Not Her Daughter

by Rea Frey

  “Indiana. But I live out west.”

  “Like California out west?”

  “Portland. How long have you and Charlie lived in Chicago?”

  “I’ve been here fifteen years. Love it here.”

  “Me too. I’ve been here a ton for work. Great city. One of the best.” I kept him talking about the city and his life as a dad, deflecting as many questions as I could. He wore no ring and didn’t talk about Charlie’s mom, so I didn’t ask.

  Our orders arrived, and Emma’s eyes grew to cartoonish proportions. “This is all for me?” The kids compared their giant omelets and waved their Greek toast around like flags.

  “And you? What about you? I’ve been talking nonstop. Are you married? Serious with anyone?”

  I laughed and pointed to Emma. “Yes, she and I are very serious.” I took a bite of eggs.

  “Where are you guys staying?”

  “Probably at the Sofitel. I have points. Where do you guys live?”

  “Wicker Park. I was lucky and bought before it turned into ‘the coolest neighborhood ever.’” He glanced at Charlie. “I mean, I know we just officially met and everything, and this probably sounds super-sketchy, but you guys are totally welcome to stay if you don’t want to spend the points. Or if you need a kitchen. I know how inconvenient it can be with kids and hotels.”

  “Oh, wow. That’s incredibly nice of you.” I searched my arsenal of excuses, trying to find one that wouldn’t offend him.

  “And definitely, probably a bit creepy, right?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “I promise I’m not a serial k-i-l-l-e-r.”

  “I can spell, Dad.” Charlie rolled his eyes.

  “I know, I know.”

  “Are we going to do a sleepover, Dad? Can we? Can we watch movies and stay up late and eat popcorn?”

  Emma pulled on my arm. “A sleepover? A real sleepover? Can we? Can we, Sarah? Oh, please? Can we?” Emma bounced so much in the seat, my body started to sway. I pressed my hands into her shoulders to calm her.

  “I know that sounds like fun, Emma, but we really can’t. We don’t want to impose. Plus, we’re not staying long.”

  “Well, if you need a place just to crash for the night or something, you’re welcome to. Charlie’s summer vacation lasts forever, because they don’t go back until September, so you’d actually be doing us a favor. Only-child syndrome and all.”

  Emma looked like she was about to burst. Which would be riskier? Staying in a public hotel with a paper trail, hotel staff, and elevators, or a private house? Wasn’t this the kind of anonymity we’d been looking for?

  Ryan waved at the waitress for the check and sat back. There was so much at stake here. I closed my eyes, took a breath, and rolled the dice. “Okay, for one night only. And then we get a hotel. I mean it, Emma.” Emma and Charlie began to shift in their seats and talk about what movies they wanted to watch.

  “I promise I’ll behave,” Ryan said with a wink.

  “That’s not what I’m worried about. I just don’t want to impose.”

  “It’s no sweat,” he said, chatting with the waitress as she brought our bill. He paid before I could protest and scribbled his address on the back of the receipt. “Do you think you can find that? Or do you just want to follow us?”

  “We’ll just follow you guys if that works.”

  “That works.”

  We all stood and walked toward the exit. Emma and Charlie were laughing about something. We pushed through the double doors and into the crisp, loud night.

  “We’re over there,” Ryan said, pointing to the left.

  “And we’re over there.” I pointed right.

  “Cool. Do you want to circle around the block and pull behind us?”

  “Sure.”

  “So we’ll see you shortly if you don’t decide to d-i-t-c-h us?”

  “Dad! Again, with the spelling!”

  “Yes.” I laughed and tucked Emma’s hand, now gummy from ketchup, into mine. “We’ll see you shortly.”

  “Promise?” Charlie looked up at me, adjusting his hat.

  “Yes, I promise.”

  “I promise too!” Emma added.

  “See you soon,” Ryan said.

  * * *

  Charlie and Emma splashed in the baby pool. They’d made fast friends over the last twenty-four hours. It was amazing to watch her with another kid, the way they talked, played, and joked, their own private language. She never talked about friends at home, or people that she missed. I was glad to give her this, even if it was temporary.

  I hated lying to Ryan, but I didn’t have a choice. Every nerve ending sizzled on high alert. I had to watch everything I said or did—keeping myself primed to make a quick exit or to cover up something Emma said.

  “Amazing weather, isn’t it?”

  Ryan was stretched on one of his lawn chairs in the backyard.

  “It is. It’s also amazing you have a backyard in Chicago.”

  “It was a prerequisite with this one,” he said. “He gets tired of parks. And frankly, so do I.”

  “Yeah, I guess you can’t lose him here, huh?” It was supposed to be a joke, but it came out flat and hard.

  “Seriously, don’t beat yourself up about that. It’s fine. It happens all the time. You’re definitely not the first person to lose sight of a child in a massive park. I once lost Charlie in a parking garage. And a pet store. And at the Water Tower.”

  “Well, I’d never forgive myself if something happened.”

  He waved his hand, a dismissal. “I just think it’s amazing that you’re taking her on such a big trip. Your sister must really trust you.”

  I swallowed and wished I had something to do with my hands. “I really love Emma.”

  “I can tell.” He sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. “How crazy is this?”

  “What?”

  “You? Me? This? Here? This kind of stuff doesn’t happen, except in cheesy movies and romance novels.”

  “You read romance novels?”

  He pressed a hand to his heart. “Fabio is my all-time-favorite book-cover model.”

  “I see. Well, on that note, we should really be going,” I joked.

  We laughed and then settled into comfortable silence. “It is definitely an odd way to meet someone, though.” It came out more flirtatiously than I meant it to. “I mean, not romantically meet someone … maybe you were just supposed to help find Emma. And buy us dinner. And then let us stay here for free.”

  He leaned over and squeezed my knee. “Calm down. I know what you mean.”

  My phone began to ring, and I dug it from my bag at my feet. It was my father. “Oh crap. This is my dad. Do you mind if I take this?”

  “By all means. I’ll keep an eye on these two troublemakers.”

  Emma looked at Ryan, her ears primed. “I’m not a troublemaker!”

  “You’re not?”

  “Hello?” I turned my back and stuck a finger in my ear to hear better. “Dad?”

  “Sarah, why haven’t you called me back?”

  “I’ve … I had a bit of an emergency. It’s fine now. Sorry. I was going to call you. Is everything okay?” The fact that my mother could be dead and I hadn’t bothered to call my dad told me more than I wanted to know about myself.

  “Yes, everything is better than okay. Are you ready for this? You should sit down. Are you sitting down?”

  “Jesus, Dad. Out with it, please.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m just so—anyway. Gosh, listen to me! I’m like a babbling schoolboy! Ah, wow. It feels good. It does.”

  “What does, Dad? What are you talking about?”

  “She called, Sarah.” He was breathless. It sounded like the phone was smashed against his lips, the way I used to do when talking to my boyfriends after bedtime. “She made actual contact.”

  I took a few steps toward the three-flat patio door. “What do you mean she made contact? What does that mean? Is she in a spaceship?” />
  “She … she just called, Sarah. Out of the blue. Can you believe it?” He was whispering like he’d won the lottery and didn’t want a single person to know. “I mean, just … after all this time … and … and everything. I don’t even know how she got my—”

  “Dad, Dad, slow down. Take a breath.” What I really needed was a breath. I needed to process the words he was saying as much as he did. I did the quick mental calculation—it had been twenty-five years since she’d walked out. Twenty-five years! I’d never received a single birthday card, phone call, or surprise visit, not even a lame Facebook request as an adult. Even though I was relieved when she left, that small part of me still hoped she’d at least recognize the important days of my life: birthdays, holidays, graduations, a potential engagement, a possible wedding, maybe grandchildren someday.

  The protective hold on my father blossomed. Already, he sounded like a different person. I hadn’t heard him with this much energy since before she’d left. He wouldn’t survive a second heartbreak. He just wouldn’t. “Just start from the beginning, please.”

  “She—where are you, Sarah? It sounds like you’re in the middle of a vacuum.”

  I moved farther away from the pool, motioning to Ryan that I was going inside. He gave me a thumb’s up—he would watch both children with hawk eyes—and then I was in his bedroom, which happened to be the first room off the kitchen. I was startled by the intimacy of it, the dark blue duvet (why did single men always choose dark blue linens?), the books on the nightstand, the clothes laid in a lazy little pile by the door. “Sorry. I’m with a friend. Is this better?” I sat on the edge of the mattress. It was one of those memory foam mattresses, and my legs sunk in until my whole body relaxed into a warm puddle, and all I wanted to do was sleep for a year.

  “Yes, better. So, I was doing my usual Sunday routine: get up, make coffee, read the paper, what have you, when the telephone rang. Didn’t I tell you there was a reason all these years that I didn’t get rid of the landline? Didn’t I insist that one day she could call—”

  “Yes, Dad. Continue, please.”

  “Okay. So I get up to answer the phone, and I say, ‘Hello?’ and I hear this raspy breath, and that’s when I know—I know, Sarah—that it’s her, that she’s come back to me.”

  “Dad, slow down. No one is coming back—”

  “And then she says, ‘Roger?’ And that voice sounded like an angel, and I almost started crying right then and there. But I didn’t. I didn’t, Sarah. I just kept my voice steady, and I said, ‘Elaine? Is that you?’ And she started laughing—remember that laugh? God, it was one for the books—and then she asked if I was expecting someone else. She still has her sense of humor, I’ll give her that.”

  My stomach churned at his gullible enthusiasm. This was the woman who’d left us, the woman who’d made us walk on eggshells twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But all of that was forgotten with a laugh and a hello? It made me nauseous. “So, then what?”

  “Well, we talked for an hour.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  I peeked my head back out to the baby pool. Emma was splashing with Charlie, while Ryan talked animatedly to them. “And did you find out where the hell she’s been for the better part of our lives?”

  “I … well, no. I didn’t ask.”

  “Wait, you’re kidding, right? You didn’t even ask where she’s been? You just let her off the hook like that, like she didn’t do the worst thing a mother could ever do?”

  He fumbled with something in the background. The more nervous my dad got, the clumsier he became. I used to think it was an endearing trait; right now, much like the rest of him, I found it pathetic.

  “Well, I know she lives in Boulder.”

  “Of course she does. Not Hollywood, right? She’s not some famous actress now?”

  “That’s not nice, Sarah. You know how cutthroat Hollywood is.”

  “No, I don’t, actually. I know how cutthroat my own childhood was, though,” I hissed. “Do you remember that at all, or has all of that been erased because she finally decided to pick up a damn phone after twenty-five years?”

  “You were always so hard on her, Sarah. Just try to understand. And she … she asked about you. She wants to see you.”

  I pulled the phone away from my ear as though he’d screamed at the top of his lungs. I tried to settle down, to remember this wasn’t my father’s fault; it was hers. I could hear him calling my name. “I’m here.”

  “Did you hear what I just said? She wants to see you.”

  “Why? Why now? What does she want?”

  “Why would you think she automatically wants something, Sarah? She wants to see her own daughter. I think that’s reason enough.”

  “Gee, Dad, I don’t know. Maybe because I run a very successful business and she wants money? Why else would a woman who abandoned us suddenly come back into our lives? Did she say she wanted to see you?”

  His breath was heavy and slow. “Well, no. Not exactly. She—”

  “Don’t you dare defend that woman to me. Just don’t. I have to go now.”

  I hung up, my fingers shaking as I struggled to calm down. This was ludicrous. Twenty-five years, and now she wanted to see me? That was an entire adult life. That was an irreparable amount of time. That was a first-degree-murder prison sentence! The irony that I’d lied about going to find her and now she wanted to find me was just too rich.

  I stepped back outside and tipped my face to the sun.

  “Everything okay?” Ryan asked.

  I studied him. He was the exact opposite of Ethan, but suddenly, I just wanted to fold myself in someone’s arms and have them tell me it was all going to be okay. I wanted to stop running.

  “That was my father. My mother called him out of the blue.”

  “Are they divorced?”

  Emma and Charlie were playing with Transformers. Every time Charlie would splash one into the water, Emma would bring hers up.

  “What?” I looked at him and shook my head. “Oh no. She walked out when I was eight years old. Haven’t heard a peep from her in twenty-five years.”

  I waited for the obligatory I’m so sorry, that must have been rough to come. “So you’re thirty-three. Practically ancient.”

  I looked at him and laughed. “Really? That’s what you just got from what I said?”

  “Hey, at least I can do quick addition, right? And P.S. Your mom sounds like a certified narcissist. Or a bitch. Want a drink?”

  Emma jerked her head to Charlie at the word bitch, and then she darted her eyes my way. “He said—”

  “It’s fine, Emma. He didn’t mean to.”

  I smiled at Ryan—the first genuine smile I’d given another male since Ethan. “Yes, she is. And yes, I would love a drink. Thank you.”

  I relaxed into the lawn chair, gazing at his small patch of earth in this urban metropolis. I closed my eyes and soaked in the children’s sweet voices. They were talking about whose Transformer could do more tricks.

  My mother wanted to see me.

  Those words should have no impact, except they did. Ethan had always tried to get me to hunt her down, but I never had any interest. I’d never googled her or tried to look her up, not even once. She wasn’t in my life, and it had been better because of it.

  I watched Emma. Was this why I had taken her? To save her from a horrible relationship with her own mother because I couldn’t save myself? Surely I wasn’t that messed up from childhood, yet any therapist would identify the parallels. The similarities were there: absent mothers, verbal, physical, and emotional abuse.…

  Ryan returned with a whiskey on the rocks, and I thanked him. He sat in the lawn chair and reached his glass out to clink mine.

  “To complicated relationships,” he said. I looked at his twinkling blue eyes, his straight, white teeth, and the small tuft of black hair sprouting from his open T-shirt in a single, wavy line. He was sturdy and dark, and there was something
so neat, handsome, and dependable about him. He seemed like the kind of person who would understand anything, but I still couldn’t tell him the truth.

  Instead, I raised my glass and touched his with mine. “To complicated relationships.” We both drank, our ice cubes clattering against our teeth, as we watched the kids. Is this what normal life could feel like? How easy it could all be?

  Emma turned to me. “Can we stay here again, Sarah? Please? Just one more night?”

  “What did I say yesterday? Just one day, remember?” I looked at Ryan, ready to apologize, but he shrugged.

  “Why don’t you guys stay another night? Charlie and I can show you the sights, isn’t that right, buddy?”

  Charlie nodded, and Emma nodded with him.

  “We don’t want to impose any more than we already have. We have to get back on the road soon.”

  “So get on the road soon. But stay for tonight. We’d really love the company.” He looked at Charlie. “Right, buddy? Wouldn’t we?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Charlie splashed.

  Ryan turned back to me, regarding me lightly, but there was something else. A small prick of desire began to stir, but I pushed it away. I wanted to say yes. I was so tired of driving—if I never set foot in a car again, I would be happy—and so was Emma. She wanted to play and run free. I was exhausted from driving to senseless locations, worried about getting caught, worried about what Ethan had done, worried about the Montana lead, worried about exposing ourselves to more and more people, worried about getting sick or needing something out of my reach. We were so far from Washington. What if my Tahoe broke down? What if we got into a wreck? What if someone recognized us again?

  I looked at Emma’s eager, innocent face, her legs jumpy and slick in the pool, poised to celebrate if I said yes. “Okay, but only if you are absolutely sure. And thank you. Really.” I bit into an ice cube, feeling the shocking cold crunch against my teeth.

  The kids let out happy shrieks and kept splashing and playing. Ryan and I laughed at their cuteness, finishing our drinks and sitting in happy silence, watching the sky turn from blue to pink to orange to black.