A Million Reasons Why

by Jessica Strawser

  “We’ll see. Like I said, you won’t catch me driving to Ohio, knocking on doors.”

  “Has anyone told Doug that?”

  “I take it you saw his Big Ask.”

  “Is that what they call it when you’re trying to assuage your guilt in public?”

  “That’s what he calls it.”

  “Should I put out a call too? I didn’t realize we’d reached that point, but if we have, I will not be upstaged.” Leigh had done the initial blood test last year, in spite of being advised she should be sure her family was complete before donating. A moot concern: no match.

  “We have not. But I appreciate you putting your competitive nature to work for my cause.”

  “Competitive kidney culling. And here I thought I’d missed my chance at an Olympic medal.” Sela laughed—it wasn’t just a lame joke. Leigh’s onetime Olympic hopes were what had brought her to town; Brevard College’s cycling team was about the only thing putting it on the map. But when her times didn’t improve enough after a year of hard training, she acquiesced to her coach’s doubts. I love it, she’d said then, but I don’t live for it the way those people do. I can accept that what I’m willing to offer is not enough. That was it: no wallowing. Sela always admired that her friend had somehow managed to quit without ever behaving as a quitter.

  Sela didn’t think she had it in her to let go of a dream that way.

  These days, her dreams consisted of things other people took for granted. But she did live for them—fought for them harder than she’d ever fought for anything before. On the online forums she canvassed, fellow patients talked about the upsides they’d found to their illness, and though Sela found it difficult—laughable, offensive—to feel anything but spite toward hers, if forced to cite a silver lining, it was that she’d found the fight that had been within her all along. She was here, wasn’t she? Out in the world, breathing the air? Getting her steps in, rain or shine?

  Anyone who thought Doug being out ahead shouting into his megaphone meant that he was the one coaxing her along wasn’t paying attention.

  Brody came running, arms outstretched, her own sudden fatigue reflected in his eyes. She gathered Oscar’s collapsible water bowl and got to her feet, grateful for the excuse to go before the conversation turned back to Doug. She wanted to think she was over him—how could any self-respecting person not be?—but she’d never get over what had happened between them.

  Annie followed Brody’s lead, throwing herself into her mother’s lap. Leigh wiped the smears of tear-streaked mascara from her cheeks and smiled down at her daughter, maternal adoration clouding out the angst of her earlier confession.

  “Don’t count that medal out yet,” Sela told her. “In the mom events, you’re going to be a triple threat.”

  Leigh looked at her with such compassionate gratitude that Sela had to look away. “You’ll call me, right? As soon as you hear anything back at all?”

  Sela rested her hand atop Brody’s fine hair and smiled as bravely as she could.

  “Who else would I call?”

  5

  Caroline

  Dad had asked for a day. On the heels of that surreal morning, Caroline had forwarded Sela’s email to both parents—FYI—without further comment. Beyond that due diligence, she wasn’t about to break the silence, make the next move. Not after her inadvertent role in what had happened so far, and the odd note things had ended on.

  Thus, she went through the motions as if time itself had slowed as “one day” stretched into two, then three. Caroline didn’t appreciate being avoided. She wasn’t the one who’d done the wrong thing. At least, not the big wrong thing. So when Dad called on Friday, she answered with a gut feeling that fell oddly between relief and dread—that she might finally get some answers but might not like them.

  “I’ve been at one of these extended stay places, but they’re sold out Saturday for a wedding, and between Oktoberfest and the Bengals/Steelers game, I can’t find anything that isn’t a small fortune. Any chance I can stay with you?”

  They didn’t have a bedroom to spare, but their semi-finished basement housed a pullout couch, every bit as uncomfortable as the rest of its breed, with the added misery of subterranean dankness. Still. She wasn’t sure any accommodations at her address could be shoddy enough to ward off resentment on Mom’s part.

  “Just for a night,” he added, reading her thoughts. “She has enough grounds for divorce as it is.” His tone made light, but they both knew he wasn’t exaggerating.

  What was the alternative—send him to a friend’s couch, where the circle of Mom’s humiliation would only grow? Besides, Caroline wanted answers. What could she say but yes?

  Walt wasted no time in planning his exit. “You two should talk. Alone.” Then, moments later, head up from an events calendar on his phone: “That railroad in Lebanon has a princess-themed ride Saturday afternoon. Think Owen would go along with it since a train is involved?”

  Caroline raised her eyebrows. “How much is this talk with Dad going to cost me?” But she couldn’t help returning his sideways grin, even as a current of memories tugged at her heart. Every year for Father’s Day, Dad used to flip the script with a special daughter date, telling everyone who asked that treating her was the best treat for him. Carousel rides at the zoo until she grew dizzy. Reds tickets behind the dugout, with clouds of cotton candy. An overflowing pick-your-own basket at the blueberry festival.

  Sela never had any of that.

  Would all Caroline’s memories be colored this way—like her ignorance-as-bliss childhood had been at the expense of someone else’s silent sacrifice? She desperately didn’t want that to be true.

  She desperately needed to know if it was.

  “Let Owen take that foam sword we got at the Renaissance Festival,” she suggested. “He can be a knight, or a prince.”

  “Good call. Has anyone told you that you’re pretty good at this mom thing?”

  Silly as it might sound, they made a point of trading compliments almost on a schedule. Maureen had noticed once, called her out, and rather than owning up to the weekly reminders set on her calendar, Caroline had shrugged and said, Don’t knock it till you try it. But this was gentler, kinder: Walt sensing without her saying so how anxious it would make her to juggle Dad and the kids at once and how she was not currently feeling pretty good at anything. Maybe it was Walt, then, as much as her memories rendering her in this moment verklempt.

  Alone in the quiet house Saturday morning, Caroline found she could do little but wait. She flipped through a magazine but retained nothing. Unable to locate the TV remote, she launched a top-to-bottom search and recovered it in the fridge. That sent her hunting for the coffee creamer, which sat warm and ruined in the living room console.

  At last, the doorbell rang—but even the chime was out of place. Usually Dad flung open the door and yodeled, “Yoo-hoo!” The formality had her bracing for how he might look—like he hadn’t slept or kept up with the blood pressure meds Mom usually monitored. But here he was—not tired or pallid.

  Only sad.

  “I have some ’splaining to do,” he said by way of greeting, holding up a plastic bag of Thai lunch carryout, a peace offering she wasn’t sure she could swallow. She tried to smile, to go along—as if he weren’t someone other than the man she’d seen him as before. If there’d been no end product of his infidelity, the issue would have remained between her parents and them alone. Did it have to involve her now, just because said end product not only existed but found her first?

  It was a question only she could answer, which made it all the more miserable. Because the answer she kept coming back to was yes.

  The warm aroma of ginger and sweet basil filled the kitchen as he unloaded the noodle bowls onto the table. She grabbed silverware and ice waters and took her seat across from him.

  “Have you talked to Mom?” She’d meant to let him speak first but couldn’t stand the quiet.

  He leaned back in his chair in
a manner that suggested she wouldn’t like what he was about to say. “Your mom has given me an ultimatum: She’ll have me back if I promise not to pursue a relationship with Sela.”

  This was not where Caroline had expected to begin. This wasn’t the beginning, thirty-some years back, but the end. Present day. She blinked at him. “She wants to just—pretend this hasn’t happened?”

  He cleared his throat. “I’m not sure Hannah is as surprised as she’s let on, to be honest. It might be more accurate to say she wants to keep pretending.”

  A puzzle piece clicked into place—the hollow darkness in her mother’s eyes the last time they’d said good-bye. It had the depth of an old, unhealed wound, not the fresh cut of a new one. “Are you saying she knew about Sela’s mother all along?”

  He sighed. “Well, she knew Sela’s mother. The message you forwarded confirmed that.”

  In the beat of silence that reverberated between them, Caroline tried to picture someone, anyone, she knew sleeping with Walt. How disregarded she would feel, by both of them.

  She didn’t imagine the torment of that kind of betrayal had an expiration date.

  “Rebecca, she was … God, this is hard.” He picked up his water glass and gulped, spilling a little down his chin and trying to laugh at himself as he wiped it on the shoulder of his sweater. “I don’t want you to think worse of me. But I suppose it’s too late for that.”

  “I don’t know, Dad. It was a long time ago, okay?”

  He nodded again, steeling himself with a deep breath. “Rebecca Astin was a good friend of your mom’s. And then, after—well, she wasn’t. So I don’t know for a fact how much Hannah knew, but I had my suspicions all along.”

  A good friend? Oh, Dad. How could he have? How could Rebecca have? Caroline felt disloyal for having reassured him. This was somehow worse for Mom. And yet … “As in, she may have known about your affair, or as in, she may have known about the pregnancy?”

  He shrugged.

  Caroline stared. “But you did not know about the baby?”

  “Unequivocally not.”

  A detail that had been nagging at her surfaced. “Your profile settings, on the DNA site—you’d opted out of the database. Why?”

  He squinted at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I’m not sure I want to.”

  She sat stunned into comparing this new picture of Mom with the one she’d had before. How could the spouse whisperer, the doting wife who’d always done everything by the book, be the same woman as the shadowboxer who’d met Caroline at the door, ready for a fight she might have had reason to fear? A fight she might have taken questionable steps to thwart?

  “If Mom knew all along, why throw you out now? Isn’t it a little late for ultimatums?”

  “Turning a blind eye on a hunch is one thing. Having the truth thrust in your face in front of the people you love most is quite another. How else would any self-respecting woman react?”

  “But if she knew about Sela, and never said—you’d forgive her that?”

  A weighty pause hovered over the table. “You say that as if I’m not asking for a great deal of forgiveness in turn,” he said finally. “Would I have wanted her, or Rebecca, anyone to tell me? Of course. Am I in a position to pass judgment on doing the right thing, and what the right thing even was? Hardly.”

  An incredulous grunt escaped her. “Well, where does this ultimatum leave me? I’m the one Sela reached out to. I can’t pretend this hasn’t happened.”

  “No one asked you to. I think Hannah knows she can’t ask that, which is what makes this such a blow to her, even if it wasn’t the total blindside it may have seemed.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Listen, she’s your mom no matter what, loves you no matter what. Her role as my wife involves more scrutiny of the data. If you maintain contact with Sela, don’t expect Mom to want to hear about it, but I doubt she’d begrudge you whatever you decide on your own.”

  Caroline considered this—the sister she’d sometimes, as a little girl, wished for, but never like this, discovered and then sealed in a secret compartment. A whole part of her life that she’d keep to herself. How would that even work?

  Evidently, she could ask Dad for tips. Mom, too, for that matter.

  “Without the ultimatum,” she said slowly, “how would you be feeling about this?”

  “That is what’s known as a pointless question.”

  “This isn’t some customer survey you’ve been hired to pick apart. It’s about you. It matters to me.”

  “I’m—” He slouched, and his face flushed crimson, reminding her how seldom she’d seen him embarrassed. “Fine. To be honest, I’m heartbroken that I never knew. I think that’s the other thing that’s so difficult for Hannah. That I would have cared, a great deal—I never would have just let it go. But what I want doesn’t take precedence over her wishes now the way it might’ve then. She says that she could never look at this woman and see anything but my betrayal. That inviting her into our lives would unravel everything else in a way your mom can’t get past—and in fairness to her, she wouldn’t have to get past it if I’d honored our vows. I owe it to Hannah to respect that.”

  “Sela might argue you owe her something too.”

  “But I’ve unknowingly shirked that duty for decades, Caroline. Is there really a chance of making that up to her now? It’s hard to imagine her directing anything but resentment toward me.”

  She shook her head. He might have retired, but he was still an actual professional at finding a mental path to justify most anything.

  “Could you back up and tell me about Rebecca? About what happened? Honestly?”

  He held up his hands as if she’d caught him. As if he’d known she would. “What do you want to know?”

  She stared at the untouched food growing soggy between them. How many details could she stomach? “How did you meet? Through Mom, I take it?”

  He grimaced. “This is going to keep sounding worse.”

  “If you expect this to be the only time we ever discuss this, I’m not letting it go until I get the whole story.”

  He looked away. “I met her at our wedding.”

  Worse indeed. “Please tell me you didn’t—”

  “Of course not. But it was an at-first-sight kind of thing.”

  “Dad. I distinctly remember you calling that whole concept bunk. Multiple times.”

  “I wanted it to be. Still do. Rebecca was the friend who Hannah always talked about but I’d never met. She was an artist, talented enough to be accepted to competitive programs before she was even out of high school. They’d been close since they were little, but she’d been studying abroad for as long as I’d known Hannah. A semester in London, a summer in Paris, a year in Italy…” The emotion in his eyes turned to something she’d never have expected. Pride. “Their home lives were equally bad, which is how they bonded in the first place. But for Rebecca, not only did her parents not get along, they wouldn’t get divorced. They were older—had already raised Rebecca’s brother, who was long gone—and the way she put it was that they were over being parents. Her father stopped bothering to hide what a violent drunk he was. Once she realized her talent was her ticket out, she used it. But she and Hannah wrote to each other—your mom wallpapered her dorm room with the postcards.”

  Caroline already knew how soon after graduation her parents had gotten married. The following weekend, in fact.

  “Hannah was so excited Rebecca was coming back in time for the wedding. At the rehearsal dinner, she forced the two of us together and commanded us to not stop talking until we’d won each other over.” He didn’t look at Caroline when he said this, which was just as well. “I hadn’t any qualms about jumping into marriage up to that point. That’s what you did in those days. Hannah had been my sweetheart since before I understood what a sweetheart was. When we met, she was the shy new girl everyone felt sorry for. Not only was her parents’ split a gossipy disaster, but who moves their kid to a new district senior
year? It made me feel good, being able to make things better for her simply by being kind. She was pretty, and loved me back. Why wouldn’t I stay with her at UC? Why wouldn’t I marry her?” He shook his head. “But when I got talking to Rebecca, I never wanted to stop. I began to worry I was starting to understand new things about love. The way it can knock you off your feet, blind you to reason.”

  “You two became friends outside of the group?”

  “More like, when the group got together, we’d gravitate toward each other. Rebecca wasn’t having the easiest time reacclimating.”

  Caroline had asked for this, but she found it difficult to listen. Perhaps because he was starting to look genuinely wistful. “Sounds like a pattern,” she said coldly. “Like you always had a thing for the new girl.”

  He blinked at her. “Nothing about Rebecca seemed lost, or wanting to fit in. She was the most self-possessed person I’ve ever met. On top of that, you had this sense that she was fleeting—that she was far too interesting to stay. I found it impossible not to be drawn in by her.” He shook his head. “I’m making it sound much more ordinary than it felt. But doesn’t all love?”

  “It sounds selfish.”

  Oddly, he smiled—as if ceding a point worth losing. “But doesn’t all love?” he repeated.

  It was Caroline’s turn to merely blink. Where had this side of him been hiding? What else was in there? “So was the affair a onetime slip, or a long-term thing?”

  “In between. We both knew it was wrong, but the idea of stopping was as unthinkable as what we’d already done. I’m ashamed to say it, but I was … reevaluating my choices. I’d barely been married a year.”

  “So what changed your mind? Or made up your mind?”

  “Hannah got pregnant.”

  This was more than a recounting of his wake-up call. It was Caroline’s appearance in the story. Her mouth went dry. “I’m the only reason you stayed?”