A Million Reasons Why

by Jessica Strawser

  He shook his head, adamant. “I never stopped loving Hannah the way I always had. Even at my most conflicted, I don’t think I’d have brought myself to leave her—she was so wrecked by her parents’ divorce that going through one herself, especially that fast, would have destroyed her. I’d have hated myself for it. I only wished, once I saw what love was capable of, that I could love her that way too. I promised myself to try, and that was the end of Rebecca.”

  But Sela’s birthday was so close to hers. “Only Rebecca was pregnant too.”

  “Evidently.” The pain in his eyes was real. “When I told her about Hannah and you, she removed herself, instantly—moved hundreds of miles away so fast it was hard to believe she hadn’t planned to all along. And maybe she had. She always talked about setting up in one of those little artisan towns.”

  “Brevard.”

  “Yes. And if she kept in touch with anyone here, I never heard about it.”

  “When I was thinking about moving there with Keaton, what did you—I mean, did it come up again? With you? With Mom?”

  “Rebecca has never come up again with me and Mom.”

  “Their friendship just stopped? And you never asked why?”

  “Asking why would have been what’s known as pressing my luck. Hannah was a newlywed and then a new mother. Rebecca was this free spirit letting her talent lead her somewhere totally different. At least, I thought it was totally different. I never pictured her changing diapers and warming bottles, the way we were.…” He cleared his throat. “It was conscionable that the friendship would grow apart, so that’s the story I told myself. When your move to Brevard was on the table, I do remember hoping Rebecca had moved on from there, and resisting the urge to look—but then it was off the table, so I put her out of my mind again, too.”

  “What if you’d known about Sela? From the beginning, I mean?”

  “You know how I feel about what-ifs.” A waste of time. His eyes clouded. “I was so sorry to read in that email that Rebecca died. I’d never allowed myself to so much as type her name into a search engine. But I did this week, at the hotel—and she’s left so much beauty behind. Paintings, murals, mixed-media collaborations. And a legacy of students—she’d been an adjunct at Brevard College. The world is a less colorful place without her, yet her color is still here. That brings me some peace.”

  Brevard College. Not only the town Caroline had almost relocated to but the campus. The coincidence poked at her, but she shoved it aside.

  “Her daughter is still here. Your daughter. How can you let Mom dictate whether you meet her?”

  She didn’t know what had prompted Sela to reach out. Curiosity, duty? But the fact that she had seemed to indicate Sela would not as easily dismiss newfound knowledge of blood ties. What might those ties hold besides blood? Caroline was Sela’s half sibling. But their father? His title in respect to them both was whole.

  “Sweetheart, I’m becoming an old man. I’m not a well man. My heart is a ticking clock, and I don’t know how much time is left on it. Your mom and I have spent this lifetime together, raised you, gone on to see your beautiful children born, and we’re proud of our legacy, if you could call it that. Up until that email, we were proud, damn it.” He pounded the table, his dreamy sadness turning to resistance, and Caroline jumped. “The last thing I do on this planet will not be disappointing my faithful wife. I’ve already broken her heart, and maybe Rebecca’s too, even Sela’s by default. If I can glue only one of those things back together, I choose Hannah.”

  “If you’ve already decided, why aren’t you back home?”

  “Among other things, I wanted to talk with you first. Anything you have left to ask, ask it now, because once I go back Hannah will not be open to us discussing this further.”

  “Isn’t it cold to carry on like Sela isn’t out there?” She was disappointing him, not being a team player. But she barely even recognized this team anymore.

  “Being your father is the best thing I’ve ever done. Certainly the only thing I haven’t screwed up.” She didn’t laugh. He leaned in. “It’s devastating to know I missed out on that with someone else. But letting her in now would hurt you too, if only because Mom would be…” He shook his head. “We all make hard choices to preserve the happiness of those we love.” He flipped open a noodle bowl and dropped in a spoon. “Rebecca too. If she’d wanted me to know, I’d have known. In that way, this course feels like respecting her wishes as well as Hannah’s.”

  “But Sela reached out. Don’t you think she knows best what her mother wanted?”

  He handed over her lukewarm bowl, and she dropped it back onto the table with a thud. “She didn’t reach out to me,” he said gently. “She reached out to you.”

  “This is not exactly Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”

  He lifted his hands in surrender. “I don’t mean to sound flippant. I know it puts you in a terrible position, and I’m sorry. I can’t change what’s happened. Even if I could…”

  Had she ever before realized how much her father’s practical, even-keeled attitudes about relationships had influenced her own? Love at first sight nothing more than a fairy tale; what-ifs merely a waste of time; quiet compromise trumping open dialogue.

  All based on lies.

  He was unmistakably glad of the time he’d had with Rebecca. While Caroline agonized over the revelation, he’d spent the last few days nursing a decades-old thirst. One last time, he’d reopened that sealed-forever bottle and let himself drink in the things Rebecca had left behind. She was the reason he had not looked haggard on Caroline’s doorstep this morning. He was sorry, and yet he wasn’t.

  “You two always said I was an only child because you got it ‘so right the first time.’ But now I’m wondering if there’s more to it.”

  “There’s not. We meant every word.”

  She was reaching, she knew. For what? She couldn’t shake this nagging feeling that there was something left to put her finger on.

  “You honestly think you and Mom will go back to being happy now?”

  “If we don’t, it won’t be her fault. It’ll be mine.”

  This was the bolded one-line summary of his analysis. There was no arguing with it.

  “Can’t have that,” she mumbled.

  He would tell himself, today and tomorrow and all the days after, that she’d come to understand in time. She knew him well enough to know that.

  But for the first time ever, she wondered what life would be like if she didn’t. Because if Dad had traded Mom for Rebecca?

  He’d have traded Caroline for Sela, too.

  6

  Sela

  In the back room Sela had converted to a studio, the best parts of her mother still lived.

  Last year, when she’d had no choice but to ready Ecca’s left-behind bungalow for sale, she hadn’t thought twice about boxing up the piles of sketchbooks for her mother’s partners at Aesthetic—the storefront their collective had conceived of as part boutique, part gallery. Determined and dutiful, Sela sorted the shelves of art history hardcovers for Ecca’s favorite students, the clothes for the women’s shelter, the dishware for an adjunct colleague doing “mosaics for public art” installations. It didn’t matter that her mother had never spelled out what she’d have wanted; Sela knew. Just as Ecca knew Sela didn’t care about those things the way she cared about, say, the stout Amish-built bookshelf that had stood at Ecca’s bedside for as long as Sela could remember—that was with her at the unexpected end, even though Sela was not.

  Sela’s artistic talent was not like her mother’s, inherent and deep and inescapable even without the formal training she’d pursued. It was borne instead from years sprawled on Ecca’s studio floor with a basket of cast-off art supplies, hoping that wanting to be like her was enough. As a teen, Sela gravitated to graphic design—where even indelicate fingers could pinpoint the right elements and arrange them in pleasing ways. It wasn’t easy, waiting for her skill to catch up to the pictures she rende
red in her mind, but Ecca saw from the start what she was trying to do and nurtured the best of her impulses. Her designs were never, even early on, conventional. They were unexpected, even if not entirely successful.

  “Your imagination,” Ecca would say when Sela showed frustration, “is your superpower. Never underestimate what you can do with it.”

  She kept Ecca’s old bookcase in view of her desk now, to remind her. Loaded its shelves with the other precious few things she’d kept—things no one but her would miss. The frayed copy of Little Women, dog-eared pages marking Jo’s fieriest moments. The Boggle game they’d played when Sela was home sick from school, the letter dice yellowing, the box stuffed with old score sheets she couldn’t bear to throw away. The hot plate that had daily kept her mother’s mug of tea steaming and now warmed Sela’s own. And, tucked out of view, a tiny, hand-carved wooden box she’d promised herself, just as Ecca had promised herself, to open only in case of emergency.

  Ecca called Sunday evenings “the memory hours.” For tucking the best of the weekend away to a place you could keep close, for summoning whatever fortitude you might need to face the week ahead, for savoring the precious time left before appointments and obligations took over again. Sela had taken to spending them here, with these reminders of what life had been like when feeling loved was as simple as a one-on-one game or a classic novel read aloud under a blanket big enough for two.

  This weekend had been especially bleak—unavoidable, when Doug took his turn at custody. But Oscar was back now, his renewed commitment to remaining underfoot making her laugh as often as it made her trip. Brody was snuggled across the hall—never fully himself on these transition days when he’d reappear in the house that was most his home, with the parent who was most his guardian. He’d hug her tight but stay quiet, go to bed early a bit too willingly. But by morning he’d be back to normal, and she’d patch the tear in her heart and think, Okay, we can do this, just us two. Plenty of people do this.

  Ecca did this.

  In fact, her mother was still lending purpose to Sela’s days. Aesthetic remained her steadiest client, with Ivy, Ecca’s closest partner in the collective, hiring Sela to maintain everything from their website to takeaway cards to booth signage at street fairs—though surely as a group of artists, they could have managed on their own.

  It wasn’t that the work made her feel closer to her mother, exactly. Feeling Ecca’s presence, for Sela, had never been about her art—though it adorned her whole house and half the town, too. She’d always known those works would outlive Ecca in the way every artist is aware of this fact, whether consciously dwelled upon or merely accepted as a blessing or even curse of the gig. The art, then, took on no mystique after her death, but the work to carry its legacy did give Sela something to do. It seemed fitting to do it here, where she kept the small parts of her mother’s heart that had never been brushed onto canvas for everyone to see.

  The parts she’d saved for her daughter.

  The parts Sela never liked to share.

  On a grade school field trip, when Ecca lent her own coat to an underdressed classmate, Sela began to shiver. Years later, when a down-on-her-luck sculptor took over the guest room, Sela counted the days until the perfectly unobtrusive woman would leave. Even in college, when Ecca joined the cheering section along Leigh’s road course, Sela burned with shameful jealousy welling where no one could see.

  Maybe it was compounded by having a mother who shared so much of herself so fully—opening a vein for every project, no matter how small. But Sela—who’d met her grandparents on only a few terse occasions, who’d learned to stop asking about her father, who’d watched her mother claw their way, commission by commission, out of their crammed apartment and at last into that light-filled bungalow—had grown up viewing life as her and Ecca versus the world. It was hard to stop seeing anything that changed that, for better or worse, as a threat.

  Sela did stop, though. Doug broke through with his easy laugh and game-for-anything stance, filling pockets of her soul she hadn’t realized were empty. Elated that her daughter had found what she herself never could—a true life partner—Ecca loved Doug like a son. But years later, when Sela feigned sleep while her mother, on the other side of her hospital room door, came at Doug with as much compassion as fury, that old jealousy reared its head, and she wanted to spring from her mechanical bed and claw at him, not for leaving her but for making her mother care about him enough to try to accept his reasons.

  “The problem with Doug,” Ecca told Sela that next morning—when he was gone, really gone—“is he has no imagination.” This, considering the source, was as close as she’d get to an insult. And Sela, who by then had to reach for things to be glad of, made a fist around this: the fact that once again she had Ecca all to herself.

  Until she didn’t.

  Sela ran her fingers over the shelves of her mother’s things, breathing in the comfort that wafted up around her.

  Then, she dropped into her desk chair and opened her laptop, intent on designing a print she could frame for Leigh: a gift that reimagined everything news of a new baby should be. The silhouette of a dream so sweet you barely dared to breathe it, stretching its arms triumphantly under a vast field of bright stars.

  But bolded and unopened on her screen, she found a new email instead.

  Dear Sela:

  To say your message came as a surprise is an understatement. I feel as if I owe you an apology, though of course I had no idea there was any possibility you existed. But it does appear likely that you are correct: that I am not the only child I’ve always believed myself to be.

  Out whooshed a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding, loud enough that Oscar’s collar jangled from the floor at her side.

  Her mysterious sister, little more than a name until now, had written back. Here were Caroline’s words, tumbling across Sela’s screen with reluctance and grace.

  She’d written back.

  This revelation has stirred up quite a bit of turmoil in my family—which I’m telling you not to shift responsibility or cast blame, but to explain my delay in responding. I don’t know how much you might have guessed or been told about my—our—father’s situation, but he’s been married to my mother since before either you or I were, evidently, conceived. His infidelity notwithstanding, he was just as shocked to learn about you. Suffice it to say my parents have some things to work through, and need space to do it. He has issues with his heart, and … Well, I won’t make his excuses.

  I’m not sure what you hoped for in reaching out, but I’m open to corresponding—I’d like to learn more about you, compare notes. But it would be disingenuous if I didn’t let you know I’m the only one in my family who feels this way.

  If you’re willing to get to know one another independently of other expectations or ties … I’d like that. If you think I have a lot of nerve imposing limits, especially when I’m in my shoes and you’re in yours—well, you’d be right. No hard feelings if you’d rather pretend you never read this, move on.

  Sela tipped her face to the ceiling. She wanted to laugh with incredulity, to cry with relief.

  Caroline was so careful, so obviously worried she was about to disappoint Sela. Or, perhaps more to the point, that their father was.

  No danger of that. At least, there wasn’t supposed to be.

  Couldn’t be.

  That her father had been married, with children, all along was one of the many possibilities Sela had entertained over the years. Learning it was true brought no worldview-altering surprise, no harsh judgment that Ecca was no longer here to defend—even as Sela took in the confirmation that Caroline was in fact, strictly speaking of the DNA, likely her strongest hope: no other siblings. And the heart issues mentioned would keep her father off any prospective donor list—a relief, really, as she’d never have considered him and had no desire to argue the point with Doug, Leigh, or a well-meaning doctor.

  For Sela these details merely provided a bette
r frame of reference. Yet clearly her own email had turned the whole picture upside down for Caroline. And Sela hadn’t even told her the most upside-down part.

  Perhaps Sela had been feeling preemptively guilty for the wrong reasons.

  I’m not sure what you hoped for in reaching out. As Sela reread the words, she wasn’t sure either. Everything seemed in conflict—things Doug and Leigh wanted for her, things Ecca hadn’t, things Sela wished she didn’t need. But open to corresponding was a good place to start. The only place, really.

  I’d love to know more about your mother. I’m so sorry for your loss. Dad tells me he was quite taken with her, and though I have mixed feelings about that, I know she must have been very special. To that end, if she ever spoke of him to you, I’d love to know what she said. This is new to me, though I suspect it’s familiar to you: having this puzzle in your mind that is missing pieces. Maybe we can help each other fill in the gaps.

  Yours,

  Caroline

  Sela held onto the desk, as if she were teetering on a high ledge. Although she supposed she had thought of Caroline as the one with the answers, this had never been about filling those gaps.

  But she should have expected it would become so for Caroline.

  In those grief-stricken days of cleaning out her mother’s bungalow, Sela did search, against her better judgment, for any sign of her mysterious father. She didn’t want to regret letting this chance pass her by. But she’d found none, and that alone seemed evidence that Ecca hadn’t been taken with him in turn. Or that if she had been, she’d wanted to forget.

  Caroline clearly thought it charitable to write our father instead of my. But she could keep him. His stories, too. Who knew if they were even true? For some women, that a man had transgressed out of love would be the last thing they’d want to hear; they’d more easily explain away a physical moment of weakness. For others, love was the only forgivable reason to do something unforgivable.