Undercurrent

by Tricia Rayburn

  I thought of Dad’s e-mail, the initials of the person he’d been corresponding with every day.

  W.B.D. Could the W stand for Willa?

  Their quick departure gave me the rest of the day to plan what I would say. And after school, while Paige stayed behind for extra help in math, I went home, determined to learn what no one had told me in seventeen years—what they might never have told me if I hadn’t first discovered part of the truth myself.

  “Is Dad in his office?” I slammed the front door closed, tossed my backpack on the couch. Through the dining room doorway I could see Mom sitting at the head of the table. “I

  need to talk to him.”

  No answer.

  “Mom?” I was ready to storm in the opposite direction, but something about her posture stopped me. Her back was straight as a stick, her head perfectly still.

  I started toward her, the calm I’d achieved during the day slowly crumbling. Did she know? That Dad had lied about where he’d been that morning… and, at this point, about who knew what else?

  “Mom?” I asked again, standing behind her.

  Still nothing. She was transfixed by the images on the small television screen before her. Leaning forward for a better look, I put one hand on her shoulder.

  “Vanessa!” She jumped. “Don’t sneak around like that!”

  I stood up, brought one hand to my racing heart. “I wasn’t sneaking. I slammed the door. I said your name twice. You didn’t hear me.”

  “Oh.” Puzzlement crossed her face. It was gone in an instant, and then she beamed up at me. “I did the most wonderful thing today. Look.” She held up the TV, which I now saw was actually a portable DVD player. “Recognize anyone?”

  “George Clooney?” I asked, squinting.

  “You might want to save that buttering up for when your father’s in the room.”

  “That’s Dad?” The man with the dark hair looked too young to be my father. He was also wearing a cape and vampire fangs.

  “And me. And you. And lots of our friends.”

  A home movie. That, from the looks of it—and us—was at least fifteen years old.

  Mom replaced the DVD player on the table. “There’s a shop in Cambridge that converts tapes to discs. I found a bunch of our old home videos hidden away in the basement and had them changed over.”

  “That’s great,” I said, thinking this was a step forward. Maybe watching old videos of Justine would help her confront the loss and eventually feel comfortable talking about it.

  “You were just a toddler, so you probably don’t remember, but for years your father and I hosted the best haunted house this side of Boston.”

  “Why’d you stop having them?” I asked.

  “I started working more. You kids got older. But your sister always loved them—she missed them when they stopped.” Mom paused, then smiled brightly at me. “I thought it would be fun to do again this year. You can invite Simon, of course, and anyone else you’d like. Same goes for Paige.”

  And there it was. Mom wasn’t revisiting the past to get through the present. She was revisiting the past in hopes of recreating it.

  I was too worried to be fazed by the Simon reference. “I don’t think this is a very good idea.”

  She looked at me. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it’s pretty obvious what this is about. And if you think you’ll feel better by doing things that made Justine happy—”

  “Your father’s in his office,” she snapped. “You were looking for him when you came in, weren’t you? Not me.”

  I slowly retreated, now noticing the tissue box next to her arm, the moist paper balls scattered across the table. “Right. Sorry.”

  My worry quickly gave way to anger as I neared Dad’s office. Whatever was going on with Mom was his fault. Her behavior might have been triggered by Justine’s death, but again, if it wasn’t for his relationship with Charlotte Bleu, I wouldn’t be here, Justine would be, and Mom would be fine. And to top it off, after messing everything up, he still wasn’t doing a single thing to help her get better.

  All of which sent the cool, calm line of questioning I’d prepared right out the window.

  “Who’s Willa?”

  Behind his computer, Dad choked on whatever he’d just sipped.

  I closed the door and strode toward his desk. “I saw you downtown today. When you were supposed to be in class.”

  “Vanessa,” he said, his face turning tomato red as he mopped up the tea with a stack of papers, “why don’t you have a seat, take a deep breath, and calm down? Then we can try to sort out what it is you think you saw.”

  I sat down. It was either that or strangle him. “Mom’s planning a spectacular haunted house. Just like the ones you used to have. Do you know why?”

  His hands shook as he dropped the sodden papers into his trash can.

  “Because she’s trying to feel closer to her dead daughter.” I paused, waited for him to take another sip of tea. “Her only daughter.”

  This time he dropped the mug. It hit the edge of the desk and fell to the floor.

  “That’s funny. Willa has slippery fingers, too. Probably just one of many things you two have in common.”

  He sighed. “Who told you?”

  “Who didn’t tell me?”

  He took his time retrieving the pieces of the mug, then sat back and clasped his hands over his belly. “I understand you’re angry… but please know it’s a very complicated situation.”

  “Please know that’s an understatement.”

  He raised his hands, as if giving me that one. “It’s a mess. And I offer you my most heartfelt apologies.”

  “For which part? Hurting Mom? Lying to Justine and me? Telling my entire life story in daily installations to a total stranger?”

  His eyes grew big. “How did you—”

  “Or seeing yet another woman? Now? After everything that’s happened?”

  “Vanessa,” he said sternly, like I’d gone too far. He sat up, leaned toward me. “I’m not seeing Willa—or anyone else. I love your mother. I’ve loved her with all that I am for more than twenty years. If I didn’t, you would’ve found out the truth a long time ago.”

  My chest tightened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means your mother…” His voice trailed off, and his head dropped. A second later, it lifted again. “It means she wanted to protect you. She didn’t want you to have to suffer from knowing something that wasn’t your fault and that you could never change.”

  “So, what? You really weren’t going to tell me? Ever? Because it would be so much better for me not to know who I really am?”

  “That wasn’t my intention. I figured—I hoped—that the right time would eventually present itself. And that whenever it did… everyone would agree you deserved to know the truth.”

  I looked away, tried to imagine how I’d react if Simon wanted to do something I didn’t agree with. Would I go along with it even if I thought it was wrong? Because I loved him more than any potential consequence?

  Yes, I probably would.

  “Who is she?” I asked a moment later.

  “A friend. She knew Charlotte.”

  I lifted my eyes to his. It was the first time I’d heard him say her name aloud. He didn’t even blink.

  “Do you see her often?” I asked.

  “No. Today was the first time in many years.”

  “You just said she was a friend.”

  “We stay in touch,” he said. “We don’t visit.”

  “Is she the one you e-mail every day?”

  “Yes.” If he was mad that I’d accessed his account, he didn’t show it.

  “And you tell her about me?”

  “I do. She and Charlotte were close. I keep her informed as a courtesy.”

  “A Christmas card’s courteous.”

  “It means nothing,” he said.

  Clearly it meant something or he wouldn’t be doing it. “Does Mom know?”
I asked.

  “No. She wouldn’t understand.”

  “And that’s not enough reason to stop?”

  He sighed, closed his eyes. “There was an arrangement.”

  My breath caught. Finally, he was going to tell me something I didn’t already know… and now I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.

  He looked at me, reached for me. Apparently thinking better of it, he sat back and rested his hand on the arm of his chair instead.

  “Before I go any further, you must know that you are loved, Vanessa. Every minute since the one you were born, you’ve been adored. And when Charlotte and I made our decision, we did so with only your happiness in mind.”

  “Okay…”

  His lips parted, closed. Parted again. After all this time, he didn’t know how to explain it. “Charlotte didn’t tell me she was pregnant. I found out because I accidentally ran into her in the supermarket when I was up in Winter Harbor one fall weekend, working on my book.”

  His book. Back then, there probably had been one.

  “At first, she tried to flee the market without talking to me.

  Then, when I caught up with her in the parking lot, she told me someone else was the father. But her eyes gave her away.” He paused, looked off at something across the room. “Her eyes were… something.”

  This I knew all too well. “What happened after that?” I prompted, not wanting to dwell.

  “She tried to brush me off. I wouldn’t let her. I told her that though our… situation… wasn’t something I was proud of, and though I hated every second of pain it caused my wife, I couldn’t help bring a child into the world and then disappear. I demanded to be involved, to help, even if all that amounted to was annual updates and financial assistance.”

  I bristled. As disappointed by him as I’d been, I still didn’t want to imagine life without my Big Poppa.

  “If it had been up to me,” he said quietly, seeing my reaction, “I would have been with you more often than not. Somehow, we would’ve made it work. But she didn’t want that.”

  “What did she want?”

  “For a while, not much. Throughout the rest of her pregnancy, she sent occasional notes to me at work, telling me how she was feeling. Then, when you were born, she sent another note. I went back to Winter Harbor the day I received the news and met you for the very first time.” He smiled. “You were the prettiest baby I’d ever seen.”

  “And Mom still didn’t know?” I asked, quickly moving past the special moment he and Charlotte had shared.

  His head lowered, his smile faded. “Not at that time, no. She didn’t find out for another year.”

  I pictured the boxes in the basement, recalled Mom’s explanation that she’d given away my newborn clothes. “What happened then?”

  Moving slowly, as if buying time to decide whether he was doing the right thing, he turned toward the bookcase next to his desk. He slid aside a stack of old dictionaries, revealing a plain wooden box. He removed a small key ring from his sweater, unlocked the box, and reached inside.

  “I received this,” he said.

  Barely breathing, I took the postcard. It was a scenic shot of Winter Harbor in the fall, when the leaves glowed brilliant shades of red, orange, and yellow. Betty’s was in the forefront. Behind the restaurant the water, rimmed with trees, gleamed in the afternoon sun.

  My eyes lingered on Betty’s. It was a Winter Harbor institution, but every store in town sold postcards featuring dozens of local scenes: the lighthouse, rocky cliffs zigzagging down to the ocean, fields of wildflowers. Yet Charlotte had chosen this one. Did she do so intentionally? Knowing I’d eventually see it, hoping it’d be some kind of hint?

  Fingers trembling, I turned over the card. The blue ink had lightened with time. Some letters were smudged, like the note had once gotten wet. The handwriting was small, precise, as if trying to calm its message.

  Dear Philip,

  This will be the last time you hear from me. Vanessa and I are leaving Winter Harbor. I know you, like me, want only what’s best for her. That’s why we’re going… and why I can’t tell you where.

  Thank you. You’ve given me an extraordinary gift for which I’ll be forever grateful.

  —Charlotte

  “That’s it?” I asked. “She just left?”

  “She tried. Fortunately, she owned a small business and gave her employees a phone number in case they needed her. When I went back up to try to stop her from leaving, I sweet-talked the employees with some little-known Emerson trivia, and they called her on my behalf. She hung up on me, but Winter Harbor police tracked down the number’s location. I found you both in a tiny apartment in Montreal.”

  “You drove to Canada?”

  “I couldn’t abandon the only lead I had. Plus, I was worried she’d fear me doing exactly what I did and move again.”

  As I pictured him racing through New England and across the border, I felt strangely moved. He’d cared. His motives before and after my birth might’ve been occasionally muddled… but I believed he’d always cared about me.

  “When I found Charlotte,” he continued, “she gave me two choices. Either I could leave and never see either of you again, or I could take you home. And raise you here, in Boston. She said that was actually the better option for you, but that she hadn’t wanted to ask me, to risk destroying my family. When I told her you could only make our family better, she agreed to let you go. Her only additional request was that she never saw you again, because she didn’t think she could handle the pain of saying good-bye a second time.”

  “Those were the only options?” I asked. “What about joint custody?”

  “It was one or the other. She wasn’t clear about much, but she was clear about that. She said it was for your safety—not just your happiness or well-being, but your safety. And I believed her. I assumed she had an ex-boyfriend who she worried would do something drastic if he knew about us. About you.” He looked at me until I looked back. “The only thing worse than the possibility of never seeing you again was the possibility of something bad happening to you. Something I could’ve prevented.”

  “So you brought me home.” I shifted my eyes to the stack of dictionaries, willed myself not to cry.

  “I did.” He paused. “We both know your mother… Jacqueline… isn’t always the easiest person to please. But Vanessa, she took one look at you and fell in love. She had issues with me, obviously—when I told her about you and Charlotte after Charlotte disappeared from Winter Harbor, she locked me out of the house for a week. But whatever disappointment or anger she felt toward me was never directed at you. And when I told her you needed a good home, she made sure you had one.”

  “Just like that?” I whispered.

  “Just like that.”

  He said this so simply, so matter-of-factly, I knew it must be true. “And Justine?”

  “She wasn’t even two years old at the time. She wouldn’t have remembered your first year on earth if you’d spent it under our roof.”