Saturday, April 18, 2015
Itasca, Minnesota
Molly had suggested an early supper at the Thai Garden—“I think we need some comfort food,” she’d said—but Liz said that would hardly do any good. She needed to go home, try to get some rest. No, she did not want to explore the biological matches that had shown up for her on Ancestry, all those Rhode Island and North Dakota first cousins; no, that was the last thing she wanted right now. And no, she didn’t want company, she was not going to check on Cecily’s house, and Molly didn’t need to, either.
She’d been worried about Molly, before, up in the room, back before everything had come out—but all she could think of now was trying to save herself. How—or if—she was going to manage it.
Then Molly said she had something to tell Liz.
Oh, Lord, Liz thought, and, because she felt she could not handle even one more tiny thing, she snapped, “What?”
“Evan’s coming tonight.”
From the tone of Molly’s voice, and the slight pink in her cheeks, Liz thought maybe this was a different kind of visit than the last one; that maybe something had unfolded between them at a distance. “Good,” Liz managed to say. It probably was good, for Molly. Liz would hear about it another day. All she wanted now was to get home to the lake.
But the relief of her arrival there was short-lived. The house felt quiet and strange. She flipped on the TV, thinking a Law & Order marathon might be just what the doctor ordered—something normal, for God’s sake—but the light of it, too bright and flashing, started to make her nauseous, so she clicked it off. There was laundry and cleaning to do, but—why bother?
She brewed a fresh pot of coffee and carried a steaming mug through the sucking mud down to the lakeshore, to the Adirondack chairs she’d never managed to bring in last fall. (Dean never would’ve let such a chore go undone, and, yes, now they would need to be repainted.) She left her jacket unbuttoned; it was the time of year when forty degrees felt warm. The lake was thawing, gray slushy ice spotted with intermittent still pools. Liz sat for a moment, looking at it, trying to be grateful for the life she’d had. Even if her MRI results came back showing that the cancer had spread, even if she died six months from now, it would have been a good life.
She was grateful. But—still. For God’s sake.
She was not who she’d always thought she was?
She was not who she’d always thought she was.
So, who was she?
Cecily had pleaded exhaustion, said to come back tomorrow. But Cecily wanted Molly to email the biological daughter right away, tonight, to explain what had happened, to say how thrilled Cecily was that the daughter was alive, that Cecily had always, always loved her, had grieved for her all her life.
All her life! While playacting the role of Liz’s mother!
Liz could not help wanting to hate this woman, this unknown “daughter” who’d been born to Cecily. Who had Liz been born to? Why had they given her up when she was five months old? Was “Liz” even her real name?
(Did cancer run in the family, and, if so, did they tend to survive it?)
She lifted her coffee cup to her lips and let the steam warm her nose and decided that she was unsettled to the exact proper degree that anyone would be, finding out that her parents weren’t her parents and had lied to her all her life. And she found herself remembering some things she had tried to forget. One, a summer afternoon when she was twelve. Angry about some small thing, she’d stormed out of the house without a word and walked downtown to Ben Franklin. She was browsing the craft supplies, exhilarated and nauseated by the freedom she’d claimed (stolen, it felt like), when, confirming her guilty feeling, a police officer came for her. He drove her home in his squad car, and Cecily came running out, gathering Liz into her arms, saying, “Thank God, thank God, I thought I’d never see you again! Never, ever do that again, please, please, please!” As if Liz had hopped a bus to Florida and been gone a month, not walked downtown for an hour!
This although, once, when Liz was about five, she woke in the night calling for Cecily, and Sam came in to comfort her. “Your mother’s out for one of her walks,” he said, and, when this made little Liz cry harder—who’d ever heard of a mother who went for walks in the middle of the night? She did it all the time?—he added, “She has trouble settling down, sometimes, but we just have to trust that she’ll be back. She likes to go down and see the trains.” This did not make Liz feel better. (The trains?) From then on, she would keep her ears pricked, even in sleep, for the sound of the back door down below her room squeaking open, then, some hours later, squeaking shut again. Your mother has trouble settling down sometimes. Your mother has trouble believing in me. Though she always, always believes in you, so don’t ever worry about that, all right, honey?
Well, maybe it all made sense now. These odd little shadowy things about bright-light Cecily. The abandonments and betrayals she’d suffered must have made her nervous to try to hold on, must have made it hard for her to trust, to stay.
But, God, what Liz had learned today: it was too much. Too much.
And she could hardly bring herself to think: her father was not her father. He had lied to her all her life, too.
“Dad,” Liz said out loud. “What the hell?”
“Dad!” she screamed, and the word echoed in the stillness.
“Thank God you’re here,” Molly said, when she opened the bungalow door to Evan, and she hugged him tight, pressing her face to his chest, taking comfort in his old familiarity.
“Hey, Moll,” he said, and his voice rumbled in her ear in a way she remembered, in a way that felt like home.
They sat down together with Caden, and Molly explained what Cecily had revealed that afternoon, and how Cecily wanted them to email her biological daughter.
“That’s wild,” Caden said, finally—he seemed almost relieved; there had been no problem with the science, after all—and Molly was relieved, in turn, that he didn’t seem upset, or even, really, shocked. Thank God, in the end, for the teenaged whatever. “Sure, let’s email her right now,” he said.
Molly swallowed. It had been a very long day. “Grandma Liz is having a hard time with this.” She didn’t want to say that she wasn’t having the easiest time with it, herself. Much as she liked to believe there was a reason for everything, it was extremely hard to think what the reason could be for all of this. “I think maybe we should check with her before we actually reach out to this woman. Anyway, it seems we might be rushing into it—”
“Mom, seriously? Grandma Cecily’s been looking for her kid for, like, eighty years. Or she would’ve been, if she’d known she was alive, right? I don’t think emailing her tonight is rushing it. Grandma Liz will be fine. She always is, right?”
Molly took a deep breath. She didn’t feel at all ready to dive into this particular pool. And would Liz really be fine?
But Caden cocked his head, imitating the way she sometimes scolded him. “Don’t you always say, whatever Grandma Cecily asks of us, we do, because she’s always done so much for us?”
Molly started, then, after a beat, nodded, sharing a glance with Evan, proud of their boy.
Caden, smirking slightly, went to get his computer.
“Oh my God,” Lana said, when she opened up her laptop again. It was nine o’clock, after dinner. They’d calmed things down, they’d hashed things out, they’d argued and shouted and cried. Lana had threatened to leave and been talked out of it; they’d cleaned up the broken glass. Around five, they’d all put on their swimsuits and walked out into the ocean, as if that could wash them clean, and maybe splashing around in the chill and salt of the waves actually had, and then Kate had cooked them up a feast—salmon, scalloped potatoes, a big salad—and they had eaten, and laughed, and cried a little more, together. They had kept the prayer card in the center of the table.
“Mom! Mom, come and look at this,” Lana said. “Katie, come look!”