by Sarah Dessen
I’d always loved everything about school, from checking out the maximum number of books allowed from the library to organizing my notebooks into neat, labeled sections. Even at ten, I took my assignments very seriously, which was why I was not content to put my stepdad down next to my mom on the top of my tree, even though he’d adopted me when I was three.
“It’s supposed to reflect my accurate, genetic family,” I told my mom when she suggested this. “I need details.”
I could tell she wasn’t happy about it. But to her credit, she gave them to me. Some I had heard before, others were new. The bottom line was that she didn’t get too far into the story before I realized my tree wasn’t going to look like everyone else’s.
My mom met my father when she was seventeen, just after her junior year of high school. She was working at the realty office; he, a year older and heading off to college in the fall, had come down from Connecticut to spend the summer with an aunt who lived in nearby North Reddemane. In any other world, they never would have met. But this was the summer at the beach, and the standard rules, then as now, didn’t always apply.
They couldn’t have been more different. His parents were wealthy—his father a doctor and his mother a realtor—and he attended private school, where he’d studied Latin and played lacrosse. She was the second of three daughters of a working-class family with a business that was mostly seasonal and always struggling to stay afloat. My mom was pretty, a known beauty; she’d dated only jocks and heartthrobs. He was a brain bordering on a smart aleck. They had nothing in common, but one night, she was heading to a party with her best friend, whose boyfriend brought along the mouthy Northerner he washed dishes alongside at Shrimpboats, a local fried seafood joint: my father. My mom was not looking for a boyfriend. What she got in the end was, well, me.
It wasn’t just a hookup: I’ve seen the pictures. They were In Love, inseparable the entire summer. He left in mid-August to go home and get ready for college, but not before they made firm travel plans to see each other again as soon as possible. The goodbye was tearful, followed by a couple of weeks of serious long-distance bills—all your typical summer romance stuff. Then my mom missed a period.
Suddenly it was no longer a romance, or even a relationship, but a crisis. Her parents were devastated, his were horrified, and what had been a singular relationship between two people became much more complicated. Calls were made, arrangements discussed. My mom had never gone into much detail, but I did know there were people on both sides who did not want her to keep me. In the end, though, she did.
For the first part of the pregnancy, she and my father remained in regular contact. But as the months passed and her belly grew, they started to drift apart. Maybe it would have happened anyway, even without a baby in the picture; maybe that baby should have prevented it. My mom, to her credit, never assigned full blame for this to my father. He was so young, she told me again and again, away at college with parents who so disapproved of the situation. They had all those miles between them and only a summer in common. It would have been hard enough for him to relate to her world—one now focused on buying onesies and reading books on labor and delivery—even without his friends in his other ear, nagging him to go to keg parties.
By the time of my birth their contact had gone from rare to nonexistent. He was listed on the birth certificate, but didn’t meet me until I was six weeks old, when he came down with his parents for what was by all accounts a massively awkward visit.
My mom said my father’s dad couldn’t even make eye contact as she held me, instead just always looking off to her left, as if trying to see around us. To him, more than anything, we represented a wrong turn, one that if acknowledged would make their entire family that much more lost. As for my father, he was nervous and distant, so different from the boy she’d met the year before. Funny how it was only when he was finally right there in front of her, she said, that she knew for sure he was already gone. After that visit, she wouldn’t see him again for ten years.
The only good thing that came out of the whole thing, my mom always said, was a discussion about child support. She, like her parents, hated the thought of any kind of handout, but she was in high school, and diapers and childcare weren’t cheap, so an amount was set, a schedule made. My father might not have been reliable, but the money—in the form of a check, signed by my father’s father’s secretary—always was. After graduating, my mother went to work full-time at Colby Realty, dropping me every morning with my great-aunt Sylvie, who rocked and fed me while she watched her soaps. Later, she would say these were the hardest years of her life.
So that was my father. As for my dad, he came into the picture when I was two years old. A widower with two small girls of his own, he was set up with my mom by mutual friends for a blind date. Both were young and single with small children: it seemed the perfect match. Instead, she hated his humor and the way he ate, while he thought she was stuck-up and didn’t smile enough. Six months later, though, my mom’s car broke down on the single two-lane road that ran through Colby. My dad was the first one who stopped.
They’d been together ever since. He always said she just needed to see him with tools to fall hard. She maintained he was not all wrong.
And so, just like that, we were a family. I was two years old, Amber four, Margo six. I had no real memory of a life without them as my sisters, just as they didn’t recall much that happened before my mom became theirs as well. After the wedding, we’d moved into the same house our dad had been adding onto and tearing apart ever since. Even without the constant construction, it was chaotic and loud, not peaceful by a long shot. But it was what I knew.
So while my dad was present for most of my childhood, my father was more like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. There had been sightings, other people claimed he was real, but the proof was all secondhand: old pictures, ancient conversations, the checks that my mom had put a stop to when my dad adopted me. Then, though, Mr. Champion wrote those three words on the board, and I was determined to fill in my own blanks.
“I want to write to him,” I told her, that first day I came home with the assignment. “Ask some questions.”
“Oh, honey,” my mom had said, getting that heavy, tired look that always came over her face on the rare times this subject came up. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“He’s my father,” I said. “It’s my story. I need to know it.”
I remember she glanced at my dad for support. He was quiet for a moment—he never spoke without thinking first—then said, “Emaline, he might not write you back. You need to be ready for that.”
“I will be,” I said. My mom gave me a doubtful look. “I will. You have to let me at least try.”
In the end, she did, sitting silently across from me as I wrote first a draft—always the perfectionist when it came to school—then a final copy of the letter. I slid it into an envelope, then watched as she flipped through her address book until she found the one that had been on the top right corner of all those checks. She read it aloud, I wrote it down, and we took it to the mailbox together.
It could have ended like that. Nobody, including me, would have been that surprised. But two weeks later, an envelope arrived with my name on it. Inside was a typed letter on thick paper. JOEL PENDLETON, it said at the top. No more Loch Ness. He was real.
Dear Emaline,
Thank you so much for writing me. I have thought of you so often, wondering how you were doing and what you were like, but never thought it was my right or place to try to find out. I would love to answer the questions for your project and, if you were so inclined, tell you a bit about myself as well. I know I can never expect to be your father. But it is my hope that maybe, someday, we might be friends.
The letter went on. He gave me everything I needed of his family history—answering each of my questions in order and detail—before moving onto his own. He was working as a freelance journalist and married, he said, five years now, to a won
derful woman named Leah. They had a two-year-old boy: Benji. Maybe, someday, I could meet him. On the last page, just before his scribbled signature, was an e-mail address. He didn’t say to write him, or that he was waiting to hear from me. It was just there, like an offering.
That was the first time I saw my mom get that particular mix of worry and sadness on her face. Now, I could spot it from across a room. He’d hurt her so much all those years ago. Her greatest fear was that she’d let him get in a place where he’d be able to do the same to me.
I finished my project and handed it in, receiving an A. Then I filed it away. (I was a kid with files, even back then; once a school-supply nerd, always a school-supply nerd.) The letter I kept in the drawer of my bedside table, where I’d take it out and look at it every once in a while. The stationery was so thick, his monogram raised. Like even paper was different, somehow, in his world. Finally, a few weeks later, I opened up my e-mail, typed in the address he’d provided, and wrote to him, thanking him for his help and telling him I’d gotten a good grade. Within a few hours, there was a response.
That is great news, he wrote. What else are you studying in school?
Really, it was in those last seven words that our relationship, whatever it was or would be, began. School was a common ground, something he knew so much about, more than my mom and dad, more than even some of my teachers. Math, history, literature, science—he had experience with them all, and was always ready and eager to provide me with his opinions, links to articles, books I should think about reading. Learning became our common language, and suddenly we were writing regularly.
A few months and many e-mails later, he wrote saying he and his wife and son would be coming down to North Reddemane. They hoped to meet me, if my parents agreed. When I told my mom, she bit her lip, and I saw that look again.
Nobody thought she should do it. Her family said he had done nothing for us and deserved the same in return, that it would just confuse and upset me. But my mom had read all the e-mails. Despite her misgivings, she understood that he was somehow filling a void we might have not even known was there. So a couple of months after the letter arrived, a visit was arranged. My father, his wife, and Benji came down to stay with his now-elderly aunt, and we made plans to all meet for dinner at Shrimpboats. In the days preceding this, my mother was so nervous she threw up repeatedly, which I’d never seen her do before—or since, actually. Your past holds on to everything, apparently, even your gut.
When the day arrived, we showed up at the restaurant and were led to a table by the window, where a tall man in glasses and a woman, a chubby toddler on her lap, were waiting for us. Personally, all I remember from the visit was how different my father was than in his e-mails. He seemed uncomfortable and awkward, and would not stop looking at me. He openly stared pretty much from when we said our hellos (stiff handshakes, awkward mumblings) until the merciful moment about an hour and a half later when we finally parted. It was like he was trying to make up for his own father, all those years ago, in seeing me.
His wife Leah, a toothy, friendly brunette, engineered the entire conversation, talking constantly to fill in any and all awkward silences. The boy, Benji, my half brother, was cute and thought everything I did was hilarious. I had popcorn shrimp. My dad talked entirely too much about the building business. My mom drank ginger ale and eyed the restroom. And then it was over. When we said goodbye, my father gave me a wrapped package, which I opened up, somewhat self-consciously, as everyone else watched. It was a copy of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his favorite book when he was my age.
“You may not like it,” he said, by way of explanation. “Which is fine. Just try it and see.”
On the way home, I sat with it in my lap, watching from the backseat as my mom exhaled, resting her head against the closed window. My dad reached over from behind the wheel, and squeezed her shoulder. “So that’s that,” he said, and she nodded.
Well, not exactly. It took me a week to read Huckleberry Finn, another to figure out what to say to him about it. In the end, I decided just to be honest, telling him that it was kind of boring, had weird language, too much river. I wondered if I’d offend him, or if how strange he’d been at our meeting meant I wouldn’t get any reply at all. The next day, though, just like clockwork, there was this:
What else did you think?
As it turned out, that lunch wasn’t the end for us. But it wasn’t the beginning of some beautiful relationship, either. More like a door being opened a tiny crack to let a sliver of light in. It wasn’t enough to see clearly by, but from then on, we would never be fully in the dark again.
We e-mailed regularly, talking about what I was studying and reading. Once a summer, they’d come down to North Reddemane and a meeting would be arranged. There was mini golf, more popcorn shrimp, the aquarium and Maritime Museum with Benji as he grew. Cards came for my birthday, gifts neatly wrapped (I knew by Leah) for Christmas. All the while I continued battling with my sisters, being with my friends, and doing all the other things that constituted my Real Life, the one I had, very happily, without them. Then, during a visit the summer I was sixteen, something changed.
It began with a simple comment, lobbed across the table as we sat at Igor’s, the lone Italian place in town. (My dad swore their slogan was “For when you can’t eat seafood one more time!” although this was not actually the case.) My father took a sip of his wine, then looked at me. “So,” he said. “Have you thought at all about college?”
I blinked at him. “Um,” I replied. “Not yet. They don’t start doing stuff at school for it until next year.”
“But you do plan to go,” he continued. “Right?”
He was a stranger in so many ways, but one thing I knew was that where he came from, higher learning was expected. This was unlike in my own family, where at that time college graduates numbered exactly zero. This difference was clear just by looking at Benji, who wanted the crayons the waitress offered when we sat down, but was told to do a word puzzle—Leah carried a book with her everywhere—instead. “Challenge yourself,” she’d told him, opening it up and pushing it across the table.
I glanced over at my half brother, watching his face as he studied the little squares. When I looked back at my father, he was still staring at me, just like the first time we’d met, but it felt different now. This was our thing, our shared interest. Maybe it was weird there was only one. But I’d take it.
“Yeah,” I told him. “Absolutely. I mean, that’s the plan.”
“Good.” He nodded, pleased. “Glad to hear it.”
A week later, the first book arrived. Test Best: Preparing for the SAT, I think it was called, although in the months following he sent so many more it was hard to keep them all straight. Books about taking tests, writing powerful essays, making your application stand out. About picking a college, calculating your chances, making sure you had the right backup and safety school. One by one, they crowded out my novels and magazines, taking over the entire shelf to the point where it sagged in the middle. I wasn’t stupid. I knew that with all these words, bound between covers, he was building me a way out of Colby, one book at a time.
The thing was, even though I was a good student, the schools where he wanted me to apply—Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia—were ones my guidance counselor hadn’t even suggested. Plus there was the question of money, always tight. “Don’t worry,” he assured me, whenever I got up the nerve to broach this subject. “Leave the finances to me. You just concentrate on getting in.”
It was a big promise, though, coming from someone who did not exactly have the best track record. This was something my mom, in particular, could not ignore. Our e-mail relationship was one thing; at least there, he was still at a distance, existing to me only, really, in cyberspace. But money and promises were real. As was the disappointment I’d feel if he wasn’t able to deliver.
“I just don’t want you to get your hopes up,” she told me. “When I knew Joel he was a big talker, b
ut not so big on delivering.”
“Mom, he was my age then,” I pointed out. “Would you want to be judged based on how you were at eighteen?”
“I didn’t really have a choice,” she said. “I had a child.”
Point taken. And I got where she was coming from. She’d done everything she could to make sure I didn’t have the same experience, on any level, that she did. Luckily, I had some people on my side.
“Stop worrying,” my grandmother said to her more than once, when I overheard them discussing this behind a door that was supposed to muffle their words. “He wants to get her there and pay for it, let him. You’ve done everything else.”
“I don’t want her to get let down,” my mom replied. “The whole idea of being a parent is your kid not repeating your mistakes.”
“People do change, Emily. He’s a grown man now,” my grandmother told her. “And anyway, no matter what happens, she has you and Rob. She’ll be fine.”
The books, essay prep, and hard work all paid off: I got into three of my top five schools, and my safety, East U, offered me a full ride. It wasn’t until the e-mail came from our first choice, Columbia, however, that I finally let myself exhale. The first thing I did was hit Compose and type in my father’s address.
Columbia, I wrote in the subject line. Then, below, without a greeting or closing, only, I got in. Then I hit Send.
I expected a quick response, as, like me, he checked his messages almost constantly. Instead, it was about five hours later that he wrote back. Great news, the e-mail said. Congratulations.
It wasn’t like he’d ever been that effusive in our exchanges. But I had expected a bit more excitement—or something—at this particular news. He’d written me pages about Huckleberry Finn. This was only three words.