Christie, however, was the chief designer, the one who kept things humming right along for Island Dreams Jewelry. Everything she designed was a best seller.
“You may not qualify as a blood donor,” my mother whispered to me, patting her blond hair, her voice quivering.
“I might,” I told her as the doctor hurried off. “I’m her sister!”
Beside me, my mother gripped a chair and fell into it, her face as white as a sheet. “Mom!” I cupped her face in my hands. “What is it?”
“Honey, forgive me.” Her big, blue eyes flooded with tears that turned them almost luminescent.
“Forgive you what?”
“I was young.” Her voice pitched. “I was scared. My parents said they would disown me. I had nowhere to go. I had no choice. I was seventeen years old!”
“What are you talking about?” I clasped her hands, thinking she’d lost it. Anybody listening to her haranguing me on the phone about natural food and vitamins would think the woman was an obsessed, partially sane, natural-food freak. They could not be more wrong. She was smart and ambitious and focused. Her slight obsession with her daughters’ organic health was because she loved us to distraction. Love comes out in crazy ways, and that was hers. “Christie is going to be fine. She’ll be okay. She’ll get a transfusion from me if she needs one. The babies are small, but they’ll be okay, I know it….”
“That’s it, honey,” my mom wept out.
“What is it?” She was falling apart.
“You, honey, may not be an exact blood match for your sister.”
“I’m her sister. I’ll be close enough.”
She shook her head, caught a sob. “Half.” She put her perfectly manicured hands on my shoulders.
“What?”
“You’re half, sweetie.” Her moon earrings dangled. It was one of Christie’s best designs. “Only half.” Her face crumpled.
“What do you mean only half?”
She wrapped shaking arms around me. “Please forgive me. I felt so trapped. I had to marry your father, had to. Your real father and I…It was one summer on Whale Island. He didn’t even know I was pregnant, not at all. And my father was livid. Remember Granddad, how he had such a temper? He always scared you girls, almost as much as your father did. Granddad forced me to marry your father. Your real father had to report for military duty. He’d promised to write, but I found out later that Granddad tossed all his letters. It’s an old story, so clichéd, so heartbreaking when it really happens, but it’s the truth….”
“I am lost, Mom, totally lost. Or you are. One of us has lost our brain, because I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I felt my lungs tightening, as if there was not enough air for the two of us.
She grasped my hands, her body rocking back and forth with stress. “Chalese, Christie is your half sister. You have different fathers. The man you’ve known as your father your whole life, he’s not related to you at all. I was two weeks pregnant when I married Richard. He knew it. He never let me forget it. Honey, that’s why he was so disparaging of you, so unkind. You were a constant reminder that I’d been with someone else.”
Once the giant, numbing fog of shock started to clear, I was suddenly able to aim binoculars at my childhood…and things began to click into place. My father’s patent dislike of me, his interest in Christie, how I didn’t share the coloring of Christie or my parents. That scary monster was of no relation to me.
“He was from Alaska, wasn’t he, Mom?” I whispered.
Her face froze into shock. “Yes, your real father was from Alaska. Richard was so cruel to you with his comments.”
“I know. I don’t think I’ll ever forget being called penguin butt or wolf daughter,” I snapped. “Tell me about…about…”
“Your real father?” My mother’s face became even more pained, and yet somehow, as she reminisced, I got a glimpse of the girl she used to be. “His family had lived in Alaska for many generations. We met when my family came to Whale Island on vacation for an entire summer. He was here, too, working on one of the fishing boats. He was such a kind boy, so handsome, so polite. I fell in love with him all at once, with a rush, as teenagers do. It was true love for me, and for him, too. My father hated him on sight. His daughter and a Native American were never going to work out. When I was pregnant, he threatened to kick me out unless I married your dad, who was the son of friends of his.”
“But Dad was never nice to you, Mom. He watched you all the time, he beat you, he criticized you—”
“Richard was obsessed with me. He wanted to own me. Control me. I was a pretty possession. I never stopped loving your real father, though, and Richard knew it.”
There were more details, more information, and I sank into a chair by my mother as she held my hand, begging my forgiveness for not telling me sooner. “I thought it would complicate things for you, honey. I didn’t know if your biological father would want to see you, and you would get hurt again. I thought you would hate me for keeping that secret from you all these years, that you would think less of me, that you wouldn’t see me anymore, and then more and more years passed, the lie got deeper. Oh, honey…”
Devastation hit me hard, heavy. I knew we would have a few rolling fights in the future, but there was one thing I wanted to know now, immediately. “Who is he, Mom? Who is my father?”
The babies, a girl and a boy, were taken by C-section, and Christie did not, in the end, need a blood transfusion.
Cary fainted during delivery, fell straight back into a doctor and had to be taken out. After the babies were in their little cribs, he wobbled back in to see them, kissed Christie, kissed the babies, took one more weak glance at his exhausted wife, and fainted again. Straight back. This time he cracked his head and bled like a sieve.
“Men are of no help whatsoever, are they?” Christie said, exhausted. “I’ve had two babies lifted from my open stomach, and all the doctors and nurses are helping my bleeding husband. Who ever thought that men should be present at the birth of babies? There are many things women do better on their own. This is one of them.”
Christie could leave the hospital in two days, but the babies would be hospitalized for weeks. The babies were healthy and beautiful, but too early, and Brenda and I cried over both of their tiny bodies, their tiny fingers, tiny lips, tiny hearts.
“What are their names?” I weeped.
My sister, already shrinking back to her Tinkerbell size and smelling like baby powder and roses, said, “I’ve named them after two people I love on Whale Island.”
“You named them Gina Martinez and Marci Chang?” Brenda asked.
“No, Princess Leia, I didn’t,” Christie said, cuddling the babies close.
“Shadow Morrison?”
Christie laughed. “No. This one, our boy baby, is named Bren, for you, Brenda. And this one, our girl baby, is named”—she glanced up at me, her eyes filling with that special love we sisters have—“her name is Chalese. Chalese Rae, for my sister. My very, very best friend.”
“Ohhh!” Brenda sobbed, clutching her heart. “Ohhh! Ohhh!”
I put my cheek next to Christie’s. I could not even speak. But I could cry, and that I did.
Brenda brought the older three kids across on the ferry, her eyes still puffy from all the crying she’d done over the babies.
When she saw the twins, Wendi Jo said, “They look like their faces were squished by somebody mean.”
Jeremiah said, “Why are they so purple? Did they eat too many grapes?”
And Rosie Mae said, “Tiny fingers. How they going to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?” She had brought a gift for the babies. It was my strawberry jelly.
When all was well, I took a ferry home and worked on my book, chugging coffee, walking my poorly behaved dogs in the middle of the night to wake myself up, and eating orange truffles.
The grief I felt over Aiden continued to follow me around. I would think of Aiden, skyscraper Aiden, Aiden of the deep voice and
gentle, passionate hands, the smart and funny and protective Aiden, and the grief would zip and zap up and down my body.
I couldn’t eat; sleep was spotty, I was exhausted, the sadness pulling me down into a swamp of pain. I fought being pulled into the swamp, but I didn’t win very often.
At night, when I turned off my light, the grief still hung around, all about the room, on my periwinkle blue comforter, next to me in bed.
“Want to dress up as princesses locked in a tower, sweet thing?” Brenda asked before she climbed into bed with me.
I went to the hospital often, bringing Christie some of my marmalade jelly, which she did indeed suck down like water as Reuby said, and I kept working because I didn’t want to become a scraggly bag lady.
When I needed a break from the book, I worked on another project. A gift. Just in case.
Amidst the massive amount of work I did, and the soul-sucking grief, this doo-dad of a refrain kept repeating itself in my head. That scary monster was not your father. That scary monster was not your father.
At one point, when I was painting tiny ballet slippers on a jumping green frog, I dropped my paintbrushes, headed to the edge of my property, my feet in the sand as the ocean rolled over them, smiled for the first time in days, and yelled, “He was not my father. That creepy, mean, horrid jerk was not my father.”
That horrible man had torched my ability to trust men, trust relationships, even to trust myself. He had ruined years of my life and introduced me to raw fear, desolation, rejection, and mind-numbing sadness.
But he was not my father.
Way out in the distance I saw water burst from a whale’s blowhole.
I took it as a happy sign.
Many long days later, when my book was finally off (late, as usual), Brenda and I took the poorly behaved dogs for a late-afternoon stroll, then lay down in the sand by the ocean, staring up at the puffy clouds in the sky. One of the clouds resembled a goofy dragon. Another resembled a worm with oversized eyes. A third resembled two dogs on the run, neck and neck.
The backlash I might have expected from people on the island because of my father’s insane criminal behavior never materialized, of course. I had grossly exaggerated in my head everyone’s reactions because my own emotions were so charged, so wrapped around my father’s abuse and that bone-cracking fear, that I couldn’t think straight about that particular “family secret” anymore.
They had reached out their arms and covered me in hugs. In fact, I became closer to many of them who told me, in confidence, of their own wily, criminal, bizarre, dangerous, quirky, and otherwise off-beat family members.
“Sit down with me one day,” Shadow told me, flipping back a sparkly purple scarf. “You want to hear about a scary family? That would be mine. Your dad’s got nothin’ on my relatives. Half of them are in jail. Hey, they may have been cellmates of your dad’s….”
Another puffy cloud drifted by.
It resembled Aiden on a ferryboat. I tried not to cry.
“Go get him, girlfriend,” Brenda told me for the umpteenth time, her sultry, earthy perfume wafting around me.
“Gee. Maybe I should bring a lasso, ring him around the neck, and haul him on in as I would a runaway bull. I think he’d find that stimulating.” I dragged my hands through my hair. I was surprised at how long it had gotten. When was my last cut?
“Whooee! I’d like to see that. In fact, I think playing Lasso Cowgirl and Bull would be…” She clicked her teeth together. “Exciting!”
“You are so inventive, Brenda.” I watched the sun slipping down the horizon. The clouds were rolling on in. It would rain soon, thunder and lightning, the works.
“Who is that?” Brenda asked, pointing out at the dock.
A woman was hunched over, clutching her knees, obviously positively miserable. “I think it’s Gina!” I got up and started running.
“Gina?” I said gently when we reached the end of the dock.
She whipped around, her eyes red and swollen.
“What is it?” I asked. Brenda and I settled next to her.
“Flaubert died.”
Ah. Got it. Flaubert was Gina’s floppy-eared rabbit.
“I’m sorry, Gina.”
“He was a loveable guy. I always hugged him, talked to him. Flaubert was trustworthy, honest. At the end, he was having trouble with his kidneys, based on what he told me. He also had some arthritis in his left hip, and he felt…old. He missed Genevieve.”
Brenda raised her brows at me questioningly.
“His wife,” I told her.
Gina nodded. “You have someone one day, you laugh and talk with them, and then they’re gone. And you have this huge, empty hole. Part of you is with them, but the other part of you is still here, still dealing with the loneliness and grief and aloneness.”
I was already dealing with that loneliness and grief and aloneness.
“Everyone goes on with their lives, and you’re in a bubble of pain.”
I knew that bubble. It was here, surrounding me.
“Gosh, I’ll miss Flaubert. He really understood love.”
I patted her back. I understood love. I understood I loved Aiden.
“Don’t let go of the rabbits you love, that’s what I know,” Gina sniffed. “Dogs, either. Horses are the best of friends. Cats, cuddly. Keep ’em in your heart.”
I kept Aiden in my heart.
“The problem with animals is that they die,” Gina said.
But Aiden wasn’t dead. Aiden was quite alive and in Seattle. And maybe I could pop the bubble. Surely it was worth a try. For someone who danced on bars, got stuck on water towers, skinny-dipped in lakes, and had lived through my childhood, what would be another rejection? At least I’d know I tried hard enough to get rejected.
“Flaubert was a smart rabbit, and I’ll miss him,” I said as a raindrop plopped on my check. “I’m taking my boat to the mainland.”
Oceans are tricky. They seem placid, and then it’s as if a giant hand comes out of the sky and whips up the waves. I took my small cabin cruiser out onto the water, intending to sail to the mainland and then rent a car to drive to Seattle.
Although the waves were choppy when I started off, I dropped my bag and the gift for Aiden in the cabin and didn’t worry. I had made this trip for years.
Midway through my journey, I became rather alarmed. The clouds gathered together like the insides of a bubbling cauldron, the waves grew into these angry, gray rushes of water, and the wind came straight at my face, hard, long gusts that seemed to want to rip my boat in half.
In addition to some truly thrashing rain, there was the requisite thunder and lightning, which added to the thrill ride.
I can only compare it to being in an edge-of-your-seat movie about surviving a storm at sea, although I didn’t have my growing butt in a chair with popcorn and pop clutched in my hands.
My boat was tossed around like a toy in a bathtub. Each trough seemed to get deeper, the waves above me higher, stronger, more dangerous. I had my life jacket on but scurried out of the cabin to grab two more life preservers from the seats.
That was bad, bad timing. The next wave was a doozer. It did not flip my boat, but it did flip me. I flew through the air, landing on my back. This terrible, shooting pain split right through my head, and then all those rollicking troughs of water, those towering waves, that racing rain and whooshing wind, they all went black, deep black, and quiet.
I woke up in a hazy fuzz of total and complete confusion. For long minutes, I could not figure out where I was or why I was there. All I knew was that my head pounded as if it had an oar stuck in it, the rain was coming down in sheets, and the wind was making that terrible howling sound you never want to hear when you’re outside in a boat on an ocean. I was cramped, freezing cold, wet, and dizzy.
I knelt down in the boat, my head throbbing, my dizziness swirling me into a wet mental funnel, my exhaustion pulling me down a dark tube.
The next time I woke up, my boat
was scraping against the rocks of the mainland. I was way off my usual course, but I knew where I was. I also knew I was starving, freezing, soaked, and my head was pounding, but I was alive. The sun was cresting over the horizon, so I knew I had lived to see another day. I kneeled in the boat, my body a teeming mass of on-fire nerve cells, threw my arms up in the air, and laughed.
How I laughed.
It was, really, so good to still be a human, on a planet, able to enjoy a truly spectacular sunrise.
And soon I might have the chance to see a truly spectacular Aiden.
Chapter Eleven
I did not realize how seriously terrible I looked until I noticed people staring at me as I walked down the dock with Aiden’s gift under my arm and my bag swung over my shoulder.
It was the rental-car guy who finally drew my attention to my scary face and hair.
“Ma’am, we cannot rent you a car.”
“Why?”
“Because, ma’am, we cannot rent to people who have been drinking or who appear as though they may have been indulging in legal or illegal pharmaceuticals.”
I pushed my hair into a ponytail before I entered the Seattle salon.
Several jaws dropped at the counter when I walked in.
I was friendly. “Put your lips back together. Are you trying to catch flies?”
“Are you all right, ma’am?”
“Yes, why?”
“Your face.”
“What about my face?”
They held up a mirror.
Not pretty. Not good. Frightening. Colorful bruise on forehead. Hair like a wicked witch. Clothes like a bag lady. Note to self: this is exactly what you wanted to avoid.
“You’ll need a long appointment—yes, indeedy, you will,” a man in a pink shirt said, his hands waving. “Perhaps all day? You have all day? You need all day. Let me see what we have.”
I changed into the other outfit I’d brought with me. Then those magician stylists fixed my hair with a cut and highlight, something of which I had neglected for, lemme see, months. They did my nails, something I had neglected for, lemme see, years. They gave me a facial, something I had neglected for, gee, decades. Next stop: a store for new clothes, something of which…you get it.
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