What remains is a world-falling-away feeling. An unrealness in everything. Like if I were to look down at my own fingertips, I’d find them fading.
“I don’t know anything about this,” I tell Aunt Leah.
She turns to me, raising an eyebrow, but as soon as she sees my face in the flickering blue light of the television screen, her expression softens. “You really don’t?” she says.
I shake my head. I feel both Harp and Peter move forward, flanking me on either side, to protect me. Harp puts her hand hard and reassuring on my shoulder.
“What is your fucking problem, lady?” she snaps at my aunt. “That’s how you deliver earth-shattering news to people?”
“I didn’t realize,” Aunt Leah says, a little desperately. “I really didn’t. There was a time when Mara wouldn’t shut up about that baby. I haven’t seen her in twenty years; how was I supposed to know she’d stopped?”
“I don’t know about this,” I say again. My mind is racing through a million different memories of my mother, of my mother mothering me, flicking through the scenes like a flipbook to find any clue that I was anything but the first. But there’s nothing. There’s my mother brushing my hair after a bath when I was little; there’s my mother taking my picture on the first day of kindergarten; there’s my mother teaching me how to scramble an egg; there’s my mother. The only thing that makes me believe my aunt is telling me the truth is the memory of a photo, hidden in a drawer in my grandparents’ apartment. An anonymous baby in 1986. The shiver that went up my spine at the sight of it. My sister.
Aunt Leah sighs. “What do you know about how your parents met?”
“They met at college,” I reply promptly, because their love story has been drilled into me like a fairy tale. Set up on a blind date by pushy roommates. Went to a movie off-campus, shared Sno-Caps and Coke. Dad nervous; Mom sweetly thinking, This is the man I’ll marry.
But Leah shakes her head. “No,” she says. “They met in New York when they were both just at the end of high school. You really don’t know this?”
“She doesn’t know,” Harp says through gritted teeth.
“Listen,” Aunt Leah says. She picks up the remote and turns off the TV. “Here’s what happened. At the end of his senior year, Ned went on a trip to New York City with his Model UN club. He had to beg our parents to let him, only because he’d never been outside of Pittsburgh without them before. Till he went, he hadn’t given them any reason not to trust him. I was out of college by that time, working downtown; Toby and me were two years married. I was home for Sunday dinner when Ned comes back. And we’ve barely asked him how was his trip when he tells us he’s met a girl.
“Okay, so he’s met a girl. So what, right? He says they met in the park; her name is Mara; she lives in New York. That’s it. That’s all he tells us, so that’s all we know. But suddenly he’s on the phone with her four, five hours a night. He’s taking eight-hour bus rides back and forth to New York on weekends. Meanwhile, she never comes to our house. I don’t know what my parents thought, but I figured Ned was ashamed of us. I thought he’d convinced his fancy New York girlfriend that he came from a family of hicks or something.
“But that wasn’t it. The truth was, your mom was pregnant. She’d been pregnant when they met, about five months along. I don’t think she knew who the father was. Later Ned explained to us she’d gotten in with a bad crowd, was seeing older guys, guys who pushed her around. She was maybe on drugs, I don’t know. Her parents kicked her out and she’d been staying with friends, and Ned didn’t approve. All those weekends he went up there, he was trying to find her an apartment, paying for it with the money he made working at the pharmacy. And then she turned eighteen, and then he turned eighteen, and they got married. Before we’d even laid eyes on her.
“Finally, he brought her out here. She was probably eight months along, getting real big. She looked terrible—her skin was all waxy, her hair dyed blue at the ends. She had a big safety pin through her nose. I thought my mother was going to have a heart attack, I really did. And we’re asking them, why did you do this, why didn’t you tell us? And Mara’s just sitting there, biting her nails, not saying a word. Ned says they got married because they’re in love. They didn’t tell us ’cause we wouldn’t understand. My dad asks him, does he realize how much work a baby is? Does he really think he’s capable of raising another man’s child?
“And then Mara finally talks. She says she’s giving it up; she wants a clean slate. And I can tell by Ned’s face he isn’t happy. Probably he had some fantasy about them playing house. I knew him his whole life; I know how he thinks. The man can fall in love with a pregnant teenage punk, but all the time he’s harboring these Brady Bunch delusions. You can’t convince me it was your mom pushing to get married at eighteen. She had plenty of wild years left in her. But he must’ve made it sound pretty appealing to give it up and be good, because that’s what she did.
“And the other thing that happened, if you want to know the truth,” Leah says, and her voice takes on a fresh wave of coldness, taps into some ancient store of anger and recrimination, “is that we told her we would take it. Toby and me. We had no children, not by choice, and we told her we’d raise it and love it like our own. And she told us no. She said it would be too painful to have it close, to know too much about it. So she had it, and she gave it to strangers. And it doesn’t make any sense, either, because she stayed in touch with the -adoptive parents for years and years after that. Up to the point where we stopped talking, because it hurt too much to hear about. ‘The Conroys sent us a picture of Winnie!’ she’d say. ‘Winnie’s learning how to ride a tricycle!’ Like it was just some friend’s kid, instead of her own flesh and blood. One day, I finally said, ‘Mara, I don’t want to hear about Winnie. Every time you talk about her I think about how you wouldn’t let her be mine.’ That shut her up. Ned calls me later, yelling, telling me I should be ashamed of myself, but I wasn’t then, and I’m not now. Then about ten years after that, you were born. My parents told me, because Ned and Mara weren’t speaking to me anymore. They’d been married ten years when you were born. If you ask me, that’s too much. You settle into routines in ten years. How do you make room for a baby? How do you know for sure, if you’re her, that you even want one?
“So, yeah,” she says, and she folds her arms. “You’ve got a sister, and no cousins. And I don’t think it’s surprising that Mara let herself get caught up in the Rapture and taken away by it. Because she hasn’t had any trouble leaving her kids behind before.”
When Aunt Leah’s done I ask her where the bathroom is. She points me down an adjacent hallway, with a wary expression, like she’d expected more questions or more yelling. But I don’t want to speak to her anymore. I don’t want to have to listen to her speak, ever again. Harp makes a motion like she’s about to follow me, but I wave her away.
In the bathroom I just stand under the fluorescent light and examine my face in the mirror. I have my mom’s freckles and my dad’s dark hair. I am the person they chose to create together. I am their blank slate. A child born out of the choice to be good. I’m angry. I’ve never been so angry. It isn’t the fact of my sister; it isn’t my wild pierced mother’s unprotected sex, or my brave dumb father’s stepping in to play the hero. I’m angry because I didn’t know. Because I had to sit on Aunt Leah’s couch while she told me. Because they left. They told me they were going and they went, and they made it seem like it was an absence in me that was worth leaving. Now I know: it was only ever their story. If I was part of it at all, I was just a footnote.
When I leave the bathroom, Uncle Toby stands outside, waiting. He hands me something, an old photograph. It’s a picture of my parents at their college graduation. They’re in navy-blue caps and gowns, their arms wrapped around each other. They look so happy. According to my aunt’s timeline, they’d been married at this point for four years. Winnie was long gone, and soon Leah and Toby would be as well. After that, my mother’s parents. After that, me.
“Leah loved your dad,” Toby says softly. “She really did. He was her baby brother. I remember how she used to talk about him when we first started going out. She made him sound like this genius, this movie star. When he was just this dorky kid. It hurt her that your parents didn’t want us to raise Winnie, but that was nothing compared to how she felt when they stopped talking to her. For weeks, she called them every day, three times a day, begging forgiveness. But they were done with her.” He snaps, to show how quickly and easily it was done. “I can’t imagine them as Believers. I can’t think of what your last few years have been like. But they were really fun once. And I never saw two people so in love. I thought you should be able to remember them like that.”
In the picture, my mother’s hair is no longer blue. It’s her usual strawberry blonde. You wouldn’t know by looking at her that she’d ever been pregnant, that any man had ever pushed her around. She looks like a normal young woman on her graduation day, excited and loved.
“Can I use your internet?” I ask Uncle Toby.
First I search her name. “Winnie Conroy.” There are pages that lead to nothing: historical records about floods, fires; an obituary notice for a Dallas woman born in 1943. Then I find what I hoped I might. A social networking page with nearly all its information hidden, but a profile picture that shows a woman in her mid-twenties, grinning in the sun, her face practic-ally obscured by large sunglasses. Winnie Conroy. A Masters student at UC Berkeley. Who one night, last month, must have tracked down her biological grandparents’ phone number, and called it. Just to see what happened. Just to hear what they sounded like. It wasn’t my mother’s silence that I heard. It was my sister’s.
I check my e-mail and find a reply from Wambaugh. She’s happy I’m safe; she’s happy I’m with Harp. Wambaugh gave her notice when the high school went Believer; she moved to Sacramento, where her parents live. She gives me her number and tells me to call it if ever I need her, but she also says:
Viv, you’re going to live a full and happy life. I still believe this, despite everything that’s happened in this country in the last two months. But I would be remiss in my duties as a Responsible Adult if I didn’t encourage you to stay where you are in South Dakota. It sounds like it’s a safe place, and there aren’t many safe places left at this point. Just keep your head low until it all blows over.
Whoops. I write her phone number on a piece of paper, and slip it into my pocket. I hide the picture Uncle Toby gave me in the middle of a pile of bills next to the keyboard. I don’t want it. I don’t know those people; I never have. It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s Leah or Toby who finds it, or when, or what they’ll think when they do. By then I’ll be long gone, a girl who came and interrupted their dinner one Wednesday night in June.
In the living room, Harp is pacing, tugging nervously at her skirt, while Peter leans against the wall with his hands in his pockets. When I walk in, he stands upright and Harp stops moving. They look at me with wary eyes. I can hear someone bustling around in the kitchen, the clatter of silverware and plates.
“She wants us to spend the night,” Peter murmurs. “She feels bad. She ordered a pizza for the three of us to split.”
I shake my head. “I want to get out of here,” I whisper.
Peter opens his mouth, like he’s going to question me, and he’s probably right to do it—I shouldn’t blame my aunt for things my parents never told me. But before he’s able to, Harp steps up to my side and links her arm through mine.
“Let’s not bother with goodbyes, okay?” Harp says. “At this point, I’m worried she’ll pull a literal skeleton from the closet.”