Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter

by Melissa Francis

  “No,” I said.

  Tiffany just nodded her head. “That’s exactly what she did,” Tiffany said. “Can you believe it? I told Dad to call the cops.”

  “She took all the money?” I asked, shocked by Tiffany’s harsh words and feeling certain that they were exaggerating to make the story more entertaining to top mine.

  “The mortgage company sent us a check for what was left after the mortgage was paid off and everyone else got what they were supposed to get. She deposited that check in our joint account, and closed it, taking the entire balance and stashing it somewhere else in her name alone,” he said.

  Even for Mom, this was off the reservation. I could imagine her, looking at the check for the sale of the house, hands shaking, deciding she couldn’t possibly share it, convinced it was hers.

  Tiffany shook her head. I kept looking from my sister to my father, waiting for one of them to say this was a joke.

  “Wasn’t the check made out to both of you?” I asked my father. Now none of us was eating.

  “It’s been cashed. I called the title company. She forged my name. She’s broken the law,” he said.

  That was sort of the least of it, I thought.

  “How do you know she’s just not managing it like always? Or buying another house? Or maybe it’s a scheme she’s cooked up to not pay taxes. It’s not like she’s running off with it to Mexico,” I tried.

  They looked at each other.

  “I mean,” I tried to collect my thoughts. “Do you think she plans to cut you out and run off or something? Why?”

  “And she wrote a huge check to herself from my corporate account, and forged my name to that, and cashed that too, draining the company’s operating cash. Why would she do that if she wasn’t planning on not seeing me, or us, again?”

  I looked from Dad to Tiffany, and back to Dad, soaking in what they were telling me, but still not absorbing the magnitude of Mom’s pure, unfiltered greed. There was no denying this was her idea of a divorce settlement. Either that or the ultimate bank job.

  “That’s definitely illegal,” I said.

  “When I went down to the bank and pointed out that they’d honored a forged check from my corporate account and had broken about fifty laws, they reversed the transaction, putting that money back, at least. But I don’t know where she put the balance of our joint accounts.”

  “What did she say when you confronted her?” I asked. “Did she think you’d just let her steal everything and live down the street at Marilyn’s?”

  “She screamed into the phone some nonsense about every wrong I’ve ever heaped upon her, not addressing the situation at all, saying she wanted a divorce, and then suddenly hung up, slamming down the phone.”

  “Yes, I’ve been on the other end of some of those conversations. When did this happen?” I asked.

  “The day of Wray’s party, before she came up to see you.”

  Wray was at work still, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to tell him any of this. I was mortified to be related to someone who would steal from her own family.

  We’d made a plan that morning to grill chicken kabobs on the roof when Wray got home, so once Tiffany, Dad, and I got back to my apartment from Sam’s, I invited Tiffany to go to the store with me, angling for a few moments alone with her.

  We walked down the staircase to the garage on the first floor of our building. Now painfully thin, Tiffany moved down each step gingerly. She seemed drained of energy. I’d noticed at lunch that she didn’t have much of an appetite. All of the fight seemed to have gone out of her.

  When we got into my silver-blue Saab, she sighed.

  I drove slowly down Chestnut Street. “I can’t believe it,” I said to her now that we were alone.

  “I know,” she responded. “It confirms what we always thought about Mom stealing and hoarding any dime that came in. But you still don’t want to believe your own mom could do this.”

  “Yeah. We’re related to her. It’s so embarrassing. I don’t know how I’m going to tell Wray,” I said.

  “On the other hand, as long as she has the money, she’s going to stay far away so she doesn’t have to give any back,” she said.

  “But Dad can’t just let her keep it. There are bills to pay,” I said.

  “He says he can make more money. I don’t know what he’s going to do,” Tiffany said, pulling down the mirror on the visor and playing with her hair.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Okay. Well, not really. I can’t eat anything. Anything with fat in it makes me feel sick. I spend a lot of time with doctors,” she said, her voice thin.

  “I’m sorry. I love you. I wish there was something I could do,” I said. She didn’t respond. “At least Mom isn’t bugging you. Maybe you and Dad can live alone in peace for a while,” I offered.

  “Yeah, that’s a plus. But . . .”

  She got quiet, and when I looked over at her at the stoplight, I saw a tear tumble down her face and land in her lap. She was half the size she’d always been. She looked like a little girl.

  “You know, I was lying in the hospital last time and in the middle of the night I was just in so much pain. And . . . so scared.” She paused, and took a gulp of air, trying to steady herself.

  The car behind me honked, and I waved my hand out the window, signaling for him to go around us.

  I put my hand on top of hers as my own eyes filled with tears that spilled over.

  “All I could think was, it would be so nice to have a mom,” Tiffany whispered.

  I waited until Dad and Tiffany left San Francisco to confront Mom myself.

  I had walked home from work early, wanting to be alone in the apartment to make the call. I’d thought all night about what I wanted to say to Mom, my anger and outrage festering and feeding on itself.

  I sat on my couch and looked out the oversized windows at another stunningly beautiful day in San Francisco. Blue and white sailboats crisscrossed the bay in the distance, as groups of people walked back and forth on the water’s edge, looking so carefree.

  I dialed the number.

  I had built up such a head of rage, my hands shook as I pushed the digits, forcing me to grip the phone to hold it steady.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “I know you took the money,” I said.

  “What money?” she said plainly.

  “All the money,” I replied steadily. “From the house. From the company account. I know everything. And then you came up here and pretended that you hadn’t done anything.”

  “Your father’s a liar! They both are. They laughed at me. They were going off without me, they were going to leave me with nothing, in the street, after all I’ve done for this family! I’ve given my life to this family, to you! To them! Your father would be nothing without me! An engineer. And your sister! A drunk! Your father too!”

  “Enough!” I shouted.

  She was quiet for a moment.

  I gasped for air. “Everything is gone. It’s in the past. I will forgive it all, forget it all, anything that’s ever happened. It’s gone. We can never mention it if you like.” My voice was shaking. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and I didn’t want her to miss a word.

  “But you cannot have a relationship with me, at all, going forward, if you don’t return the money. You have to treat all three of us like adults, with decency, from this day forward.”

  “What are you talking about?” she spat.

  “You cannot throw them away, throw Tiffany away like trash, your daughter who is sick, who is scared, and needs you, has always needed you. You are her mom. You cannot throw her away like she’s worthless, and have a relationship with me. Or Wray, or my children in the future. I won’t do it.”

  She was silent.

  “All the craziness. It ends with me. I swear it, once and for all. One way or the other. It’s your choice how it ends. But it ends with me.”

  She slammed down the phone.

  And I n
ever heard from her again.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It had been a terrible week. The Internet company where I’d spent the last two years was teeing us up for massive layoffs. I called it the curse of an opulent new building. Anytime a company builds a flashy new headquarters, they inevitably jump the shark and have to downsize.

  But now I was worried that the impending layoff was a sign. Maybe it was time to move back to New York. The dot-com bubble had burst, soaking my prospects for another job in the area.

  It was the Fourth of July, and Wray and I hadn’t bothered to stay out long enough to see the conclusion of the fireworks. Our worries weighed too heavily on us for our spirits to be lifted by patriotic celebration. After looking for more than a year, Wray and I had bought a sweet jewel box of a house on the waterfront in the marina at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. I unlocked the door and assessed the living room, worried that we had decorated too hastily.

  Wray closed the door behind us and fell onto the couch. As I slid off my jacket and removed my phone from my pocket, I noticed I’d missed a call.

  It was my dad. I dialed his phone.

  “Melissa . . . ,” he said into the phone. He usually answered with what we called his radio voice, a rich, warm baritone that would have been perfect for broadcasting. But this time his voice was paper-thin.

  “I have something really terrible to tell you.”

  He was crying. I think I’d only seen him cry twice—when his father died and when Tiffany was flown by medevac to Holy Cross Hospital after the truck accident in high school.

  “Tiffany is dead. She’s dead,” he cried.

  I slid down the wall of my cheery yellow kitchen, crumpling into a heap on the pine floor, not knowing I was replicating her final motion.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I just found her in the corner of the bathroom. Against the wall. In her bathrobe. I thought she was taking a shower. But instead, she was dead. In the corner,” he sobbed.

  “Oh, no,” I cried.

  Seeing me on the floor, Wray rushed over to lift me up.

  “You have to come. Right now,” Dad said, choking.

  The phone clicked and I just shook my head, staring blankly in front of me but saying nothing.

  “What?” Wray said fifty times.

  “She’s dead.”

  A tsunami of grief washed over me, and as it receded, I realized a lifetime of worry had ended. Just like that.

  I got in the blue Saab with Wray and we drove through the night to Westlake. As we got closer, I felt more and more panicked. I was terrified of the scene we were going to find. I had no idea who he had called, or if he’d even moved Tiffany’s body. I didn’t want to ask.

  Wray drove but neither of us spoke, except for the few times Wray kept saying he was so sorry.

  We pulled into the driveway of the small, one-story home they’d been renting. It was only the second time I’d been there. I swallowed so I wouldn’t throw up.

  I knocked on the solid brown door, and my father answered, still hunched over and weeping, hours and hours later. Tears and snot poured down his face, but he didn’t wipe any of it away. It was as if he didn’t even notice his own disarray.

  He wrapped his arms around me and clutched me, crushing my bones with his grief, soaking my hair and my shirt with his tears.

  Then he grabbed my hand, his whole arm trembling violently, and pulled me through the doorway.

  “Here. Come back here,” he said, dragging me through the narrow hallway that led to the back of the house. We took a left into the master bedroom and walked toward the bathroom.

  I shut my eyes, terrified to see my sister’s lifeless body.

  “There!” he said, pointing and shaking.

  But when I opened my eyes, all I saw was Tiffany’s bathrobe on the floor. The white, monogrammed bathrobe, the one Mom had had made for my wedding, lay in a heap in the corner.

  “Right there,” he said, as if Tiffany were still there. “That’s where I found her. She was already gone.”

  I wasn’t sure why I had to stand there and look, or what I was supposed to see. My eyes drifted from the worn robe to the twisted trail of shampoo and conditioner on the floor of the shower. There must have been a dozen or more bottles, standing up or spilling over. That was Tiffany. She couldn’t leave the grocery store without spending fifteen minutes in the beauty aisle, sniffing shampoo. Now that jumble was left, but the paramedics had taken my sister away, saying there was nothing more they could do. She was gone.

  In my mind, I heard Tiffany say, “I’m so scared . . . it would be so nice to have a mom.” And as I stood there and looked at her tattered robe on the tile floor, I closed the door on my mother forever.

  She’d never called, never returned the money, never opened her heart to the daughter who needed her.

  There was nothing to forgive. And nothing to salvage. Our bond was just wiped away. Gone.

  Tiffany had spent that one semester in college, backpacking around Europe, and had come home the sister I had always wanted. Calm, clear, sharp. Full of life and at ease with it at the same time. I had blown off friends and boys to be with her. I thought maybe during the sabbatical from college she’d left the crazy life she’d created at Berkeley and the weight of Mom’s boundless disapproval in a Eurail car, hopping off the train before it could catch up to her and crush her.

  I remembered that day on the beach, racing down to the water as the bottoms of our feet burned, jumping into the waves as the surf sprayed our clothes. Our only worries: how dark we could make our tans, and if we should try to beat the beach traffic home. That day, she was the person I knew had the capacity to be happy.

  It was the best summer of my life, and I will always save the memory of it in a quiet corner of my heart.

  When Tiffany drove back to college that fall, I mourned. I wanted to hang on to that new sister for dear life, and not let her out of my sight, fearful that I had imagined her, that she had been a dream, a mirage. I worried that she’d disappear and I’d never know if she’d really ever existed.

  I was right to be afraid. I never saw that girl again.

  I told my dad that I would take care of telling Mom. It had been more than a year since I had given her the choice of coming back to help Tiffany or losing us forever, and she had chosen to throw all of us away. Thirteen months of silence.

  I wrote her a letter and sent it to Marilyn’s house, since I wasn’t even sure where Mom was living, I informed her that her oldest daughter was dead, and the window of opportunity with me was now closed forever. She’d made her choice, and now she’d have to live with it. Her chance to make things right on this earth was gone.

  This cycle of madness, this pain—it ends with me.

  EPILOGUE

  I held my first son after his birth, and I could not believe how much I loved him, and at the same time, how much of a stranger he was. I wanted to breathe him in, consume him, devour him. Where did this person I could not get enough of come from?

  I had spent my life making sure that I didn’t drown. Sometimes swimming strongly, sometimes barely staying afloat. But I did not do enough to keep Tiffany’s head above water. Not nearly enough. Or she’d be here now. That’s my pain to carry forever.

  I have never been able to save anyone but myself. I’ve never been able to bank on anyone but myself. So who was this person tied to me now? This little boy?

  I knew who he was. The person I’d drown to save.

  I would happily give my life for his, and not even consider it a sacrifice. It would be my pleasure, my love for him is so great.

  I have whispered in his ear a thousand times that he is the smartest boy in the world. He is my most precious treasure. And I know I love him above myself, as I was not ultimately loved by my own mother. As neither my sister nor I was loved.

  The endlessness of my love for my son was matched only by the enormity of the love I later felt for his little brother when he arrived.
Those boys make it impossible for me to understand my mother.

  I haven’t figured out what I am going to tell my children about any of this. I don’t know how to tell them where my mother is, or why they will never see her. Or what happened to my sister—their aunt they will never meet.

  My dad is an important and loving part of our lives. My sons cherish him and chant to him on the phone when he is not visiting.

  “Hi, Grandpa!” they shout.

  He pretends to scare them through the phone, “Boo!”

  They scream and run laughing, a game they love when he is here. He is the only thing they know of my family before Wray.

  My older son asked me if Martha, Wray’s mom, is my mom too. I could see the wheels turning in his head.

  I simply said, “No.”

  He couldn’t quite figure out what to ask next. But he’ll be back.

  With the rest of the world as well, I have become a master of not answering questions. The skill is subtle. I do not lie.

  “Does your family still live in California?” someone asks.

  “Yes,” I reply.

  “Are they coming for the holidays?” they ask.

  “Not this year,” I respond.

  “Do you have any siblings?” they ask.

  “It’s just me,” I say obliquely.

  If you tell someone you had a sister, but she died, they are mortified that they’ve pulled the scab off an old wound. The truth kills the conversation. If you tell someone you have no idea where your mom is, where she lives, if she’s alive, and you haven’t seen her for more than a decade, they blanch. It is so abnormal, it begs an avalanche of uncomfortable questions that even friends are too shocked to ask.

  My non-answers are not lies, but, of course, they aren’t the whole truth either.

  The truth is that my Dad and I grieve the loss of my sister, and that pain will never go away. It just dulls very slowly over time. We cried over her ashes, just the two of us without a formal funeral, and there was nothing more to do but say goodbye.