March 2015
Kure Beach, North Carolina
Clarissa had wanted literally to kill the boy who’d raped Kate a month after her fifteenth birthday, in late August 1972—actually hunt him down and kill him (with a knife; Clarissa had imagined it more than once, watching him bleed).
But Kate hadn’t even known his last name, or where he lived. He was just some nineteen-year-old blond surfer (nineteen!) Kate had met on the beach one afternoon, and she’d gotten into his old Corvair with him that evening and ended up bruised and scratched, with a black eye and ripped bikini, and still everyone—yes, Clarissa and Kate both knew this to be true—would say it was all Kate’s fault, because she’d gotten into his car wearing only that bikini. (What had she imagined he wanted? her friends had asked, even as they were driving her home, watching her bruises purple while she shivered.)
Now, with the saliva samples shipped off to Ancestry and Lana back in Raleigh, Clarissa found herself lying awake nights wondering not what the DNA tests might reveal about her own past, her parentage, but whether they might find her grandchild—and if that might just be a big mistake.
Clarissa, who did not like thinking about the past, now could not stop thinking about it. All her life, she had tried so hard to do “the right thing.” But it had not always been easy to know what the right thing was. (Almost never had it been easy, in fact.)
She’d been convinced, for example, that she was doing the right thing when Kate had come to her just before Christmas 1972, four months after the rape, to confirm the worst. And, no, Kate did not want an abortion; she’d actually looked horrified, when Clarissa asked. Kate imagined she could already feel the baby fluttering around in there (it was really still too early for that, but Clarissa kept quiet, realizing that to say so would’ve broken Kate’s heart a little bit more) and none of this was his fault, Kate insisted, cradling her tiny belly protectively, in a way that made Clarissa proud, confirming what she’d always known: Kate was stalwart, brave, Clarissa’s right-hand man, Clarissa would’ve never made it anywhere without Kate, Clarissa wouldn’t have made it ten miles out of Lexington.
So Clarissa, coming up (somehow!) with the money for a one-way plane ticket, had arranged to send Kate to Oregon to stay with Clarissa’s sister-friend Gloria from the commune. Gloria had been like a second mom to little Kate, those first years in California—or maybe a first mom, given how overtaken Clarissa had been by baby Lana then—and, in the years since, had acquired a goat farm of her own twenty miles outside Portland, along with her partner, Jill. Kate was going to Oregon, Clarissa explained to Lana, nine, “for the educational experience of learning all about a goat farm!” Lana bought it (Clarissa had always touted belief in the “school of life”) and, furthermore, decided she wasn’t jealous, nor even truly curious, because, well: goat farm. While she’d be playing at the beach with her friends.
In other words, Clarissa had arranged it so nobody would ever have to know. And Gloria and Jill, true to their word, had never told a soul. (Not even after Kate got famous, when the tabloids would’ve paid a pretty penny for the story.)
And Clarissa and Kate had never, ever discussed it—the rape, the baby—not in all the years since, though Clarissa, leaving Lana with friends in Laguna, had been there at Good Samaritan in Portland for the birth of the little boy. While Gloria and Jill spent the entire twenty-four hours of Kate’s labor making sure Kate didn’t suffer any guff for being unmarried, Clarissa had stayed squeezing Kate’s hand. And, afterward, Clarissa had held the baby; his little fingers had gripped her thumb! Her grandchild! With his little eyes squeezed shut; the perfect little gums in the open mouth as he cried. As Kate had said: not his fault, his origins! And Clarissa had felt (to her shock) her own heart being ripped out, too, when Kate, glassy-eyed, two days after the birth, two days she’d spent holding and whispering to the baby—Clarissa had been unable to discern one word—had signed the papers and, sobbing so hard Clarissa felt the shaking of it in her bones, kissed his forehead and handed him over to the woman from the adoption agency.
Three days after that, Clarissa drove Kate back home to California, with Kate stretched across the back seat, crying, the entire eighteen-hour trip. Or so Clarissa recalled. But they must have stopped overnight? Clarissa couldn’t remember. In any case, when they arrived home—it was very late at night; Clarissa did remember that—Clarissa told Kate stiffly that she would have to pull herself together, so no one would know. Maybe Clarissa had been speaking, also, to herself. Pull yourself together. Stop thinking about that little fist around your thumb! Those perfect little gums! “I am not about to stand by and see your life ruined,” Clarissa had told Kate, there in the driveway of their Laguna Beach bungalow.
And Kate had blinked and straightened.
And Kate, who had always been a “good girl”—straight A’s, a dozen sweet friends, plans of applying to law school—had become a girl who ran around with boys and smoked weed and drank way too much and barely graduated from high school.
And then she had become an actress.
And she had become an addict. Hollow as a bone from lost love.
All Clarissa’s fault? That old therapist had said no. Clarissa wasn’t so sure. Also, she did not want to talk about it. (Not with Kate, not with anyone.) What it would mean if this child came to light. Kate’s child. Child of the surfer-rapist. Everyone would learn what Clarissa had done; how cold she’d been. How intractable. There was a moment (in the hospital? back at the goat farm afterward?) she’d actually shouted at poor, broken-in-two Kate: No, you cannot keep the baby! You cannot change your mind!
And what would it do to Lana, always such a stickler for the truth, to find out her mother and sister had kept such a secret from her? She’d be sorry for Kate, maybe, but furious with Clarissa (the lies she’d told!). She would think Clarissa should’ve known better, done better (and, oh, she’d be right!)—or, at the very least, told her.
And Kate! Kate who’d been ripped wide open in more ways than one; who’d done her best to sew herself back up, the way her mother had told her to. It was no wonder, the way her life had gone afterward. What would it do to her now, if that baby turned up? (“Baby”! He’d be nearly forty-two years old. What was he like? Clarissa couldn’t help wondering.)
What if, instead of helping Kate’s recovery, as Clarissa had at first imagined, the DNA results set in motion something that made her spiral down? Traumatic memories, or some kind of rejection from the child if he did turn up—perhaps he would be angry, perhaps he would not want to meet Kate!
It was little wonder Clarissa tossed and turned for nights in a row, wishing she’d never let Lana talk her into sending in those tests. That foolish gust of optimism Clarissa had felt!
When, honestly, some things were meant to be swept under rugs—weren’t they?
In the absence of being able to drink, Kate took up counting things. One . . . two . . . three . . . On and on, in a steady rhythm. She would sit on her mother’s deck, wearing her big hat and sunglasses, counting the waves breaking on the shore. She made it up to five hundred one day.
At five hundred and two, Clarissa came out and set a book on the table. “Have you read this? I think it might be helpful.” The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav. Kate had heard of it—what viewer of Oprah hadn’t?
“Okay,” Kate said. Still the girl who tried to please—plus, now, a houseguest, and a demonstrated delinquent, trying to prove herself redeemable.
Clarissa pretended to be adrift, distracted, even absentminded—and anyone might be, waiting for test results that were about to tell them who their parents were! But Kate knew from experience that Clarissa was never actually these things; that she was watching every move Kate made. But Kate was being so careful; she never even ventured downstairs in the late afternoons alone, on the chance she’d meet a neighbor, unaware of Kate’s circumstances, who’d offer a gin and tonic with a cool wedge of lime.
She was really hoping she would be different this time. She almost—almost—felt she had a reason to be.
So she joined Clarissa on her beach walks, the two of them strolling in silence, Kate trying hard not to wonder about her baby, her son—where he was, what he was doing; some days she pictured him a chef, other days an airline pilot, a pediatrician, maybe an actor, like her!—and what would happen if the DNA test turned him up. Harder to think: it could also turn up her baby’s father, “Rick,” whose last name Kate had never learned; whom she’d known for a total of six hours, and who had changed her life forever. Of course, she despised the man—she’d count herself lucky if he was dead by now—and yet, she found she couldn’t hate him entirely, because she had grown, in the seventh, eighth, ninth months of her pregnancy, to love her baby with the entire depth and width of her cavernous heart, and the thought of her son’s existence now was a beacon of light for her at the end of the long dark tunnel of her recent life.
Walking beside her mother, Kate said none of this out loud. Clarissa, who claimed to be on the lookout for dolphins, seemed instead mostly to watch her feet, as if afraid of tripping, of losing her footing in the sand. Both women wore their hats, plenty of sunscreen and loose, long-sleeved clothes, so they did not get burned.
Kate liked Kure Beach—was really growing fond of it, in fact—though she had no idea why her mother had chosen to retire here. When Kate asked, Clarissa just said she’d somehow felt called, having visited an old friend here ten years earlier and fallen in love with the place. “Anyway, I’d never have been able to afford a waterfront place in California, or even to stop working, really. And I never truly felt at home there, not in all those years. Plus, this way, I get to be closer to you girls. I missed you after you left, you know. Just knowing you were nearby.”
“Aw, thanks, Mom. I missed you, too!” Kate said, surprised, though she wondered. Kure Beach wasn’t that close to Raleigh, and certainly not to Vero Beach. There had to be more to it, didn’t there? “Do you think you were born near here? I mean, North Carolina’s a big place. We don’t have any idea where the McNaughton Home was?”
“No. None.” And Clarissa’s mouth zipped closed. It was almost a visible thing.
Kate couldn’t stop herself. “Didn’t your birth certificate say? Place of birth? I mean, assuming it’s true you were adopted, and they changed the parents’ names to Jack and Lola’s, wouldn’t the place have been the same?”
“That part was left blank,” Clarissa said, and kept walking.
So, they weren’t going to talk about it. Of course.
In the bathroom brushing her teeth that night, Kate suddenly noticed her father’s face in the mirror. His nose, cheekbones, eyebrows. She did remember him to that degree—though she tried not to think of it, not to remember him. She didn’t have a single photograph of him, so there could be no maudlin moments of wishful gazing at the image of his face, as the writers of Love and Yearning would’ve surely scripted.
But now, with her mother’s origins so undeniably mysterious (and why did this seem sudden, like a revelation, to Kate?) she found herself—to her surprise—in search of something else to root her down. She’d never realized how much solace she’d taken in “knowing where she came from.” Regardless of how horribly her grandparents had acted when Lana was born, Kate’s happiest early memories were with them at their beautiful horse farm: Jack Duncan had taught little Kate to ride; Lola had hosted elaborate tea parties, trusting Kate with her finest Limoges. And Kate had imagined that she shared their blood, “belonged” to their “line,” knowing as she did in some vague, childish, yet somehow utterly ontologically satisfying way that Grandpa Jack Duncan had been a Son of the American Revolution; that Grandma Lola’s people were proud descendants of an Englishman who’d come to America as an indentured servant and made himself into a well-respected cobbler in Norfolk before 1800.
Now Kate had to face it: none of those people might actually be her people! The DNA test would tell them, once and for all. And then—what would be left? Would the test results actually connect Kate, Lana, and Clarissa meaningfully to anyone on Clarissa’s side?
And, meanwhile, the Montgomery line—could Kate claim it? Did she even want to?
What she knew for sure was that she remembered the feeling of floating in the wind from when she was six years old, and maybe for the rest of her life after that, and for the feeling to intensify right now was exactly the opposite of what she needed.
She got into bed and, seemingly without thinking, clicked open Facebook on her phone. Lana had previously told Kate the names of Clayburn’s four daughters. All were married, and none had kept the last name Montgomery, but Kate remembered the oldest’s. She had never looked her up, but now typed in the name: Tricia Montgomery Robinson. There. Kate selected her profile from the list of options. They did not share any mutual friends. Tricia had just turned forty-nine and lived in Columbus, Ohio. She liked Friends and Def Leppard and bichon frises, had kind brown eyes and bright blond hair with expensive highlights, a husband who surprised her with roses on their anniversary, and two nearly handsome teenaged boys who played soccer.
Scrolling through Tricia’s feed, Kate thought, I can find no reason to hate this woman.
And then, there it was. A photo from last October captioned Family Reunion for Dad’s 80th! All the Montgomery girls together again!
They were posed around a picnic table under a sheltering maple, its leaves on fire with the autumn: Clayburn and his wife, Roberta, seated in the center, their four daughters surrounding them, the eight grandkids seated in front: five boys, three girls. (The husbands had evidently been deemed nonessential for the photograph.) They all looked happy. Wholesome. Problem-free.
Kate blinked away tears. Gary Zukav said that a father could feel his daughter’s energy, could feel when she started to try to heal any wounds that existed between them, even if there was no communication. That could hardly be true, could it?
Kate zoomed in on her father’s face. (All right, yes, the writers of Love and Yearning were right—she had to do it.) Clayburn Montgomery: nearly fifty-two years older than when she’d last seen him. Face still razor-sharp and handsome, his hair silver, his smile slight and almost bitter-looking. He wore glasses now.
Did he ever think about her? About Kate, his firstborn? Had he ever watched her on TV? Seen her that time she’d been on the cover of TV Guide?
God, was that what she’d been trying for, all along, by trying for the shows that had the broadest distributions possible? To reach him?
(Or—it flashed through her mind now—to reach her son?)
In fact, when she was thirty years old, she’d been offered a shot at an exceedingly good role on Broadway. And she’d turned it down, hadn’t even taken the audition, because she’d thought, Who would ever see me there?
A hundred thousand theatergoers, that was who. But probably not Clayburn Montgomery. Or a baby boy born June 1, 1973, in Portland, Oregon.
Kate took a deep breath, badly wanting a drink. She set her phone aside, picked up The Seat of the Soul and skipped ahead to the chapter titled “Addiction.” She had a session tomorrow morning with Dr. Alvarez. She would make it through till then.
“Gary Zukav says my soul wants to heal,” she told Dr. Alvarez on the phone. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, keeping her voice low, feeling like a teenager trying to keep her mother from hearing. She could hear Clarissa puttering in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher, making a fresh pitcher of iced tea.
“Do you think it does, Kate? Does your soul want to heal?”
Kate had never told Dr. Alvarez about her son. She didn’t know how to broach the subject now.
Anyway, there were no guarantees that the DNA test would turn him up. And, if she started telling everyone how much she suddenly was hoping to find him (the hope was shining so brightly right now, like a sunbeam hitting a mirror, that it could blind her, start a fire), there’d be no way to put that particular genie back into the bottle.
“—I looked up my father’s family on Facebook,” she whispered into the phone instead. “The family he kept, I mean.”
Dr. Alvarez didn’t say anything. A moment passed.
And Kate burst into tears.
Dr. Alvarez advised keeping busy; Kate decided to take up cooking. She’d always looked at food as somewhat the enemy. A necessary evil, at best. Now, who cared if she put on a few pounds? It wasn’t as if she was ever going to get back on TV.
She subscribed via email to NYT Cooking and relied on Clarissa to bring back cookbooks from the library, plus the ingredients she wanted: a dozen tomatoes and a handful of basil from a local farmstand; cabbage, white beans, spinach greens, sweet corn, crabmeat, bread crumbs, garlic, sweet onion. Gaining confidence, she googled the recipe for monkey bread, which she’d tasted once, years ago, and never forgotten. After two days’ assurance from her mother that baking with yeast truly wasn’t that hard, she finally tackled the project, kneading the dough, letting it rise, shaping little balls to dunk in butter and roll in cinnamon and sugar, then arranging these in her mother’s Bundt pan and drizzling the whole concoction with a melted butter–brown sugar sauce. Once the pan was out of the oven and the bread only slightly cooled, she tore off a piece and, as the first bite melted in her mouth, thought: Yes—it was definitely worth it to go on living.
And then one night in the back bedroom, the sound of the waves muted and distant, Kate woke up sobbing. She didn’t remember what she’d been dreaming, but her body was racked with an anguish that she could not rein in. Her mother came into the room. “Kate? Kate! Katie, honey, you’re okay!” A cool hand came to rest on Kate’s forehead.
Kate was sobbing. “Mom, I was so scared!”
The cool hand stroked Kate’s hair. “I know, honey, but you’re safe now. You’re safe.”
In the morning, Kate wondered if that part had been a dream, too, but she didn’t think so, and coffee on the deck with the rising sun had never tasted so rich, so entirely validating. “I think, when I go back to Florida, I’m going to buy a horse,” she told her mother, tearing off another piece of monkey bread, which, it turned out, made as excellent a breakfast as it did a dessert.
“That’s a great idea, honey!” Clarissa said, and, for the first time in days that Kate had seen, smiled.
“Maybe you’ll want to come riding,” Kate said. Clarissa rarely mentioned it, but Kate remembered: Clarissa had been a skilled equestrienne, as a girl. Jack Duncan had owned thirty thoroughbreds, give or take.
The smile broadened. “I think I’m too old for that now, honey.”
“Never say never,” Kate said, feeling, at the sight of her mother’s smile, a jolt of hope.
And, for a second, she wondered—where did that smile come from? It didn’t look like Jack’s or Lola’s. Would they find it had come from Clarissa’s biological mother? Father?
Well, they would know soon—to that level of detail, maybe. Lana had said sometimes people shared pictures of their forebears on the Ancestry website. Whether or not Clarissa ever agreed to talk about it, they would know.
Kate picked up a huge piece of monkey bread and tore off a bite with her teeth, and Clarissa—who was still, deep down, a Sweet Briar girl—blushed slightly at the bad manners and looked into her coffee cup, moving it to swirl the liquid inside. Kate chewed with relish and watched her mother, suddenly hoping—defiantly!—that they would find out everything. Everything that had never been spoken; she hoped it would all spill out like a vase full of marbles strewn noisily across a concrete floor. Kate was so tired of secrets, tired of all the things she’d kept inside plus all the things she’d never known and had to guess at. (In treatment, they’d talked about the connection between secrets and addiction, but Kate hadn’t even realized—and would not have been able to name—all the secrets she’d been keeping, all her life. Nor had she ever realized till now: how exhausting!) She could no longer keep tidy all she knew and all she wondered about, when, taken together, it was enough to make her explode. Her son. Her father (was he her sister’s father, too?). Her grandparents, for God’s sake—who were they?
Soon. They would know. Soon.