Chapter Twenty-Seven

 

Baltimore, Maryland

Friday, October 6, 1995

 

After breakfast, Lillianna, Greg, and Sarah hiked across the parking lot, past the walled construction site to the hospital’s reception area, where they met their aunts and uncles. Greg and Sarah had seen them frequently over the years since Cassandra died, but to Lillianna, it was like gazing at three sofas full of strangers. During the last decades, their middle-aged faces, the ones she remembered, had collapsed and merged into these nearly unrecognizable, white-haired people. Most of them had quit smoking and carried an extra twenty pounds to show for it. Only their voices sounded familiar.

“Emma, I mean Lillianna. Your dad told us you changed your name. It’s gonna be hard to get used to. Emma was our mother’s name, you know?”

“I know that, Aunt Evie, and I also know I’ll always be Emma to you and all of Dad’s family, so don’t even try to call me anything else. My father doesn’t.”

“Good. I’m glad,” Aunt Allie chimed in.

“Me too.” It was Aunt Nellie, the one-time redhead who was always a favorite of Lillianna’s. Nellie paused for a moment, put her hands on her niece’s shoulders and held her back for a look. “It’s been so long. But you haven’t changed much, you little brat. You still look like a teenager.”

“Everything’s relative, Aunt Nellie. I have a twenty-two-year-old daughter now and a twenty-four-year-old son. I’m glad neither of them is here for a close-up comparison.”

Uncle Ron stood and gave her a big hug. “We’re sure glad you’re here, Miss Emma/Lillianna, or whatever you call yourself now. Your dad needs you, and we all felt a hell of a sight better when Greg said you were coming.”

“It’s been a good couple weeks for me too, Uncle Ron. I’ve been away too long.”

The reunion was more upbeat than she’d anticipated, not fraught with the feared past echoes. And, if they judged her long absence and name change, she didn’t perceive it. Since Lillianna had been with him every day for nearly two weeks, she gave up her turn and saw her father only to say goodnight. She spent the remainder of the time in the lobby and cafeteria where her aunts and uncles spun yarns about her father and their childhoods. Embellishing the ones she’d already heard from him, they provided a different angle, another perspective.

Alone in her hotel, Lillianna thought about a poem she’d read once with the line Memory is a hole your life falls into. She understood the risks, but this journey into the past had taken on its own life, and she wouldn’t turn back. Not now. Not ever. The unsteady process of remaking herself propelled her steadily forward, knowing, in the end, she might discover a particle of truth.

Her thoughts turned to Zack and Cassy. Since they’d gone off to college, Lillianna marveled at the seeming absoluteness to the end of motherhood—mothering, the all-consuming, central-to-her-life way she’d approached it when they were small. So many of her emotions focused on love for them, her guilt at not being perfect, their pain and sadness, Lillianna’s fierce pride in their many accomplishments, their physical beauty. And when they packed up their bedrooms and ventured out into the college world, the biggest love affairs of her lifetime suddenly disappeared with them.

They had their own lives now, secrets and fears, old hurts, unknown, but often imagined by their mother. When they’d come to the ranch last Christmas, the sense of a new friendship unfolded with those college students, a philosopher and a psychologist. And while that pleased her, the hollowness left over from those measureless feelings of lost motherhood struck a powerful blow to her heart.

But in some ways, Lillianna welcomed the return of her life, the restraints of motherhood loosened. But oh, how she missed the little people. Cassy at three, finger painting on the blank newsprint stretched across the kitchen counter, a broccoli tree and a smiling, orange sun beaming down on her stick house. Constructing a puppet of her laughing, dark-haired mother from scraps of wood, staples and old string. Lillianna warmed when she rediscovered it and proudly hung it on her bedroom wall.

Zackery, the six-year-old inventor, with spaceships concocted from empty string bean cans. The two of them racing down the driveway on their big wheels, fighting over the license plates dug from newly-opened cereal boxes. Zack and Cassy, the baseball and soccer stars, the Cub Scout and Brownie earning their badges, the piano player and the ballet dancer performing their annual Christmas pageant for Aunt Martha.

They’d disappeared—all those little people her children used to be. Sometimes she dreamed of them, forever captured in small bodies. And she’d wake nostalgic and sad, the way she’d felt when she remembered her best friend from high school had been killed in a head-on collision crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

She had desperately wanted to provide her children with childhoods safe from the terror and abuse of her own. They’d talked about her drinking, the suicide attempt, many times and both assured Lillianna they understood. But, in spite of counseling, the treatment center she admitted herself to, and years of sobriety, she remained unable to forgive herself.

Suddenly needing reassurance, the sound of her children’s voices, she grabbed the phone, dialed Cassy’s apartment in Tucson.

“Mom. What’s up? Is everything okay? How’s it going with Pop Pop?”

She filled her daughter in on her grandfather’s condition, the progress on the donor search, and the surgery he faced.

“Give him my love, will you, Mom. And remind him that the bull doesn’t let the doctor mess with him.”

Lillianna laughed. Her father, a Taurus like Cassy, once taught his three-year-old granddaughter to warn her pediatrician, “if you mess with the bull, you get the horn up the tail.” It became the source of many embarrassing back-to-school physicals.

“Cassy...”

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

“Oh... it’s nothing, really. I’m just having a hard time here. It’s bringing back bad memories, and they aren’t all about my father, either. I keep thinking about my own drinking. What it must have done to you and Zack, the way you must really feel about me.”

“How many times do we have to go through this, Mom? You’ve been sober for more than fifteen years. I don’t have a single friend I’d trade mothers with, but most of mine would grab you. So you weren’t perfect. Do you think anyone is?”

“No. But drinking... it’s the one thing I swore I’d never do to my kids.”

“Come off it, Mom. First of all, you didn’t do it to your kids, you did it to yourself. And it’s not like it went on our entire childhoods. Cut yourself some slack. All Zack and I cared about was you. We understood your mother just died. I can’t imagine what I’d do. And if that wasn’t enough, Dad was... well, we don’t have to go into that, do we?”

“No. It’s just that...”

“Do you know what I think?” Cassy’s voice softened. “I think because you never forgave your father, you didn’t believe Zack and I could forgive you either.”

When she hung up, Lillianna paced the small hotel room, opened the drapes and stood in front of the window staring out into the night.

Once, as a small child skipping along a leaf-strewn path in the woods behind their house in Collins Park, she’d discovered a bird tumbled from its nest. The downy chest rose and sank in quick, uneven ripples. Emma imagined the bird cupped into her palms, its warm heart pulsing against her own tepid fingertips. But instead of picking it up, she stood with her hands clamped behind her back until the tiny chest grew still. Filled with terror and rage and love, she wept for the dead bird, for whatever was missing inside herself that prevented her reaching out. Cassy had unveiled the truth. There was no way around your own life—you must plunge straight through it. And with so much new information available to Lillianna now, the facts had somehow changed.

She rearranged and reinterpreted her father’s life, dredging up new memories of her own that had lain, undisturbed, at the bottom of her heart.