Lovey

Lies That Matter

February 1960

My momma always said that the snow can bury secrets, but, at some point, the frost thaws, the spring comes, and whatever you were hiding comes to light. But sometimes, the truth comes out while the snow is still falling all around you.

“She died,” Dan said.

Those two simple words made that panic rise to the surface briskly and painfully enough that I completely ignored the fact that my husband was standing at our back door, at our house in Bath, breath blowing in the winter air, with a whimpering, swaddled child, who, from the sound of it, couldn’t have been more than a few hours old. My mind catapulted to my girls, vomit rising in the back of my throat.

But that’s impossible, I thought. You just checked on them.

Feeling my heart come back into my chest from where it had been racing around the solar system, I stilled my breath and asked, “Who? Who died?”

“Her mother,” Dan said, as though that was supposed to clear up anything at all.

The baby began to wail loudly as he shouted over her noise, “Can we keep her?”

“For God’s sake, Dan, she’s not a kitten.” But it registered that I also sounded like I was referring to a stray pet when I said, “I’m sure we can find her a good home.”

I took the baby from him and turned to go inside. I sat down beside the hearth in the kitchen, feeling the roaring flames return the heat to my body as he said, “She must be starving. I don’t think she’s eaten at all.”

I looked around the kitchen helplessly, knowing we didn’t have any formula or anything else appropriate for a baby to eat. I looked into that beautiful, red, wailing face, and that maternal pull, the tug in your loins that makes mothering feel so right, got the better of me. I knew in the instant I saw that beautiful face, despite what I said, that this little girl belonged to me too, that she would slide seamlessly into the staircase of pigtails that I was raising.

And, without even thinking about it, I did something that was as natural to me as making the beds and boiling the coffee. I opened my shirt and fed this helpless thing that was completely alone in the world save Dan and me.

“Can you do that?” Dan asked.

“Well, I’m still nursing Louise, so, yes, milk is milk, I presume. I don’t know what other option we have in the middle of the night in the middle of a farm.”

Louise was only ten months old then, and I had breastfed her longer than the other girls, confident that she would be my last child, wanting to savor those fleeting seconds of babyhood, that deep connection that sharing your body with another can bring, while I could.

“So, could you please explain why I’m nursing someone else’s child in the middle of the night?”

Dan sat down in a chair beside me, put his head in his hands, and, a moment later, I realized that he was crying. “I was going to lie to you,” he said. “But you have to know the truth. You have to forgive me, Lynn.”

I looked down at the heavy eyelids beside my breast and, more than my curiosity or the sinking feeling that what was coming next was an explanation that I wasn’t going to want to hear, it occurred to me how much things change. When Dan and I had reconnected again and again, our love for each other was like the fire in the hearth. It was intense, passionate, heated. But, over the years, through childbirth and diapers, scrimping and saving, getting promotions and losing jobs, the person beside you in the church pew morphs from the object of your near-addictive love obsession into something more akin to the sterling silver service on the sideboard. You can always count on it being there even though you don’t really use it in the same way you once did. And that burning love you had for another person reshapes itself into the love you have for your family, that united front against the world that you have become with him at the helm.

And so I made a command decision. Where I had had four daughters moments earlier, I now had five. “Get the suitcases and clear as many of the girls’ things as you possibly can into them,” I said, stroking the cheek of the now-sleeping baby in my arms.

He looked up from where his head had been in his hands and asked, “What?”

“Well, we have to move, obviously. There’s no way on earth I can explain this if we’re still living in the same town. We’ll move on, start over, and people will just assume we had these five little girls the whole time.”

Dan kissed me hurriedly and ran toward the door, like a child on his way for ice cream, afraid that Mother would change her mind. “Wait,” he said. “Couldn’t we just say she was adopted?”

“Adopted,” I spat. “She’s your child, for heaven’s sake.”

Dan was crumbling fast. And I think that’s how you know that you’re really meant for a person. When, in the trail of their crumbling, you can be upright and unwavering.

“What will we tell our parents?” he practically cried, sitting down again. “Won’t they be a little suspicious when we arrive with this child we never told them about?”

I put my finger up to my chin. “We’ll tell them the doctor thought the baby was sick, that she wouldn’t survive to term. We didn’t want them to be hurt by the news, so we never told them.”

He looked up at me, his elbows on his knees. “Will they believe that?”

I shrugged. “They don’t really have a choice because neither of us is ever, ever going to stray from that story.” I raised my eyebrows. “Right?”

“But her birth certificate . . .” Dan trailed off.

“Well, we’ll have to get her a new one,” I heard myself snap. I took a deep breath and whispered, “I’ll have to adopt her, I suppose.”

“You would . . .” Dan stood up and wrapped me in the most sincere hug of his life, the tears in his throat choking him, keeping him from finishing a question that didn’t need an answer. He already knew the answer because he knew me.

He pulled back and looked at me. “How can I ever deserve you again?”

“You really can’t,” I said. And I meant it. “But I damn well expect you to spend the rest of your life trying.”

And I can truly say that he stood by that promise.

That night is, I believe, the crux of my life. Knowing that my husband had strayed from me broke something inside me. But maybe it was something that needed to be broken. Walking away from the life we had built never even occurred to me. Raising Jean as my own was the best decision I ever made and perhaps the easiest. But those hard decisions, the big ones, the ones that really matter, have always come easily to me, especially in a crisis. I make a decision and I stand by it. Period.

And so, leaving behind most of our worldly possessions, we piled in the car before sunrise and left Bath in the dust, heading up the road toward Raleigh to take the job that the heavens had so benevolently opened for Dan two weeks prior. We had no place to live, no furniture and no idea what the future held. But we had the hurtful, shameful, family-destroying truth to hide. And we had another daughter to raise, a little white lie, a secret that would thread the seven of us together like pearls on a string forever. And, though my husband had once been the one that had made me feel that love like cream rising to the surface, it was my girls now.

And that, as it goes without saying, was more than enough.

I told myself riding into the sunrise that early morning, Jean warm and fast asleep in my arms, that Dan and I could get back to that place of love and trust where we had once resided. After the secrets were buried and a new truth was formed in the lives of our family members, we would repair that fissure and become as strong as we once were. I looked back at my four other little angels, their eyes closed, snoring in the backseat, and then I looked at Dan’s profile, the way the sun seemed to radiate off of him less glowingly than it once had. And the thought, though I willed it not to, crossed my mind: The lies that matter most are the ones we tell ourselves.