“You’re not relating to her?”
“I’m not related to her. Biologically. She’s not my mother.”
“Hannah,” Rachel huffed, her voice edging up with exasperation. “What are you talking about?”
“Our blood types aren’t compatible.”
A moment of silence indicated she’d finally realized what Hannah was saying. “That’s obviously wrong. Was it a test? Have them redo it.”
“There have been three tests. It’s not wrong.”
“Hannah . . .”
“She’s not my mom. I know I’m just springing this on you and it’s hard to believe, but she’s not. The doctor kept saying I must have been adopted, but . . .”
“You look just like Dad.” Rachel wasn’t finishing Hannah’s thought. The words snapped out of her. An accusation. A cry.
“I know.”
“If you’re Dad’s daughter, then she has to be your mom. The end.”
“No. No, she doesn’t have to be.”
“Hannah,” she said again, harder this time. Horror and disgust sharpened the edges of Rachel’s voice and asked that age-old question: Hannah, why do you always cause so much trouble?
Because she’d been born trouble, apparently. “What do you want me to say, Rachel? She’s not my mother. It’s not scientifically possible. And Dad is obviously my dad! So what the hell happened?”
“How should I know?”
“You were there!”
“I can’t even believe what you’re saying!” Rachel cried. “How could Mom . . . ? That doesn’t make any sense. She and Dad were married for forty-five years!”
“You must remember something. Arguments, drama, upheaval?”
“No.”
“Do you remember moving to Iowa?”
“No.”
“Do you remember anything about California?”
“I don’t . . .” Rachel blew out a breath. “I don’t know. I remember chickens, I think. Holding the eggs. And playing in a river, maybe? That’s it. I was four.”
“Rachel, what am I supposed to—?”
“There has to be some explanation for this,” Rachel cut in. “Some rare exception. This is absurd.”
“Absurd? It’s fucking horrifying!” Her shout echoed into silence. When she registered the pain in her scalp, she unclenched her fist and shook away the hairs she’d accidently torn free at the roots. “This is my life,” she whispered.
“Listen,” Rachel said in her soothing oldest-sister voice. “This has to be a mistake. Don’t tell anyone else. Don’t freak out. Becky and I will be there the day after tomorrow. We’ll figure it out, okay?”
“Should I call her?”
“No. Not yet. Becky was even younger than I am. She can’t help if I can’t.”
Hannah shook her head. “What am I supposed to do?”
“We’ll figure this out. We will. I promise.”
If she’d said it about anything else, Hannah would have believed her. Rachel kept her promises. And she was so good at taking care of people. Gifted, really.
But there was no neat answer here. No innocent explanation. Her dad had fathered a child with someone else. Her mother had helped cover it up. And there might not be enough of Mom’s memory left in this world to ever find the truth.
CHAPTER 3
Hannah waited patiently for the morning aide to finish his duties. She sat placidly in the armchair with her book, telling herself that the man, Miguel, wasn’t shooting her careful looks. He’d probably always watched her with a bit of caution in his eyes. It was difficult to perform professional work in front of an audience, after all. This had nothing to do with yesterday’s outburst.
But everyone must have heard that she’d caused trouble. Maybe she’d even been accused of attacking her own mother, because the doctor couldn’t reveal private patient information to explain her behavior. She must seem unstable and cruel and awful.
Or maybe they knew all of it. Even medical professionals gossiped, privacy rights be damned. She hoped they did. Hoped they didn’t just think she’d lost her temper and yelled at her disabled mother for no reason.
She shouldn’t have frightened her mom. Of course she shouldn’t have. But anyone might have behaved irrationally after getting that kind of news.
She met the aide’s eyes and smiled reassuringly as he helped Dorothy shuffle from the bed to her chair. “Thank you so much, Miguel,” Hannah said, the words nearly edging into a Southern drawl in her attempt to ooze polite calm. “I’ll help her pick out something to wear in a little while.”
He seemed relieved at the normalness of the conversation and smiled back. “Have a good morning, ma’am,” he called to Dorothy as he left.
Dorothy didn’t respond. Her eyes weren’t clear today. She looked away from Hannah’s gaze.
The impatience inside Hannah was a living, hungry thing, but she couldn’t do anything that might frighten her mother. Even on a good day, she could easily be sent into a state of confused terror. This was not a good day.
So no accusations. No anger. No direct questions. And definitely no grabbing.
Chastising herself for even entertaining the impulse, Hannah steadied her breath. The truth was, she did want to grab her mother. She wanted to grab her and shake her and scream with rage for this betrayal.
Another deep breath. And another. She calmed down a little. Made herself patient.
Her mother’s state today could be a good thing. She might want to deny everything to Hannah, but maybe she’d talk to someone she thought was a stranger. Maybe she’d forget that she’d meant to keep this all secret.
“Hi, Dorothy.”
Her mother’s eyes darted away, but she offered a flash of a polite smile. She might have lost most of her mind, but she still knew her manners.
“Could you tell me about your husband?”
“They’ve stolen his ring,” she responded immediately.
Steeling herself against her own mercenary plan, Hannah smiled. “But I have it right here.” She withdrew her father’s gold band from her pocket and held it out.
“Oh!” her mother cried. “I couldn’t find it!”
“I found it,” she said in the same soothing murmur a TV villain might use. “You can trust me.”
Hannah had no idea how the vagaries of memory loss worked. How could her mother focus on the ring being missing, yet rarely ask where her husband was? Perhaps her husband’s death had been such a blow it was stamped on her brain and couldn’t be blurred by even this disease.
It didn’t matter, she supposed, not if the ring could get Dorothy talking.
She pressed it into the palm of her mother’s shaking hand, and Dorothy tucked her fingers against her heart. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Are you sure it’s his?”
“Your initials are engraved right inside. You two used to live in California, didn’t you?”
Dorothy’s expression flashed from happy to sour in a split second. She pressed her hand tighter to her chest.
“In Big Sur,” Hannah suggested.
“We left.”
“Sure, but you lived there for years, right?”
Dorothy raised her chin and looked away. “No.”
“You had your daughters there. It was your home.”
She turned sullen. “We don’t talk about California.”
Hannah’s heart leapt into a frantic beat. “What? Why don’t you talk about California?”
“Because,” she snapped, “we don’t.”
“But you had a farm there, didn’t you?”
Dorothy curled tighter around her hand, as if she were trying to protect it. “We had a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“Things, things, things.”
“So you had a lot of money?”
“No! We had God. We had God there. He was with us. Always with us.”
God? What did that mean? “Miss Dorothy.” She leaned cl
oser. “I’d like to know about your family. Peter and Rachel and Becky. And Hannah. She was born in California, wasn’t she?”
“We don’t talk about Hannah.”
Hannah’s hands clenched at the rush of fear. Her nails dug into her palms, a bite of physical pain to match her emotions. “Why?” She didn’t get an answer. She wasn’t even expecting one at this point. “Mom, please. Please. I need to know.”
No answer. Dorothy’s body was frozen, guarding that wedding band, shutting Hannah out.
“Who is she?” Hannah pressed. “Who is Hannah? Who’s her mother?”
Dorothy looked up, and for one heartbeat, Hannah thought her mom had heard and would answer. But her watery gaze focused somewhere past Hannah’s shoulder. “He’s here!”
“Who’s here?” She looked back automatically even though she knew the room was empty behind her.
“He’s here to take me to the puzzle room!”
“No one’s here, Mom.”
“He’s here. He brought a puzzle.”
Hannah closed her eyes and felt tears well behind them. Once a hallucination started, it could go on for hours. “Is it Dad?” she asked in the vain hope she could get her mom back on the subject of their family.
“I need to go to the puzzle room.”
Jesus. There was no puzzle room just like there was no man there to collect her. Hannah rubbed a hand over her burning eyes. “Just tell me who my mother is.”
“He’s here. I’m late. I need to get dressed.”
“Jesus Christ, Mom, there’s no one there!”
“Don’t be rude. He gets mad when you’re rude. I need to get to the puzzle room.”
Hannah glanced over her shoulder one more time, then gave an exaggerated nod. “Yes. But first he says he wants to know about Big Sur.”
Dorothy blanched. “Why?”
“He says it’s a puzzle of Big Sur and you have to tell him the right thing to get it.”
“He didn’t say that!”
“I talked to him before I came in the room. He says you need to do the right thing and then you can have the puzzle.”
“W-what?” She looked confused now, her eyes darting from Hannah to that imaginary man behind her.
This was a terrible trick to play. Hannah was a terrible daughter. Oh, hell, she wasn’t a daughter at all.
“What’s the right thing?” Dorothy whispered.
“The right thing is to tell him what happened in Big Sur.”
Dorothy’s gaze slid to the side, and her eyes narrowed. “We left the garden.”
“Which garden?”
“I had to do it, so we left the garden.”
“Mom, do what? What did you do?”
She wouldn’t look at Hannah now, not even for a moment. Her gaze bounced restlessly from object to object. The table, the floor, the window. “I need to go to the puzzle room now. I’m late.”
“Who is Hannah’s mother?”
“I’ve always loved puzzles.”
“I know, Mom, but—”
“I need to go now!” she shouted, lurching forward until she teetered on the edge of her chair. “He’s getting angry!”
Hannah’s rage tried to push out, but she held it down, stuffing it deep into her gut, pressing until it felt tight and hard and nearly secure. “All right,” Hannah ground out. “Let’s pick out some clothes.”
“I don’t want your clothes! I don’t know you!”
“Mom—”
“You’re not my daughter!”
This time the arrow struck. This time it found a soft place and sank deep and true. The thunk of it reverberated through her body. She wasn’t Dorothy’s daughter, which was why Dorothy only recognized Rachel and Becky now.
“I’ll get someone to help you,” Hannah whispered before grabbing her purse and pushing out the door. Halfway down the hall, she spotted Miguel carrying a tray from another room. “She’d like to get dressed, please,” she said past numb lips.
A rumbling filled her head, a quiet roll of vibration that chased her through the security door. It was her world breaking down. And her sanity. And all her love and softness. It was crumbling inside her, and she was a monster now. The selfish, heartless bitch her family had always feared she’d grow into.
The rumbling swelled and swelled until it gave way with a sudden crack.
It wasn’t until Hannah slammed through the front doors of the care center that she realized the sound was only a storm. The gray sky lit up with another bolt of lightning just before rain began to fall in fast, hard drops that hit the ground like bullets. Thunder rolled again, shaking her guts and her brain.
She didn’t bother racing for the car; she just stepped right out into the rain. It was ice-cold and numbing, a counter to the hot anger coiled inside her. The rain plastered her hair to her head and sneaked in rivulets down her shirt. Even after she got into her car, the tiny streams of water kept flowing as she sat there shivering.
She wanted to be back in Chicago. Back in her apartment. In her bed. In her marriage. She wanted to wake up, dry and warm, and realize the past six months had been a bad dream. A nightmare that didn’t make any sense in the morning. Why had she come back to Iowa? And how could Jeff possibly hate her so much? It was nonsense. Jeff didn’t hate anyone. And what utter foolishness to think her sweet, steady mother wasn’t her mother at all.
It was one of those dreams you couldn’t even explain to another person because it made so little sense. It was me, but I wasn’t myself. I lived in my old room in my parents’ home, but my mom wasn’t my mom and I didn’t know who I was.
She sat there, trembling and waiting to wake up. A flash of lightning cracked with such fierce nearness that she jumped and hit her temple on the car window. A smaller, duller crack, but one that would have woken her if she’d been dreaming.
So. This was all real, and she couldn’t wake up from reality no matter how hard she tried.
The chill had settled into her bones, so she started her car and cranked the heat up. Now she was a creepy, wet lady trembling in her car in the rain. Her breath fogged the windows. She was breathing too hard. Nearly hyperventilating.
She turned on her seat heater and tried to get control.
It was only 10:00 a.m. The whole day stretched out in front of her, awful and endless. She couldn’t go back into the center or she’d lose it and scream and yell and be reported for elder abuse. She couldn’t go home and be productive. Just the idea of shifting through meaningless piles of papers nearly broke her.
But maybe they weren’t all meaningless. Maybe there was a secret stash somewhere. A box that held adoption papers or a diary with a scrawled confession of . . . whatever had happened. Her father’s affair. Faking the birth certificate. Or something about “leaving the garden,” whatever the hell that meant.
She could try to do some research. Figure out who lived at that address now and whether they knew anything.
Or she could just do some determined day drinking.
“Yeah,” she murmured into the foggy blank of her windshield. “Day drinking. That feels right.”
She grabbed tissues from her purse and wiped off her side of the windshield. The automatic windshield wipers were already working furiously to try to cut through the steady wash of rain. Another bolt of lightning cracked the sky in two, but Hannah didn’t jump this time. She just pulled out of the parking space and headed for the liquor store for a bottle of her favorite expensive vodka. She needed orange juice too. And maybe a terrible frozen pizza and a pint of good ice cream.
By the time she got home with her vodka and groceries, the impulse to start drinking had passed. Not the desire, certainly. She desperately wanted to not be sober right now. But she could wait until after noon. She might even be able to wait until happy hour.
She set her bag on the salmon-pink Formica of her parents’ kitchen and looked down at the worn spot in the countertop where her dad had set his keys every night. Every single night. Never a change in habit
. Never even an overnight trip with his fishing buddies.
“God, Dad,” she sighed. “What the hell did you do?”
Touching the spot with two fingers, she could almost smell her father. A hint of grain and sorghum from the feed store, underlaid by the smell of Old Spice and Dial soap.
No, she definitely wouldn’t make it until happy hour. But she could get a little sleuthing done before she retired to the couch with a bottle.
After putting the drinks in the fridge, she maneuvered the frozen pizza box until it fit in the freezer and set the ice cream on top of it. She’d gained five pounds since the move but couldn’t bother caring much about it. She’d stayed slim her whole life, kept her clothing hip but age appropriate, and updated her hairstyle and highlights to match current trends. She’d stayed relevant. Listened to new music. Read the latest books. Maintained a busy social life.
And what did any of that matter? She was no longer a successful businesswoman with a confident style. She was just an aging failure. No marriage, no kids, no home, no job.
No parents.
She had to get something back. Had to pull something from this rubble.
She’d seen shows about people searching for a birth parent. Reunions between strangers who somehow felt a spark of recognition at first sight. Was that what had always been missing from her life? The certainty of belonging? Some animal sense of rightness?
Maybe her birth mother was just like her. Dark haired and dark eyed and dark souled. Maybe she pushed too hard at boundaries and couldn’t settle down and always caused too much trouble.
That made sense, didn’t it? That’s what had happened. Her real mother had slept with a married man. Seduced him, maybe. And when she’d realized she was in trouble, she’d stuck around just long enough to have Hannah. Then she’d rolled out of town again, back to her restless life of wandering. That had been Hannah’s birthright from the beginning.
The story felt like a deep breath filling Hannah’s lungs. A cool rush of relief. The relief lasted only a moment, though, because her father didn’t fit very neatly into that scene.
Peter Smith had been just as steady and sweet as his wife. A bit harder, yes, as men of his generation were. He hadn’t been given to deep conversation or emotional declarations, but he’d taken his girls out for ice cream on summer weekends, kissed their foreheads goodnight, and always been the voice of calm during Hannah’s temperamental teen years. She couldn’t imagine him engaged in a wild affair, even in his youth.
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