Your father lifted the lid from the shoebox labeled Christmas and you both began sifting through them. I moved from my spot in the doorway to meet you in the pile of our family memories. Memories of trips to the beach or the lake. Memories of eating ice cream or spaghetti. Memories in the cold of winter and the brightness of spring.
Your father sifted through the photos slowly and methodically, looking at each one carefully, but you tried to hurry him along, determined to find photos that would be the right size and shape to fit on the tree.
You were particular about which photos you wanted. They were either too big or too small or the subject wasn’t turned quite in the right direction. You and your father went through the pile and tossed one after another photo to the side.
At once, your eyes got bright and you pulled a photo from the pile. You found the one you wanted and you held it out with pride.
It was a picture of me and your father, our faces big and smiling, pressed together and up close to the camera.
I remembered exactly when the photo was taken. The three of us were out for an early dinner. It was summer and it was still bright as midday along the coast. You must have been only three years old and we were teaching you how to use the camera. You were standing on your chair and leaning across the whole table and holding the camera up close to our faces.
You told us to smile and your father and I obliged and pressed our faces closer together for the photo.
You asked if we were ready to cut the figures out and your father told you where you could find the scissors, in the top drawer to the right on the kitchen cabinets. You stood up and skipped out of the room toward the kitchen, your pigtails flopping as you bounded.
I looked up at your father and smiled warmly, feeling nostalgic among all the wonderful family photos.
Your father looked straight into my eyes but didn’t smile back. He touched the tip of his finger to the space labeled Dad on the tree.
And then he asked the question I thought would never come. He asked if his face belonged there on that family tree in the space where the father was supposed to go.
His tone wasn’t challenging. It wasn’t angry or fierce or argumentative. Just calm and measured. Matter-of-fact.
It was as if that question had long, stretching arms that reached inside me and squeezed my insides and rattled them around.
I felt the air drain from my lungs. My heart bulge. My vision blur.
I thought perhaps I misheard, so I asked him to ask again. And he did. He asked if his photo belonged in that spot for the father. He didn’t ask more loudly or more firmly. No more challenging or angry or argumentative.
I stared back into your father’s eyes. A pressure emerged in my throat and behind my eyes. I knew he knew the answer to his own question.
I opened my mouth to respond but there were no words to say. I lifted my arm to touch him, but there was so much space between us. Your father’s gaze was still unwavering.
Before I could muster anything, you came skipping back into the room, still bouncing, your smile still stretched across your face. You rushed over to your father and handed him the scissors, which he accepted with a shockingly natural-looking smile.
Stunned, I kept my eyes locked on your father, who was now focused on moving the scissors along the contour of our faces in the photo. All at once, I interpreted my own life as hinging on this single fact that your father was not your biological father. A single fact that I had twisted into a single lie. A single lie that I had wrapped everything in our lives around.
I had surrounded the lie with a home built for three. With photos of a mom, a dad and their daughter outside on a summer evening tucked in a shoebox in their living room. With introductions to your new teachers with Parker as your father. With nodding along with my girlfriends as they said, “She has Parker’s nose,” or “That’s such a Parker thing,” while they watched you play. The more I wrapped and wound things around the lie, the further from the surface they were. But with that one question, that one look, your father had cut right to the center of it and unwound it all.
I felt afraid to move. I was afraid that any sudden motion would send the whole thing crashing down. Our whole life crashing down. I felt a tear form. Determined not to let it fall, I closed my eyes and inhaled. When I reopened them, you had his face at your cheek, kissing you. The image of my cut-out face next to your father’s cut-out face looked so strange decoupled from their necks and bodies. They looked so out of place floating there like that on the wood floor. The images were overlapping slightly, but it was so clear that they were separate. So clear that they were disjointed, detached, parted. I couldn’t bear to look at our faces like that and closed my eyes again.
Your father suggested that you go upstairs and wash up for dinner, like nothing had happened.
I opened my eyes again to your father organizing the pile of photos and replacing them into the shoebox. You were out of sight now.
All I could muster was an “I don’t know.”
Your father stayed silent without lifting his eyes from the pile of photos.
I asked how long he had known for. My voice was quivering.
Your father’s hands stopped moving now. He sighed and looked up at me.
He told me he had always known. He reminded me how many times he had been tested and of the medical impossibility of his fathering a child.
He looked back down at the photos and started rustling them around, apparently now too frazzled to make sense or order out of them.
I asked why he hadn’t said something sooner. I still needed to gasp to find the oxygen required to make words. He said there wouldn’t have been any point. And he assured me that he loved our life and that he loved you. He paused and swallowed. I thought he might say that he was leaving me, leaving us, but he just kept saying that he loved us.
He was always so gentle. So understanding. At times I had found it annoying, but it felt so perfect now.
I felt the tear fall down my cheek. When I brought my fingertips to my face to wipe it away, I noticed that everything was already wet and salty.
I apologized as many times as I could. As many times as he had said I love you, plus some more. It was now a deluge of tears down my face. They rippled down my cheeks and chin and dripped onto the floor in front of me. My hands were shaking and my insides were vibrating.
He reassured me again that he loved us. That was the truest truth of all. And that he would never leave us.
I reached my hand out for your father’s. He placed his hand on top of mine tenderly enough. His face remained stoic. Unemotional. I scooted up close next to your father and rested my head on his shoulder.
He told me that he had made peace with the circumstances on his own, but that he wanted you to know the real story someday. He wanted you to have a chance to make peace with it, too.
When he said that, everything paused. I don’t know why I expected a different outcome for this conversation. I looked up at your father, preparing to protest. I didn’t want your life to unravel. I didn’t want to rob you of your reality. Your history. Your identity.
And then your adorable, piercing voice rang out from the upstairs.
Your father straightened his back and I lifted my head up. Your father looked confident. He looked sure of what he wanted. What he needed. And I wasn’t in any position to set the terms.
I can’t forget what he said to me then. He said that the lie was worse than the facts. And he didn’t want lies in this house. He didn’t want lies mixed up with love. And I believed him to be correct about this.
I had truly never envisioned this conversation with your father. I had resolved so long ago not to tell him. And so many years after that decision, I was still sure I would never have to have it. But if I had pictured this conversation, it wouldn’t have gone like this. It wouldn’t have been so short. It wouldn’t ha
ve been so measured. So clarifying. It was rare that your father so firmly stood up for something he believed in.
And in this instance, I knew I had to give him what he wanted. And I knew deep down that it was the right thing to do.
I placed my head back on your father’s shoulder and I told him we could and we would do it eventually.
And then your father returned the last picture to the box, tucked it into the cabinet and wiggled out from under the weight of my shoulder and left the room.
I’m sorry if it made a mess of things,
Mom.
* * *
And with that, Jane felt the need to write her own explanation for Hazel.
Letter 6
When everything changed for our family
Jane
Dear Hazel,
I think I would have gone on with a family comprised of just you and me forever. And for a long time, I thought I could. But deep down, I think I wanted something different. And one day Cam just walked into our lives. It was the thing that changed all of our lives forever.
You and I were enjoying our Saturday afternoon over a picnic in the small park near our house. There was a playground on the corner and a thin dirt running path that cut through the grass. The park was crowded with young families with strollers spilling with toys and young couples with overflowing picnic baskets. There was just enough grass and just enough trees for us to set down our blankets and remove the contents of our basket and sprawl our arms and legs and still not impose on anyone else’s space. Still, it was hard for me not to notice that we were the only mother-daughter duo. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I wondered if people might think we were sisters in our matching sun hats with big wide brims and matching sunglasses that stretched from cheekbone to forehead.
In an attempt to shake the thought, I gave you a big harsh smooch right on the side of your cheek and you giggled and blushed a little bit and pretended to try to squirm away and yelled out at me.
Hearing you say “Mom” in any capacity, in any tone, still made me gush with pride. It would never get old. I stopped thinking about the embarrassing sisters thing.
We munched on breads and cheese and jams and grapes and salamis. I liked the raspberry jam and you liked the fig preserves. I turned the shiny pages of InStyle while you did the same with your Seventeen magazine and we took turns pointing out particularly cute outfits and particularly cute men from our respective pages. The breeze would have been nice except that you kept losing your page to the gusts of winds. Exasperated, you turned over onto your back and watched as the clouds skated through the sky and I joined you immediately.
The clouds floated up there in perfect white puffs. They looked like the clouds you used to draw with your whole little hand gripping the crayon as you pulled it across the construction paper.
We both lay there calmly for a few moments until another gust of wind rushed through our hair. This one was bigger than the others, stirring up grass and leaves and sending the other people in the park running after rogue pieces of trash or toys set into a roll. I sat up and when I turned to my left, a tall, slight man in running sneakers was standing right next to our blanket. I flinched at the surprise of a person so close to our little bubble.
He apologized right away for startling us. I looked up from beneath the brim of my hat but didn’t know how to respond. So I just smiled. And then he asked me if I could help him with something. I agreed, though I was a bit confused about what it could be. You had now sat up, too, with your hand pressed to the top of your hat to keep it from flying away.
He told us we looked like twins. What a ham!
I remained seated as I waited for more of an explanation of why he was standing there, my patience and the smile that came with it waning.
The man appeared to have been jolted back to reality and then asked if I wouldn’t mind holding on to his shirt for a moment.
I was confused and turned to you to see if you had figured out what was going on, but you looked just as confused as I did, but perhaps more curious.
He explained that it was windy out and that he was worried about trying to take his sweatshirt off and the wind catching his shirt and making it fly up.
I had certainly seen this situation before—tummies or bras exposed after a man or woman intending to simply lift an overshirt above the head, mistakenly took the entire garment underneath with it.
I asked if he was serious, pulling my sunglasses down on the bridge of my nose so that I could get a better look at the man in front of me.
And he said that he was very serious with a real earnestness, but also a new charm. His eyes were clear and blue and his cheekbones and jawline were strong but still gentle. He could not be described as muscular or strapping like some of the other men I had been with, but he was fit. Athletic even. Like his flesh was tailored to his anatomy. I caught him scanning my left ring finger. I sensed a twinkle in his eye when he found it bare.
I could feel my cheeks get hot and I looked over at you. You gave me a smile back and a quick wink of your left eye helped me to realize what was going on here.
It had been so long since I had been with another man, even thought about another man. I was so busy, so happy, with you. Well, maybe I had thought about them, but none of them were men that were in front of me. None were men that I could feel or touch or flirt with.
I stood up slowly with as much composure as I could and stepped closer than I might otherwise step toward a stranger and pinched his T-shirt between my pointer finger and my thumb.
He expressed his relief, and might have even winked, before pulling his sweatshirt over his head.
As his sweatshirt came up, I caught a glimpse of his groin lines disappearing below the waist of his shorts. Nervous that I shouldn’t be looking there, I craned my neck and looked back up toward the man’s face. I could see in my periphery that he now had his sweatshirt crumpled up in his right hand. When I realized my fingers still clasped his T-shirt, I pulled my hand away as quickly as I could.
The man smiled and thanked me. His teeth were big and white and straight. He seemed smart. And kind. And handsome. Definitely handsome.
My cheeks got hot again.
And then he introduced himself as Cam and stuck his hand out toward me for a shake.
I looked down at you and you were still sitting on the blanket on the grass, closely watching and listening. At the moment of eye contact with me, you put your hands over your mouth to hide your smile and lay down again on your back. I could detect you laughing by the shake of your belly and your shoulders.
I turned back to Cam and smiled.
I introduced myself, and then you, with pride. I felt you would be excited to have a father figure in your life after all these years.
And Cam smiled right back.
I was impressed he would come up to both of us like that.
A few days later, I found myself at a real, and quite upscale, restaurant with white tablecloths, sitting across from a man I confirmed to be smart and kind and handsome. Definitely handsome. I giggled when Cam told me he was a tax attorney. It was the most adult job I had ever heard described over a beer on a date. He had kind light blue eyes and smiled easily as we talked easily.
I had sensed this when we first met in the park, but it was becoming increasingly clear that everything about Cam was right in place. Well arranged. Planned. He talked freely about his hopes and dreams for the future. About having a family. About moving to an old but well-constructed house in a beach town when he retired. He was near certain that he had his sights set on Kennebunkport, Maine, but was watching the housing markets up and down the eastern seaboard closely. He deliberated over the number of bedrooms and which direction the porch should face.
Before even spending an hour together, I felt safe with Cam. I found myself telling stories about you. A lot of stories about you. Openin
g my phone up to show him pictures of you in your Halloween costume or eating something sour or jumping off the diving board at the pool. At the sight of you, at the window into my life, our life, I could tell Cam’s heart was at ease.
With a gentle smile and clear, sparkling eyes, he told me that I seemed like a really good mom.
I smiled back as I tried to keep my heart from exploding. I knew he could be a great father to not only you, but also to his own. I wanted that for him. For us.
Soon, as you’ll almost certainly recall, I was spending many meals and nights with Cam while you stayed home with a babysitter. And I was becoming more and more enamored, and more and more in love every time.
You would help me get dressed for dates. I would ask you how I looked.
“Beautiful, Ma,” you would say so sweetly. And I could tell you meant it. And then I would kiss you on the head and say, “Be good.” And then you would say, “Always,” with a smirk. And then I would slip out the door to Cam.
He was always, always, always steady and kind. He offered me big, honest love and he did it freely. More and more, I felt so deeply that he could give me what I wanted, what I needed, in a partner. And that he would do it forever.
And when he asked me to marry him nine months later, no frills, at city hall, I said yes and kissed him deeply. And when he said he wanted to have a baby of our own, I said yes and kissed him deeply again. I thought about you at each and every one of those moments, Hazel. I really did. I thought it would make us both so, so happy. He was so sweet with you. So considerate. So thoughtful about your role in our family. His role in our family.
I have to be honest. I was excited about my second chance at motherhood. This time, I would have Cam at my side.
Of all the decisions I had made quickly, from my heart, this one felt the most right.
I’m sorry if it made a mess of things,
Mom.
18
It was a slow Saturday morning with Cam and the boys. For all intents and purposes, it should have been a perfect morning. Cam was making pancakes and the smell of warm syrup and freshly brewed coffee filled the air. The twins were in their own world, playing charmingly with a set of blocks. Everything was peaceful but Jane.
That Summer in Maine Page 11