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I’ll bury this entry. I’ll bury it deep in my hope chest and lock it up. It can sit under something heavy, so it stays in place, and I’ll tell Clara to be sure to find the hope chest. I’ll tell her when she’s older. When I’m older and on my deathbed. Maybe I’ll go down in history as one of those enchanting women who call a loved one to her deathbed to share a shocking secret.
No, that’s a little too “tabloid” for my style. But I’ll tuck this page underneath something heavy, like Wendell’s revolver or a paperweight, deep in the bottom of the hope chest. And there it will stay until they pull it out and see for themselves that I wasn’t selfish.
I have to hide this, because if I don’t and it’s discovered, then everything could fall apart, and I can’t have things fall apart. Not when they’ve finally started to calm down.
Yet, I want it down on paper so that the truth isn’t lost forever. One day, my girls will want to know. They probably want to know now, but it wouldn’t help them. What will help them is for us to push on and live our lives as normally as possible. How could I live with myself if I interrupt Kate and her newly perfect life? Or Amelia, bless her wild heart, who’s following her dreams? And Megan, secure, dark Megan with her clever husband and babbling baby girl? I won’t do it. And Clara’s still in school. She deserves her normalcy. Needs it, really.
I know what it’s like to hold a secret to my breast and have my entire life spin out of control, and I’ll never put that on any of my children. But one day, I’ll die, and they won’t know about the lighthouse. They won’t know about what happened to me and what I had to do. So here it is.
When I was a teenager, I thought I met a boy. I probably wrote about all this back then. He was a tourist, and he was cute. I fell pregnant, and I told my mother. This was a mistake, in retrospect. I thought she would help me and raise the baby with me. We could pass her off as my youngest sister. I thought everything would be okay.
My mother was enraged and shared the news with my father. They threatened us. They told the boy and me that we had two choices, get married and move out or give the baby away.
The boy wanted to marry me. Maybe I ought to have done that. But to marry him would be to move off the lake and somewhere else. He was going to school to become a teacher, and in the end, I didn’t love him.
I told my parents that I would not marry him, but I would keep the child.
That didn’t happen. It turned out that they made the decision for us, adopting the baby out to a good family from the south. A big, Catholic family happy to take in another Catholic baby.
For some years after, I searched for my daughter, never to find her. Instead, I found the man I would fall in love with, Wendell Acton.
I made another mistake, though. I never told Wendell about my past. I was too worried it would be a deal-breaker for him and that I’d be faced with new heartache. I feared I would drown from all the tragedy, and so I kept it a secret.
By the time Wendell and I were married, and we had our own three beautiful girls, I found a new comfort in my new life. I could move on. I had to move on from my first bouncing baby girl.
It was by then that that child would have turned eighteen, but the no-contact order had been two-way. My parents and her adoptive parents had agreed that neither we nor they would ever get in touch. To do so would break the law.
On her birth certificate, my parents and I agreed to leave the boy’s name off in favor of a humiliating note: Father Unknown. I’ll never forgive them for that, but then I’d never have wanted to include the boy’s name. The simple truth was that I did not love him. Despite my preference for excitement and adventure, it was never a summer boy I wanted.
It was a local one. And once I found Wendell, all I wanted was for the past to be buried for good.
Then, Kate unwittingly followed in my footsteps. To me, there was just one option, to raise the baby as Kate’s sister, as I had wanted. Wendell disagreed and thought perhaps Kate and Matthew ought to be together. But I thought then that we shouldn’t force that on Kate. I sometimes wonder if I was wrong. If that’s why Wendell left?
And unfortunately, I’ll never know. As much as I wish I could answer that mystery in this note, I cannot. All I know is that wherever Wendell is now, he’s not with me. And I can’t stand it. So, I’ll ask my daughters to look for him. In my own way, I’ll see to it that they find their father and come to know that whatever happened, he surely loved them. As much as I do.
Kate, Amelia, Megan, and Clara: Go find him. Please.