Feather for Hoonah Joe

by Marianne Schlegelmilch

  “She signed a contract, you know,” Della said in her matter-of-fact way.

  The rest of the eight mile walk to the motel was uneventful. The custodian had been right about one thing, Doug’s stress seemed to melt with each footstep, leaving him with deep feelings of remorse for the harsh way he had talked to Sal.

  But, what the heck? Hadn’t even Mara lost patience with the old woman recently? And Joe?

  Sal/Sylvia had pushed everyone’s tolerance. He had just been the first one to be open about it. He stopped berating himself and began to plan how he could do damage control with the woman at the heart of all the turmoil.

  What he couldn’t figure out yet was how to tell Mara. Keeping a secret this big from his wife felt wrong on many levels, yet was it his place to tell her? Was this the right time? Would waiting allow him some time to work things out and come up with a way to soften the blow, or would waiting serve only to leave his wife with an even deeper sense of betrayal?

  He had just about decided to tell her first thing in the morning, when he and Thor arrived at the motel. Wouldn’t you just know that the first person he ran into would be Sal, who was out in the parking lot talking on her phone?

  Sal clicked her phone off and began to walk towards him. Doug spoke first.

  “Look, Sal—Sylvia—”

  “Hush, Doug,” Sylvia LaMonte told him. “You owe me no apology. I deserved every bit of what you said.”

  “But it wasn’t respectful—” Doug said, before she interrupted him again.

  “It was what it was, Doug. The first thing I want to say is that I appreciate that you came to me first with the information that you uncovered. There are some who might have chosen to handle things in, shall we say, a less straightforward manner.”

  Sylvia LaMonte put her arm through Doug’s as he walked with her to the flower-decked boardwalk that lined the river across the street from the motel.

  “Well, whatever the case,” Doug told her, “It’s not like me to be so rude and I want to apologize for my tone and for the accusations and inferences that I made.”

  Sylvia LaMonte squeezed his arm.

  “Please, Doug, let’s just forget about it, okay?”

  “I was tired . . . worried about how to tell Mara,” he persisted.

  “Me, too,” Sal said. “You know, I want to explain something to you.”

  “No need,” Doug interrupted her.

  “Let me finish, Doug,” she said gently.

  “When the records were unsealed three years ago, I was just as curious as I guess anyone in my position would be. There were so many things I wondered about, but mostly I wondered if my daughter had had a happy life.”

  Doug looked at her. It sounded strange having Sal refer to Mara as her daughter, yet somehow comforting—as if his initial impression of his wife having been coldly and callously cast off might have been wrong.

  “The first thing I did was to try to find her adoptive parents.” Sal laughed wryly. “I’m not sure what I was thinking. I didn’t know if I might write them, call them, spy on them, you know? I just needed to find them. I hired someone. That’s when I learned they were dead. I have to tell you, having that knowledge alone threw me into turmoil.”

  “How’s that?” Doug asked.

  “It tore me apart knowing that she had no one,” Sal answered. “Then when I learned about Brad dying, I knew I had to find her, so I hired two more people and we did find her—just as she was boarding the ferry for Alaska.”

  This was just too weird.

  “But, that’s about when I met her—and when Joe found her. Don’t tell me that some cosmic force or something brought us all together or something, Sal,” Doug said.

  He could feel himself tensing, unsure about just how much more “truth” he could handle.

  “Nothing like that,” Sylvia LaMonte said, “just coincidence, maybe.”

  “I don’t know, Sal. There’s been an awful lot of that—coincidence,” Doug said.

  “I had left Alaska after Bert’s death. I was confused then and not sure what would become of my life. Finding out that Alaska was where she was heading made me want to go to back there and talk to her,” Sal continued, “but a little voice told me not to. Anyway, like I just said, I was having my own personal life crisis. I still hadn’t come to terms with the death of my husband, Bert, or with the betrayal by my mother and sister, and—well—I returned to Alaska, changed my name to Sal, and began reliving the life that my Bert had taught me to live—a life that had been my only real happiness.”

  “Wow,” Doug mumbled.

  “I really tried not to think of Mara for a while. I didn’t want her to have to know about me,” Sal said. “So I just lived as Sal Kindle. Do you know that Sal stands for Sylvia Anne LaMonte?”

  Doug just stared at her and said nothing.

  “Now that you know, well, I’ve already decided to tell her,” Sal said. “And I can’t stop you from beatin’ me to it.”

  Doug cocked his head. Strange, how Sylvia LaMonte could flip back into her Sal persona so easily. Was that the safe zone in her head, the person called Sal that they all knew?

  “And I can’t say fer sure jest when it’ll happen, ya know?” she continued. “Part of me wants to try ta wait till this mess with Elzianne gets cleared up first, and everything with the bowl and the lawyer and that whole mess gets settled.”

  They could both see Mara and Joe walking their way. No further discussion could happen right now.

  “I’ll think of a way to handle my own dilemma,” Doug told Sal. “And I promise you, I will do all I can to be mindful of yours in the process.”

  “I couldn’t ask for more than that, Doug,” Sal said. “No one could.”

  Sal turned away briefly as Doug greeted Mara and Joe. Doug could hear her talking on her smartphone. Odd. It would only be a minute later before he understood.

  Stepping forward, she began, “Joey? I need to talk to you right away, and Mara, I have something important to talk to you about as well.”

  All conversation stopped as Sylvia LaMonte spoke with regal authority.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of reserving a booth at a small bistro about five miles from here,” she said. “Of all of you, Doug most closely understands what this is about.”

  Sylvia smiled at Doug, her eyes pleading for him to remain silent.

  “Joe and I will meet you both there at five,” she continued.

  And in a weak attempt at levity she added, “Dinner’s on me.”

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Rectitude

  “What’s going on, Sal?” Joe Michael asked his wife when they got back to their room.

  Sal jumped right in with what she had to say, not even waiting for Joe to take off his jacket, get them some tea, or behaving in any way like her usual self. She simply sat down and indicated that her husband should do the same.

  “With everything that’s happened, with all we’ve been through, it’s time for me to come clean—to lay all my cards on the table. If you choose to judge me, or decide you can’t understand what I’m about to tell you, then I’ll have to accept that. But the bottom line is that I haven’t been honest with you, with Doug, or with Mara. Matter of fact, I haven’t even been honest with myself,” she said.

  Joe Michael could feel his blood pressure rise. What now? He looked at his wife sitting there as strong and straightforward in her demeanor as he had ever seen her. Gone was the false bravado that had been the façade of her persona ever since he had first met her. Gone was the vulnerability that made her seem frail and old. In its place was a confident, serious, and determined woman, who was about to come forth with yet another missing piece of the puzzle that her life had become.

  “I’m listening, Sylvia,” he said, using her given name for the very first time when addressing her, a point that did not go unnoticed by his wife and one made in a manner as equally straightforward as her own.

  “The only thing I want to say before we continue,
Joe, is that I promise you that this is the last piece of hidden information that I have about myself for you to discover—that, and that I’m sorry it has taken me this long to learn to be open with the you, the man I love more than life itself. I just pray you’ll find a way to understand.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Right before Bert died, I got pregnant.”

  She paused to look at Joe Michael, but he showed no reaction.

  “As a matter of fact, neither of us knew it at the time of his death. I found out about a week after the funeral when I went to the doctor because I couldn’t stop vomiting.”

  “Okay . . .” Joe said softly.

  “The doctor said that I might lose the baby, or that I might not,” she continued. “So, I took the medicine he gave me, did my best to rest in spite of all the turmoil that was going on, and the short version is that I gave birth to a baby girl six months later.”

  This time Joe Michael did not remain expressionless. He got up, walked around the room, and then sat back down.

  “So, are you trying to tell me that you have a daughter out there somewhere,” he said. “Is that the news? Is that what’s been making you so distracted for the last several months?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, Joey,” she said.

  “So what’s the deal?” he asked. “It’s not like this is news to you or anything. Is she trying to embezzle from you or giving you grief?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Sylvia said. “I made a decision long before the baby was born that I was in no position—financially or emotionally—to raise a child. I consulted with several agencies and finally settled on one that would allow me to give birth to the child and turn it over within twenty-four hours to the adoptive parents. “

  “Wow,” Joe said. “So you lost your husband and then gave up his baby right after? Wow, Sylvia. That’s a tough one to understand. Real tough.”

  Sylvia said nothing, instead lowering her head as her husband stood again and paced the room.

  “Do you know what I’d give to have my children back again?” he said, his voice low and gravelly. “I’d give my own life if that’s what it took, and you—you just handed your newborn daughter over to a pair of strangers and simply walked away. Amazing.”

  “I was afraid you might not understand,” she said meekly. “I was under so much pressure. I literally did not know where my next meal was coming from. I was lost. I did what I thought was right. The agency even let me help screen the applicants. I could see the interviews through one-way glass. I knew the right ones the minute I saw them.

  “I even named the baby. I called her Jane. They let me hold her for as long as I wanted to that first day—just to make sure. When it came time to hand her over to the nurse, I almost changed my mind, but I knew that she’d be in better hands and have a loving and stable life, so I gave her to the nurse, signed the papers, and never looked back.”

  Sylvia LaMonte dabbed tears from her eyes.

  “Every year on her birthday, the adoptive parents would send me an update through the agency, but no pictures. They had some policy about pictures. The records were sealed, too, and I learned that they would not be able to be unsealed for thirty-five years.

  “Even then, I didn’t try to find them, that is—”

  Sylvia LaMonte got up and blew her nose before sitting back down.

  “That is, before they found me.”

  “What do you mean they found you?” Joe asked her.

  “About three years ago, the records were unsealed and the agency sent me a notice. Along with it, they sent me the additional information that my daughter’s adoptive parents had been killed in an accident. They also told me that she had completed college, gotten married, and that there would be no further communication.”

  “Okay,” Joe said.

  “I decided to find her,” Sylvia said. “My plan was to know about her, but not approach her. Then, somehow, I learned that her husband had died and that she was heading up to Alaska. By then, I was living in Spokane, but I decided to go find her. Then I changed my mind. What right did I have to disrupt her life? So, I headed back to Alaska intending to stay alone, took on my identity as Sal, and tried to resume the life that Bert and I had lived.”

  “So, are you saying that she’s in Alaska?” Joe asked.

  “Yes. I’ve know about her for some time now, but she doesn’t know about me.”

  “So, what’s different now, Sal?” Joe asked, getting up and putting his arm around his trembling wife.

  “Someone else knows now,” Sal said. “Her current husband.”

  “How do you know this?” Joe asked.

  “Because—because—” Sylvia LaMonte crumbled into her husband’s comforting arms, speaking through the sobs that wracked her body. “I never planned to tell her. Why disrupt her life? But now I have no choice. I don’t know how—I don’t know if I can . . .”

  Joe Michael got up and got a cool cloth to wipe away the tears from his wife’s face.

  “I’m not sure you’ll be able to handle this, Joey,” Sal blurted. “I’m so scared.”

  “Look, Sal,” Joe Michael said. “Whatever it is, I’ll handle it, okay. Just tell me. Tell me so we can face this together. “

  “Sylvia LaMonte stopped crying and looked her husband squarely in the eye. “It’s Mara, Joe. Mara is my daughter.”

  “Mara? Mara’s your daughter!” Joe said, stunned. “I’m gonna need a minute to absorb this.”

  “It’s not like you think, Joey,” Sal said. “I didn’t mean to follow her so closely. It’s just that everything fell into place the way it did from the first minute we met. It started with me being able to help her kind of anonymously, but then it became more. Still, I never planned to tell her. There was no reason to shake up her life. Then when Doug found the papers . . .”

  “What papers?” Joe asked.

  “The adoption papers . . . last week with the rest of the information he turned up on the Kindle and LaMonte families. He put it together, and yesterday he showed them to me. That’s what the meeting is for this afternoon. I plan to tell her. I have to, Joey. I can’t expect Doug to do it or to keep a secret like this from his wife. I only hope she won’t hate me.”

  For a long time, neither of them said anything. Sal went into the bathroom to freshen up and Joe paced the room. His army buddy had never told him that his daughter was adopted. It wouldn’t have mattered even if he had known. He still would have watched out for her. How horrible this must have been for Sal—to keep such a secret for so long.

  Something had told him to give the feather to Mara. Maybe there was some kind of destiny thing at play here after all. Whatever the case, his decision was immediate, and surprisingly easy to make.

  “Mara’s always been like a daughter to me ever since I promised her father I’d look after her,” he told his wife when she came back into the room. “And you, Sal, you are my wife and I love you. We said we’d tackle everything together, and that’s how we’ll handle this. Together. I’m not sure how, but we’ll handle it and whatever we do will be right.”

  Sylvia LaMonte ran to her husband’s arms. Never in her life had she believed that she would find someone such as he. “I love you, Joey,” she said simply. “And I always will.”

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Jane, Understood

  The booth that Sal had reserved was along a far wall and like the others in the small bistro, built with tall backs that provided a great deal of privacy. Mara and Doug were already inside when Sal and Joe arrived at the restaurant. As each of them sipped their wine, their conversation was light, if not somewhat guarded.

  After several minutes of light banter, Sal began.

  “I’d like to thank you for coming here with me tonight, while knowing that something different than our usual time together would be coming forth. Before I begin, I want to thank each of you for coming into my life and tell you that I love you.”

  After the toas
t, Mara leaned over to Doug to ask if he knew what was coming down.

  “Sal’s scaring me,” she said. “Is it bad news—like is she dying or something?”

  Doug squeezed her hand and looked Sal’s way, nodding for her to continue.

  “I know that each of you has noticed a change in me, beginning way back when you came looking for me out on the water on that foggy April day in Juneau,” she said.

  No one else spoke. Mara smiled uncomfortably, while Joe shifted in his chair.

  “I also know that I dropped a bombshell on everyone when you learned that my given name was Sylvia LaMonte, and that I was born into a wealthy family outside of Alaska.”

  Sylvia sipped her wine and looked directly at each of them, one by one, before continuing.

  “Recently—within the past week—well—”

  Sylvia LaMonte pause, her discomfort palpable.

  “Maybe I can help, Sal,” Doug said, standing.

  “I should . . .” she protested weakly.

  “If not for me, for the discovery that I made,” Doug began, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  He stopped to sip his wine, looking at each of them as he did. Joe Michael had put his hand over his wife’s, while Mara sat frozen with an expression of dread on her face.

  “Last week, when Joe and I went to Albany to research the Kindle and LaMonte families, we found plenty of information to support us in reclaiming the Edo period bowl from Elzianne. As you know, all of that has been forwarded to Dennis Connor Sr. He is currently preparing our case, and it looks like it’ll be a strong one.”

  This was proving to be more difficult than Doug had imagined.

  “Look,” he said, “no sense beating around the bush anymore. I found something when I was in Albany looking through the records, okay?”

  “Okay, Doug,” Mara said.

  “Mara,” he said, speaking directly to his wife. “I don’t even know how to tell you this. I just want you to know that the last few days have been hell for me—wondering if you should know, then wondering how you should know . . .”

  “Just tell me, Doug,” Mara told him.