A Mother's Secret

by Janice Kay Johnson

  A sign pointing to the Children’s Zoo caught Daniel’s eye, and he steered them that way. There, they hit pay dirt. The Insect Zoo enthralled Malcolm, offering a goliath tarantula that could get up to ten inches across and which was able to regrow a leg if it lost one. Malcolm loved that idea and started hopping on one leg saying, “See? Look! My leg’s growing and growing and…” Triumphantly he planted it on the ground. “And now I’ve got two legs again!”

  He liked the Giant African millipede, too, which was long enough to give Daniel nightmares. The Children’s Zoo was home to the meerkats and prairie dogs, both of which entranced Malcolm, and he was happily at home in the family farm, where he could roam at will, petting goats, donkeys, pigs and calves. They admired the American Cream draft horse, a huge, dignified creature with patient, kindly eyes. As enamored as he was of earthmoving equipment, Malcolm liked making the acquaintance of the nineteenth-century version.

  He also liked the lunch of hot dog, soda and snow cone, far less nutritious than Mom generally encouraged. By the time they finished eating, he was flagging. Daniel swung him onto his shoulders again and carried him to the car.

  “Did you have fun?” he asked, helping buckle the boy in.

  “Yeah!” Malcolm’s smile dimmed when he added, “But it might have been even more fun if Mom had come. Huh?”

  Yeah. It might have been. But, damn it, the possibility was real that they’d never all go anyplace together again. How were they going to explain it to Malcolm?

  That was Rebecca’s job, Daniel decided grimly. Her choice. She had to justify it to her son.

  Their son.

  Of course Malcolm was asleep long before they reached Half Moon Bay. Rebecca had to let him in when she opened the door to find him carrying a limp, seemingly boneless child.

  “Why don’t you get the booster seat out of my car?” he suggested.

  She gave a choppy nod and let him pass. In the boy’s bedroom, Daniel took off Malcolm’s shoes, then pulled the covers over him. After a moment, he bent down and gave him a kiss that felt no more natural than the first time. And yet, as he backed out of the room, he felt a tenderness and a near-painful twinge he guessed might be love.

  When he returned to the living room, Rebecca had already set the booster seat on the sofa and was waiting by the open front door. She looked so damn beautiful, glossy hair up in a bun, chin high.

  “Did it go all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah. He was especially taken with a tarantula.”

  She shuddered. “Great.”

  “He said Mom didn’t want to go in the Insect Zoo the last time you were there.”

  “He was right. Mom didn’t.” She stared uncompromisingly at him. “Daniel, I’m not going to ask you to stay.”

  His jaw tightened. He walked past her and out onto the porch, taking with him the scent that was only hers. Stopping, not looking at her, he said, “We’d have both enjoyed the day more if you’d been with us.”

  “You two need to have a relationship separate from me,” she said with finality. “Goodbye, Daniel.” She closed the door. The click of the lock might have been in his imagination.

  As he walked to the car, he wondered whether it would hurt this much every time.

  STANDING INSIDE, WELL BACK from the window, Rebecca watched Daniel get in his car, sit there for a minute with his head bent, then finally start it, back out and drive away.

  Dry-eyed, hands pressed to her chest, she wondered whether she could survive this every other weekend, month after month, year after year. Was this what her parents had experienced? Had they tried at first? Been polite? Shared news of the girls’ accomplishments? She didn’t remember, only imagined anguish slowly blinding them to their daughter’s needs. Driving them to find a way to make the other person feel something, even if it was rage.

  Once again, Daniel was gone. I could have had him. I could have said yes, and hidden my hurt, and pretended I didn’t mind the lack of a few words. Knowing she could have had almost everything that mattered made it so much worse.

  For the hundredth time this week, she asked herself if this was really better. “No,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “No.”

  But she, who had tried so hard as a child to bandage the rifts in her family, to make the best of each displacement both for herself and her sister, also knew what it would do to her to pretend that almost was good enough.

  Her hands flew up to cover her face and hot tears dripped from between her fingers.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  NARROW STEPS LED TO the basement, lit only by a single, bare bulb. Daniel rarely came down here. He was claustrophobic enough not to enjoy the dark, windowless space.

  He had piled boxes from his mother’s house in a corner years ago. Out of sight, out of mind. Making decisions about her stuff should have been Adam’s job, of course, but as usual Adam hadn’t been around. Thank God Joe had been.

  Most of the furniture and household goods, they’d divided up or sold. Clothes and costume jewelry, they’d boxed and given to The Salvation Army. Which left quite a bit they hadn’t been able to deal with quickly. Jewelry that might have had sentimental value to her, or was particularly nice. Photographs. They’d stored some decorative pieces that felt like part of their pasts, too—vases, figurines, a moustache cup, a few knickknacks she had cherished from her childhood.

  Daniel had seen to it that outstanding bills were paid. Otherwise paperwork went into cartons, too. He’d meant to go through it all someday; most could probably be tossed or recycled. She had carefully kept tax returns and credit card and bank statements, for example, years worth of them. Letters, too, including a packet written to her during the war by her first husband. It was the letters and personal mementoes that were Daniel’s current focus, but he supposed he might as well be systematic about this and not cherry-pick the few boxes of papers that might be most interesting.

  He made a number of trips up and down, starting with eight boxes. He piled them beside the kitchen table, where he could spread out paperwork and where the lighting was better.

  This was probably an exercise in futility, he thought impatiently. God knows what he expected to find. To the best of his knowledge, she’d never kept a journal, which was what he really wanted: her voice from beyond the grave, explaining every decision she’d ever made. Tax returns were no substitute. But baring her soul for posterity wasn’t Jo Fraser’s way. Chances were, she’d kept her secrets to the end.

  Bank statements didn’t go back long enough to tell him whether she’d received any unexplained payments. Daniel did spot the regular deposits she’d received for child support from Vern. The money wasn’t much, but Vern had never stopped paying it, whatever doubts he’d had.

  Daniel started by shredding the statements, even though the account numbers were no longer valid. He felt better reducing them to a pile of confetti. She had wanted her body cremated, not buried, and she wouldn’t want her private affairs lying visible for anyone to see in a recycling bin somewhere.

  The second box was filled entirely with credit card statements going back to when he was ten years old. Out of curiosity, he dug down and flipped through the early statements.

  She always had been careful with money. It turned out, she’d rarely used credit. Most of these charges were at places like Sears and JC Penney department stores. School clothes or shoes for him, he guessed, bought when she didn’t have the cash. He’d grown like a weed during those years, and his mother had had too much pride to shop at thrift stores. Welfare or even food stamps were out of the question.

  “We just bought those!” he could remember his mother saying too many times as he outgrew yet another pair of jeans. He would stare down to see his ankles in white sweat socks below the hems of the jeans. He went through shoes even faster.

  They always went shopping as soon as she noticed he’d shot up another two inches. He didn’t recall ever being embarrassed by what he wore, and he realized that had mattered to her. Whatever els
e she was, Josephine Fraser was proud.

  Troubled to realize that he’d taken for granted all those new clothes for a growing boy, Daniel wished he’d just once acknowledged the sacrifices she must have made.

  Or did her pride demand that he never know those new clothes were more than just a nuisance?

  He shredded these statements, too, bundle by faded bundle.

  The next box held a quilt that had been on her bed as long as he could remember. It was obviously handmade and old, faded from too many washings. He thought it had been a wedding present when she married William Fraser, but he didn’t know who it was from. He wished he’d paid more attention. Maybe somewhere he’d find a note about it.

  Nestled in the quilt was her jewelry box, which held trinkets that Joe and he had guessed were meaningful to her. Her wedding rings were in here, too. Since he’d already looked through it, Daniel set the jewelry box aside for last.

  He’d intended to give just a couple of hours to this probably fruitless search for some meaning in his mother’s life, then turn on his laptop and do some real work. But once he started, he couldn’t tear himself away.

  No, it was more than that. He has this gnawing sense of urgency. It was as if he had to find something that would…hell, he didn’t know. Free him? Convince him that love, if it existed at all, wasn’t always cruel? That he was capable of committing a lifetime to one woman?

  Whatever it was he sought, he needed it soon. Before Rebecca gave up on him. If she hadn’t already.

  Daniel found loose photos that hadn’t gone into any of the albums. His mother hadn’t been able to afford to have pictures developed very often, so the boys took big jumps in ages, from gap-toothed kindergartners to lanky teenagers in basketball uniforms. There was, he saw now, more familial resemblance between him and Adam than he’d thought existed. Believing as he had that they had different fathers, he’d seen what he expected to see. Looking now at photos of them at the same ages, lying side by side, he couldn’t imagine their mother couldn’t have told they were both Robert Carson’s sons. Their builds, their cheekbones, the way their ears lay against their heads, grins that lifted higher on one side than the other…Yeah, they were brothers, all right, even if one was dark-haired, the other a freckle-faced redhead.

  Josephine Fraser was indeed an extraordinarily lovely woman. She glowed in the wedding photo that had always hung in an oval frame in the living room. A second, studio portrait of her as a young woman, beautiful and dreamy-eyed, had been displayed below it. She never looked as happy again in the few photos they had of her, including the one taken of her and Vern at their wedding over twenty years later. In that picture, she was composed, serene, and yet…detached.

  Rather, Daniel thought, staring at the photo, the way he felt most of the time. Had the ability to hold a big part of himself back been learned from her, a woman who had been deeply wounded when she had loved unreservedly?

  He had memories of happy times, fleeting impressions of tenderness: a kiss, a smile that held such pride his chest had swelled. But they were few. The mother he mostly remembered had been stern, tired, distant.

  She had admitted, during that talk they’d had only six weeks before she died, to having been dismayed to find herself pregnant when she was almost forty years old.

  “I didn’t have the energy I had when your brother was born,” she said. “Or the patience. Everything seemed harder. It didn’t help when things weren’t going well with your father. We fought, and you were there big eyed and scared…” She’d paused, regret in her eyes. “Then later, I went through menopause, and I think I went a little crazy for a few years. If there’s any part of my life I wish I could do over, it’s being your mother. You were such a good child, but you got quieter and quieter and quit turning to me at all.”

  “Being a single mother had to be hard,” he had said stiffly, the closest he had come to offering forgiveness.

  He didn’t remember her ever seeing a doctor during those years. He didn’t suppose she’d gone on hormones to treat the symptoms of menopause. She’d had health insurance through her job, but how adequate it was Daniel didn’t know. Struggling to raise him, she might not have been able to handle co-payments and prescription costs.

  He dropped the photo back in the box and squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t remember ever saying to her, “I love you, Mom,” not even there at the end, when they both knew she was dying. Joe was more her son than he was, he’d figured. Daniel had wanted to believe he didn’t love her, although now he knew better.

  She had let him down in some ways. In others, she’d never failed him. He hadn’t wanted for anything but hugs and her approval. She had gone to parent-teacher meetings, hung his report cards on the refrigerator, made sure he had the basketball shoes he needed. He even remembered a hideous mother-son talk about responsible sex and birth control, about the time he turned fifteen. She had been grim but determined.

  Had any of her three pregnancies been planned? Not the one that resulted in him, for sure. But maybe she had wanted Adam, or at least been careless on purpose. Had she felt so empty after Billy’s death, she needed to have someone to hold on to? Had she truly fallen in love with Billy’s friend Robert yet, or was he just a comfort to her? Did she want a baby she could almost believe in her heart was Billy’s after all?

  The second pregnancy, though. That was something else again.

  Daniel shook his head and opened another box. China figurines, a couple of vases she’d often filled with flowers from her garden. Some of these he repacked, a few he left out to use. He’d ask Joe if he wanted a few more mementos.

  More financial records, none from early enough to tell him whether Carson had ever paid child support. Daniel kept the shredder running, flattened the now-empty cardboard boxes. He went down to the basement for more, and this time the first he opened revealed the letters she’d kept as carefully as she had her financial records.

  She must have been a prolific letter writer. He wished he had her letters, not just the responses to them, but hope quickened in him. If he were to learn any of her secrets, it would be here.

  Batches were bundled with rubber bands or tied with ribbons. On top were letters from a childhood friend. It appeared they’d continued to correspond into their seventies, even though to his knowledge Jo never went back East where she’d grown up, and he doubted her friend had made it all the way out to California, either. He read the last letter written in Mary Culligan’s spidery scrawl first.

  I’m afraid the cancer is winning. I’ve asked to stay at home until the end, and Kate has arranged for hospice care and is here often herself. Truthfully, Jo, I don’t fear death. I feel sure Edgar is waiting for me, and I’m eager to see him again.

  She finished,

  Since I may not be able to write again, I did want, just once, to say how grateful I am for having one person—you—with whom I could always be honest. Why is it easier to confide in a piece of paper and the memory of a young friend than it is to the people you see every day? I don’t know, only that it is so. I pray I will know your face when we meet again.

  Most letters were still in their original envelopes. He flipped through and laid them out by postmark date, the earliest at the top.

  Daniel got up and poured himself a cup of coffee, then reached for Mary’s first letter, written in 1941. He quickly became immersed.

  Jo and Mary had been best friends in high school. Both got married young, Mary to her school sweetheart, Jo to a young soldier who had caught her eye and her heart. Jo came west to live with Billy Fraser’s mother, who apparently was not altogether happy with the marriage, but perhaps came to love her son’s young bride. She died herself of breast cancer before the end of the war; Jo had written him with the news, but didn’t know whether he’d get it before he came home, as he was already in transit.

  Mary sent her condolences when Billy in turn was killed in an automobile accident.

  “How kind his friend is!” she marveled.


  You must feel so alone. Have you considered coming home? Even with your parents gone, you do have old friends here. But perhaps you’ve made so many there, you feel secure.

  She congratulated Jo on her pregnancy, nothing in that letter or later ones suggesting she knew the baby wasn’t Billy Fraser’s. When she wrote about the next pregnancy, however, it was clear she’d been told about Robert.

  Oh, Jo! How can you love a man who is already married? Are you so certain he loves you? And how will you explain this child?

  Explain was underlined three times.

  The next letter was dated six months later.

  My heart is breaking for you. My miscarriage was terrible enough, and I never even held the child. I cannot imagine what it must have cost you to give up your baby. I won’t ask whether you’re certain you did the right thing. You would have thought and thought and thought, without ever considering yourself. As you say, her father can give her so much more. If only you are positive love is part of what he will give her.

  Daniel reached for his coffee, took a sip. It was cold. Already reaching for the next letter, he set the mug down.

  Mary had had another miscarriage. She was beginning to believe she would never bear another child, and worried her husband was disappointed not to have a son.

  Perhaps we both love Kate all the more because we now know how precious she is! I hope your heart is undivided, and you are able to give it all to Adam. Better yet, I wish you would meet a man you could love, someone who would make you forget Robert. He didn’t deserve you.

  No. The son of a bitch hadn’t deserved her. Daniel rubbed burning eyes.

  When had his mother changed from the starry-eyed young woman Mary recalled to the stern, relentlessly frugal, unhappy mother he remembered? Had Billy’s death done it, after she had given herself entirely to a future with him, traveling across the country and leaving behind everything and everyone she knew, enduring his mother’s critical company for the wartime years? Raising Adam alone? Or was it when she gave away her baby girl to what she prayed was a better life?