The Favorite Daughter

by Patti Callahan Henry

  And then everyone was talking at once, while still somehow carrying on the conversation about the dinner they were having when the passel of siblings came in from Nevada next month.

  “Where does everyone else live?” Colleen asked.

  Denise rattled them off, top to bottom, where they lived and what they were doing. Colleen couldn’t keep up. She glanced at Beckett, who shrugged and said, “You asked.”

  Within minutes they were back in the car. Colleen exhaled. “What a fun family you have. I’m a bit envious.”

  Beckett’s face wrinkled in confusion. “You have a fine family from what I can tell.”

  Colleen felt the lurch of despair. How could she explain to this man that yes, it appeared she had a family, but she’d also willingly given up on being an intimate part of their tribe.

  She grew quiet, running a finger along the passenger-side window, making tiny circles until Beckett parked at the Oyster Shack and they both climbed out. Once seated at a small outside table with a fan whirring overhead, Beckett said, “I feel like I’ve said or done something wrong. You’ve retreated.”

  Colleen shook her head. “I’m just not that hungry and . . .”

  Beckett stood and held out his hand. “Come on. I’m not one to force a girl to eat. Let’s take a walk instead. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

  “You can take me home.” Colleen said the words she’d said so many times before when she’d felt the urge to open up, to crack the door that led to the room where all her sadness and grief were stored. Beckett wanted to talk about family. She did not.

  “I don’t understand.” He exhaled and stepped back. “Listen, if you want to go home, I’ll take you. But if I’ve said or done something to upset you, then you must tell me.”

  “No.” Colleen shook her head, her hair falling from the clip that held it back. “It’s my family. It’s complicated, and seeing yours so funny and loving just brings up things I try my best not to dwell on. If I talk about it—it all comes rushing back at me and that is the last thing I want right now.”

  “We’ve had rough times, too, Colleen. Everyone does. I put them all through hell—that’s why it’s a big ol’ joke that I’m the favorite. Mom doesn’t say that because I’ve been the angel, or because anything is perfect.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s why I don’t drink. I’ve hinted at that. I had a terrible problem in my twenties. I was arrested. I put them through hell and back, and then to hell again.”

  Colleen stared at Beckett—a man who seemed so together, with a family so intact.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s walk on the riverfront and we’ll eat if and when you get hungry.”

  After apologizing to the waitress and vacating their table, they ambled to the river park, where a sidewalk followed the curving shore of the rushing tidal waters. Gas lanterns and spotlights punctuated the darkness. “I’m sorry to ruin the night,” Colleen said.

  “So what happened, Colleen? What happened that you had to change your name and leave this place?”

  She paused at the edge of the river and stared at the man who had asked her what no one ever had—the real reason. Other men had probed in different ways, but he’d nailed it: why did you change your name and leave this place? Tears bloomed in her eyes; a thunderhead of anguish built in her chest. And right there, with the exact right question asked, Colleen blurted out the truth. “On my wedding day ten years ago, I found my sister and my fiancé kissing in the hallway of the church. I ran. They married soon after. I’ve avoided this place as much and as often as I can.”

  “Oh, Colleen.” He rested his breath on those words and then said softly, “I’m so sorry that happened. When she came outside with her husband . . . behind the pub, I figured something had gone wrong, but I didn’t think . . .”

  “I know. Who would think that?” Colleen’s pulse bounced in her temples and she felt the flush of embarrassment begin to creep up.

  “Did you have any idea?”

  “None. Hallie had never betrayed me in the slightest. We were so close. So close. I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t suspect it.”

  “I don’t mean to pry. Only talk about it if you want to.”

  “Honestly, I didn’t have a clue. She was planning our wedding. Planning our wedding! She was picking out the flowers and the cake and the dresses and I guess she was also picking out her own groom. I didn’t get a tingling sense of anything weird or wrong. I’ve gone over this a million times in my mind and tried to find the one place or time or hint. Hallie, up until then, had never had a serious boyfriend. She was naïve in a way. She’d never stopped living at home, even in college, and although she certainly wasn’t simpleminded or anything like that, she was easily influenced by others.”

  Colleen rolled her neck around to shake off the ideas that had so long haunted her. “So he probably seduced her. But I’ve never wanted to know what happened.” She covered her mouth with her hand as a laugh erupted. “No, that’s not true. I totally wanted to know what happened. I just didn’t want it to be Hallie who told me. Or my family—I was too embarrassed. So I’ve just made up my own stories, but I had no idea until she told me the other day.”

  “I can only again say I am so sorry. I know it must have broken your heart.”

  “Yes. But it felt like more than my heart. I felt like it broke . . . me. Now I come home only to see Dad and Shane. This week is the first time I’ve spoken to Hallie since it happened.”

  “You’ve avoided your sister for ten years?”

  “Essentially, yes. It took careful planning, but I managed.” She laughed, but he shook his head—he wasn’t going to let her joke her way out of this.

  “You know, if there’s one thing out of a million I’ve learned it’s this: when you are powerless over a situation, and everything rises in you to do something, to hurry and do something, sometimes there is just no fixing it. Sometimes there is . . .”

  “Don’t you dare say acceptance.” Colleen closed her eyes. “Don’t say it.”

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  Colleen kicked at a fluff of Spanish moss that had fallen to the path. “I want a better solution than that.”

  He shrugged. “We all do.”

  “Actually I found a better solution than that—build a new and different life.”

  “Was it worth it to forfeit what’s here?”

  “Who are you? A counselor?” Colleen squeezed her hands into little fists, feeling her fingernails dig into the soft places of her palms. “See? This is why I don’t talk about it. Now I’m being mean to you. I can’t talk about this.”

  Beckett nodded. “I understand.” He smiled, but his expression was sad, as if she’d let him down. God, she was tired of letting people down.

  “No, honestly you don’t understand. I think I have to go now, Beckett. I know my way home.”

  She set her feet to leave but then turned to see him still standing there, still looking at her with gentle kindness. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you don’t hate me. You should be mad as hell. I’m being . . . rude.”

  “I told you. I’ve been there. I get it.”

  “Been where?” Colleen took a few steps toward him.

  “In the place where you don’t want to accept what you must and so you try every damn thing in the world not to feel it or know it. I drank. Sounds like you run.”

  “That’s not what’s happening here.”

  He shrugged. “Then maybe I’m wrong.”

  “You are so frustrating!” Colleen’s voice echoed across the plaza and she lowered it. “What happened that you had to accept?”

  “I was driving and there was an accident, and the girl in the passenger seat, a friend, didn’t . . . make it.”

  His words fell on her like a bag
of wet sand between her shoulder blades, holding her immobile. “Oh, God, Beckett. I am so sorry . . .” And she forgot everything about Walter and Hallie. She touched the thin scar by his ear. “This scar, right? Tell me what happened. I mean, you don’t have to talk about it. Here I am going on and on about a love affair and there you are with life and death and I’m . . .”

  “No.” He took Colleen’s face in his hands, kissed her softly. “It all matters. I’m not saying my tragedy mattered more. I’m just telling you that I had one.” His hands dropped to his sides and he was far off for a moment. “It was my fault. They told me over and over that it wasn’t, that the rain and the dark night and the spilled oil on the road contributed.” His attention returned to Colleen. “But it was my fault. I was preoccupied, fiddling with the radio, flirting with her, acting like a fool, and when the car started to skid I overcorrected. And I had been drinking and was set to drink even more that night—not drunk yet but damn well planning on it. I see it in my mind’s eye every day. I remember it every day. I was careless and reckless and inattentive to anything but my own desires. And I will never stop trying to atone for it. I descended into a dark place for a long time—where the drinking was all I did or thought about. So I know how you feel—not the blame, but the inability to forget. You can’t erase something that painful. I know.”

  “I am so, so sorry.” Colleen felt a sadness that had nothing to do with her own life. “Isn’t it strange?”

  “What?” His voice broke free from the snags of the past. “What’s strange?”

  “What memories can be?” Colleen couldn’t express exactly what she meant, but the thought hovered just beyond her consciousness, a gnat buzzing, a realization forming. “Memories are alive, and they can take over; they have their own life apart from us. But what are they really? Just some amorphous, dreamy things that shift with time, almost like ghosts. Still they cause us pain or happiness or they keep us from doing things or cause us to shiver inside and wake us in the middle of the night.”

  “Wow.”

  “Huh?” Colleen found his face in her sight again; she’d been staring across the river’s blue expanse to the horizon, where green marsh grasses winnowed the sky from the water.

  “That was beautiful. What you just said. I want to write it down.”

  Colleen tried to laugh, but laughter didn’t want to join the conversation. Instead she offered Beckett a small smile. “I have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s just that memories seem to be all we talk about these days—my siblings and me, I mean. How to save them; what they are; how to record them; how confusing they can be. And what are they, Beckett? Just some chemicals along a neural pathway?”

  “No.” He brushed back her hair and ran his finger along her hairline. “They are who we are, little strands of who we are, all tied together.”

  “Why can’t we just pull out one memory strand, or ten or twenty for that matter, and keep only the ones we want?”

  He didn’t answer her, because of course there wasn’t an answer.

  Instead he told her, “I’ve only told one other person that story. It’s mine. I don’t like dumping it on people.”

  “I’m honored that you told me. My dad has this saying he’s repeated for as long as I can remember. ‘As the Irish say . . . ’ and one of them is, ‘No matter how long the day, the evening comes,’ which means, all things do end. But these bad memories of ours don’t seem to have an end.”

  “Indeed.” Beckett attempted an Irish accent that wasn’t convincing. He laughed at himself and dropped his arm over her shoulder. In comfortable silence they took a few steps along the river walk. Colleen moved a few inches from Beckett, allowing his arm to fall from her shoulder, and they held hands.

  Then quickly, a shiver ran up Colleen’s arm, and then down again. What was it? What was amiss? Something. Or was it that she was moving too close to Beckett too fast—alarms sounded inside.

  There were so many people out enjoying the riverside at day’s end. Two teenage boys ate something out of a paper bag. A set of three girls took selfies with their phones and then snapped them again and then again in various poses. A couple stood kissing, her arms thrown around his neck and tears on her cheeks. He consoled her with strokes on her hair and cooing noises.

  So familiar: that stance and those noises.

  Walter.

  Colleen squeezed Beckett’s hand too hard. “What?” He paused in midstep and Colleen released his hand and pointed at Walter and the young woman with the bright red hair, so unnatural it looked painted on.

  “That’s him.” Her voice fell as low as her quickly plummeting stomach. And the label came from habit. “My fiancé.” She shook her head. “My brother-in-law.”

  “That’s not your sister . . .” Beckett dropped his hands on Colleen’s shoulders and spun her around to face him. “Don’t get involved.” Beckett then took her face in his hands, kissed her.

  Colleen stared at him for a few breaths and then broke free. “Of course I have to get involved. It’s my sister.” She twisted her neck to watch the train wreck, to see what she’d seen before as a repeating echo. But he was gone. Instead there stood a family of five, rough-and-tumble toddlers and two exhausted parents trying to get them to stand still for a photo next to the flagpole. The kids were having none of it.

  There was no way Walter and the woman could have disappeared in that short time. Colleen broke free of Beckett and jogged the few yards to where they had stood only moments ago. She scanned the river walk, back and forth, and then looked toward the parking lot to see them climb into a bright red VW Bug—he in the passenger side, she in the driver’s seat.

  “Walter!” She hadn’t planned on calling out his name; she hadn’t planned on running toward the car. But she did.

  The driver was quick on the pedal and the car gone before Colleen reached the pavement. Beckett was behind her in a moment. “Colleen . . .”

  “I know that was him. He’s cheating on my sister.” Tightness gripped her chest.

  “I’m sorry.” Beckett’s voice came sad and low in her ear.

  “I have to go home. I have to tell her.”

  “Are you sure it was him? Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said with certainty now. “But what I’m not so sure of is if she’ll believe me; she’ll think I’m making it up to get back at her or . . .”

  “I don’t think it so much matters what anyone believes as long as we speak the truth, right?”

  Colleen stared at this man she’d only come to know days before and smiled at him. “Who are you, Yoda?”

  He laughed so deeply that Colleen could only smile in return.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.

  Pat Conroy, Beach Music

  SIX DAYS UNTIL THE PARTY . . .

  Morning came with the sound of Colleen’s nieces’ voices overlapping outside, and she knew that her sister was at the house, and she knew what she must do—tell the truth. Colleen had slept as poorly as if she’d slept on a bench at the river park where she’d seen Walter kiss that woman. She rose with dread and dressed quickly, poured a fortifying cup of coffee and went to find Hallie and the girls on the screened porch.

  Rosie and Sadie sat on either side of Hallie as she read to them from a picture book that Colleen recognized from their childhood—Where the Wild Things Are. Hallie’s voice lowered with great authority and her girls laughed.

  Colleen entered and they all looked at her, the overhead light falling onto their faces causing shadows that made the little girls indistinguishable from one another. “Aunt Lena!” The one on the left jumped off the swing and ran to her side. It was Sadie, the more reticent of the two.

  “Hi, girls.”

  Hallie sat stock-still. “There you are. We were hoping you’d be up soon.”

  “Can I ta
lk to you?” Colleen couldn’t find small talk or jolly jokes for the little girls.

  “Yes.” Hallie shifted on the large seat and Rosie jumped down with her sister.

  “Does this mean we need to go inside?”

  “Yes, sweetie.”

  “Can we watch the iPad? Please?”

  Hallie nodded. “It’s in the kitchen.”

  The girls ran off quick as lightning. “The iPad with movies hidden inside—it’s their favorite thing. I don’t let them very often.”

  “I saw Walter.” Colleen didn’t want to talk about movies or iPads.

  “Where?” Hallie asked as though she was as tired of his name as she already was of the day.

  “At the river park.”

  “No, that wasn’t him. He’s out of town.” Hallie shifted on the swing.

  “He was with a woman, Hallie. A woman who was crying and had her arms around him. He was consoling her, looking at her, and he kissed her.”

  “Nope.” Hallie’s facial expression didn’t change. She rose to her feet and stood as still as the carved mermaid statue in the park, her face placid with denial.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re trying to make me feel the way you felt that day. You’re trying to make me understand. But I’ve known, all these years I’ve known and I’ve tortured myself about it. You don’t have to—”

  “That is not what I’m doing. I’m telling you the truth.” Colleen took a few steps closer. Hallie reached her hand out and for a moment Colleen thought she might slap her, but instead she grabbed on to the swing’s rope to steady herself. “He’s in Columbia, where he’s supervising a housing project.”

  “No, he’s with a women whose red hair is as bright as her VW Bug.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Hallie slapped her hand against the edge of the wooden swing and then flinched at the sting; she shook her hand out.

  “I’m not doing anything. I’m telling you what I saw.”

  “Thank you, Lena.” Hallie’s words were robotic, stilted. She turned quickly and entered the house, leaving the door ajar while calling out for her girls.