Chanel Bonfire

by Wendy Lawless

  When I got off in Minneapolis, I looked around. I searched for a face I hadn’t seen in ten years but felt sure I would know. Strangers walked by lugging strollers and backpacks as I scanned the crowd. Then I noticed, across from my gate, standing next to a large potted palm tree, a distinguished-looking older man. He had beautiful, wavy white hair and was nattily dressed in a navy blue, pinstripe suit with a maroon paisley tie. His black shoes were shiny and pointy. I started to walk toward him. He had a big Irish face and blue, misty eyes, and he was chewing gum. He looked remarkably like me. He was also wearing makeup and hair spray because he had just been shooting a commercial for Red Baron pizza. I walked over to him; he stood there smiling.

  “Daddy?”

  “Sweetheart! Ha-ha!” He opened his arms wide, laughing.

  I could see the gum dancing around on his molars like a little musical peanut, and I hugged him, breathing in the smells of my dad, which were the same after all this time: Trident spearmint gum, hair spray, and Dunhill cologne. It was a great smell.

  “Let’s go to the bar and have a drink.”

  We bellied up to the bar and I ordered coffee, and he had a perfect manhattan on the rocks with an olive.

  He told me that my stepmother was on a business trip, so we would have the next few days to ourselves. “She sends her love.” He gestured to my hair. “What color is that?”

  I had been dyeing my hair with henna so it was red. I told him that my hair had started turning white when I was around nineteen. I didn’t want to say that I’d often thought that Mother had given me the prematurely gray hair with all her shenanigans. But now I knew it was inherited.

  “It runs in our family. Your grandmother has it and my brother and sisters, too.” He looked down into his drink. “I’m just so happy to see you.” He shook his head and looked up at me with tears in his eyes. I was crying, too. It was weird—like looking into a mirror after not having seen yourself for such a long time. Here we were, father and daughter, lost and found, sitting in an airport bar.

  We went down to baggage claim, where my bag was the only one remaining. Daddy carried it through the parking garage, and we got into his huge, black Buick LeSabre. Classical music played on the radio as we drove through Minneapolis, which I had not seen since my childhood. He drove me past the old house on Humboldt Avenue, where Robbie and I used to live with him in the summers, and around the park where he played tennis while we rode our bikes, and down Mount Curve Avenue with all the elegant mansions, where Robin and I lived briefly after our mother had left him for Pop. We swung past the Guthrie Theater, with its modern concrete-and-glass façade, where we had watched him in Twelfth Night and The Tempest and other plays, and by Seven Pools, where our babysitters used to take us swimming in the summer, and Dayton’s, where Daddy used to take us to buy our summer play clothes.

  Their home was one I had never seen—a lovely, old stone house with lots of windows and a big fireplace across from the front door. It reminded me of a house in a fairy tale, which of course it was in a way. The house was filled with things I didn’t recognize. Every rug, every chair, and every book was new to me, and I was painfully struck by how I had missed so much time with him and that it had gone on without me. The photographs in the house were of my stepmother’s children. They had grown up with my father, I had not. The only pictures of me and my sister were in a clear plastic photo cube, which I picked up off the mantelpiece. I turned the box over in my hand, looking at snapshots of two little blond girls. We were all grown up now.

  Daddy lit the charcoal in the grill out on the back porch. We were having steak and Caesar salad. He told me these were the only two things he knew how to make. He told me that he had learned how to grill steak from my grandfather, my mother’s father, when they lived in Kansas City. Never poke the meat and always let it rest for ten minutes after cooking. He opened a bottle of red wine, and I set the table.

  After dinner, we went to sit on the front porch. It was late and we were both tired from the day.

  “Is there anything you want to ask me?” Daddy said. He lit a thin cigar. It was dark out by now, the only light from a lamp inside the house. The stars had come out, and the air pulsed with the chirruping of many insects.

  “Why didn’t you come to get us?”

  For my whole life there was another life that I had never lived but had always imagined. In my ghost life I had grown up as Wendy Lawless, my father’s daughter in a big house in the Midwest with all my siblings. I lived a normal, almost boring life, never moved, and walked to school carrying a lunch box.

  “Well, your mother made it so difficult when she took you away.” He shook his head, looking down at the ashtray. The cigar smoke smelled heavy and sweet.

  “What do you mean, took us away?”

  “I just didn’t know where you were for the first few years.”

  I was stunned.

  He went on. “I came to New York to tell you and your sister that I was getting married. That really upset your mother.”

  I remembered when he had come to New York to tell us that he was marrying Sarah—that was the un-Christmas, when Mother took all our toys away.

  “After I got back, she wouldn’t let me talk to you girls. Sarah even wrote to your mother trying to smooth things over, but it just made it worse.”

  I remembered Mother’s showing us Sarah’s letter, a card with flowers on it. Mother shook it at us and said, “How dare she speak to me like that!”

  “Then, it all seemed to blow over. I was so relieved. I sent two airplane tickets for you and Robin to come out to the wedding. We drove to Sioux Falls, which was the closest place we could get married, because we each had only one day off.”

  “Then what happened?” I couldn’t believe I was hearing this for the first time at the age of twenty.

  “We waited at the airport. You weren’t on the flight from New York. We waited and you weren’t on the next flight or the next.”

  Of course we never got off the plane in Sioux Falls. While my dad and his bride-to-be and my future stepsiblings waited for us at the airport, we were sailing out of New York harbor on the QE2. Mother had told us he didn’t want us there and we had believed her.

  “Finally, we just drove to the courthouse wondering what had happened to you.”

  The wedding took place as planned without us. After the ceremony, everyone went back to the Holiday Inn and sat around the empty swimming pool. It was May and still chilly there. I imagined my father in a suit, with a boutonniere pinned to his lapel, sitting in a plastic chair holding a drink, staring down at the leaves at the bottom of the drained pool.

  “It was only later that I found out what had happened. She had actually cashed in the tickets and disappeared, taking you girls with her. I hired a private detective, who found out you were in England. When we found that out, my brother, your uncle Billy, started to formulate a plan to come and get you; to essentially kidnap you back and return you to the States.”

  “But you never came.”

  He looked down at his hands, shaking his head. “No, I decided we couldn’t do that. I thought it would be better to wait. I sent birthday cards and Christmas presents.” He looked at me and I shook my head because we never got them.

  “I knew one day you’d come back. And here you are.”

  “Yes.” I smiled at him in the dark, hiding the big hole in my heart.

  I went to bed that night in my father’s house for the first time since I had been a child. I could hear him humming in the hallway, going into his room, and turning on a radio. I dreamed of those summers I used to spend with him—riding my bike, swimming in our little kiddie pool in the backyard, sleeping in a double bed with my sister.

  In the morning, we sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee. He had a box of photographs that we looked through. I didn’t even have a picture of him, and I had seen few baby pictures of myself. There were pictures of me and Robbie with our cousins and grandparents in Canada; one of us, at ages two
and three, bundled up in navy-blue jackets, sitting in a wagon in a driveway somewhere on a fall day; and at the bottom of the box, one from 1192 Park that last Christmas. We are sitting on my father’s lap in an armchair in front of the Christmas tree, dressed in matching red velvet jumpsuits with frilly, white lace collars. We look like sad little candy canes.

  Looking at the photos, I felt adrift. This entire part of my life had been taken away from me by Mother. It was she who had decided it wasn’t important.

  “Why did you marry her?” He must have loved her at some point.

  “Your mother told me she was pregnant, and in those days you got married.”

  “Pregnant with me?”

  “Uh, no.” He told me that after they had got married, my mother claimed to have lost the baby, fishing it out of the toilet and burying the fetus in the backyard. It was the kind of lurid detail that I recognized as her trademark. “You came along a year later.”

  “Are you sorry you married her?”

  “Then I wouldn’t have you girls.” He pointed to the box of photos and said, “I want you to have those.”

  My father drove me to the airport the next day. I will always think of him in an airport; that’s where we said our hellos and good-byes. I kissed him and promised to call soon and to come visit again.

  On the plane ride home, I thought about how I would never get the time I had lost with my father. Those ten years were over. It seemed that everyone had paid a high price for what had happened—except for the person who had caused it all. She had cheated all of us. We’d been kidnapped and never even knew it. We did have a father who loved us, who could have helped us, and Mother had deprived us of our one shot at happiness.

  The taxi drove up the big hill to my house. I paid the driver and carried my suitcase up to the front door. I thought of all the times I had returned home, not knowing what I would find on the other side of the door, my stomach turning over with the key in the lock. I thought of all the times I wished I hadn’t lived here at all. I opened the door and walked into the living room, where my mother sat, leafing through a magazine as if it were just any other day. I put my suitcase down. She looked up. She was actually dressed and wearing makeup. The house looked tidy. I wondered where the hidden camera was. Who was this show for? Me?

  “Oh, hello. This came for you.” She picked up a white envelope from the coffee table in front of her and handed it to me. I wondered if she’d steamed it open. It was from NYU. I opened it. It was an acceptance letter. I had gotten in. I was moving to New York.

  “So, how’s your father?” she asked casually.

  I wasn’t going to answer that question. Might as well cut to the chase. “I want you to know that he told me what you did. Ten years ago, you cashed in the airplane tickets and you took us away—you kidnapped us. And I want you to know that I can never forgive you for that.”

  For the first time, I had successfully set off a bomb in the living room. The silence hung in the air and the smoke cleared as I watched Mother mentally rifle through her bag of tricks, trying to decide how best to proceed. She was like a bad actress trying to remember her lines.

  “He’s lying to you. He just wants to hurt me,” she replied as if it were all ridiculous. “He’s still in love with me,” she said haughtily.

  Always with the “me,” I thought. Was this the best she could do?

  “Why would he lie?”

  “Because I am the only woman he’s ever really loved,” she oozed, as if she were telling me that not just the Tarleton Twins were in love with her, but all the boys at the barbecue.

  “After all this time? He doesn’t have a reason.” I felt calm. “And who could hurt you? You don’t have any feelings.” Careful, I thought.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Wendy. I always did the best I could.” Her hand fluttered up to her throat, where it fiddled with the collar of her blouse. She gazed out the window, stalling for time.

  “Well, I think your best was pretty damn lousy.” This remark put an end to the Scarlett O’Hara routine.

  “Oh, you do, do you? I suppose you think raising two children alone is easy.” She stood up, tossing the magazine on the couch, and drew herself up. I could tell that she thought she’d scare me if I thought she was about to blow me to hell with her fury. But I wasn’t afraid of her anymore. She seemed small to me. Like the pepper shaker on Michael’s kitchen table. I could see now that she was a big phony, hollow inside.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter because I got into film school in New York. That’s where I’m going.” I held up the letter. “And I’m changing my name back to my real name. To Lawless.”

  “Oh, Wendy.” Suddenly she was trembling and tears were running down her cheeks. “I know that I’ve made some mistakes, and I’m sure you hate me now.” Black mascara streams fell from her cheeks, staining her silk blouse. She looked all crumpled, like she’d been stepped on.

  “I don’t hate you, but I can’t forgive you.”

  “I’m sorry if I hurt you and your sister. You girls were my whole life. Everything I did was for you.”

  This was a big fat lie, but it made me feel sorry for her all the same. She lacked the necessary equipment for the job of motherhood, which partly wasn’t her fault. It was just . . . missing, buried somewhere, like the phantom dead baby in the backyard.

  “There isn’t anything else to say. I’m going to go.” I picked up my suitcase and turned toward the door.

  “Of course you are. Everybody leaves.”

  Or gets driven away, I thought.

  “My whole life everybody’s abandoned me: my mother, my father, your father, your stepfather, Robin, and now you.”

  The mountainous waves of self-pity left me unmoved. I reached the door and opened it, clutching my suitcase and the acceptance letter. “Good-bye, Mother,” I said.

  “I’m all alone. With no one, with nothing.”

  “I think you’ll be fine, Mother. The thing about you is, you always land on your feet. Good-bye.” I pushed through the screen door and started across the front lawn. I heard the screen whine and knew she was behind me.

  “That’s it? Just good-bye? See you sometime?”

  I turned. “Yes, I guess so.”

  She opened her arms wide and low. “Can’t I give you a good-bye kiss?”

  I was approximately four yards from the road. “All right, Mother.”

  She walked up to me and embraced me. Many emotions coursed through me at that moment. She was my mother and I still wanted her to love me, wished that she could. In her arms, I felt hatred, fear, pity, guilt. But somehow, in that instant, they canceled each other out and I felt nothing. I gave her a small hug, then I pulled gently away from her and headed for the street.

  She cleared her throat. “Oh, before you leave, there’s just one thing.”

  I stopped and turned to look at her. “What’s that?”

  “The money.” She lit up a cigarette.

  “What money?”

  “My money that you inherit from my father that rightfully belongs to me.”

  Then it hit me. The money was all that she wanted. Her last-minute apology, the tears, the hug—it was just the final gambit. I didn’t matter to her. I was nothing but an extension of her, like an extra arm. I’d sign over my trust fund to her and then I’d finally be free. All I had to do was give her the money, the payoff for her rotten childhood and having been saddled with Robin and me, and soon I’d be so far away and she’d be out of my life. I stood there with my suitcase, watching her puff away while her eyes shriveled into slits. It was at that moment I saw my chance to hurt her as much as she had hurt me. As much as she had hurt everyone.

  “I’m not giving you the money,” I announced.

  She looked at me with an expression of high dudgeon that, of course, I had seen about a million times.

  “But it’s mine. You said you’d sign it over to me when you turned twenty-one,” she spluttered, her voice starting to quaver. For once, I ha
d pulled the rug out from under her.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I said.

  Switching strategies, she followed me. The anger dropped out of her voice, which took on the throb of a movie heroine pleading for her life on the witness stand. “But you promised me. You said you’d give me the money.”

  I turned on the path and regarded her with steely eyes. “I lied. Good-bye, Mother.” I started to walk back down the hill. I could walk into town and get a bus.

  “You monster! I’ll hire a lawyer! That money is mine! You’ll never get away with this!”

  Mother followed me screaming, but I never looked back.

  “Don’t bother trying to come home! Ever!” she fumed. “Go to New York! Go to your father!”

  And I did.

  postscript

  My sister dropped out of college, cashed in what was left of her trust fund, and made an award-winning documentary about pilgrims to Elvis’s home, Graceland. She later moved to New York, waitressed, put herself through Hunter College, managed restaurants, and now works as a freelance writer.

  I dropped out of film school and returned to acting, performing on Broadway, off-Broadway, and in regional theater across the country, including at the Guthrie. I married a screenwriter and live in Los Angeles with our two children.

  My father walked me down the aisle and gave me away on my wedding day. He held both my children in his arms. He passed away at the age of sixty-three, surrounded by his wife, children, and stepchildren.

  My mother was found dead in her apartment in Concord, New Hampshire, by the fire department after she had failed to appear at a chemotherapy appointment. She had been dead for four days. Although she had been diagnosed with colon cancer the year before, she’d instructed those nearest her not to contact me. When I discovered that she had died, her body had been in the morgue unclaimed for over three weeks. She was sixty-seven.

  The police report stated that she had died in bed, watching the History Channel in her nightgown. It was blue.

  acknowledgments