True to You

by Becky Wade

  “We visited the house you and Deborah lived in,” John said.

  “Did you? Ah.” Sherry seemed to lose herself in memories for a moment before refocusing on him. “When I became pregnant, I’d just turned twenty-two and I was terrified. I don’t think there’s any way to explain to you how terrified I was, how distraught. I didn’t know what to do. Every time I thought about how my parents and brother might react if I told them the news, my head would spin.”

  Sherry quieted as their waiter delivered their drink order, then continued talking in her articulate, measured way once he was gone.

  “I couldn’t bear the thought of how upset my parents would be and how mortifying it would be for them to have to share the news of my pregnancy with our extended family and their friends. So I decided not to tell them.” Frown lines marked her forehead. “Later, much later, when my own daughter was twenty-two, I realized how foolish I’d been. Of course I should have told my parents about my pregnancy. Of course I should have. Their love for me would have been strong enough to bear the truth.” Regret filled her expression. “My only explanation is that back then, the scared twenty-two-year-old I was couldn’t face telling them.”

  “I understand,” John said. And he did. “I don’t blame you. For anything.”

  “I decided to put you up for adoption,” she said with a faint rasp in her voice, “because I wanted you to have the best life possible, and I realized that I couldn’t give that to you.”

  “That’s exactly what my mom and dad always told me about you.”

  “God bless them.” Moisture filled her eyes again. “And thank you, John. For not blaming me. I carry guilt about what happened.”

  “Don’t.”

  Nora squeezed Sherry’s hand. Strength appeared to flow through the contact from Nora into Sherry. When Nora let go, Sherry had herself back under control.

  “How were you able to keep your parents from finding out about your pregnancy?” Nora asked.

  “Deborah helped me. Because of her help, it wasn’t very hard, actually. I was already living several hours away from my mom and dad. I visited Bend when I was three or four months along but not yet showing. Then summer vacation arrived, and Deborah and I told them that I’d received a last-minute invitation to teach summer school in Minnesota. That was a lie. I stayed right where I was in Shelton with Deborah until the baby—John was born. Deborah was a lifeline for me in those days. She went with me to my obstetrician’s visits and helped me research adoption agencies. She was with me, the only one with me, during labor and delivery.”

  “Were you able to spend time with John after he was born?”

  “I got to hold you for about an hour.” Sherry looked at him as if searching his features for the baby she remembered. “You were a big baby. Beautiful. Perfectly healthy. With a cry as loud as your silences were quiet.”

  He didn’t know what to say. His mom had taken hundreds of baby pictures of him, so he knew what Sherry had seen when she’d looked at him as a newborn. He also knew what he’d looked like at every age after that, which was knowledge Sherry didn’t have.

  “We know from John’s birth certificate that you named him Mark Lucas,” Nora said.

  “Yes. Lucas is my father’s name. And Mark was my favorite boy’s name.”

  “Did you continue teaching in Shelton?” John asked.

  “No. A few weeks after the adoption, I returned to Oregon. I moved in with close friends in Grants Pass and got a job teaching second grade. A year or so later I met Ed at church, and we started dating. As things grew more serious between Ed and me, I wrestled with whether or not to tell him about the pregnancy and the baby I gave up.”

  Sherry took a sip of water. The cup trembled slightly before she set it down. “When I was pregnant, I thought I’d be able to deliver the baby, then go on with life as if nothing had happened. Instead, I couldn’t forget any of it. Keeping it secret from my family hadn’t made it go away. Every single day I was aware that there was a little boy walking around in the world somewhere that I’d given birth to but knew nothing about.” She sighed. “I thought I’d be able to push down the things that had happened to me, but I couldn’t. The things that happen to us in our lives happen. They won’t and can’t be pushed down.”

  John had thought plenty about Sherry and how this reunion might affect her. He’d expected this meeting to be difficult for her, and it seemed that it was. He hadn’t thought enough, however, about how living with her decision might have affected her across the years since she’d made her choice. He’d been too focused on how her choice had impacted him.

  “It got to a point,” Sherry said, “when I realized I was falling in love with Ed and he with me, and I knew I had to tell him. It still makes me cry to think about the grace he immediately extended to me. He was so supportive. He is so supportive. He’s always assured me that he’s fine with me telling my parents, my extended family, and our kids. But I never have told them. Deborah and Ed are the only ones who know.”

  John had run all the scenarios in his mind so he’d half-expected this news. He’d already told her he didn’t blame her, and wouldn’t start blaming her or judging her now. Still, it was hard to hear her say that she hadn’t told her legitimate children about him, her illegitimate child.

  “I never made a conscious decision not to tell Lauren and Ben. It was more a question of . . . when.” Sherry looked to Nora. “Do you tell a toddler that you once had a baby you gave away? Do you look into the trusting face of an elementary school girl and tell her? Do you tell your son when he’s a teenager and already full of reasons not to like you?”

  “I don’t know,” Nora answered kindly, honestly.

  “The right moment never came,” Sherry said. “If I told my kids and my parents and the rest of my family now, I’m afraid that their perception of me would change. They’d no doubt be angry with me for keeping something this important from them for so long. And they’d have a right to be angry.” She took another sip of water. “I wish I’d told everyone about the pregnancy right from the beginning. Instead of trusting the people closest to me with the truth, I covered everything up. I made a big mistake.”

  “We all make mistakes,” John said.

  “My big mistake explains why I said in my email to you, John, that contact between us would be difficult.”

  He nodded. Sherry had given him a great deal of information, but she’d said nothing yet about his birth father and her relationship with him. And he’d said nothing yet about his diagnosis. Both subjects needed to be addressed. “A few months ago I learned that I have an inherited eye condition called Malattia Leventinese, which is partly why I wanted to contact you. Have you ever heard of it?”

  “No,” she said with concerned surprise. “I haven’t.”

  “It causes vision loss.”

  “I’m so sorry, John. You said that it was inherited. So is it . . . the kind of thing that can hide for generations and then crop up?”

  “No. Not everyone in a family that’s affected by it will have it. But a lot of people will. About half. You would know if it’s in your family.”

  “No one in my family has it.”

  He took a second to absorb that. “What that means is that I inherited it from my biological father.”

  Sherry flinched.

  “I apologize for bringing him up, but I’d appreciate the chance to get a medical history from you and from him.”

  “Of course. That makes sense. Only . . .” She smoothed her fingers along the corner of the table over and over. “Are you sure you want to know about him?”

  “I’m very sure,” he said without hesitation.

  She dropped her hands back into her lap. He watched her grip her wrist reflexively. “The thing is . . . it’s not a . . . pleasant story. I’ve thought about whether or not to discuss it with you, and I still don’t know if I should. I just . . . I’m unsure. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  His muscles tightened with worry. She wouldn’
t withhold the identity of his birth father from him, surely. “If Malattia Leventinese doesn’t run in your family, then it must have come from my biological father,” he said calmly. “I can’t contact him or his relatives about the condition unless I know who he is.”

  She swallowed. “Yes, but I’m afraid that it will be difficult for you to hear about him. That it will cause you unnecessary pain.”

  What could have happened between Sherry and his father? Dread began to simmer within him. “I’d still like to know.”

  Her eyes held a world of pain and indecision. “Are you very, very sure?”

  “Yes.” He’d faced plenty of challenging things in his life. No part of him wanted to shy away from this. “It’s important for me to know who both my parents are.”

  Sherry spoke carefully, as if each word were a stepping-stone in a stream she had to cross. “The winter after I moved in with Deborah, I went hiking alone on one of the trails outside of Shelton.” He read apology in her face. “I’d been walking for about twenty minutes when I . . .” Her voice faded to nothing. She cleared her throat. She was still gripping one wrist, so tightly her knuckles had whitened. “I was pulled off the path by a man,” she finally managed to say.

  No, John thought.

  “He dragged me out of sight.” Her voice shook. Sorrow weighted her frown. “He put duct tape over my mouth and around my wrists. He . . .” Her gaze slid from his.

  No, he wanted to yell. No!

  Nora was dead quiet. He couldn’t stand to look at her.

  “He took advantage of me.” He could hear growing courage in Sherry’s tone even as his own courage drained out of him. “Af—afterward, I managed to get myself back to the house. Deborah took me to the hospital.” She paused to inhale and exhale. Once. Twice.

  “I was treated and evidence was taken and stored. I’d hardly even seen the man’s face because he was pressing my cheek into the dirt the whole time, but I answered the detective’s questions as best I could.”

  John couldn’t speak.

  “The man who attacked me raped five more women over the next five years,” Sherry said. “His final victim was a woman named Robin Bradford. Her, he killed. She was only twenty-five, and she was the mother of two little girls.”

  John felt like he was going to vomit. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. He sat motionless while everything inside him tore apart.

  “I’m thankful now that I allowed the nurses to take, um, evidence, because when they finally caught the man who’d done it, that evidence helped put him away. His name was Brian Raymond.”

  John’s heart beat in hollow, aching thuds.

  “A month after the attack,” Sherry said, “I found out I was pregnant.”

  Through the rush of awful thoughts filling his brain, John understood, in a distant way, how hard it must have been for Sherry to tell him this. Yet she was looking at him like she wanted to extend compassion, not like she expected to receive it. “I’m so sorry, John. I wish the facts were different. I know how terrible they are.”

  “It’s okay,” he said hoarsely. “Thank you for telling me.” He was too devastated to say anything else. He regretted that he couldn’t find more words, better words. Why—why wasn’t Nora saying anything? It took all John had to glance at her.

  Nora’s skin had paled. As if in answer to his gaze, she turned and met his eyes. In her face he saw two things. Horror. And disgust.

  He reached toward her, and she jerked instinctively back.

  He pushed to his feet so quickly that the legs of his chair made a loud scraping sound. “I’m sorry,” he told Sherry with a voice like sandpaper. “I can’t stay.”

  “I understand,” Sherry assured him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “It’s all right.”

  “John,” Nora said urgently.

  He didn’t answer. He stalked from the restaurant without once looking back.

  ———

  Nora balanced her palms on the table and rose halfway to standing as she watched John leave. Should she go after him? Or give him room? She wanted to go after him, but doing so would mean leaving Sherry here alone after Sherry had just finished trusting them with her traumatic story.

  Gradually, filled with numbing gray shock, Nora lowered into her chair. John’s biological father had raped Sherry. John’s biological father had raped and killed Nora’s mother. Her lovely sweet mother. John’s biological father was the monster who’d stolen her mother’s chance to live, to be a mother to her.

  That man’s blood flowed in John’s veins.

  But John . . . John was good. Had he seen just now what she’d been thinking? He’d definitely seen how she’d recoiled. She’d been processing. She’d needed a minute to get her thoughts right.

  Panic and remorse swirled inside her. She hadn’t guarded herself like she should have. What had her response betrayed to him?

  Vaguely, she became aware of Sherry’s gentle hand on her arm. Sherry’s words. “Nora? Are you all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Here. Drink some water.”

  Nora sat back and took two long sips of icy water while Sherry watched anxiously. “Better?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not surprised that John needed space. Imagine the shock of finding out that you were conceived that way.” She clicked her tongue. “Ever since I received his letter, I’ve been praying about whether to meet with John and whether to tell him about the circumstances of his birth. I hope I made the right choice.”

  “I think you did. You warned him, Sherry. John was the one who decided that he wanted to know.”

  Sherry appeared to think through Nora’s statement, and then, in the relaxing of her posture, to accept it. “Between you and me, I almost had an abortion when I found out I was expecting. I even went to the clinic and sat in the waiting room, but I couldn’t go through with it. The Holy Spirit spoke to me in a powerful way, and there was just no way I could . . . go through with it. What I didn’t get a chance to say to John just now is that I’m thankful that I carried him and gave birth to him. Will you tell him that for me?”

  “I will if you want me to, but I think it might mean a lot to John if you told him yourself through a phone call or email or letter.”

  She paused. “You’re right. I’ll tell him.” Sherry surveyed Nora’s face. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay? You’re very pale.”

  Sherry deserved an explanation. “Part of why . . .” She licked her lips. “Part of why John reacted the way that he did is because my mother was Robin Bradford.”

  Sherry blanched. “No.”

  “My mother was killed by Brian Raymond, and John knows that.” Grief scored Nora. Grief for John and the misery intertwined with the truth of his conception.

  Text message from Nora to John:

  Please call me.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-two

  John was shaking.

  He noticed it as he peeled off his clothing and yanked on his swim trunks. He was shaking. Add it to the list of things that were very, very wrong with him.

  He reached his dock, walked to its end, and dove into the lake. His arms sliced the water as he swam, hard, toward nowhere.

  His life was the result of an act of violence. A man his mother hadn’t known, a stranger, had physically overpowered and violated her.

  And he was the outcome.

  A lot of babies were put up for adoption by young, unmarried mothers because they were unwanted. Sherry had been young and unmarried when she’d had him, so he’d assumed he’d been unwanted. But this?

  He’d been far more than an accidental mistake. The sex hadn’t been consensual, which made his conception a horrible injustice.

  He couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t aborted him. Agony gripped him when he thought of what it must have been like for her to have her rapist’s child growing inside of her.

  Half of what made up his physical body—his bones and blood
and organs and skin—had come from a serial rapist and murderer.

  Brian Raymond had raped Sherry and killed Nora’s mother.

  And that man made up half of who he was.

  As if he could outswim the facts, he pushed himself harder. His burning muscles and rasping breath made him feel no better, yet he continued because he didn’t know what else to do, had nowhere else to go. All his life, water had calmed him. After leaving Sherry and Nora he’d made his way straight to the lake, because he’d known that if anything could help, it was water. But there was no help to be found today. Not even here.

  His sight was deteriorating because of a condition he’d inherited from his father. His father had left a mark of both symbolic and literal darkness on John. His blindness wasn’t something he could escape. It was coming for him, and every day that he lived with impaired vision was a day that he’d be reminded who had saddled him with it.

  There had been times when he’d been conflicted about whether or not to continue his search for his birth mother. But every time he’d chosen to move forward. Even today at the restaurant, Sherry had cautioned him. She’d asked him again and again if he was sure he wanted to know. He could have turned back. He hadn’t, and now he couldn’t unknow what he knew.

  He had the answers he’d valued so highly, and they sickened him.

  All his life, his mom and dad had been carefully building his identity like a statue made of stones. One stone here. One stone there. The things Sherry had told him today had jerked away the largest of the foundational stones and brought the whole structure crashing down.

  Who am I?

  He was the son of an evil man.

  He stopped swimming and treaded water. Gasping for air, he looked back toward shore. He’d crossed a long distance, but this new perspective changed nothing about the landscape filling his head.

  He couldn’t see his house very well because his central vision had gone blurry. But he could make out its long, modern lines against the green of the hill. He lived in a very expensive house that his famous heroism had bought. People paid him ridiculous amounts of money to speak to their groups. Strangers lined up for the opportunity to shake his hand and take pictures with him and have him sign their books and DVDs of Uncommon Courage. When he’d met the President of the United States, he was the one who’d been thanked and admired.