We got out of the car like that was something we’d decided in advance, and walked along the path to a fairly secluded bench. There was no one else around, which was good, and even if someone came by we still had some degree of privacy.
I turned to face him, took a gulp of water, and waited. I’d decided that I’d let him go ahead and talk first, see what he had to say for himself, and then hit him with the questions.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you called,” he said when he finally spoke. “I’ve waited and prayed for this day ever since your mother and I separated.”
He stopped to clear his throat. “Lynn … how is she? Does she know about this?”
“Lynn’s fine,” I said. “And no, she doesn’t know I called you.”
“Are you two still close?”
“We’re okay,” I said. “What do you mean, still?”
“You were always playing together when you were little,” he answered. “You used to pester her until she’d get down on all fours and let you ride around on her back. Then, you’d holler “Giddy-Up” and kind of bounce up and down because she wasn’t wild enough for you. You liked to ride on my back because I’d do the bucking bronco thing.”
He smiled sadly and his eyes drifted back in time. “You were a little wild man when you were small. Used to practically give your mother a heart attack by launching yourself off the furniture — the couch, coffee table, bed. You crashed into the wall once and never made so much as a peep about it — just jumped to your feet and headed for the chair to get up and go again.”
“How old was I?”
“I’d say you started with the wild-man stunts around eighteen months, and kept them up ... well, for as long as I was around. I didn’t get much in terms of information about what you were doing after that. I guess you know things didn’t go smoothly between your mother and me after I moved out.”
“I know she hates you for what you did to us,” I said. I looked at him hard and waited to see how he’d react.
He hesitated before he spoke again. “I was hoping you’d still have some good memories.”
“Of you? How could I after what you did to us?” My voice was flat but I could feel the anger surging back.
“Porter, I don’t know what you think you remember, but I promise you that I never did anything to hurt you or Lynn.”
“Don’t you dare call my mother a liar,” I said through clenched teeth. It was all I could do not to get up and walk away, but I reminded myself I wasn’t through with him — yet.
“I don’t know what to say, Porter,” he told me. “All I can tell you is that your mom was hurt and angry when we broke up. I expected everything to be worked out like it would be in most cases where a marriage has ended, but it didn’t happen that way. I was awarded visitation — and I’ve lost track of the times I went back to court trying to enforce it — but I never got so much as one weekend with you and Lynn. And the worst thing was that you and your sister were put under tremendous pressure by the whole situation.
“Nothing that was ordered in court helped — everything spun more and more out-of-control until I felt I had no choice but to step away. Nothing I did worked, and eventually I ran out of things to try. The day finally came that I gave up — not on you and Lynn, but on expecting anything to change through normal channels. From then on, I just prayed about it and trusted that it would all work out somehow, someday.”
His tone and everything seemed so sincere that I almost bought it, so it was a good thing I’d gone over the things I wanted to say earlier. I wasn’t going to be taken in and fooled, like some little kid. I had questions to ask, and he was going to hear them.
“Yeah? So then why didn’t you ever send us anything, or pay support?” I asked.
“I sent gifts and letters to both of you, in care of your Aunt Jean, until about three years ago, when they started coming back. I guess Jean had moved then and when she did I lost the one place I could still send things for you. Your mother had a court order blocking me from having your address.
“As for support — I’ve never missed a payment. I assume you’ve been told otherwise.”
“I never got any presents or letters from you,” I said.
He paused. “The last thing I sent you was a Playstation. That was for Christmas about three years back. Some of the other things I can remember are a Blue Jays baseball jersey, roller blades, a compass and binoculars —”
“I don’t know about any of that,” I interrupted, but my stomach was churning. Everything he’d listed I’d gotten but … those gifts had been from Mom. I pushed away my confusion by saying, “And what about child support? Mom told us you never paid a cent to support us.”
“I never missed a support payment,” he said. “Not once. And I was only too happy to be able to pay it — to contribute something to you and Lynn — since I wasn’t able to be with you.”
“Then I guess you’d have some kind of proof of that,” I said, unable to hide my disgust. I knew he was lying, and I didn’t care that my voice made that clear to him.
“Sure I do,” he said. “They give me receipts every month. In fact, I think I have one in my wallet.”
We looked at each other and I could see he was holding his ground, wanting me to believe him without seeing the receipt. He was going to force me to demand it.
“So, show me,” I said, but it made me feel as though I’d lost something by saying it.
He reached into his pocket without ever taking his eyes off me, pulled out his wallet, and flipped it open. He glanced down, found a white stub of paper sticking out of one of many slits, slid it out, and passed it to me without opening it.
I took it and unfolded it because for some reason I had to play this thing out right to the end. It was a receipt from the courthouse for child support, dated that month. I realized at that moment that he was telling the truth, and that he’d paid every month all along.
My mother had lied. She’d lied about support payments and she’d lied and pretended the gifts he’d sent were from her.
My mouth was dry and I tilted up my water bottle and drained it before passing the receipt back.
“You never even tried to see me … us,” I said. The anger was forced now, though, and sliding off fast. Or, rather, it was turning around and heading somewhere else.
“Porter, I’m sorry you think that, and I can’t change the way things were, but I swear I did the best I could. Maybe there was something more, something I didn’t try, but short of kidnapping you, there was no way I could think of that would have let me see you when you were small. The two of you were trained to say things. You told social workers and psychologists I’d abused you. You told me you hated me and never wanted to see me again. Once, your sister even made a terrible claim that I’d touched her inappropriately, of all the sick things! Thankfully that was proven false during the investigation, or I might have been charged and jailed.”
His voice rose just a little in anger and anguish as he recited the events from the past. “There was only so much I was willing to put the two of you through — only so many lies I’d see you coached to tell, only so much pressure I could stand to see you under. It was clear the courts were blind and the social workers untrained in that particular area. Two of the psychologists saw that you were being poisoned against me, and they made some recommendations to the court, but the court orders that resulted weren’t worth the paper they were written on. Your mother kept sidestepping, making up new stories about what a monster I was … and dragging you two along through it all. It was so unfair to you and Lynn … so hard on you. In the end, I had to stop trying and just have faith that it would all right itself some day.”
He talked for a while longer, until I realized I didn’t need to hear anymore. Sanning had been right. I had wanted to see my father. There had been questions and doubts in me that I hadn’t even known were there, memories of the truth that were pushing their way to the surface.
I stopped him, ho
lding my hand up and saying, “I guess I always knew the truth on some level. I don’t know why it wasn’t clear all along.”
It took him a few minutes to be able to speak again.
“How could it be clear? Two beautiful children were taken from someone who loved them more than life itself, and programmed to think he had hurt them and that they couldn’t trust him. That’s pretty heavy stuff for a child to sort through.”
The word child triggered one of the questions I’d made a mental note to ask him.
“You have another kid?” I asked.
“Oh … yes. You and Lynn have another sister you’ve never met. I remarried seven years ago and my wife and I had Nicole the following year.”
I let that sink in. A six-year-old sister. Nicole.
“Does she know about me and Lynn?”
“Of course. She’s always asking me when she’ll finally get to meet you.” He said it with an emphasis that I knew was hers. Nicole’s. My little sister.
“What’s your wife’s name?”
“Amelia. She’s a good person. You’ll like her.”
It was after that that we really started to talk. Dad told me a lot about himself and his new family, and I told him about me and Lynn. I couldn’t believe it when he glanced at his watch and said it was almost four in the morning.
“Will your mother be waiting up for you?”
“Naw, she’ll be sleeping.” I wasn’t worried about Mom, anyway. There were things to straighten out, but I didn’t even want to think about all that tonight.
Knowing what time it was seemed to have an effect on both of us, though, and we were soon yawning. Dad put his arm around my shoulder and said maybe we’d better head back. I was okay with that because this was just the beginning.
On the way home I recalled something. I asked him if he remembered the day outside the daycare, when I’d been coached to say I hated him.
He did.
“It wasn’t true, Dad,” I said. “It was never true.”
“I know that, Son,” he said. “I always knew it.”
chapter twenty-seven
It was Lynn who found the letters.
Mom had been hanging around the apartment and I knew she’d sniffed something out — probably because of us going through all her stuff the day we were looking for the key to her cabinet. She didn’t ask about it, but it was easy to see she was watching us, waiting to see if we might give anything away.
Even though I’d been out late the night before, I was up early that morning, my head too full of everything to let me sleep in. Lynn got up not long afterward, and once she’d had her breakfast I gave her a signal that I needed to talk to her.
“I think I’ll head over to Tack’s place, see what’s up,” I said, lying for Mom’s benefit. I caught Lynn’s eye and pointed down, hoping she’d know to meet me in the lobby.
It was about twenty minutes before she joined me, bursting out of the elevator with a panicked look on her face.
“I thought for sure you’d be gone,” she said breathlessly. “What’s going on?”
“Come on,” I said. “We can’t talk here.”
We slipped out the back entrance, just in case Mom was watching out the window, and went through to the street behind our building. From there we made our way to the park and, finding the few benches there occupied, sat on the grass under a maple tree.
I started slowly, giving her time to take it all in. She kept interrupting, asking me questions that made me repeat what I’d just said. It was almost comical.
“You called our father?” she said, right after I’d told her that exact thing.
“Yeah, I called him.”
“You called our father?” Then, like that needed clarifying: “Our real dad?”
Eventually I got through the whole story with her. She sat very still, looking at the ground, her head suspended forward over her knees. She tugged at a few blades of grass, then she cried silently for a bit.
“He drew funny faces on balloons,” she said, without looking at me. “Do you remember?”
Something flashed forward from the memories I’d had to freeze out, but it was gone before I could get a solid image.
“Maybe a little bit,” I said.
“How could she?” Lynn said then. “How could she do this to us?”
“I’ve been wondering that, too. And why.”
“I mean it, Porter. How could she?” Her voice rose, caught in her throat, then turned into a moan, and more tears.
“Take it easy, Lynn.” I said a few other things to try to calm her and even went so far as attempting to put an arm around her shoulders, but she shrugged it off and rose to her feet. In an instant transformation, she became red-faced and ugly with anger.
“She’s going to tell me right now why she did this to us!” she said through clenched teeth.
I went along with her, making half-hearted (and futile) attempts to talk to her while she stomped toward home. I’d never seen Lynn this mad before and as small as she was, there was something terrible and frightening in the way she looked — and even in the way she moved.
It wasn’t until we were in the elevator on the way up to our apartment that I was able to make her hear me.
“Just don’t do anything she can get you for,” I begged. Mom had called the police on Lynn once when there’d been a bit of shoving back and forth. Nothing had come of that, but I knew there could be big trouble if Lynn so much as touched her.
“Don’t worry,” she said, breathing a bit more normally.
It was hard not to worry, especially when we got inside and Lynn exploded with a stream of name-calling and accusations. It took Mom a good three or four minutes to even start reacting.
“I knew this would happen someday,” she said, trying to yell over Lynn. “He got to you, didn’t he? Got to you and filled your head with lies. Well, I—”
“SHUT UP,” Lynn screamed. “YOU SHUT YOUR LYING MOUTH.”
Mom ventured a glance at me to see if she might find someone on her side. I guess she didn’t see any sympathy in my eyes because she backed down and stayed silent while Lynn went on for the next few minutes.
It might have lasted longer but she stopped raving in mid-sentence and turned to me, her face wild with fury.
“Where’s that key? I bet there’s other stuff in her cabinet that she doesn’t want us to see.”
Mom looked really scared when she heard that. She stood up and took a few faltering steps toward the hallway but stopped when Lynn spun around and faced her.
“You just try and stop me,” she said. “Go ahead and try.”
Lynn’s voice had gone totally calm and quiet, which, in a way, was scarier than the screaming. Mom’s mouth moved, fishlike, but nothing came out. Panic was written all over her face but even then I could see her searching for something to say.
I turned away, unable to find so much as a hint of pity for her, and followed my sister down the hall, stopping in my room to get the key.
I handed it to Lynn and stood at her side as she slid it into the keyhole and turned, pulled the drawers open, and started pulling things out and throwing them on the bed behind us.
It was surprising how much those two drawers held. There were all kinds of documents and court papers, Mom’s income tax returns, cards, pictures and, nestled underneath everything else in the top drawer, neat stacks of letters tied in bundles.
Lynn snatched out the top bundle with a little cry and clutched it to her. I saw there were several other stacks addressed to her underneath and to the right of those, twin bundles with my name on them.
Letters. Dozens and dozens of letters. And every one of them had been opened.
“This is my room!” Mom, now in the doorway, did her best to put authority and indignation into her voice, but all she sounded was scared.
“And these are our letters,” I snapped. Then, curious, “Why didn’t you just throw them out?”
“I was protecting you,” she said. Her
eyes begged me to believe her. “I didn’t want you getting confused or upset.”
“So, why keep them?” I repeated.
“In case …” She hesitated. “In case anything ever happened to me. I couldn’t stand the idea of you in foster homes. I thought that anything would be better than that.”
There were things I would have liked to say to that, but I somehow managed to hold them in. Mom misunderstood my silence.
“You know, Porter,” she said, her face pathetic with hope, “you can’t believe anything that monster says to you.”
I turned away from her and saw that Lynn had sunk onto the edge of the bed and was reading one of her letters. Tears streamed down her face and her shoulders shook. She looked so small.
“Lynn,” I said. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
She looked up, her eyes confused, like she was trying to focus on something after coming in from bright sunshine.
“I’m going to call Dad to come and get us,” I said.
Dad.
“Won’t he be working right now?”
“Yeah, but he’ll come. He gave me his card with his work and cell phone numbers.”
“You’re not calling him from my phone,” Mom said. Her last pitiful attempt at control.
I shrugged, grabbed the rest of my letters, and walked, with my sister, down the hall and out the door.
Behind us, we could hear Mom yelling that we were fools if we thought we could trust our father, and that we’d be sorry if we didn’t turn around right that moment.
We kept walking.
epilogue
If you ever want to plan a surprise party for someone, don’t let my little sister, Nicole, in on it. Believe me, you’d have a better chance of keeping it under wraps if you put it in the paper.
I knew they would do something for my graduation, but I’d thought it would be along the lines of a family dinner out. We almost always go out for birthdays and other special occasions.
The first hint that it was going to be a party instead came when Nicole started guarding the deep freeze.
“Don’t look in here!” she’d yell, throwing herself across the front of it.
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