23

Sienna

“Don’t be mad at your dad or your grandma, Sienna,” Rachel Jensen says from where she sits in a pink velvet chair with her back straight and her wrinkled hands layered on her knee. Her fingernails are painted a light pink, with some design in white drawn on both thumbs. Her posture is both confident and anxious. “Like I said, it was my idea, and I’m the one who wrote the letters.”

Beck squeezes my hand, silent encouragement that I need like I need air. I’m trying to sit as normally as I can, despite my shoulder aching and unshed tears stinging my sinuses. That it was Rachel’s idea doesn’t vindicate Grandma Dee or Dad. It just makes me feel more betrayed.

“So, how did it all work?” Beck asks in her soothing mom voice. The kids are home with Clint getting ready for the Easter egg hunt; she has to meet them at in thirty-seven minutes. She’d explained before we went inside that she’d had to tell him last night. “I mean, he’s my husband,” she’d said. I knew it was only a matter of time before everyone else knew, even though Beck really did want to respect her promise not to tell anyone. “We’re not angry with anybody, are we, Sienna?” Beck says to Rachel. “We just want to make sense of things. Tell us how the letters came together, if you would.”

I am angry, but I don’t say so because Rachel hasn’t told us everything yet.

Rachel shifts slightly, as though hoping she can find a more comfortable position. Her tone is casual, as if she’s recounting combined efforts toward a display at the county fair. “Mark would tell Dee things that she would write into a letter, then I would copy it so that you wouldn’t recognize the handwriting.” She shrugged. “It was meant to make your mama real for you, Sienna. Not to hurt ya. Never that.”

But it had hurt me.

I try to think of something else to say, but my silence seems to make Rachel nervous, so she fills it in. “My daughter lives in Boston. There’s a cute little paper store in Cambridge, and she’d sent me a package of that stationery for my birthday.” She looks at her hands layered on her knee, giving me the sense that she’s more embarrassed about using her daughter’s gift for the deception than she is about the deception itself. “Blues and greens really aren’t my colors.”

So, if Rachel’s daughter had sent pink stationery that Rachel had wanted to use for herself, would this have happened? I imagine Rachel frowning at the green paper and going through her options for getting some use out of it. “Oh, I know. What if I offer to write fake letters to Dee’s granddaughter?”

I take a breath and let it out before speaking, trying to keep my questions as objective as possible. I don’t want to shut Rachel down by being accusatory, and yet I still can’t believe that sweet old Rachel Jensen would play a part in such fraud. Never mind my “honesty is the best policy” grandmother. “Did you write them all at once?”

Rachel shifted again. “To start we came up with eight pinnacle events, which included a few different birthdays, high school graduation—that sort of thing. But then, well, Dee thought of some other things that it would be good for us to tell you as time went on. I still had the stationery, so we worked on a few more.”

“My sixteenth birthday was one you did later, wasn’t it?” In the months prior to turning sixteen, I had been coming up with excuses to skip church, mostly because it started at nine o’clock in the morning. I didn’t hate the letters yet, but I was anxious about getting one for my sixteenth birthday—I hadn’t received one since I was twelve. I’d asked Dad when I could expect the letters a half-dozen times, and he always told me to let it be a surprise. When Dad tapped on my bedroom door the night of my sixteenth birthday, I sprang up from my bed and ran to the door with my heart racing. I wasn’t able to open that letter fast enough.

Then the letter said all the same things Grandma Dee was always telling me—about staying away from boys, knowing myself before I started dating, and going to church so I would know how to do right. I had thought Grandma Dee was unreasonable, but here was Mom advising me in the exact same way, with an air of subtle disappointment that seemed to say she’d known all along I wouldn’t measure up. It emphasized the pressure I felt to make up for what Mom and Dad and Grandma hadn’t had in their lives. Dad wasn’t intense like Grandma Dee with his soft-spoken advice and worried eyes, but he didn’t stick up for me with her either.

“Sienna, dear.”

I look up into the lined face and bright eyes of my grandmother’s best friend. In recent years, Rachel had finally stopped coloring her hair, and it bloomed like dandelion fluff around her face, the morning light from the windows filtering through the gossamer strands of fluffy. There were pastel Easter decorations all over the house—toll painted bunnies and plastic Easter eggs hanging on the ends of her curtain rods. She’d probably have a houseful of kids and grandkids over tomorrow for an Easter egg hunt in the backyard and a leg of lamb for Easter dinner. She wore a full face of makeup even this early in the morning and looked like the kind of grandmother you would see in a Hallmark commercial. Rachel smiled, bringing on more wrinkles, and cocked her head to the side. “I got the idea of the letters because you were making up stories about your mother, how she died and things like that. Dee was worried about it. I thought the letters would make your mother more . . . alive, I guess. My Carl had written letters to our kids when he had his first heart attack, and it meant the world to them after he died. If your mother had thought about it, I’m sure she’d have written those letters herself, dear. We did it because we love you and wanted you to have that connection.”

I shake my head, and Beck tightens her grip on my hand again to try to remind me to be nice. Fair. Kind. Would Rachel have orchestrated letters like that for one of her own grandchildren? “It was the wrong thing,” I say in a whisper as diplomatic as I can manage right now. Rachel’s face falls, and Beck squeezes my hand harder. I hate that she wants me to put politeness first. As though Rachel’s willingness to tell us the truth now makes up for years of lies. I pull my hand out of Beck’s grip and stare hard at the old woman who helped betray me. Alongside Grandma Dee. Alongside Dad. “You twisted who my mother was to fit your own agendas.”

Rachel smiles sweetly and shakes her head. “No, dear, we made her real for you. Everything in those letters was true.”

“You couldn’t make her real for me by pretending to be her and pretending that the advice she would give me would be the exact same as Grandma Dee was cramming down my throat.” I lean forward, and Rachel pulls back slightly, though her back stays perfectly straight. “I deserved to know my mother, and you cannot give that to me.” I stand and leave because I really don’t want to lose my crap on this old woman. I also don’t know what else to say. I let myself into the passenger seat of Beck’s minivan, which perpetually smells like French fries, and pull the door shut with my left hand, pressing my right arm across my chest to try to contain the throbbing. I forgot to take ibuprofen in my anxiety to get out of the house this morning.

With my eyes closed, I take deep breaths and try to calm myself down even as tears leak out the corner of my eyes. I am swiping at them with my left hand when I hear the driver side door open. Beck slides into the seat, and the door shuts.

“Sienna, I—”

“Don’t tell me that I shouldn’t be mad,” I say. “You knew your mother.” It’s petty. But also true. Right now “truth” feels more important than any other virtue.

Beck is quiet. Several seconds pass in virtual silence. Beck’s phone chimes with a text message, but she doesn’t check it.

“The only person in my life who actually knew my mother is Dad, and he chose to play along with this.” I open my eyes and stare at the orange brick of Rachel Jensen’s rectangular house in front of us. There are three brightly painted, wooden Easter eggs connected to dowels and pushed into the flower bed that lines up with the front of her house—the tulips haven’t yet bloomed.

“But your Dad gave the info for the letters,” Beck told her. “I think he did put in the things he thought your mother would say.”

I shake my head. “My parents were together for only three years. How would Dad know what Mom would have told me when I started my period or the names of her best friends in high school who liked boys too much? Can I really believe they talked about those things and Dad remembered it years later? I have no way of knowing what’s real and what isn’t, and the fact that they lied about it makes everything suspect.”

Beck is silent for a few seconds. “Rachel asked if you had talked to your dad yet, and I told her that you hadn’t, and we would appreciate it if she didn’t give him a head’s up.”

“She’ll tell him,” I say, because why not? She knows I’m upset and she’s been worried about Dad since Grandma Dee died, always asking Aunt Lottie how he’s doing, taking him a batch of her pralines at Christmas like she used to when Grandma Dee was alive. I can’t put off talking to Dad because he might learn about it before I get the chance if I hesitate much longer. The idea makes me shrivel inside like last year’s pumpkins.

The conversation Beck and I had last night when I laid it all at her feet comes back to me. “Unless I go to Canada and find those details for myself.”

“I’m not sure you have time.”

“I’ll go now. Today.”

Beck’s eyes go wide. “Now? You had surgery last week.”

I lower my arm into my lap in an attempt to show that I’m more recovered than I actually am. My shoulder burns, but I blame it on the tension brought on by sitting across from Rachel and holding myself in check. “I can’t stay here, Beck.” I think of the credit card in my wallet, linked to the joint account with Tyson. It doesn’t expire until October, and although I haven’t used it since he went to London and we decided to pay our own expenses separately while we were apart, there’s money there and I think he’d let me use it. I hate the idea of asking him, but I hate facing Dad even more.

Beck opens her mouth but then closes it without voicing the concern written all over her face. Instead she takes my left hand in hers. “I’m so sorry, CC.”

A lump rises in my throat, and the tears come back. The only time I don’t feel like crying is when I’m angry.

“What can I do to help?”

“Come with me to tell Dad I’m going to Chicago, back me up, and help me get out of there as quickly as I can.”