Whatever It Takes

I stand on the front porch of the ranch house, watching Dad through the front window as he moves around the kitchen—he hasn’t seen me. The buzz of insects and lowing of the herd are like music on the summer breeze around me, and I wish I could stay for a little while. I’ve been standing here long enough to watch Dad rinse his plate, wipe down the counters, and pull a beer out of the fridge—I better understand now why he never has more than one. He looks stronger now that he’s working the ranch more, but tired. Lonely. It’s been two months since that phone call when he told me what he knew and said how sorry he was over and over again until we were both crying. We have not spoken since. We’ve texted about ranch stuff—Where did I put the seat cover for the tractor? Do I know where the pin for the trailer hitch is?—but I told him I needed time and he has given me that. My dad has always done everything he could to help me—whatever it takes. I haven’t forgiven him for that yet.

I am on my way to Chicago, where I’ll be going through the storage unit for real this time. I need to bring my stuff back to Cheyenne, where some of it will go into another storage unit half a mile from my apartment I’ve been living bare-bones in for the last six weeks. My life in Chicago is over. My life on the ranch is . . . on hold. My new life in Cheyenne is just getting started. I had texted Dad this morning to see if I could stop on my way through town and say hi as though I’m a distant cousin who doesn’t get this way very often. He was so excited to have me come that I almost changed my mind. Not because I don’t want to be here but because I have missed him so much. It scares me to think we might try to go back to who we were. That can’t happen, but I am ready to have him in my life again. One step at a time.

Dad disappears from view, probably heading into his office, where I couldn’t find my mother. He’s kept up his blog—I read every post—and he hired one of Uncle Rich’s grandsons to help out for the summer. Beck said he sent a dozen yearlings to a feed lot to get quick money. I’m thinking about going to London after all or a folk-art school in the hill country of North Carolina where I can “major” in leatherwork. It’s a whimsical idea, but I’ve worked out the numbers a dozen times all the same. An unexpected side effect of learning that the mother I idolized never existed is that I no longer feel as if I need to be her. Or Beck. Or the Sienna I thought was the only Sienna for me to become. I am just . . . me, and I’m okay with that for the first time in a really long time.

I let myself in through the front door of the house. “Hello?”

“CC,” Dad calls from the study, his feet following his voice in my direction. His face lights up when he sees me. I wonder if David’s other daughters have ever seen the kind of warmth I have taken for granted all my life. I haven’t talked to David since I fell off his porch, and I’m not sure I ever will. I’ve learned enough from Tristin, my half sister, to know that he’s not someone I want to know. Dad crosses the space between us but then stops before hugging me, insecurity entering his expression. I don’t initiate a hug either, but I smile at him and feel those still-hard places soften as I look into his blue-blue eyes.

“You look good, CC.”

“Thanks,” I say. “So do you.”

He grins proudly. “I’m doing more around the ranch and started going to the gym with Rod and the guys a few times a week. Stopped eating red meat too.”

I smile at the irony of a cattle rancher who doesn’t eat beef. We continue standing there, looking at each other with everything between us. I wonder if he knows he’s not my biological father, but I’ve decided that I will never ask—the day I realized that was a big step for me. He lied to me as a form of protecting me. I am doing the same thing for him, and that helps me better understand what he’s done.

He half turns toward the kitchen, graying eyebrows lifted and thumb pointing over his shoulder. “Do you want me to make you some eggs?”

I laugh because it’s such a Dad thing to say. He smiles again, and everything feels a little more . . . right. Good. Normal. “No, thanks. I’m not hungry.”

“Can we sit?” Dad asks, waving toward the living room where I watched 60 Minutes on Sundays and put together countless puzzles with Grandma Dee, who isn’t really my grandmother and engaged her friend to write letters because she thought that would make things better for me. Or maybe the fact that it made things better for her was a bigger factor. I wonder if her guilt was what stood between us all those years. I wonder if every time she looked at me, she saw my mother. Maybe it could have been different between us if I’d known the truth, but maybe it would have been worse. I’m attending a breast cancer support group, and one of the women said, “I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason, but I think God can help us find purpose in the struggles.” I’ve gone to her church a few times, and I like the way they talk about God. It’s not Grandma Dee’s church. It’s not Beck’s church either. But it might be mine, and it’s helping me to forgive and look ahead and decide what I want to choose for myself.

I sit on the couch and Dad sits next to me. “How are you doing? How are the treatments going?”

“I’ve had the first two rounds of radiation. It makes me sick for a couple of days afterward, but overall I’m feeling pretty good. Two more rounds and then I’m done with that.” No chemo, so I get to keep my hair.

“Radiation was worse than chemo for me,” he says sympathetically, shaking his head.

I tell him about my part-time job at a sporting goods store and my tiny apartment that Tyson is paying for because working part-time doesn’t pay the rent—Ty got a raise when he extended his contract and I’ve chosen not to feel like a leech for accepting his generosity. I’ve never lived alone before. I had asked Dad to set out my leatherwork kit—I need something to do with my hands when I’m home in the evenings all by myself. That same lady from my support group talks about how we are all creators and that making things—babies, food, crafts—puts us in touch with God. It’s a little hippy-dippy, but I like it all the same. She taught me how to knit but all I’ve made are scarves so far. I’m missing my leathercraft.

“And where are things with Tyson?” Dad asks.

“Better.” We talk on the phone at the end of his day and the start of mine a few times a week. Last night we talked about the embryos for the first time. Tyson said it would be a shame to waste them, and I laughed. Dr. Sheffield’s given me the name of a specialist who’s successfully helped cancer survivors conceive. I won’t make a consultation appointment until I’m a year past treatments, but it’s something to look toward. A possibility. It is no longer my whole life, and I feel more capable of dealing with what might come next. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I think, but I hope not to be bitter either.

“It seems like you’re doing really good, CC. I can’t tell you how glad I am for that.”

I smile my thanks. He squeezes my hand, and his expression falls into regret.

“I’ve wanted to tell you, CC, how sorry I am for everything. I’ve always wanted to do right by you, and I . . .” He pauses and takes a shaky breath. “You have been the greatest gift of my life.”

I breathe his words in and let them settle in my lungs and heart and mind.

What would life have been like with a father like David Vandersteen? Tristin and I have sketched out some things she’s never fully understood before. Tristin’s parents were together and apart and together and apart for years. The separations when they went to live with Tristin’s grandmother started with Mae, Tristin thought, but there were other women too. And drugs. And fights. Her parents finally divorced when Tristin was ten—five years after Mae had been found in the Grand River. Tristin’s mom overdosed six months later, and Tristin and her sisters moved in with their dad again. Tristin got pregnant at fifteen and went to prison for drug charges when she was twenty. She’s been clean for six years now but can’t make things work on her own even though David is verbally abusive and goes on binges a few times a year. One of Tristin’s sisters moved to Alberta and is keeping herself together. The other sister died in a car accident three years ago; she’d been using since she was fourteen and had lost two children to social services. Tristin would like to get her sister’s kids back, but she knows she can’t take care of them. They’re currently in an adoptive placement that could be final by the end of the year. Cancer isn’t the disease that caught my biological family in its barbed fingers. Addiction and violence and emotional disconnection have proved more deadly.

“I’ve got something for you,” Dad says, and pushes himself up from the couch. He goes to the kitchen table, and I recognize the plastic tub of my leatherwork stuff. Next to it is a banker’s box—the kind with finger holds on the sides and a fitted lid. He picks it up, and I notice that the print label is faded as he brings it my way. Have I seen it before? I would have assumed it was old tax forms if I had.

He sets the box down on the couch between us, and I know that my mother is in this box. My long-form birth certificate must be in there. Maybe there are more photos. Maybe other things that Dad hasn’t shared with me because it would interfere with the picture he and Grandma Dee had decided to paint instead.

“I wasn’t sure whether to throw out the twenty-fifth birthday letter,” he says with regret as he stares at the box. “I didn’t give it to you because, I don’t know, it didn’t seem like a good time. There’s also one in there for the day you become a mother, but. . . they’re still yours and . . .” He trails off, swallows, take a breath. “I’m so . . . sorry.” His voice catches, and I blink back tears. He takes another breath and waves at the box. “I’ll let you decide what to do with all this stuff. It should have been yours a long time ago.” He finally looks up to meet my eyes, layers of heartache and apology within his gaze.

Who would I have become if there had been no Mark Chadwick?

What kind of life would I have had with Maebelle Gérard?

How would I have understood who my mother really was when I was young? When I was a teenager?

The anger and the hurt didn’t go away when I started asking myself these questions a few weeks ago, but it moved aside on the bench, leaving room for something else. Something different. I wasn’t sure what that space was for but maybe I do now. We will rebuild. We will come together. The knowing is as steady as a fence line disappearing into the horizon. I take a breath, let it out, and let it be. Picking out the old stitching of my life story has been hard. Now I’ll need to sew in new, not so pretty panels. Dad can help me with that when the time comes, but too much pressure before I’m ready to open my heart as wide as it needs to be would shatter this. This that is left between us. This that can be a place to build from.

I pick up the box and set it at my feet—I’m going to look through it when I’m alone. I take Dad’s hand and give it a squeeze. “I love you, Dad, and we’re going to be okay.”

“Promise?” he says, his eyes eager. Begging.

“Cross my heart,” I say, making an X over my chest forever scared by the removal of the tumor that really was a one-in-a-million case. My cancer could have killed me, and yet it may have saved me too. Like growing up on the ranch. Like falling off a porch. Like having a father and grandmother who did whatever it took to keep me. Someday I’ll ask Dad what their choices cost them.

Dad leans forward, and I duck my chin so he can kiss the top of my head. I feel the blessing of it as though he’s poured cool water over me. “Cross your heart and hope for pie. I love you, CC.”

I lift my head and look him in the eye. “I love you too.”

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you.
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.