May–September 2015
Clarissa had a mother.
Clarissa had a mother!
“Why does it break my heart so badly?” she asked Monty, walking the beach, as they did together sometimes now. They still hadn’t gone to dinner, but she’d told him all about what she’d been going through—and, to her surprise, this act of unburdening herself had actually helped. So, she had just kept on doing it. He’d suggested she join a support group for people who’d had DNA surprises—more and more groups were being created, he said, as this kind of event was becoming more and more common—but, so far, she’d found talking to him enough. “My chest will not stop aching! Shouldn’t I be happy?”
“Well, you hadn’t known, until now, what you were missing. And now you can imagine what you lost, not having her, all these years. You can imagine the pain she might’ve spared you.”
That was true. Oh, so true. The pain of Lola, of Jack Duncan, of Clayburn Montgomery; of all the years of feeling she belonged nowhere, was from nowhere, connected to nothing.
Now, at age seventy-nine, she actually had a mother!
And Cecily was a delight. A pure delight! They talked on the phone for hours. (Each time they hung up, Clarissa cried and cried, and Kate would bring her a cup of tea, a homemade peanut butter cookie.) Kate had long conversations with Cecily, too, as much as Cecily’s energy allowed. And, though Lana was back in Raleigh, busy teaching, Clarissa knew she’d spoken with her several times, as well. Lana was interviewing Cecily, in fact, having received her blessing for the book she was writing that would be the story of all of them—beginning with Cecily and Lucky.
A bareback rider. A roustabout. Clarissa’s parents! Her brave, foolish, beautiful parents. What a relief, and a joy, to hear Cecily speak of Lucky—her first love, her first true heartbreak.
Cecily’s granddaughter, Molly, had emailed a scan of a photo of him, of Clarissa’s father. The only photo Cecily had! The resemblance to Lana was uncanny.
“I am so sorry,” Clarissa found herself saying to Cecily, when Cecily explained how broken she’d been when Lucky had left without even saying goodbye. (“I bet,” Cecily had said, “that if he’d had the first inkling of you, he would’ve found some way for us to be a family!”)
And Cecily said, “What are you sorry for? You’re the beauty in this story. You’re the whole reason why we loved each other, in the end—we loved each other so that you would come to be. I wouldn’t change a thing. Do you hear me? I don’t regret one thing.”
Cecily had, from the start, been champing at the bit to find out about Lucky—what had happened to him, and was there any chance, at age ninety-seven, he was still alive? So, pretty quickly after their first contact with Cecily, Lana had emailed the half-sister, RHarris.
RHarris had been suspicious at first—she had no knowledge of any additional children of her father’s, thank you very much—but, finally, when Lana emailed her the whole story that Cecily had shared, of the summer of 1935 and beyond, RHarris—Reyna Green Harris, daughter of Moses Washington Green—agreed to talk with her biological half-sister, Clarissa.
“God, no, we never knew our father had worked for any circus,” Reyna said. (It turned out: Clarissa had one more half-sister, plus a half-brother! The two just hadn’t ever submitted their DNA to Ancestry.) “Much less anything about a baby!”
“Oh, even he didn’t know about me,” Clarissa assured her. “But my mother, she tells me, loved him very much. They were each other’s first loves.”
“Huh,” Reyna said. (She was sixty-five years old, a grandmother herself. To think of her father as a young man, before her, before her mother—in love, and with a white girl, making a baby in the middle of a circus—was a million miles away from anything she wanted to imagine.)
“Will you tell me about him?” Clarissa asked.
Reyna sighed. “Oh, he was a good man. A good, good man. A good father. Reliable. We had a happy family. But we lost him way too young. He passed in 1972. Only fifty-four years old. Heart attack. I was twenty.”
“Oh!” Clarissa’s father. Dead. Not a shock, exactly, but she felt it like a punch to her kidneys.
“He was a good businessman,” Reyna went on. “Had what he called an ‘empire’ of ice cream stores. Eleven franchises all over the city, called Lucky’s. Giant neon signs on top, you know. And that wasn’t easy for a Black man to build in those days. He had served in the Army during the Second World War and never even got the GI benefits the white guys got. I mean, the government had all kinds of ways to lock the Black men out from those opportunities. Regardless, my father managed to build up his empire.” She gave a warm laugh then, and it was clear her shell was breaking down. “He said you just never knew when somebody might be on the lookout for ice cream—that you always had to be ready.”
When Clarissa told Cecily all of this, Cecily laughed and cried. She told Clarissa about the poem. “‘Let be be finale of seem.’ That was what we said to each other. We were going to make the world be exactly what we wanted it to be . . . and we did, for a very short time.”
Clarissa blinked back tears, her phone hot against her cheek. “You really think he opened those ice cream stores in hopes you’d find him?”
A sigh. “He went to Chicago looking for me, I bet, because I’d told him that was where I was from. And I went to New York looking for him.” Cecily sighed again, then her voice came across the line, sounding tiny and young and brokenhearted. “1972, you said?”
When Clarissa hung up, she cried and cried again.
“You see, Mom,” Kate said. “You were wanted. You were loved. And your parents loved each other. You come from love. And you were always, always loved.”
“Oh, honey.” Clarissa sighed, and laid a hand against her daughter’s face.
Kate had a far-off look in her eyes, these days, but a new serenity, too. She’d started talking about going back to Florida. She thought she was ready. She was going to check with the rehab center about buying Ransom.
And Clarissa thought: It’s true—they really all were going to be all right now.
It was September when they all met in Chicago. Cecily was not really well enough to travel, but insisted. She could sit in a car, for heaven’s sake, she said. (Yes, even for nine hours! she said.)
Liz did not want to go—she was through the worst of her radiation treatments, but hadn’t fully come to terms with everything yet, and didn’t feel up to a trip, besides—so it was Molly, Evan, and Caden who piled into the Mazda with Cecily, Molly driving, Cecily and Caden in back. (Because Caden was continuing a special study of genetics this year, independently with Mr. Rasmussen, this trip amounted to research, or so Molly and Evan had claimed to the school, laughing together afterward when the school had actually bought it.)
The four of them were used to each other’s company these days. Yes, Caden had spent three weeks in August with Evan in Newport and Maine, and he’d also gone to hockey camp in Brainerd in late July. But Evan now spent a week or two each month in Itasca, too, and, in the early summer, with the lease up at the blue bungalow, Molly and Caden (and Evan) had moved into Cecily’s big white Victorian, after, with Liz’s blessing, converting Sam’s old office into a downstairs bedroom for Cecily, allowing Cecily to move home from The Pines.
Molly felt that, unlike Liz, she had come to terms with the lies Cecily had told; with her reasons for telling them. But she also knew that forgiveness was far easier from where she was sitting, because Cecily had never taken anything from Molly, the way that, in Liz’s view, she’d taken Liz’s identity and biological family—the truth of who she really was. To Molly, Cecily had only given, and given from her heart. She would always simply be Molly’s beloved Grandma Cecily.
Meanwhile, Evan was arranging for his business partners to buy his share of the Newport brewery, and planning to start a micro-brewery in northern Minnesota. He thought there could really be a market, given all the Northwoods towns, Duluth, the Twin Cities. Evan and Molly would keep the Newport house for summers and holidays, maybe rent it out the rest of the time, and Molly hoped this would, someday soon, give her an opportunity to meet some of her biological relatives who lived in Rhode Island, the family of Liz’s biological mother, Helen Schneider Myer.
Sure, there was a lot still to figure out—logistically and, of course, between her and Evan. Would they get married again? Molly wasn’t sure. What she did know: she was not going to let him go again. It was really forever, this time. For her sake, his sake, and Caden’s. And, once the Newport business was sold, Evan wanted to buy a place of their own in Itasca.
But there was no real hurry on that. Cecily was going to need help for a while, and, for the time being, at least they had the upstairs to themselves. (Cecily had insisted Molly use the master bedroom—but, God, those purple walls! They made Evan groan and laugh every time he walked into the room.) Molly would go back to full-time practice soon, but for now she’d been scheduling client sessions just three days a week, allowing her to help out Liz through her cancer treatments; giving her more time with Cecily, too.
Through all of this, Cecily’s friends from the Prayer and Action Circle, other committees, and book clubs were in and out, helping with this or that errand or chore, bringing over another hotdish, staying for a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. The story—that Cecily’d been a circus bareback rider and had a long-lost daughter whom she’d always believed had died at birth; that Liz wasn’t actually Sam and Cecily’s biological child—had circulated around town, of course, but hadn’t caused as much of a ripple as Molly would have expected. (Most people said they weren’t even sure whether to believe it; others grew quiet, like they had secrets of their own.) The Prayer and Action ladies, though, when left with Cecily one-on-one, would grill her gently, trying to reconcile what they’d believed of Cecily for decades with what they’d just learned, until finally Evan or Molly would step in and say, “All right, ladies. Cecily needs her rest.”
Honestly, Molly thought that they should all simply do what Cecily had described doing after she’d been arrested: only look ahead, and not back.
She thought they were getting a good start on that now. For the long weekend in Chicago, long anticipated and carefully planned, Clarissa, Kate, and Lana were flying up from North Carolina and staying at an Airbnb near the one Molly had rented, which was near where Reyna Harris and her family lived, in the Austin Village section of the city that bordered Oak Park.
“Are you nervous?” Molly said to Cecily over her shoulder, as they set out, leaving Itasca behind them. It was a gorgeous, golden, September blue-sky day. Tall pines lined the highway. “To meet your daughter? And Lucky’s other children?”
“Excited!” Cecily said.
Molly smiled over at Evan, and he grinned back. They’d talked at length about synchronicities, chains of events, all the parts and pieces that had had to come into play for Cecily to find her biological daughter, for Evan and Molly to get back together, for Liz to discover her cancer so early on. Even Cecily, overhearing them one day, had agreed that, as painful as the events of her early life had been, the outcomes seemed by grand design. “Kate says my daughter saved a thousand lives with that domestic violence center she ran,” she’d told Molly. “And your grandpa and I saved your mother’s.” Not to mention breathed life into this whole town, Molly had wanted to add, because she knew now that Cecily never would’ve ended up in Itasca at all, if it wasn’t for Lucky, the lost baby, little Liz on the side of the road.
Molly did understand why Liz was angry, but she had to believe that, one day very soon, Liz would begin to appreciate the patterns of all these intersecting lives as some of the most beautiful artwork imaginable.
“I’m hungry,” Caden said. “When are we gonna stop for lunch?”
“Let’s at least try to make it to Duluth, bud,” Molly said, laughing.
An hour and a half later, they were all unwrapping giant sub sandwiches from Erbert and Gerbert’s as they crossed the mile-long high bridge from Duluth over into Wisconsin—the expansive view from way atop it always gave Molly the appealing feeling of being set free from the limits of her own, earthbound life—when Cecily sighed. “This is where I first kissed Lucky,” she said. “Superior, Wisconsin.”
“Grandma?” Molly said, with a nervous glance in the rearview mirror, a sidelong glance at Evan. This did not seem like it could be true. Was Cecily losing her grip on reality? Were they going to have to turn around?
“July fourth, 1935,” Cecily went on. “During the fireworks. We were here on the circus train. I never could stand to come back here. All these years living so nearby! It was always too painful. I thought—of all places in the world that Sam would be from, why did it have to be less than a hundred miles from here? Because, you know, the moment I first kissed Lucky was the moment I knew I loved him, and it was the moment I started to lose him, too. I didn’t know that at the time. But now, I look back, and I see him just . . . evaporating, the way a dream does when you wake up.” She sighed, looking out at the blue expanse of Lake Superior. “We just never had a chance.”
Molly blinked back tears. Evan reached over to squeeze her hand atop the steering wheel. Even Caden was quiet.
“No, Grandma,” Molly said. “I guess you didn’t. I’m so sorry. I’m so very, very sorry.”
“Oh!” Cecily said, from the back, when she spotted the three women standing on the steps of the former orphanage, as Molly pulled into the circle drive. Two women—the taller, paler one, in a white belted dress, had a gorgeous mane of chestnut hair; the other, in a red dress, had darker skin and beautiful black curls—flanked a petite, white-haired lady who (yes, there was no mistaking it, even at this distance) looked just like Cecily. “Oh, stop, let me out, let me out!” Molly parked, and Evan hurried to help Cecily, who would’ve leaped down from the SUV, if given an instant more.
It was Lana who’d managed to figure out—from what Cecily remembered of how the place had looked, and of that taxi ride with Tebow down to Union Station—the name and address of the orphanage where Cecily had spent three years of her early life. The old mansion still existed—now as a law office—and, with the lawyers informed of and happily consenting to the reunion, Cecily and Clarissa had agreed that this was where they would first meet.
“There you are! There you are!” Cecily said, holding out her arms to Clarissa, moving as quickly as she could toward her.
It was like looking into a mirror, looking into those sapphire eyes.
Finally, Clarissa thought. I’m home.
“This is where my mother left me,” Cecily said, after some moments, after they’d hugged and cried and hugged some more, with Kate and Lana taking turns, too. Cecily was trying to catch her breath. She could not believe it, could not believe it! She would’ve sworn she remembered the tiny mosaic tiles of the front stoop, the stained-glass fleur-de-lis in the door, from the day she was four years old. “And now, it’s where I find you. Oh, thank God, thank God!” She hugged Clarissa again, then Kate again, and Lana, then Clarissa once more. She wanted never to stop. The DNA tests had revealed no close relatives that could tell her about her parents, about Madeline and Thomas McAvoy. This, now, was the only biological family she had. The only biological family she’d ever had.
Lana tapped her shoulder and showed her a small picture frame. “Remember this?”
“Oh, my word,” Cecily said, taking the prayer card in her hands.
They met Lucky’s daughters, Reyna and Gwen, and his son, Langston, plus their spouses and eleven of Lucky’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, at Lucky’s grave at Oak Woods Cemetery on the South Side. Cecily briefly touched the stone, tracing her fingers over the lettering, which read simply, Moses Washington Green, 1918–1972—but then, there were so many people to meet! The introductions and hugs were awkward but heartfelt. All around, Cecily heard voices young and old, high and low, a chorus of: “And you are . . . ? And you are . . . ? And that makes you my . . . what . . . ?” Finally, everyone was laughing. They settled, some of them, into the grass surrounding Lucky’s grave—he was buried beside his wife, and her children joked she might just be rolling her eyes and giving Lucky what for about all this—and others stood by chatting, getting to know one another.
Reyna came over to Cecily with a soft smile, pulling a tiny notebook out of the deep pocket of her blazer. “My father had a whole stack of these little notebooks,” she said, “and I finally read them all a few years ago, after my mother died. I thought you’d like to see this.” She opened to one of the last pages. “I remembered it because I didn’t know who ‘Cecily’ was, so of course I wondered.”
Cecily looked, and there was Lucky’s familiar handwriting, the thick strokes of pencil:
May 8, 1936—Chicago
CECILY.
Around every corner of my dreams, I hear you calling out my name
(If I could find you to tell you once more
I love you
Would I stop aching like this?)
Cecily looked up, blinking at Reyna. “He wrote this on the day that Clarissa was born, and he was already here in Chicago?” These facts together were so astonishing that all Cecily could do was close the little notebook and look at its cover, as if that would help her make sense of everything. And then she realized the cover seemed oddly familiar. And though she realized, too, that Lucky might’ve owned countless notebooks like this one (but maybe not!), she flipped through it, the early pages, until—yes.
There was her handwriting.
“Oh!” she told Reyna. “I wrote this! This was me!” Exquisite, sanguine, oblivious, incandescent. She was brought back to the stable tent; the scent of hay; the warmth of Prince nearby. Tears blurred her vision.
Reyna leaned in to look. “Really? Wow.” She leaned back. “You know, that was the only place in any of his notebooks—I mean, from his whole life, because I read through all of them—the only place where there was different handwriting. I had forgotten about that. It was you?”
“It was me!”
“And he had left you? He didn’t know you were going to have a baby?”
Cecily shook her head, wiping at her eyes. “He didn’t know. He was trying to protect me, I think. He was worried we’d get caught. I thought he loved me, and then I doubted it, and now I know he did. He did love me.” Tears were streaming now; she looked back down at the notebook—exquisite—and remembered the note he’d slid under Prince’s bridle the day he’d left: Bittersweet. “We were writing a poem together,” she said.
Reyna smiled in a comforting way and reached to squeeze Cecily’s hand, and she looked around at the gathered crowd, the two families, which were really one. “Yes,” she said. “Well, it seems as if you did that, the two of you.”
Cecily smiled, wiping away her tears, and then one of the grandsons caught her eye. How had she not noticed him right away? “Who is that, Reyna? He looks exactly like Lucky. Like Lucky when I knew him!”
“That’s my grandson, Elijah. He’s fifteen right now.”
Elijah was chatting with Caden in that offhand, cool way of teenaged boys, and Cecily blurted, “It’s like a miracle, seeing him. Will you introduce me?” Reyna nodded, took Cecily’s arm, and guided her carefully over across the grass to where he stood. After a short conversation—Cecily hoped no one would ask her what Elijah had said, because all she could see, all she could think, was Lucky—Cecily asked the young man to promise to write to her, and he smiled the way Lucky would’ve smiled—that same bright, mysterious, knowing smile—and said he would, and it suddenly broke her heart and confused her that Lucky had never had the chance to meet this boy, his own great-grandson, and here Cecily was, standing here with him, talking to him, in real life, in real time. None of it made any sense, and it made her tired to realize how very old she was, how long Lucky had been really gone.
And somehow, then, Cecily was at the edge of the circle, as everyone else hugged again to say goodbye, and Clarissa came over and linked her arm with Cecily’s. Cecily blinked back more tears, as happiness and gratitude flooded her again. “Speaking of impossible things,” she said, watching everyone hugging and laughing and promising to stay in touch, and Clarissa smiled, watching, too.
“How do you think that doctor ever lived with himself?” Clarissa asked. “The one who told you I had died? How do you think he got away with it, not just in the case of me and you, but over and over again?”
Cecily sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t like to think about him.”
“Oh—of course,” Clarissa said, seeming chastised.
Cecily hadn’t meant to make her feel bad—would never want to do that. This was her daughter. Her daughter! “But, dear, in a way, we have to admit, he’s responsible for all of this. The good as well as the bad. For all of these people here existing. So, we have to just say ‘all right.’ We have to just accept it. The criminal and the insane and the selfishness and greed. And the munificence of everything, too. You know?”
Clarissa nodded, blinking back tears. For the lost years, Cecily knew—and oh, God, don’t think Cecily didn’t feel the weight and grief of those lost years, too.
And yet.
“I wish Lucky could’ve seen this,” Cecily told their daughter, and she showed Clarissa the poem Lucky had written on the day that Clarissa was born. “You see, don’t you? How much we loved each other?” Clarissa was nodding, with tears rolling down her cheeks, pressing the little notebook to her heart, and Cecily looked back around at the gathered families. “Isn’t it beautiful? I wish my husband, Sam, could be here, too.” And Liz, she thought. “I wish everyone could be here,” she said softly.
But Liz would come around, Cecily had to think. Liz had told Cecily what Eric had said, and Cecily had wanted to cheer, to call him, to send an extravagant gift to wherever he was in the world. Because she could see: Liz was on the verge, the absolute verge, of forgiving her.
Yes, Cecily had to think this was true.
Cecily reached to squeeze Clarissa’s hand, and Clarissa squeezed back, and Cecily realized suddenly that, in the end, maybe she really never had stopped believing in impossible things.
That maybe she never would’ve survived to make it here, if she had.