Chapter 36

Tara

 

 

My fist hurt from how hard I was slamming it against her front door. To hell with the neighbor on the right, whose porch light flicked on. Go ahead and cuss me out, neighbor on the left, who opened his window and screamed an obscenity at me. I was too enraged to care about anything else but breaking this door down.

When my mother answered, I pushed my way through her, past her, heading straight to the rosy living room where all the evidence I needed was on full display.

There it was. Proof of what she had done, framed and preserved behind glass. All over Jonah’s face. And the heart-shaped scar that had followed him through the years, in pictures of him as a toddler splashing in the ocean, through childhood Christmas mornings opening a pile of wrapped gifts, then teenage rock climbing, and a cruise ship family vacation.

“Mom, who is Jonah?”

“What do you mean? He’s your brother.”

“No, Mom, the truth. Who. Is. Jonah? Or should I say Cole Mallowan—his birth name?”

My mom’s lips parted with a shaky breath…and her throat bulged with a nervous swallow. “I think you already know. And honestly, I’m relieved you figured it out. At least it’s out in the open now.”

It had never occurred to me that there were no infant pictures of Jonah. All of his pictures captured him at around one year and older. It was the 1980s, after all, before the digital age, when photos taken with film cameras had to be developed, then shoved into albums where they rarely saw the light of day. If I had ever questioned it, Mom would have probably lied and claimed they were in some missing photo album, or on a roll of undeveloped film tucked away in storage. But I never wondered, never asked.

The more I pieced it together, the more I should have seen that something wasn’t right. But like all children, we believed what our parents told us, no matter how many holes deflated their version of the truth.

“I just can’t…understand it. I can’t understand you. You stole a child from another woman!”

Her whole body fluttered—her hands, her head, her hair—as she denied the truth and cried. “It’s not what you think, Tara!”

Mascara dripped down her cheeks, but my emotions were cold against her.

“Then explain it to me. For once, I don’t want more lies. I can’t carry the weight of them anymore.”

In the past week my life had become a mountain to climb, while I was forced to haul everyone’s lies and secrets up, up, up with me, until eventually an avalanche threw me back down.

“I’m not evil, I swear. I found Jonah—Cole—wandering the beach alone during a storm, freezing in a paper-thin T-shirt, and I didn’t see any parent around. The beach looked completely empty, and the storm was picking up. So I took him home, totally prepared to bring him to the police station the next morning to return him to his parents. But then your dad got me thinking, what kind of parent would let their toddler run around alone at night during a storm? Even if it was an accident, clearly that parent couldn’t keep track of her child. Maybe this child shouldn’t go back to that parent. Maybe that parent was dangerous, or neglectful. So your dad and I simply…kept him.”

She said it so matter-of-factly like she had found and kept a stray puppy. There were still so many loose ends in this story.

“How did you get around not having a birth certificate? You can’t just one day have a toddler and no one asks questions.”

“First of all, back in the 1980s, honey, things were different. I told the birth registry that I had never filed for a birth certificate or Social Security card after having a home birth, so they issued me a late one. It was surprisingly easy to get one back then. Then I quit my job to become a full-time mom, so I really didn’t see anyone who would ask questions. It was just me and your dad for a long time, then Jonah and you, and that was enough for us.”

“Did you abduct me too?”

Mom laughed as if that was the silliest notion she’d ever heard.

“No. In fact, my pregnancy and labor with you convinced me never to give birth again.”

I didn’t trust her truth. Because she was a liar and liars lie. It was ludicrous. Insane. And yet it was real. This really happened. My own parents, kidnappers! This was heavy, as if the weight of it crushed through my world and opened up another one where my brother wasn’t my biological brother, and my parents were criminals.

“Does Jonah know?”

“No, I never told him that Ginger was his biological mother.”

“Wait—you know about Ginger?”

“I only realized who she was recently, after Benson moved in. The only reason I even knew the mother’s name was because I was watching the news constantly after we took Jonah, and I thought it ironic that she had red hair and was named Ginger. It was just so…on the nose. Then, I don’t know, maybe a couple months ago Chris was talking about Ginger over dinner one night. He was ranting about Benson moving in, and it hit me like a blow to the head. Instantly I just knew it was her, Jonah’s mother, because I remembered Benson’s name from the old news reports. I think some reporter had done an interview with him and he was pleading for his baby brother to come back. It was touching, memorable.”

“Apparently not touching enough to return him to his family.”

Mom ignored my snide remark and kept going. “Anyway, as soon as I got home that night I checked the newspaper articles I had collected back in 1986 about Jonah’s disappearance, and sure enough, the names matched.”

“Do you still have the articles?”

Mom waved me to follow her into my old bedroom, which now multi-functioned as an office. I was surprised to see my Britney Spears poster still clinging to the wad of wall putty all these years later, and beside it my prized NSYNC poster, with my lipstick print on Justin Timberlake’s face. On my old dresser sat a myriad of memorabilia, like my purple Koosh ball and a Troll doll that I had traded my Beanie Baby for after I became best friends with a girl named Kendall. We even had matching half-heart necklaces to prove our undying loyalty to each other…though I couldn’t remember her last name anymore.

Picking up my old Tamagotchi toy, I pressed the power button, surprised to see the screen turn on. The tiny creature skittered across the screen, and I still wondered what the creature was, knowing only that it demanded way too much of my time and attention feeding it, reading to it, and playing with it.

I set the toy down and stood behind Mom, who was opening the top of the antique desk my grandmother had passed down, a gorgeous cherry rolltop. Inside was a large drawer, which Mom opened and pulled out a small stack of vintage papers and handed them to me. The first article was the exact same picture Ginger had on her mantle, which must have been the same photo Ginger had provided to the police:

 

Toddler Goes Missing from Beach, Search Efforts Underway

 

The article was dated June 28, 1986, one day after Cole disappeared. Then another article, dated a week later:

 

Mallowan Child Still Missing, Investigators Presume Drowning

 

“Was that why you hired a private investigator to watch Ginger? You thought she figured out who Jonah was and would tell him the truth about what you did?”

Mom sighed. “That was part of it. I didn’t want Jonah finding out that I was a kidnapper or that his biological mother neglected him during a storm. Do you realize what that could do to him? He’s already struggled with depression, but that…that would send him over the edge.”

“Maybe that’s why he’s depressed, Mom. Maybe he knows innately that something isn’t right and his body is trying to tell him that.”

I thought of how harsh I had been on him all through the years, how ashamed of him I had been, and it killed me that this huge part of him had been missing and I punished him for it. I had been an awful sister. Reaching for a tissue, I let the tears roll freely, and I needed to feel that shame before I could let it slide away.

“What if knowing only made it worse?” Mom reasoned. “I spent years, Tara, years following the news, anticipating every moment that someone would come to take Jonah from me. But no one came, and eventually I felt like Jonah was my gift from God. My redemption. That’s why I named him Jonah—the man who was saved from the sea.”

“Jonah was never supposed to be your gift, though. He was Ginger’s. She made a mistake, Mom. We all do. But you stole a woman’s child. You say God brought him into your life, but how crazy is it that God brought Ginger back to Chris, and Chris married me, who is Jonah’s sister? I mean, you can’t get more Days of Our Lives than that.” I didn’t mention that Ginger had actually been the one to orchestrate that reunion, after connecting the dots on her own. Though maybe with God’s help.

“Trust me, that fact hasn’t escaped me. When I realized who Ginger was, and that she lived next door, the first thing I thought was that she was using you to find Jonah. But I didn’t know how she could have possibly figured it out. Jonah’s been away for a decade, so there was no way she could have seen him in public and recognized him. It started worrying me that this woman had managed to track him down, which is why I wanted to hire Ari Wilburn, because I was scared she was coming after my family.”

How ironic my mother would say that, considering she was the criminal here, not Ginger.

“What did you tell Ari to do exactly? Certainly you didn’t tell her you stole a kid, right?”

“No! I only told her I wanted her to look into Ginger and Benson Mallowan because he had recently moved in with his mother and seemed like he might be doing something illegal next door. I told Ari I just wanted to make sure they weren’t dangerous people. Especially since my family was spending so much time with them. That’s all I hired Ari to do. I didn’t expect her to stumble on Jonah being Ginger’s missing child from thirty-six years ago.”

“You know that’s what private investigators do, right? They dig up stuff.”

“Well, I realize that now, after the fact.”

“Is Ari going to turn you in to the police?”

I imagined if Ari was watching both of our houses, it probably only took a Google search to find out that Ginger’s son had gone missing, seeing the picture of Cole and Benson, smiling on the front page of the archived newspaper. Since apparently everyone but me knew that Jonah was living in my basement, if she got even a glimpse of his forehead scar, an observant person could have eventually made the connection. The rabbit hole didn’t need to tunnel too deep to piece it all together if you were good at investigating…which Ari Wilburn clearly was.

“She told me because of our confidentiality agreement she’s not obligated to tell the police. But I’ve already decided to tell Ginger and Jonah the truth, and turn myself in if necessary. I’ve been keenly aware of the potential punishment for thirty-six years and I’ve been preparing for it.”

I couldn’t imagine my mother in an orange jumpsuit, a color she detested wearing.

“Are you sure about doing this? You do know you can’t accessorize your outfit in jail, right?”

Mom exhaled a tiny laugh, and I knew then that whatever happened, she’d be okay. As for Nora, I wasn’t so confident.

“Do you think Ari knows that Nora killed Benson?”

“I don’t think so. She hasn’t said so, in any case. Honestly, all she told me was that she looked into Ginger and found nothing nefarious or dangerous. She pulled a mountain of police reports on her, but it was all related to Ginger fighting to get Chris back after he was adopted by the Bloodsons. Eventually Ari pieced together that Ginger had two sons on record with birth certificates and Social Security numbers—Cole Mallowan and Benson Mallowan—and one allegedly unidentified and undocumented infant that Ginger dropped off at the children’s home in May of 1986. There was no local hospital record for the birth, so Ari thinks she must have used a fake name or refused to fill out the paperwork and slipped out without getting caught. Our small-town hospital didn’t have much security back then. I remember because I was petrified someone was going to walk out with you after you were born; I wouldn’t let you leave my side.”

Mom paused, slipping into the memory for a beat, then returned to me. “The whole case eventually fell through the cracks, but Cole had a death certificate, so according to public records, he died from drowning.”

Maybe the name Jonah, the biblical figure who was saved from the sea, fit him perfectly after all. I hated that this was the fourth person in my family to be facing jail time—first Jonah, now Chris, and possibly my mom and Nora. Oh yeah, and I couldn’t forget about my own tampering with evidence. We were a family of criminals wrapped in a polished, suburbanite façade.

“Mom, you know what we have to do, right?”