a therapist. For your generation, these problems have names, and because they are defined, solutions can be found for them. But for my generation, we didn’t have access to those solutions and it made life endlessly complicated...and for women like your mother, endlessly cruel.”
Two weeks ago I stuffed a script for Prozac into my tote bag, and it’s still there—resting between baby wipes and spare pacifiers and my purse. I clutch the strap tighter in my hand.
“Do you think it’s that simple?” I ask her, my voice uneven. “Things like tackling depression, I mean?”
“Of course it is,” Maryanne says dismissively. “If your mother was born now rather than then, she wouldn’t have died at the hands of strangers. She could have accessed contraception and planned out her family. If she fell pregnant anyway, she could have accessed a safe, legal abortion. She’d have given birth to you children when she actually wanted to. I know she’d still have developed postpartum depression—because it’s pretty clear that my mother suffered from it, too, and there was some genetic predisposition. But if she was facing that challenge now, she’d have been able to access treatment for it. She’d have been able to control her destiny...and that’s all my generation dreamed of.”
Sometimes moments of change happen during quiet conversations like this, when a simple shift in perspective empowers you to make a choice you just haven’t been able to make before. I know in this instant that I’ll wean my son, and I’ll take the damned antidepressants, because I want to feel better—for Noah and Hunter, but also, for me.
I don’t want to live like this, and more importantly, I don’t have to. I wanted to be strong enough to overcome this illness. I finally understand that in this case, being strong means accepting help to find myself again. With a little support, maybe I really can become the mother I always thought I’d be...the kind of mother Maryanne once was for me.
“I’m really glad we found you, Maryanne,” I whisper, staring at her.
She smiles kindly, then reaches to gently pat my back.
“I’m really glad you did, too, sweet girl.”