As the oldest Rockwell daughter, Esme felt a livid spasm in her chest that made her blush; she was angry at Ru for knowing something she didn’t. The flag, obviously. What was obvious about the tattered relic of the Rockwells’ glory days in commercial fishing, munitions, and banking, and what could it possibly have to do with their fabled father? Being the oldest came with responsibility, overwrought scrutiny, and pressure; the only upside was that eventually you could know things the younger siblings couldn’t, things you were supposed to protect them from. Ru was always screwing that up. Even as a little kid, she walked around with her ears popped out like satellite dishes, gathering data that clearly didn’t belong to her, as if pretending to be part spy herself.
Their father wasn’t a spy.
They had no real father.
Their mother was a woman who’d wanted kids but was too off-kilter to handle marriage.
The old spy was an ancient invention, one that proved Augusta’s limited imagination, to be honest.
Ingmar barked from the screen door—again, Augusta didn’t appreciate what she perceived as an outburst of the dog’s masculinity. Augusta told her daughters to get inside. “For God’s sake,” she added, “let’s not air this on the front lawn!”
The three sisters and Atty took their seats around the kitchen table with Augusta standing in front of the sink, all thick shoulders and long imperious neck. And Ingmar padded around them, nervously, the way he often did before a thunderstorm.
Augusta faced them, prepared to explain something—something that Ru already knew. Was their mother going to trot out the old lies and was Ru going to support her?
“Jesus,” Esme said, “just spit it out.” Her anger now felt inextricably stitched to some old instinctive fear—about lying mothers or unknowable fathers?
“I kind of like the overt drama,” Liv said.
“You would,” Esme said. It wasn’t a nice thing to say but Esme wasn’t feeling nice. She felt like she was about to be attacked, and the year had offered enough unpredictability—on the boarding school’s playing fields, in the mahogany halls, at dinner parties, endlessly. Plus, Liv had been living such an overtly dramatic life that it seemed like she was purposefully trying to live in opposition to Esme’s decisions, which, until recently, had seemed safe and responsible. Liv’s dramatic lifestyle had felt like a judgment on Esme’s practical one.
Liv was annoyed by Esme’s impatience. Liv had always been prettier than Esme, and Liv was sure Esme couldn’t ever really get over a slight genetic injustice like that. And so Liv had spent much of her life giving Esme a wide emotional berth because of it. She was sick of it now. Her mother deserved a little attention. The girls hadn’t been doting daughters. Case in point, Liv wasn’t sure what her mother was going to say, but she also didn’t really care. Fairly well medicated at the moment, she looked at her mother as if she were made of soap bubbles. Sweet smelling, but ultimately fragile. She thought, My mother is poppable. “Just let her have her moment,” Liv told Esme.
Ru was silent and wide-eyed. She’d given up on the idea that this moment would ever come, so she was surprised that it had arrived with such little fanfare.
“I’m not going to have a moment,” Augusta said. “You are.”
“Me?” Atty said. Augusta’s eyes had been scanning but had accidentally fallen on Atty right at the end of her sentence. Atty was still holding the Nancy Drew books in her lap. She was confused and a little gleeful. Atty’s mother had told her stories of her unconventional childhood and Atty knew she was about to see some kind of performative event. She’d gone to an experimental play in New York City with her drama class a few months earlier, where they were allowed to walk from room to room, scene to scene, and interact with the actors. She’d kissed a man’s shoulder in a dark hallway. He hadn’t been an actor after all, but he kissed her back on the mouth, and it was a strange moment of groping that Atty had never been privy to before. She’d tweeted, Immersive theater just got handsy. #Idontkissandtell. Before her father’s affair, she hadn’t been the type to get invited to the orgies that took place on campus, but after, imbued with a collateral air of illicit sexiness, she had what turned out to be an audition, one that had gone incredibly badly, and which she’d recently decided was the origin point for her downward spiral.
“Not you, Atty,” Esme said. “You’re not going to have a moment. She meant us. The girls.” She and her sisters would always be the girls. Esme said this in an attempt to relieve her daughter but Atty looked a little disappointed. Esme just wanted this to all be over with. “Go on, Mom. Please.” She sounded whiny and childish, and hated how these family get-togethers always seemed to make her regress.
Augusta clapped her hands together. “Fine. Yes. Your father. I know I’ve stopped talking about him altogether. I thought that might be best. But a man came to the door today. Something’s been churned up by the hurricane. A box of letters. His father was a friend of your father’s and so this up-churning happened in a basement.” It was oddly formal but disconnected, as if she’d practiced some version of a speech and was telling it out of order.
“The hurricane,” Ru said with quiet astonishment. This is what it had taken—a brutal act of nature—to get to the truth.
“Correct, Ru. The hurricane,” Augusta said. “And your father had been writing this friend all these years. Your father and I were never married and so we never really divorced, but we stopped seeing each other in 1984.”
“Wait,” Liv said. “You’re a divorcée?”
Augusta nodded. “In a way, yes. We have that in common.”
Esme shook her head. “That’s the thing that’s most impressed you so far with this story? That she’s a divorcée who was never actually married?”
“Oh, I like all of it,” Liv said. “What’s not to like?”
“What’s not to like?” Esme said. “It’s delusional. It makes no sense.” She turned to her mother. “Are you going to get to the part where you tell us he was a spy?”
Augusta sat down at the kitchen table and pursed her lips.
Ru feared her mother was retreating, and so she jumped in. “He was a spy,” Ru said flatly. “He was. People are spies, you know. It is an actual occupation and there are those, in reality, who do the work. CIA, NSA, FBI. These aren’t just organizations made up by the entertainment industry.”
Atty piped up, “Alicia Spitz’s dad is in the CIA.” She went ignored.
“How would you know anything about our alleged father?” Esme said.
“Yeah,” Liv said, rubbing balm from a metal tin onto her lips. “Why are you saying things like this, Ru? I mean, where’s this coming from?”
Augusta knit her hands together. “How do you know about the flag, dear? I’ve never told anyone about the flag.”
Ru stood up, walked to the cupboard, and pulled out a small juice glass. “Not one of you, not one, ever asked me where I went. Not one!” She was surprised how quickly the anger flared.
“You went to Vietnam,” Esme said. “You told us.”
Ru spun around. “No! I was sixteen years old and gone for three days—three whole days—before you even realized I was gone.”
Liv laughed. “I know. Right? Three days. That’s hilarious. I mean, that is classic Ru’s Poos. It would only happen to her.”
“Classic Ru’s Poos,” Atty said, wagging her head—obviously familiar with the phrase.
“What do you mean? Classic Ru’s Poos? What the hell?” Ru said. “Is that something you say behind my back?”
“No, dear,” Augusta said quickly. “I’m sure that’s something they’ve said to your face. It’s a full-family joke. Isn’t it, Esme?”
“It is. Absolutely. I mean, we started saying that when you were really little.”
“I remember you two saying that one time when I was like thirteen and we were playing Risk, but I cried and you swore you’d never say it again.”
Esme looked at Liv, who then nodded. “That might have been when the saying went underground, but you do these classic Ru’s Poos things. And our hands are tied.”
“Screw you, Liv! At least my classic moves don’t land me in rehab.” On the car ride home, Ru had pieced together that the spa that Liv was raving about wasn’t really a spa.
“Don’t attack Liv!” Esme shouted. “That’s not a fair fight.”
“Oh, because I’ve hit a low point, Esme? Like I’m the one made of dish soap bubbles?” Liv said. “And I’m just going to pop to death if I have to take a jab?”
“That’s not what I meant!” Esme said. “I was sticking up for you!”
“By putting her down!” Ru countered.
Atty’s heart was skittering in her chest. She put the Nancy Drews on the ground just in case this got physical. She wanted to be ready to participate.
“Is this because I pooped in a shoe once as a two-year-old?” Ru said, holding her head with both hands.
“We’ve seen you poop in a shoe. All of us. Me, Esme, Augusta, and even Jessamine. We saw it.”
“If you pay attention to the rest of the story,” Ru said, stiffening, “you’ll recall that I really only had one accident.”
“I think it’s the image that just sticks with you,” Esme said.
“It’s kind of a first impression,” Atty added—as if Ru needed more people lining up against her. “And first impressions are important.”
“Basically, I could win a Nobel and this is the way you’d think of me, still, as a shoe-pooper.”
Liv raised her eyebrows and froze for a moment. “Really?” she snorted. “Now you’re going to win a Nobel?”
“Screw you!” Ru said.
Augusta raised her hands in the air and shouted, “Enough! Enough! Enough!”
The kitchen fell silent.
There were some short sighs, huffy breaths, the scrape of a chair against the floor as Ru took a seat, pulled back from the table, holding her empty juice glass.
“We made light of your disappearance because it was a horror. We joked because the love and fear we felt overwhelmed us. And we believed you when we found the note you wrote that you’d come back soon!” Augusta sometimes relied on the tenets of the old lost Personal Honesty Movement, by offering many simple statements in a row.
“I looked him up,” Ru said.
“Who?” Liv asked.
“Our father.”
“You looked him up?” Esme said.
Augusta was stunned. “And you found him?”
“Yes.”
“Where?” Liv asked.
“In Guadeloupe.”
“You made it to Guadeloupe?” Augusta said. “You didn’t have a passport, did you? That’s international travel!” Augusta seemed retroactively terrified.
Ru didn’t want to bog down in details right now. “I found him and we talked in a bar. He’s real.”
“Our actual father,” Esme said aloud—half question, half statement.
“And you never told us?” Liv asked.
“You didn’t ever ask where I’d gone!” Ru said, trying to keep calm.
“Right,” Liv said, and she sat back. “I get that. We didn’t deserve to know.”
“Right,” Ru said, relieved.
“Nineteen ninety-two,” Esme said, doing the quick math.
“How did he look?” Augusta said, a little defensively, as if she might have wanted him to look forlorn and lost without her.
“Like a middle-aged man,” Ru said.
“I don’t even know his name. What’s his name?” Esme asked.
“Nick Flemming,” Ru said.
Esme glanced at her mother for confirmation.
Augusta nodded.
“What was he wearing? Did he know you’d been hunting him down? What did you talk about?” Esme asked.
“We talked about the past, about his relationship with Mom, about his regrets and failings.”
Liv stared at her mother. “Wait. You had three children with this man. Not just one or two but three full children.”
Augusta sighed. “It’s a long story. You don’t have to understand it. In fact, I don’t expect anyone to ever understand it.”
Esme pounded the table. “Ru! What happened? What really happened?”
Ru lined up the salt and pepper shakers. “I asked him to leave my life alone.”
“What do you mean—leave your life alone?” Liv asked.
“He’d abandoned us,” Esme said, and then she knew why she’d decided he didn’t really exist. If her mother had invented a fake father for them—a supposed spy, no less!—she didn’t have to deal with the fact that either one or three men had, in fact, abandoned the Rockwell girls. In her personal narrative, Esme’s mother had, most likely, seduced men from good stock, gotten pregnant, and never informed the fathers. Esme’s abandonment issues were pristine—it was as if they’d been there all along, just like this box of letters that bobbed up from some basement during the hurricane—and now someone was taking off the lid. She could feel herself reprocessing being abandoned by her husband—as if it hadn’t been painful enough. The problem wasn’t that her mother was delusional or simply that her husband had some sort of breakdown. It was that she, Esme, was ultimately abandonable. “Our father had already clearly left our lives alone!” She rubbed her ears. Her own voice sounded muffled in her head. “Am I shrieking?”
Ru wasn’t sure what her mother knew, what she was willing to admit, how far this conversation was going to go. “It’s your turn,” she said to her mother.
Augusta tried to smile. She lifted one hand as if about to offer a benediction. “It turns out, your father never really abandoned you girls at all. He’s been very…involved in your lives.” Her expression shifted then. The smile faded. Her voice tightened. “Your lives aren’t completely your own.”