It contained pictures. Pictures of my dad. Of us. Our family.
Seeing his face after all these years hit me square in the chest.
He was so young! How had so much time passed without him? How had we survived the loss of him?
Here he was, laughing in the canoe, his hair black, face young. Maybe when they were dating? The two of them on a hiking trail, both wearing jackets and hats, the foliage brilliant around them.
Dad holding me in the hospital after I was born. I knew, because my mother had written on the back—Bill with Nora, 2 days old.
There were dozens. Some were in frames, and I remembered them sitting on the shelf over the couch in the living room. Some had faded, some were better quality, but all a treasure chest of memories. Lily, about three, sitting on a pony, Dad holding the halter. Daddy and me sitting in his chair, reading a book. The four of us squinting into the sun. Mom and Dad eating cotton candy. When the heck had that happened? Dad flipping burgers on the little round grill we’d had as kids. Lily sitting on his shoulders, reaching out for snowflakes.
The pictures were mostly from our golden years—the first seven or eight years of my life. They tapered off after that.
Why had Mom kept these from us?
When was she supposed to give them to you, Nora? said a voice in my head. You’ve been away from home for half your life.
And so had Lily.
Boomer nudged my head, and I turned. He licked my cheeks—I was crying again, for the second time this day.
The love my father had for us—for all three us—radiated out of these pictures like sunshine.
How could he have borne life without us?
I leaned against my dog’s solid neck and let the tears seep into his fur.
25
I was so lost in memories and sadness, I didn’t hear my mother’s car. I had no idea how long she’d been home when I heard laughter. Boomer whined to see his grandmother, but I held his collar.
Mom wasn’t alone. Was Poe home? No, this was her sleepover with Audrey. Or maybe it was Poe, home to grab some things.
Nope. That definitely wasn’t Poe’s voice. And Mom didn’t laugh very often...at least, not when I was around.
I stood up, my knee crackling. My legs were stiff—I’d been on the closet floor awhile.
I wanted to talk to my mother about this box. About Dad. She had to have some answers. She had to. Maybe that was the point of this dinner, why she’d been so insistent that I come over.
I went to the top of the stairs. Boomer, wrongly thinking it was nap time, went into my old room and climbed onto Poe’s bed.
“All right, I’ll get out of your hair,” came a woman’s voice. “Good luck tonight.”
“Yeah, I’ll need it,” answered my mother. “Call you later.”
“You better.” There was another laugh. Donna Krazinski, that’s who it was. I wondered why she’d wish my mother luck.
I went down the stairs, turned into the kitchen, and saw my mother and Donna kissing.
Let me repeat. My mother and Donna were kissing.
“Holy shit,” I said, and they broke apart.
“Aw, damn it,” Mom said. Her neck and face turned bright red.
“Donna,” I said. “How are you?”
She smiled. “Fine, sweethaht. Have a seat. There’s something your mother wants to tell you.”
“Now that you mention it, I think I might know what it is.” The chair was good, though, because my legs were a little wobbly. “There’s a bottle of wine in my bike basket,” I said. “I highly suggest we open it. Right now. I parked in the back.”
Donna went outside.
My mother leaned against the counter, not looking at me, arms across her chest. The clock ticked. In the distance, a crow screamed (not really, but it felt that way).
“Here we go,” Donna said, bustling back in. When we all three had glasses, I chugged mine, then held it up for a refill. Donna obliged.
“To love,” I said.
Mom glanced at Donna, who smiled. “To love,” she echoed. My mother had apparently been struck mute.
“How long have you been together?” I asked.
“Coming up on ten years,” Mom said, causing me to sputter up wine.
I blotted my mouth with a napkin. “And you never said anything because...”
Mom shrugged. “Wasn’t any of your business.”
“I practically have a stepmother. That’s sort of my business.”
She sighed.
“Are you guys out, or is this a secret?”
“We’re mostly out,” Donna said when Mom failed to answer. “I think just about everyone knows.”
“Bob Dobbins doesn’t,” I said.
“Yeah, well, just about every smaht person knows,” Mom said.
“I take offense at that.”
Mom straightened out the napkins, still held in the plastic fruit holder from my youth. “We, uh, cooled things off a little when Poe came. Didn’t want her to feel... I don’t know.”
“Like she wasn’t wanted,” Donna supplied. “She needed to be your mother’s first priority.”
I nodded. “So my mother is gay. Go figure. Well, Mom, you couldn’t have picked anyone nicer than Mrs. Krazinski. Well done.”
Donna beamed and squeezed my shoulder. Mom just blinked. “Is that all you got?” she asked.
“Um...should there be more?”
She thought for a minute. “No.”
“Good. Let’s eat. I’m starving.”
* * *
Dinner lasted longer than our usual seventeen-minute eat-to-survive mode. With Donna here, it was almost like a party.
I could see that they were an established couple (sure, I could see it now). Donna got Mom water without ice, the way she liked it, and Mom got out a container of sour cream for Donna’s baked potato, a pleasantry denied to me my entire life. Love and sour cream. Might make a good song.
Donna’s house was up for rent because they’d been planning to move in together. I asked Mom when she’d realized Donna was the one for her, and Mom blushed and said it was when she’d had to give Donna a ride home in a snowstorm, and they got stuck and had to wait in the car for an hour until Jake Ferriman came to tow them out.
I couldn’t fault her for not telling me. I really couldn’t. “You should tell Poe,” I said.
“Ayuh. Just wanted to tell you first. Been tryin’ like crazy to get you alone.”
Ah. The dinner when I killed Tweety, her readiness to accept my invitation at Jitters today.
“I guess I have to stop fixing you up,” I said.
“Thank the Christ,” she answered and told Donna about meeting Richard today, making Donna laugh till tears flowed down her cheeks.
“You have a good heart, Nora,” she said, squeezing my hand, and suddenly, my eyes overflowed.
“I’m glad you have someone, Mom,” I said into a paper napkin. “I’m really glad.”
But those pictures... God, here I was, thirty-five years old, trying to accept the fact that my parents weren’t going to get back together, even if they’d been apart for twenty-four of those years.
“Donner, I need some time with my daughter,” Mom said, because yes, I was weeping it up good now.
“I’ll see you tomorrow. Thank you for being so wonderful about this, Nora,” she said, bending down to hug me.
“I’m really thrilled. Don’t let these tears fool you. Hey, does Lizzy know?”
“Oh, sure. She’s known since forever.”
Right. Because they were a normal family.
Donna left, and Mom and I cleaned up the kitchen without talking. She made her sludgy coffee, and we sat back down at the kitchen table, where all really important conversations took place.
“Why the tears?” Mom
asked.
I took a deep breath. “I found the pictures of Dad today.”
She nodded, not even bothering to chastise me for rooting around in her closet.
“What happened, Mom? What happened with Daddy?”
“I guess it’s time you knew,” she said, her tone weary. No, not weary.
Sad.
Ever since she first met him, my mother said, Bill Stuart was the most wonderful man she knew. Life of the party. Full of energy. “He could charm the pants off anyone,” she said. “Charmed them right off me, that’s for sure.”
“Skip that part,” I said.
“We were married five years before you came along, and Lily right on your heels,” she said. “Those were five good years. I mean, they weren’t perfect, but they were just fine.” She took a deep breath. “But your father, he had these dark moods once in a while. He’d just sit there and...and do nothing. Wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t get outta the chair, wouldn’t even take a shower. I’d leave a sandwich next to him and go to bed, and the next morning, it’d still be there, him sittin’ like a statue in the chair like he hadn’t even moved.”
I pictured that, how confusing it would be to a pragmatic person like my mother.
“Then he’d just be done,” she continued. “Back to normal, and if I asked what the hell that had been, he’d just say he was having one of his moods. And the flip side of that was he’d get wound up. That’s how I thought of it. He’d be wound up, talkin’ nonstop, laughin’, makin’ me laugh. At first, I thought it was fun—he’d stay up for two days, paintin’ the living room—two days straight, no sleep. Guess I thought he just had a lot of energy.”
“Bipolar disorder,” I said.
“Ayuh. He wouldn’t go see a doctor, though.” She took a deep breath. “Most of the time, he was fantastic, Nora. You remember, don’t you?”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “I do.”
“Having you girls was the best thing evah. God, he loved you! He was good for a long time after you were born. Maybe he was takin’ his medication. He never would tell me. Then when you were about five or six, the moods came back. He quit his job, wanted to write that novel. And I was all right with that, more or less. But then he started all that with you girls, takin’ you with him at all hours, doin’ all sorts of nonsense...” She shook her head.
All that adventuring. The wild bike rides, the swims in the icy ocean, the dares and thrills, the lack of rules and order.
More memories began flooding back in—my father’s grandiose ideas about how successful he would be as an author, how we’d have servants and live in a mansion. The time he took Lily and me to Portland and bought us brand-new clothes until the credit card was denied. Mom took all those clothes back the next day, and Lily and I had cried and cried. Dad would get so annoyed at Mom for not going along with his ideas—tear down the house and build a tree house we could live in, sell the house and move to Africa.
And on those adventures... God. It was a miracle we hadn’t ended up in the hospital or dead.
I remembered the time when we swam out to a little island about half a mile away from Scupper, so small it was just a pile of rocks and a pine tree. I was so tired and cold, my limbs stiff, my head sinking underwater, my little dog paddle not doing much to propel me forward. And there were Lily and Dad on the rocks, yelling at me, irritated that I wasn’t there already. My teeth chattered and my head ached, and suddenly, there was my mother in our little Boston whaler, the engine the best sound I’d ever heard. My father had yelled at her, saying I’d never learn if she kept coddling me, that his daughters were exceptional, that she would ruin us.
Except she hadn’t. She’d saved us.
Well.
She’d saved me.
“Lily has it, too, doesn’t she?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question.
My mother nodded, and her eyes filled with tears. Maybe if I’d seen my sister more than five times in the past fifteen years, I would have known sooner.
“So what happened to make him leave?” My voice was just a whisper now.
Mom tapped her fingernail against her cup, not looking at me. “I gave him an ultimatum. A doctor and medication or a divorce. That was the day he left.” She took a deep breath. “When a few weeks had passed, I tracked him down in Portsmouth. He’d been using our credit cards, taking out new ones, too, so Visa and I found him. I begged him not to do this to you girls, to call you, to get into treatment. But he wouldn’t. He was wound too tight. I couldn’t reach him. He hated me by then.”
A tear dropped on the table. My mother’s tear, something I’d never seen before. “Before you girls came into the world, it was different. We loved each other. But you both loved him so much, thought he was the whole world, and my opinion just didn’t matter anymore. It was always three against one.”
“Oh, Mom,” I whispered. I grabbed us each a napkin so we could wipe our eyes. “Why didn’t you ever tell us?”
She waved her hand. “Maybe I should have. I kept hoping he’d come home. After a year, I figured he wouldn’t, and by then, both you girls were hurtin’ so bad. You were so sad, and Lily was just furious. I was afraid to let you know your father was...mentally ill. I was afraid it’d crush you both. I thought it’d be better if you thought it was about him and me.”
“I didn’t think that. I mean, I did, but I knew if Dad wanted to see us, he would have.”
She nodded. “I admit, Nora, I was outta my league. I should’ve gotten you girls into counseling. I figured the more steady home life was, the better you’d be. You were doing so well in school, and Lily had her friends... I guess I wanted to think you were both all right.”
“I was. I am, Mom. I’m fine.”
“Yes. You are. Your sister, though...” Her voice broke off.
“You can only do what you can do, Mom.”
She nodded and blotted her eyes again.
I got up and refilled her coffee cup, set it down next to her. Boomer, whose sleep had been interrupted by all this human distress, came over and put his head in her lap, and she stroked his ears.
“Do you know if Dad’s still alive?” I asked.
She looked down.
I guess I had my answer. “Was it suicide?”
She shook her head. “Car crash during a hard rain down in Texas somewhere. Tractor trailer crossed over the line and hit him head-on. He was the only one in the car.”
Mr. Gillespie had found him, after all. A car accident in El Paso, Texas, seventeen years ago.
Seventeen years.
My dad. He was really gone, my daddy, and even though it had been so, so long since I’d seen him, the pain was like my heart had just been ripped from my chest.
My father, who had made life so special—and so dangerous—had died all alone.
Oh, Daddy.
I put my head on the table and sobbed.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you,” my mother whispered, stroking the back of my head. “I didn’t want to break your heart all over again.”
Her hand kept petting my head, and Boomer wormed his snout under my arms, unwilling to have his beloved in such distress, and I sputtered with a laugh.
“This dog is very attached to you,” Mom said, and I looked up at her, her mouth wobbling with all those years of secret pain.
The rain that had been flirting with the island all afternoon opened up, and for a few minutes, my mother and I just listened to the ceaseless rush of it.
“Does Lily know she’s bipolar?”
“Oh, ayuh, she does. I got her on medication, but once she got pregnant, she went off it. I don’t think she was real steady after that.”
It wasn’t uncommon. Treated, bipolar disorder could be managed quite well in most cases. Two of my med school professors had talked openly about having it. But for some people, the medication ma
de them feel flat. Gray. The mood swings and mania were the price they paid for a life full of color.
Maybe I could help my sister yet. I was a doctor, after all.
Mom twisted her napkin into a hard little knot. “Do you think Poe’s got the same thing?”
“No,” I said. “I think Poe’s just gone through a long, hard time.”
“I tried to help. I went out every year, sometimes more.”
“You’re a good mother. And a good grandmother, too.”
Mom snorted, then blew her nose. “I don’t know about that,” she said.
“Well, I do.” I reached across the table and gripped her hand, and after a second, she squeezed back, and we just sat there for a minute, looking at each other, our eyes teary, our hands linked.
“You killed Tweety, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Oof. Yes. I’m so sorry. I really didn’t mean to.”
She smiled. “At least he didn’t suffer.”
I didn’t disabuse her of that notion. My mother had been through enough. For a long time, we just held hands and listened to the rain.
26
Sullivan called me Saturday afternoon at two. “You free tonight?” he asked.
“You know,” I said, stroking Boomer’s ears, “you should probably call earlier. I’m a very busy person with many friends and responsibilities.” The truth was, I’d spent yesterday weeping on the couch, the bed and the lounge chair on the deck. Hopefully, I had it out of my system now.
“So you’re free?”
“Yes.”
“Pick you up at eight?”
“Sounds great.”
I’d be glad to see him. Knowing my father was gone was like a stone on my heart. I told myself it didn’t really change anything, except of course, it did.
There was no upside to it. My mind kept saying At least he didn’t suffer and Now you know and This is better than having him out there, still not caring enough about you and Lily, maybe homeless or a junkie.
But the little girl in me was so, so sad.
Sully would be a balm.
At eight o’clock sharp as the sun was a red ball sinking in the clear, pink sky, I heard the sound of a motor. A boat motor. Sure enough, there was a good-looking guy coming toward my dock in a little outboard boat. Boomer wagged his tail.
Now That You Mention It: A Novel Page 33