April 2015
Itasca, Minnesota
“Can you ever forgive me?”
That’s what Cecily had said to Liz.
“I have been desperate for your love, all along. That’s why I never told you. I was so afraid I would lose you!”
“—It’s going to take me some time, Mom.”
That’s what Liz had said back.
And Cecily had shaken her head quickly. “You see, the instant I held you, in the middle of that snowstorm, I knew what I was on this earth for. What everything I’d been through to that point was for. So that I could take care of you! Does that sound overdramatic? Well, it’s just the truth!”
“But you’re saying my mother died with me in her arms. She died protecting me?”
“She did! It was a terrible tragedy. Terrible. We were heartbroken to see—your father—he was so brave, you know, and he tried, he would’ve saved them, but it was already too late—and then, you see, you needed me! And you were love to me, you understand. You were the only doorway I had in!”
And Liz had swallowed back the bile in her throat, finding herself wondering—though she’d been just five months old—how could she have no memory of the accident, her parents dying in the car where she was riding in her mother’s arms? And how could she have any prayer of knowing, at this point, what was true? “What does that even mean, Mom?”
And Cecily had blinked, as if surprised. “Well, honey, your father—he told me later that, when he put you in my arms, I—well, I changed physically before his eyes. And he saw that this was the way that he and I could be together for the rest of our lives. To keep you, to make you ours. You see, I wouldn’t have been able to marry him without you. And I loved him so much. But I would’ve been too afraid. I would’ve missed out. And he—he loved me far more than I understood. More than I was able to understand for decades, to be honest! And we just—we always wanted to spare you the pain of knowing. That’s all, Liz, honey. We wanted you to know only love. Not grief, or loss, or sorrow—not just starting out!”
Liz had put her head in her hands. And still Cecily had gone on, though her voice had sounded distant and strange: “And I have tried and tried—your father and I both did—to do as much as we could to help others. To make up for . . . for whatever might have been wrong about the way we went about things. Not telling Mae and Arnold where we went, for example. But I was so afraid of losing you! For years, I woke up in the middle of the night, terrified! But—building the hospital—that was in honor of your parents, in our hearts. The performing arts center, too. We were so grateful to them! They had done such a marvelous thing, creating you! I never forgot them. I always wanted only good to come out of this—”
And Liz had sat up straight again. “You were love to me, too. You always have been. You and Dad.”
“Oh, yes! Your father loved you entirely. We have loved you so much, all your life!”
“I know, Mom,” Liz had said, and sighed, and looked out the window to watch the snow fall.
But it was hard—no, impossible! To think of her parents—her biological parents—dead on the side of the road; of Cecily and Sam driving off to Minnesota pretending that Liz had been born to them; of the absolute extravagance of the lies that Cecily had told over the years—“You get your height, your eyes, your big sturdy bones, from your father!”; “I always love this scar, because it’s from you!”
Impossible.
And it was impossible, too, to think of sweet, good Sam, if he were still alive—how would he explain such omissions of fact, such lies? (“I think it’s in your blood, being a doctor!” he’d told Liz once, with an uncharacteristic sort of glee, when she was eleven or so and he’d caught her poring over his Gray’s Anatomy.)
You were love to me.
You were my only doorway in.
Liz was scheduled for a lumpectomy and radiation. The cancer had not spread. Her chances of survival were 99 percent. A bullet dodged. All she had to do was get through it: the surgery, the recovery, the treatments, the next few weeks. Cecily would stay at The Pines, for the time being; Liz needed the ability to come and go from her, as she was ready, day by day.
“Wow, it’s you!” her biological uncle—eighty-nine-year-old Joe Myer in Bismarck, North Dakota—had said, when Liz finally got him on the phone. “We had no idea what had happened to you!” Extremely cogent for his age, he explained: Liz’s parents had married shortly after the war. Liz’s father, Paul Myer, Joe’s oldest brother, had been stationed in Newport, where he had met Liz’s mother, Helen. “So, none of my family had ever met your mother. Paul hadn’t even been home to North Dakota in years, on account of the war. He was just about to get out of the service, in fact. The last letter he ever wrote me, he said he was trying to convince your mother to move back to Bismarck with him.
“But then, the two of them got killed—” Here, Joe’s voice broke slightly. He cleared his throat and went on. “And, since my mother had passed away, my father certainly wasn’t equipped to take you in, and all of us boys were away in the service. Then we were told that Helen’s family had given you up for adoption, and that was the last we ever heard. We always hoped you were all right. We always hoped we’d hear from you.”
Liz sighed, picturing Cecily and Sam driving away with her. Renaming her. Erasing her true origins entirely. Yes, she might’ve frozen to death had they not come along. But they still could have told her the truth, left it an option for her to keep in touch with her blood relatives, instead of doing everything they could to make sure the opposite was true. “Will you tell me about my father?” Liz asked.
Joe sighed, then, after a moment, said, “He was a good big brother. A little in his own head. Quiet. I’ll tell you one strange thing I remember. We had no money growing up, you know. But Paul was itchy to create things. So, anything that broke into pieces—glass bottles or old china or crockery, things like that—he started fashioning into a mosaic on the side of the chicken coop. And we didn’t even know what a mosaic was, back then, to be honest. It would catch the light in the morning, all those pretty pieces of broken colored glass, and make my mother so happy while she was looking out the kitchen window. A bit of beauty, in the middle of those dusty Dust Bowl years, you know.” Joe sighed again. “It was all so long ago.”
A Rhode Island first cousin on Liz’s biological mother Helen’s side, Frank Schneider, barely remembered that his father had had an older sister who’d died in a car crash a decade before Frank was born, and he’d certainly never heard there was a baby who’d survived that same crash. “How about that?” he said, when Liz told him her story, and about what Joe Myer had said, but Frank could shed no light on anything about Liz’s biological mother. And Frank’s father, who would’ve at least had stories from growing up with Helen, had died years ago.
“How strange,” Molly said, when Liz told her all this. “The whole time I was living in Newport, I was living where my biological grandparents had met. Where you lived when you were a baby.” She blinked and swallowed; her eyes teared. Evan reached for her hand, and she felt the comfort of it, and the strangeness. He’d been absent for so long, yet, still, he was permanent. “No wonder I always felt at home.”
Eric called Liz, finally, from the airport in Seattle. With the climbing season over in Patagonia, he was on his way to Alaska to spend the summer leading packrafting expeditions. He was calm and good-humored about the DNA results—Liz guessed she should’ve predicted it, but she hadn’t, perhaps because she was still so upset herself. But Eric said, “Sounds like, if Grandma and Grandpa hadn’t happened along, you’d have frozen to death in that car, and none of us would be here at all.”
“But they lied to me!” Liz said. “They lied to everyone! For almost seventy years!”
“They saved you. Saved all our lives, and only did what they thought was best for you,” Eric said definitively, as if he’d been thinking about the question for years rather than three minutes. “Listen, Mom, my flight’s boarding. I’ll call you when I can, okay? I’m going to Ketchikan first, not sure what the signal’s like there.”
She hadn’t told him about the cancer; found she was glad to have an excuse not to. “Oh, all right, then, honey. You be safe out there.”
“Always am, Mom. Hey, funny to think: I’m half German!” He laughed, said, “Love you,” and hung up, leaving Liz looking at the blank screen on her phone.
Liz (Mary? No—she was still just Liz; it was simply too late for anything else) got a big cardboard box up from the basement storage room, and, on a muddy, sunny first-day-of-spring-feeling day, a first few hardy daffodils beginning to bloom alongside the garage, she swept Dean’s golf shirts into it and put the box into the Grand Cherokee to take to Goodwill. Dean would’ve wanted someone to get some use out of those shirts. She’d been selfish, she guessed, hanging on to them, when she already had so much of him: in Molly and Eric, in Caden, in the house Dean had bought for her, the studio he’d had built to her specifications. “So you can do your art!” he’d said, grinning. “That thing that makes you you, my dear!”
She had known love in her life. Indeed, she had. She was lucky. She just had to keep remembering it: she was maybe the luckiest person in the world.
“Hello?” Cecily said into Molly’s cell phone, which Molly, standing beside Cecily’s bed at The Pines, had handed over. “Hello? Clarissa? Oh, I love you! I love you! Can you hear me? I love you! Hello!”