Sunday, February 22, 2015
West Palm Beach, Florida
“Kate,” said Dr. Alvarez, “we’ve talked about this before, but I really would like you to acknowledge the worst-case scenarios you’ve thought of out loud, before you leave us tomorrow.”
Kate bit her pinkie nail. She was fifty-seven years old—too old to be spoken to like a child. Though maybe she’d been acting like one, in this latest chapter of her life. Gunning Mark’s Porsche convertible to 110 on A1A just before midnight Christmas Eve—God, the sweetness of the wind on her face!—then braking and veering so suddenly and violently—she would’ve sworn there was a turtle in the road—that the Porsche ended up (unaccountably; she could not reconstruct it, no matter how she tried) across the bike path on the opposite side of the road, facing the way she had not been going, nosed into a crisply trimmed hedge. She’d been naked under her white Prada coat, and barefoot, and, when she’d seen the flashing lights come up behind her—had she blacked out for a moment? She didn’t remember any time passing between the hard stop and this—she had, unfortunately, stumbled out and opened her coat for the cop. It might’ve worked when she was younger.
She’d blown a 0.12 percent on the Breathalyzer and spent most of Christmas Day in jail, before her friend Marie bailed her out and brought her straight here to the rehab center. Humiliated as Kate was to make Marie Harrington her one phone call, she knew Marie would fix everything: somehow guarantee the incident was kept out of the news; call in a favor to her friend, the director of the center, to get Kate right in. It had taken every ounce of humility that Kate possessed to ask for these things. “Anything for you, baby,” Marie had said, hugging Kate goodbye under the center’s portico, her white BMW idling in the circular drive. “Now, swear you’re gonna be okay?”
Kate had a long history of needing people when she didn’t want to; of swearing she was going to be okay.
She’d been in rehab for three months ten years ago, back in California, just before she’d met Mark. And fifteen years ago, for six months, after the catastrophe that had ended her TV career. Probably a dozen other times in her earlier life, she should’ve been in rehab.
To say she didn’t trust herself was an understatement.
Mark’s lawyer had arranged everything beyond Marie’s purview: paid the fine, exchanged jail time for the time in rehab, even gotten the sentence reduced since Kate had checked herself in so willingly and instantly. Her license was suspended for six months. This was, by some miracle, her first DUI.
Born under a lucky star, her mother had always told her.
Not that Kate bought that for an instant, not really.
“I know you’ve said you didn’t intend to harm anyone except perhaps yourself, correct?” Dr. Alvarez prodded. “But we’ve been talking about admitting that your addiction had escalated to the point where you had no control over who you might have harmed. I want you to consider this only because modifying your behavior for these reasons is a bridge to beginning to care for and love yourself as much as you care for and love others.”
“I understand,” said Kate—ever the girl who tried to please.
But worst-case scenarios were tiresome, and, honestly, too terrible to acknowledge. A late-night bicyclist whirring down the path (the bicyclist: dead). The power pole four feet closer (Kate: dead). A car in the oncoming lane (perhaps a whole family on their way home from a Christmas Eve service: dead). Kate ruminated on all these possibilities—constantly, in truth. But she couldn’t list them out loud, not even to Dr. Alvarez, because that would make them real.
Which was exactly what Dr. Alvarez wanted, she guessed.
How did rubbing Kate’s nose in the face of the damage she might’ve done—if only she weren’t so damn “lucky”—help her? Wasn’t she here to be helped?
Sobriety, she thought, was tiresome, too.
“It’s a way I used to be,” she said, plucking at a loose thread on the cuff of her long-sleeved white T-shirt. “Reckless. I’m not that way anymore.” She had been being extremely careful for a long time, in fact—up until a couple months ago, at least.
Dr. Alvarez raised an eyebrow, made a note. “Let’s talk about your strategies going forward. Now, your sister’s coming to get you tomorrow to bring you to your mother’s in North Carolina. You and I will have phone sessions three times a week, and I can meet with you in person as often as you like, once you come back home. Have you decided how long you’re going to stay at your mother’s?”
“We’ll see how it goes.”
“I’d advise that you create a plan, Kate.”
Kate shrugged. “My mother and my sister don’t trust me to be alone.”
Dr. Alvarez cocked her head. “Do you trust yourself to be alone?”
Kate laughed. “I’ve done a fine job of it so far, haven’t I? Two months a widow and I land myself in jail.” Some days, ever since the call had come about Mark, Kate had found it hard to care what happened to her at all. That her mother and sister were going to bat for her—still, after all these years—was her saving grace, honestly, but also struck her as just plain exhausting. Her flare-ups of largesse and I-can-conquer-the-world; her low points of drunken despair. Why did they even bother? Weren’t they exhausted, too?
What was going to make this time any different?
Dr. Alvarez made a note. Then she looked up and, behind her glasses, blinked. “Kate, you’ve been sober for fifty-nine days now. Sixty, by the time today’s over. Do you realize what an accomplishment that is?”
Kate shrugged. “Not so hard, in here,” she said, though she instantly realized that wasn’t true. Every day was hard. Every day, not drinking was hard. Out in the world, it would be that much harder. Even though she was clean now, that didn’t mean her body and mind didn’t remember the joy and release they got from drinking.
Oh, how she hoped this time would be different—
She was trying to have faith, the way everyone in here talked about, but that wasn’t so easy to do, either.
Plus, once she left, she wouldn’t have Ransom, her therapy horse, and whether she’d be able to keep from losing her mind to grief and her same mad furies again without him, she wasn’t sure. Though she hadn’t had much to do with horses since she was six years old, when visits to her grandparents’ farm had ended, finding Ransom had felt like coming home. For all his moods and persnickety (she would swear) opinions, he had really saved her, these last two months. A beautiful chestnut with a white blaze, he’d shown her that she could be reliable, just because he needed her to be.
It was something, at least. And not a little thing.
Unfortunately, the trouble with bonding with him the way she had—currying him, feeding him, riding him every day on the beach—was that he, too, would soon be gone. Assigned to the next arrival who needed him. And this was undoubtedly the right thing. What was Kate going to do, take him home?
Dr. Alvarez blinked again. “Do you think that your mother’s will be a nurturing place for you as you reenter your life—and I really want to encourage you to think of yourself this way—as a sober individual?”
“I think she’ll keep me in line,” Kate said, then gave a short laugh, though nothing was actually funny.
Mark had up and died on her, that was the entire problem, Kate thought, as she headed for the stable and Ransom along the palm-shrouded trail. How was she supposed to deal with that and stay sober?
Mark, who’d shown up in her life by literally bumping into her as she was heading into the Gower Café on the Sony lot after an audition, and he was walking out. “Excuse me!” he’d said, then blinked and added, in a way that actually seemed involuntary, “May I buy you a cup of coffee?”
She was so used to the double take—people still recognized her from her five years as Rosetta on Love and Yearning, if not from her cameos on The Love Boat, Charlie’s Angels, Dynasty, Hart to Hart—that it wasn’t really flattering anymore, except that she’d been forty-eight at the time. Why she’d let her guard down and said yes, then yes to dinner that same night, she had no idea. Maybe her therapist then had been encouraging her to try behaving differently for different results.
She’d only ever had bad experiences with men. Men who’d loved her as arm candy—in the early days, her agent had billed her as the next Raquel Welch, “a luscious brunette you won’t be able to take your eyes off of!”—but, in private, belittled her, laughed at her, pinched or slapped her, so she’d know who was in charge, who mattered and who didn’t.
If they bruised her so it showed, she always left—but a lot of the ways they bruised her didn’t show. One of them had mentioned casually, when they were cuddled on the couch watching TV one night, how easy it would be to break her neck, with the proper grip and just a slight flick of his wrist, and she’d come to assume, without precisely realizing it, that that was a desire and skill they all shared.
She had never been married before. Mark was five-eight, cue-ball bald with a gray goatee, ten years older than her. Ordinarily, she’d have never given him a second glance. “It almost seems you like this man, Kate,” she remembered her therapist observing, with surprise, after the second date or so. And she had to admit: she did. He’d been divorced a few years and had three college-age children whom he spoke of fondly. He did not badmouth his ex-wife, Carin; nor did he speak of her often. All Kate knew, really, was that Carin had never remarried and had been “a wonderful mom.” He did his own landscaping—his backyard was a haven—spoke ardently of his California asters, and was a devoted viewer of the PBS NewsHour. He averaged a bike-a-thon a month for charity. He lost track of the story in any movie they watched, because he was so focused on the musical score; he could transpose any piece he heard into written notes on the page, which astonished her. He’d been raised on a farm in southern Minnesota, though he’d been in California for forty years, ever since moving there at eighteen to start at USC.
And he was kind to her. At first, she’d laughed at him for it. Then, she’d started to like it. And then she’d tried to push him away. He wouldn’t let her. “You’re the love of my life, you must know that,” he said, which was surprising, given that he’d been married to Carin for twenty-four years. (What had gone wrong between them, Kate didn’t know, nor did she ask.)
A year after Kate and Mark met, they were married in his backyard, with the asters in bloom. A year after that, she was bemoaning another failed audition—despite her stints in rehab, nobody was willing to take a chance on her after what had happened that last time—when he blurted that he thought they should move to Florida. His younger son, Ryan, had gone there for a job in yacht sales; his daughter, Hannah, was starting as a medical resident in Miami; and his older brother, Walt, had retired to Vero Beach after a lifetime in Minnesota, having had his fill of frigid winters. In Florida, Mark said, their California money would go further; last the rest of their lives, even. Kate could retire, just enjoy life. Mark could do some work remotely, and commute to L.A. when he had to, for a couple years. Then he’d retire, too—the minute he turned sixty-two, he promised.
Kate didn’t want to give up on her career; on her self, it felt like. She knew she was far better than her looks had ever allowed her to be. Plus, now that she was older, her emotional range was greater. Maybe people would finally begin to see her talent.
Mark finally got exasperated, said that wasn’t realistic, not for Hollywood. She was fifty years old. “What are you trying to prove? I’m offering you the chance to be happy. Not to have any cares. For the first time in your life!”
His exasperation was so out of character that it took her aback, and made her feel she must be in the wrong, somehow.
Then, she realized: he’d never believed she would succeed at breaking back into the business. He’d just been humoring her—since day one, probably.
Also, he didn’t seem to notice or care that her mother, at that time, still lived in Laguna Beach.
Of course, Kate almost never made it down to see Clarissa. With traffic, the drive each way was at least two hours. Anyway, Clarissa was invariably busy with her work at the domestic violence shelter, though she’d supposedly retired.
“Let’s not hang on to the past!” Mark said, with, again, uncharacteristic enthusiasm, fanning out on the table in front of her a stack of real estate listings he’d printed in color, tiny photos showing swimming pools of cerulean blue, kitchens with stainless Sub-Zero freezers, spotless glass tile. “Let’s have a new adventure!”
Finally, Kate ran the idea past her mother on the phone. Clarissa responded with a distracted-sounding, “You have to do what’s best for you and Mark,” as if Kate’s proximity made no difference to her whatsoever.
So Kate told Mark she would move to Florida.
And they’d been happy there! He hadn’t retired on schedule—“Just one more” project always came his way—but usually he was gone only a week or two each month. He’d hung on to his house in California, to make the back-and-forth lifestyle easier; Kate imagined he enjoyed the time there by himself, and the pleasures of their time together in Vero Beach were heightened by the time apart, too.
Their house on the barrier island overlooked a long stretch of empty sand beach. They slept with the curtains open so the sunrise would wake them. They drank fresh-squeezed orange juice every morning and ate dinner at the club most nights. A Bose sound system pumped music throughout the house and out to the courtyard and the pool. On winter mornings, when they wanted to wake before sunrise, Mark set it to play the Star Wars theme as their alarm. Once a month or so, Ryan would come up from West Palm, or Hannah from Miami, to join them for dinner or the weekend. Walt and his wife, Linda, who lived in a modest bungalow just across the bridge on the mainland, would come out to spend the occasional Sunday afternoon sipping piña coladas by the pool.
Kate had decided against complete sobriety—it was just so not fun, socially; not to mention embarrassing, to have to admit you might’ve had a problem in the past. The New Kate had her drinking under control: one piña colada by the pool, one glass of wine with dinner—or, if she was at a party, two of champagne. She’d promised herself and Mark that she’d stick to these limits, and she did (for the most part). The New Kate had a walk-in closet full of DVF wrap dresses, Christian Louboutin pumps, swimsuits, straw hats, Tory Burch flip-flops, beach cover-ups. And, as it turned out, a knack for planning events; it wasn’t long before she was chair and emcee of four annual galas. She starred in a local production of The Sound of Music as the Mother Superior, which she hoped would prove, at least, that she had a sense of humor about herself. For the first time in decades, she had women friends—lunch dates, shopping buddies—to the point that Mark, when he was around, good-naturedly complained.
If she’d been walking a high wire, an instant from disaster with every move she made, she hadn’t exactly realized it.
Except, some nights, after Mark had gone to sleep, or nights when he was away in California, she would sneak downstairs and have an extra glass of wine. Or two. Sometimes three. There was no harm in it that she could see. She’d flip on the big TV, get sucked into episodes of Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders: Making the Team. The girls who’d gained a little weight in the offseason: God, the poor things.
And then, one early afternoon last October—she’d been bracing for hurricanes, believing it her worst nightmare that one would strike while Mark was away—she’d gotten a call from a California number. For one soap-bubble moment, she’d thought maybe her agent had put in a word somewhere—
It was an ER doctor at Hollywood Presbyterian. Mark had had a heart attack, which had killed him instantly.
The first thing Kate did was call his oldest child, Ben, who was in medical school out in L.A. By some miracle, he answered. He stammered that, yes, he’d call his brother and sister and mom and let them know, then added that he’d go to the hospital to “claim the body” and begin to “make arrangements,” which stunned her. “I’ll be there by tomorrow!” she blurted, but Ben just said thank you and hung up. She looked blankly at the phone, wondering what he’d been thanking her for.
The second thing she did was to set the phone on the kitchen counter and pour herself a glass of Pinot Gris. She drank it in three swallows, booked her ticket out of Orlando for that night, then poured a second glass, which she brought upstairs to drink while she packed. Her DVF wrap dress in black. Her black Louboutin pumps.
By the time she saw the children and Carin, late the next morning at Mark’s house—they walked in as a mob without knocking (and how had Ryan and Hannah made it from Florida so quickly, ahead of Kate, it seemed?)—the four of them had the service planned. Mark was to be buried in a plot in North Hollywood that he and Carin had purchased together in 1985, the year that Ben was born.
They might as well have taken a baseball bat—each one of them in succession—to Kate’s knees.
Though none of them seemed to have a glimmer of a thought that anything was amiss. Mark had evidently never brought up any possible alternative arrangements; Kate, of course, had never thought to ask. Maybe she’d imagined they were too happy to die—certainly, at least, right now.
The force of his children and his ex-wife, all together, was too much for her to overcome. Anyway, she knew Mark would’ve wanted his children to be soothed in any way they could be.
So, she didn’t say a word. She went through motions and tried to smile, to not be a bother, in this place and with these people where and with whom she so clearly did not fit. (Her mother wasn’t there; Clarissa had—to Kate, this was inexplicable—moved to North Carolina the year before and didn’t “feel up to” travel, even for her daughter’s husband’s funeral.)
Only days later, after the whole thing was done and Kate had had four glasses of wine at the backyard reception—the same backyard where Kate and Mark had been married; now the house would be sold, the proceeds divided among the children—did Carin come up to Kate and say quietly, “I’m sorry, Kate. It’s just that we were a family for so long.”
Ransom seemed to sense it was their last ride together. He walked out carefully toward the beach with the group of six, as usual, through the canopy of palms, but, once his hooves hit the long stretch of sand, he started to edge ahead, tossing his head impatiently.
Did he finally trust Kate enough to carry her at the speed he wanted to go?
Kate had been told that this was why they’d been assigned to each other: they both had a reckless side that the other would help assuage. And, so far, they had.
But it was their last day. Kate looked back at the group leader, Dr. Jill, who waved and grinned and shouted, “Just this once!”
Kate laughed with delight. “Okay, buddy, go,” she whispered, giving Ransom a little squeeze, as warm wind rustled her hair. The horse’s muscles rippled to life, and she held on tight, letting her body move with his steady rhythm. Empty beach stretched as far as she could see.
She leaned in.
“Look, you know I’m right,” Lana said, just as if she were the older sister, as she merged onto I-95 heading north. Behind her sunglasses, Kate was squinting. The outside world seemed terribly bright. Lana had picked her up at 8 a.m. sharp—way too early, as far as Kate was concerned, but the center and Lana had both required it.
“Can you just give me five minutes to adjust to being out here?” Kate said.
Waiting wasn’t Lana’s style. She pushed her voluminous dark curls out of her eyes, flipped on her turn signal, moved into the middle lane, and pushed her Honda CR-V to eighty. Cars in the lanes to either side sped past, one after another after another.
If Lana had ever had an agent, Kate had always thought, that agent would’ve compared her to Halle Berry, and not been far off. But Lana had gotten a Ph.D. in American Studies instead, and now was a professor at the University of North Carolina. She’d written and published five, six, maybe seven, books on racial identity; Kate had somehow lost track.
“I’m just saying, the more I think about it, the more I think your . . . your feelings of ungroundedness, shall we say, go back to our—to your—father and his literal abandonment of you. You felt it more than I did, because you were six. You remember it. You witnessed it. You took it personally. This looms large in your pain body. I mean, you can’t escape it, can you? Isn’t that what your drinking is all about? About this gaping wound you’re trying to fill?”
Kate had also always thought it unfortunate that Lana had minored in psychology. “You felt it, too. You’ve been pissed about it all your life.”
“Well, I was the obvious problem! The reason he abandoned us. But you—you had done nothing wrong, you had been nothing wrong, and yet, you were abandoned all the same. You’ve been hurt all your life.”
Kate rubbed her temple. They were going to be in the car for almost ten hours. Lana had insisted on driving all the way down from Raleigh to pick up Kate straight from the door of the rehab center, as if Kate couldn’t be trusted to get herself onto an airplane and up to Wilmington and their mother’s Kure Beach condo without taking a drink. Well, maybe that was a safe bet. And it was generous of Lana, for sure, to drive all the way here and back, cancel her classes for a couple days, and all the rest.
But why did she always have to leap right into the deep end? And why had she not brought Kate home, at least to grab some different clothes and see the place—something about how Dr. Alvarez had thought it would be better not to be reminded of the old life, just yet, as long as Kate had the option? Only no one really had given Kate the option. “I just don’t see how a DNA test is going to help,” Kate said, and she had more reasons than her sister knew for being frightened of one; for questioning whether it might not be best to leave certain stones unturned. “Anyway, what if it proves that Mom’s been lying to us all these years? You really want to put her through that? Put all of us through that?”
“Why do you want so badly to protect her? At your own expense? Do I need to remind you? I have features that would suggest I am at least part Black. And I have had experiences all my life based on my appearance that tell me I am ‘less than,’ due to the systemic racism inherent in American society, while your appearance has been lauded, rewarded, because you look very much like pictures I’ve seen of Clayburn Montgomery, the white man who is our reputed father.”
Kate remembered—both too well and as a sort of general blur—what had happened shortly after Lana was born. She remembered, somehow, standing outside the back door of the brick house in Kentucky, gripping her mother’s skirt, as Clarissa held baby Lana. She remembered her father, shutting that door in their faces.
Kate never saw him again. She had no wish to.
Lana, on the other hand, had tracked him down. Twenty years ago, then again ten years ago, and five years ago. How she’d stood it, over and over again, him hanging up on her each time she proudly announced her name, Lana Montgomery, Kate had no idea.
Then again, Lana swore that, despite their mother’s unwavering insistence all these years, she was 90 percent sure Clayburn wasn’t her father at all. It’s just that ten percent chance—I just want that to be acknowledged.
“Remember,” Kate said, “Mom said her mother told her, that same day Clayburn kicked us out, that Mom had been adopted at birth; that her biological mother was Sicilian. That has to be where you got your features. From our biological grandmother. Right?”
“Right. Yes. And Mom recently got some news about that.”
Kate’s stomach fluttered. “What do you mean?”
“I should leave it to her to tell you.” Lana pushed up her sunglasses and switched lanes to pass a Subaru that was going only seventy-five. “Listen, though, a colleague of mine did her DNA recently, and it got me thinking. The tests are affordable now, and really easy. Everything I’ve written and studied so far has been about not knowing. Imagining, perceiving. But now I could actually write the next chapter! About knowing. I think I’m ready for that. And, see, if I just sent my own test in, I’d find out if I was Sicilian or whatever—but, if you did it, too, we’d find out for sure if Clayburn is my father. And if Mom did it, she’d find out where she comes from. She always says we should leave the past in the past, but I think it would help us all if we knew the truth.”
Kate spun her corded bracelet around her wrist. It used to be that Kate was the one calling the shots, protecting Lana from hard truths, deciding what was what. But that had been a long time ago. “I’d rather just say I believe Mom that Clayburn is your father. Not put her through this.”
Lana shook her head. “Whatever Mom’s reasons for keeping it hidden all these years, it’s time. You’re in crisis, and I need to know who I am.”
“I’m not in crisis right now,” Kate grumbled, thinking again of that moment standing at the bottom of the back stoop, her little six-year-old self clutching her mother’s skirt and looking up at her larger-than-life father. Lana’s birthday was in September 1963, and she’d been brand-new when their father had kicked them out, so this moment had to have taken place a couple months before Kennedy was shot—but, in Kate’s memory, it had all happened the same day, the same instant, even: everything destroyed. She wished suddenly for a glass of wine. She could almost taste it: a lush Sancerre. “Anyway, you said Clayburn has a whole new family now—four grown daughters, eight lovely grandchildren. You said you saw them on Facebook. You don’t really think he’d welcome you as his daughter after all these years, do you? Is that what you’re hoping for, if the test proved you were his?”
“That might be your hope,” Lana said, in a clipped tone. “It is not mine.”
Kate guessed her sister wanted to be asked to elaborate, but what would follow would be a list of a hundred reasons why Lana, with her “lifelong feelings of difference/different-ness,” as she’d written in one of her early books, just knew Clayburn wasn’t her father, along with her dreams of the man (“probably Black, probably ignorant of my very existence”) who was.
Kate didn’t take the bait, instead squinting out the window at the swampy forests zipping by.
Obviously, she did not like thinking that Lana might not be her “full” sister, not least for the fact that it would mean their mother had been lying to them all their lives. And she did not like thinking about her father, whom she had loved, as much as she had feared him.
Why was Lana insisting on it now?
Come to think of it, Kate did remember Clayburn setting her on the back of a horse, likely more than once, leading her around at a slow walk . . .
Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Not even in all this time with Ransom, not till right this very moment. Memory was so fickle.
If anyone ever asked, Kate always said her father had been dead a long time.
Clarissa’s whole day felt like one of “waiting”—for the girls to arrive; to see how Kate would seem—though, in fact, she was in motion nonstop, doing a huge shop at the Food Lion, carting everything up the three flights to her condo, putting everything away and cutting the roses and finding the right vase and making up the guest room bed with fresh sheets, then cleaning everything again that she’d already cleaned yesterday. She hadn’t heard from her daughters, but there was no point trying to call; Lana would have let her know if there was any problem or delay. And at least cleanliness was one thing Clarissa could control, in the middle of so many things that she could not.
Finally, she stashed away the vacuum and Swiffer and Windex and set out for her usual beach walk, tacking on an extra half mile to pass more time—she averaged two miles a day, which she didn’t think was too bad, given that she was almost seventy-nine years old—keeping her eye out for leaping dolphins in the vast, sparkling blue. Her downstairs neighbor, Sally, claimed they were out there every day this time of year, though Clarissa, her eyesight being what it was, rarely spotted them.
Back home again, she poured herself an iced tea and got to work making a salad and prepping stuffed zucchini—“zuccanoes,” the Moosewood recipe called them—to go into the oven. Lana was a “pescatarian,” while Kate, off and on, had tried out being vegetarian. Clarissa didn’t know, now, what she was. The knife kept slipping in her hands as she minced the garlic and mushrooms; she was more nervous than she’d realized.
She was trying not to think that this was the last chance she had to get it right with Kate. With Lana, even.
But it might be. It really might be.
Her condo was a two-bedroom, third floor, facing the ocean. Her bedroom and the living room had sliders to the deck, which overlooked the beach and the crashing waves, and the dining area was open between the kitchen and the living room, so she could see the ocean from every room, except, of course, for the two bathrooms—since when had Americans decided that every last one of them deserved the immense luxury of their own private bathroom, Clarissa wondered—and the back bedroom, where Kate would stay. Clarissa had considered giving up the master suite to her daughter—Kate was so used to a posh life; the guest room here would no doubt be a letdown—then decided against it. Not that she wanted to punish Kate for being “in recovery” once again. Not at all. Clarissa understood: It was a disease. Not Kate’s fault.
Years ago, a therapist had told Clarissa that Kate’s difficulties weren’t Clarissa’s fault, either. Clarissa had been trying all this time to believe it.
She cued up Ella Fitzgerald on Pandora and set the table while she sang along with “It’s Only a Paper Moon”: blue goblets for water, her white Pottery Barn plates and woven blue and white napkins, silver seashell napkin rings. She set the dozen yellow roses in their blue glass vase in the empty, fourth place, so she and Lana at either end would be able to see each other around them. She would seat Kate facing the ocean view, the roses.
She’d given all the alcohol she’d had on hand—not much, just three dusty bottles of Chardonnay—to Sally, who’d sworn she’d keep them “under lock and key.”
Clarissa did wish she had a glass from one right now, though.
“Mom,” Lana said, from her end of the table an hour later, “I just think it would help Kate and me both, to get definitive answers.” The girls had arrived on time, looking worn thin but, even after their long drive, still on speaking terms and smelling of their expensive shampoos and perfumes when Clarissa hugged them, and Kate had seemed happy enough with the back bedroom when she’d brought her suitcase in. “Nice place, Mom!” she’d said, which had made Clarissa’s heart go soft—just the normalcy of it, maybe; as if she’d been expecting a stranger to arrive and now saw it was her daughter, after all. She hated that this was Kate’s first time seeing the condo—Clarissa had lived here a year and a half—and that they hadn’t seen each other at all in more than three years. She still felt terrible that she hadn’t gone to Mark’s funeral, or even to visit Kate in Florida afterward. She’d thought the travel would be too taxing, but that had more likely been a cover for the real reason—her fear that Kate would be too much for her, that she wouldn’t know how to help her; that she’d only lose her own hard-earned peace of mind in trying.
Somehow, she heard what Monty, the piano player in her jazz band, would have said: Lame excuse, Clare.
“Not to mention you, Mom,” Lana said now. “If what you say is true about us having the same father, wouldn’t it feel good to have it proven, once and for all?”
“Of course what I say is true. And I made my peace with all that a long time ago.” But Clarissa’s hands were trembling as she sliced through her zucchini. She did not like to think about the past. Especially, she did not like to think about Clayburn Montgomery. “Anyway, this is a bit much for Kate’s first day, Lana, honey.”
“But, Mom, you can’t avoid this forever. It’s the questions and unknowns that have led to . . . to Kate’s difficulties!”
“My husband died,” Kate put in. “That was difficult. Stop pestering Mom.” Kate’s eyes flashed to meet Clarissa’s, and Clarissa saw in them (oh, God, of course—DNA): the rape, the baby. Kate and Clarissa’s “little” secret. 1973. Kate had been only fifteen. Nobody knew, not even Lana.
Lana tossed her hair. “The two of you would sweep the whole world under the rug, if you could! And where does it get you? Meanwhile, I don’t know who I am. I could just send in my own DNA, but I thought a little support would be nice. A little solidarity. Not to mention support for my work. I should’ve known the two of you wouldn’t be in favor of the truth.”
“That isn’t fair,” Clarissa said. “I’ve always told you the truth.” In fact, starting when the girls were small, Clarissa, to explain their differing characteristics, had told them what her own mother, Lola, had said, that last, awful day when her parents had disowned her: that Clarissa was adopted, that her birth mother was Italian. Clarissa—who hadn’t known for years whether to believe Lola at all, or been able to figure out whether believing or not believing her was more painful—had, for the girls’ sake, tried to make it a fun curiosity. We don’t know who our family is! We might be Italian! We might be anyone! Maybe it hadn’t been the right strategy, but it was all she could think of, at the time. “Clayburn Montgomery is definitely your father, both of you.”
“I just don’t believe you, Mom,” Lana snapped. “Look at me! Anyway, don’t you understand that it would be far better for me to think I had a father who never knew about me than one who turned me away at the first sight of me?”
Clarissa swallowed. Whenever she allowed a thought of it to enter her mind, Clayburn’s heartlessness still shocked and pierced her like a stab wound—and, if it felt this way to her, how must it feel to Lana? Maybe this was why Clarissa had been so resolute about not looking back. She had wanted to protect her daughter—and herself—from the pain.
But this had probably done Lana no favors, in truth. Lana, who’d been zeroed in from an early age on her “differences”: her skin, shades darker than Kate’s; her curly black hair; her deep brown eyes, when Clarissa’s and Kate’s were blue. Then, around the time Lana was a teenager, a friend had brought her to a high-end salon in L.A., where the stylist had told her, laughing, “Girl, you may be white, but this is Black hair you’ve got here!” Lana had come home demanding to know if she was Black, and Clarissa, startled, had said, “No! Italian, I think! As I’ve told you, I don’t really know!” But Lana, for a while, had ended up experimenting with identifying as Black, then ultimately made it her life’s work to study cultural assumptions around the formation of racial identity in the U.S. Her third book, Passing?: Awakening to Being the Darker Sister, had cemented her place as an expert on “evolving racial ‘identities’ and colli/usions,” as her website bio put it.
And Clarissa was achingly proud of Lana, of course—of her prodigious intellect, and of her yearning, wide-open heart. Also, Clarissa had to admit, if one believed Lana was Black, Lana could certainly be perceived that way. (“Especially in cases where a person’s lineage is unknown,” Lana’s website explained, “identity can be, in large part, about perception. Perception of the self. Perception by others.”)
Clarissa did not believe Lana was Black—how could she be, when neither Clayburn nor Clarissa were? But Clarissa also had to admit that the reason she’d driven the girls all the way across the plains and mountains to California, almost without stopping, after that awful last day with Clayburn and her parents, was because she had not wanted Lana growing up in the South, or even in the North, where the color of her skin—whatever its origins—might get her beaten or killed, or certainly, as had already been proven, ostracized. Clarissa’d had the idea that California would be more open, accepting. To go there had been instinct, almost—but instinct about what?
She sighed. “Lana, as I’ve explained, we don’t know where your characteristics come from, because I might be adopted, or, for all I know, my mother was trying to cover up some affair she’d had. The only birth certificate I have—from here in North Carolina—states that Jack and Lola Duncan are my parents. My mother once told me that I was born here when they were on vacation. She also told me that I was born upstairs in the house in Lexington, which was obviously a lie. So, the long and the short of it is, I just don’t know what’s true.”
Lana’s mouth thinned. “Should we tell Kate about what Marlys sent you?”
“Well, I don’t know if that’s even real,” Clarissa snapped, because she still couldn’t swallow the idea that it might be—though she’d had three months, now, to try. Her cousin Marlys, to whom she hadn’t spoken in fifty years, had found her on Facebook and messaged asking for her mailing address. Three days later, the old, yellowed letter had arrived, with a sticky note from Marlys explaining that, after Marlys’s father’s death, she’d found it inside the back of a painting he’d inherited from his sister, Lola, years earlier.
“Can I show it to Kate?” Lana asked. “Is it still in the sideboard?”
Clarissa pursed her lips and gave a brief nod, because with Lana there was only one possible answer, but she did wish Lana would just let them eat one meal in peace. She tried shooting Kate a look of apology, but Kate was focused on her plate, and Lana was already up, digging in the sideboard drawer, pulling out the envelope.
Clarissa did not like mysteries. She did not like surprises. But secrets, she understood. There were reasons to keep secrets.
She went back to cutting her zucchini, though she’d lost her appetite.
Lana sat back down, extracted the yellowed paper, unfolded it, and read out loud:
May 15, 1936. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Duncan, Congratulations. You are now the parents of a beautiful little girl, CLARISSA ANN DUNCAN, born May 8, 1936. The McNaughton Children’s Home guarantees the quality of this child and knows you will be entirely satisfied with her. The biological mother was at least partly of Italian (possibly Sicilian) descent, though her family had been long in this country and was well educated and wholly Americanized, and she was extremely young (19) and beautiful. The classically handsome father, from an old English family long in the U.S., was studying to become a doctor and is on scholarship, barely making ends meet. Though the couple were engaged and deeply in love, they did not feel, to their regret, capable at this time of caring for a child, and they wanted more than anything for her to have all the advantages that any child could hope for. We are glad to have played a role in finding that home for her, and wish you the happiest of futures with her. Sincerely, Dr. Joseph Addington, Director.
Lana looked up. “It’s on stationery from this place, the McNaughton Children’s Home, but there’s no address, which makes it hard to verify. I tried googling the name and nothing came up.”
Kate had stopped eating a full minute earlier; her fork dangled from her hand. “Wow. So this verifies what Lola told you, Mom. You’re adopted.”
Clarissa shook her head quickly. “But Lola was always making things up! She could’ve written this herself, for me to find after she was gone. To make me think she’d told the truth.”
Kate looked at her quizzically. “Why would Lola have bothered to forge something like this when she’d already disowned you?”
“I don’t know. But that woman was always beyond my ability to explain.”
“Also,” Kate said, “if it is true, if Grandma and Grandpa knew you were Sicilian, why would they have disowned you for having a baby whose skin was a little darker? They would’ve known where the trait came from.”
Clarissa set down her fork and knife, giving up on trying to eat. She took a deep breath and spoke carefully, as if to pretend this whole story had nothing to do with her. “Well, people were incredibly bigoted back in those days, you have to remember, Kate. Jack and Lola wouldn’t have wanted people to know they had a grandchild with darker skin, no matter where that darker skin came from. If they blamed me, if they said the wrong man had fathered my baby, they could disown me and have their own reputations remain intact. You know, my father, being in the horse business, was all about bloodlines.”
“But they could’ve just admitted you were adopted!” Lana said.
Clarissa shook her head. “In those times, that would’ve been more shameful than disowning me. They wouldn’t have wanted people to know that they couldn’t have children of their own. And all Clayburn was probably thinking about was running for office. It’s hideous, really. It’s all just hideous. I’m just so sorry that it was the environment you girls were born into. Honestly, as horrible as it seemed at the time, I have to think that all of us were lucky to get out.”
“But, Mom, don’t you want answers?” Lana blurted. “If we do this test, it will connect you to anyone you’re biologically related to, anyone who’s submitted their DNA to the database. Assuming this letter is true, you might even find your biological parents! Doesn’t it bother you, not knowing?”
Clarissa swallowed. Blinked against a sudden burning in her eyes. She looked at Kate, thinking of that baby, born on the first of June, 1973.
Would he be in the database?
Then, she thought: disowned once already. She wouldn’t be able to handle it again. To find out she hadn’t been wanted, even before she was born? Or, equally painful, that she had been wanted, but time and death meant she’d lost the chance of being claimed? No, she would not be able to stand it.
She blinked again and tried to sound calm. “Lana, honey, I’m almost seventy-nine. Any biological parent of mine is long dead.”
“A sibling, then! Maybe! Maybe we have whole scores of relatives we don’t know about.”
And in Lana’s eyes, then, Clarissa saw not just the usual mix of fury and curiosity, but simple, straight-out pain. That, coupled with the anguish in Kate’s, made Clarissa realize suddenly how dead wrong she had been, and for how long.
She had spent her life hoping that, if she loved her daughters enough, well enough, she could make up for the absence of their father. She’d probably known it was a foolish hope—especially since Clayburn’s absence had not been mere absence, but a violent disavowal.
Though, together, the three of them—Clarissa, Kate, and Lana—had made a family. And Clarissa had been proud of how she’d overcome the odds, proven she didn’t need anyone, despite her debutante/Duncan past, which had raised her to believe in her weakness more than in her strength. (Though she’d always been confident atop a horse; maybe it was the memory of that that had gotten her through.) Sure, she’d struggled for those first several years, first at the commune, then in this or that secretarial job. Her two years at Sweet Briar premarriage had meant little in California.
But then, after what had happened to Kate at fifteen, Clarissa, spurred not so much by her past experience with Clayburn as by a sudden fury with the injustices of the world, had founded a domestic violence center in Orange County. She’d served as its director for nearly twenty years, coordinating everything from shelter and education to legal services and counseling for more than four thousand women and children who would’ve had nowhere else to turn.
She knew she’d saved more than one life. Maybe, in fact, she’d saved hundreds.
But now, all these years later, here were her daughters in front of her, struggling. Needing, themselves, to be saved. Clearly, her avoidances had taken a toll. Her unwillingness to talk about things.
She remembered Dr. Phil saying that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results was the definition of insanity.
She did not want the same results: Kate, drunk, crashing up her car; Lana, alone in the world and seemingly unable to stop battering her head against the wall of these questions of identity. (Clarissa couldn’t help it: much as she was proud of Lana’s career and fierce independence, much as she knew that aloneness was what she herself had modeled for Lana, a mother still wanted her daughter to have someone.)
Could a DNA test actually help Lana and Kate move forward?
But—no. It was wild even to think of. The ways it might rock the boat! When Kate’s recovery was the most important thing now.
Clarissa had to be practical. Keep her feet on the ground. That had been the job of her life, after all—giving her daughters a steady base, because she knew so vividly what it was like not to have one; or, at any age, to have it ripped away. If she’d failed at times in the past, that didn’t mean she could give up trying now.
“Hey, what’s that?” Kate said, pointing to the little card that was peeking out from the envelope in front of Lana.
“It was enclosed with the letter,” Lana said. “But we have no idea why, or what it means.”
Kate reached for the envelope and took out the prayer card illustrated with a picture of a crowned, bearded man. As much as Clarissa had not wanted to see or think about that letter, she quite liked the card; had even been back-of-mind thinking of having it framed. “‘Hope begins with Saint Jude. The patron saint of lost causes,’” Kate read, then laughed. “Fitting for us, I guess.”
To Clarissa, it looked as if a dark cloud had lifted off Kate with that laugh. Could hope be switched on like a light? Just from some small feeling of connection? Of new possibility?
Then, she saw. Her daughters needed this. Her daughters needed family. To know who they were. And what they needed, at this point in life, needed to outweigh Clarissa’s need not to know. Needed to outweigh Clarissa’s fear of looking back, of upsetting the delicate balance of her life.
Besides, Kate’s painful secret—the one Clarissa had been so insistent on keeping—well, what if the truth coming out could help put Kate’s broken pieces back together again? Help her recovery, instead of hurt it?
“I think we should do the tests,” Clarissa blurted. “If it’s okay with you, Katie? I think Lana’s right. It would be good for us to do. All of us together.”
Kate’s eyes crinkled slightly; Clarissa wasn’t sure what that meant.
Lana looked at her sister. “What do you say, Kate?”
Kate looked at Lana. Then back at Clarissa. Her eyes filled with sudden tears. “Okay.”
Lana shrieked, getting to her feet, running to hug them each in turn. “I have the kits in my suitcase! I’ll go get them!”
“Oh, of course you do,” Kate said, and she gave Clarissa a wry look that made Clarissa laugh and hope suddenly: Yes, they were going to be okay. They were all going to be okay.
Well. Hope was a thin thread to hang on to, but sometimes it was all you had.