Saturday, April 18, 2015
Itasca, Minnesota
Cecily lay awake in the darkness Saturday night—it would always be the day she’d been found out—in a state of equal parts exaltation and regret.
Her baby was alive!
Hadn’t she known there was something wrong with the McNaughton Home, with Dr. Addington? If only she’d been brave enough to question him (had he wanted her to look at her file, to read it, so she would truly believe his giant lie?), to ask for proof. Life could’ve been so different then!
But. Her life was her life. And, yes, the years after her baby’s death—no, after her baby’s birth—had been a decade-plus-long nightmare of grief and wandering. The loss had left a hole that nothing had ever filled.
Still, she would not have traded Sam, Liz, Molly, Eric, Caden, her life in Itasca—
Oh, but she wanted it all! She wanted her baby! Her baby girl, whom she’d thought of all these years as Tommy. She wanted not to have suffered so—
Not to have been betrayed by the only “sister” she’d ever had—
Not to have lost her first true love—
Well. Certain things you couldn’t dwell upon, if you hoped to continue to survive.
(Was there any chance Lucky could still be alive? He would be ninety-seven years old! Would these DNA tests be able to tell her where he was, after all this time?)
“Sam, I’m sorry,” she whispered out loud. “I’m not going to come to you, not yet. I want to meet my daughter!”
And she thought she heard Sam say, I understand. But you have to tell Liz the truth now.
“I will!” Cecily said. She sighed. Should she be angry that Liz and Molly had stolen a DNA sample from her? Probably. She would not have chosen for her secrets to come out this way. She might not have chosen for them to come out at all—though the miracle of learning that her baby was alive meant she couldn’t wish these events away.
But now Liz was so angry. Cecily wished Sam were here to sit down across from their daughter and help Cecily explain. Should they have done so fifty or sixty years ago? Sam had thought so, but Cecily’d said no. If she hadn’t been so frightened—if she’d known better. If, if, if.
And she found herself thinking of Grace. Long dead now, certainly. Cecily had always hoped that Grace had made it to New Mexico. She’d tried writing her, a year after marrying Sam and moving to Minnesota, finally feeling she had something to offer; or, at least, that she wouldn’t need to take so much anymore.
She wrote that she had named her new baby after Grace, and that she had taught herself not only to cook and keep house (I am a bona fide “doctor’s wife,” can you believe it?), but also to make a cake of fifteen thin little layers, in the old Southern tradition, and that everyone in Itasca, when they talked about Cecily, would mostly begin and end by shaking their heads over the spectacle of her cakes. Although they certainly seem to like them, too! Cecily wrote. I think it’s good to be known for something particular, in a very small town, don’t you? Because they will find things to say about you, regardless, so you might as well put something front and center, and let them think that they are the ones who’ve chosen what you’re known for.
She did not mention that, with each little layer she poured into her old-fashioned hoecake pan to quickly cook atop the blazing stove, she thought of Lucky’s grandmother, and, as she watched the batter brown around the edges and turn into something solid and sweet, she thought, Lucky. She did not mention (or maybe didn’t even realize, perhaps not till years later) that her cakes were the one way she let out the steam of her grief and loss and acknowledged her past; that, without this release, she might not have been able to uphold being the Cecily Larson she’d wanted to be; or that each little layer was a tiny prayer: that Lucky was safe, and well, and loved, wherever in the world he was.
That, when people ate Cecily’s fifteen-layer cakes, they were ingesting actual love.
She wrote to Grace twice more after that. Never received an answer.
Grace, who had saved her life, made everything possible, had never written Cecily back.
Cecily had pictured her in Taos, painting the mountains, a flower, a bone; the spectacular light.