Megan's Island

by Willo Davis Roberts

  Ben stood leaning against one of the posts that supported the porch roof. He spoke from over their heads. “There’s somebody coming.”

  At the same moment Wolf leaped up, barking, sending Megan’s heart into her throat. She was halfway to her feet, ready to flee into the house before the car came into the clearing, when Sandy—or should she think of her brother as Andy, Megan wondered in confusion—cried out.

  “It’s Mom!” he said, bounding down the lower steps. “It’s Mom!”

  The car was, indeed, familiar. It jounced over the bumpy spot in the driveway and rolled to a stop.

  Mom looked the same as ever—well, better than when they’d last seen her. She was smiling, waving a hand out the window before she got the door open.

  Grandpa pulled himself up, awkwardly because of the foot that couldn’t bend inside the cast, and stumped after Sandy to meet his daughter. Ben stayed where he was, and so did Megan.

  Her heart was pounding. A part of her was glad that Mom had come, that she was all right and that now she could answer the questions.

  Mostly what she felt, though, she couldn’t have described. Fear and anger and confusion. What possible reason could Mom have to change her name, make her another person from the one she should have been?

  For a few moments Megan wasn’t sure she liked her mother well enough to sit still and talk to her, or listen to her.

  When her mother got out of the car, though, and kissed first Sandy and then Grandpa before she came toward the house, Megan reluctantly rose.

  “Hi, honey. I’m back, I got the job, and I have a lead on an apartment, too. It won’t be vacant until the fifteenth of July, but if you’re having fun here with Grandpa that’ll be soon enough to move anyway, won’t it?”

  She started to reach for Megan to give her a hug, then hesitated. “Is there something wrong?” she asked, sobering.

  “You got here just at the right time,” Grandpa told her. “We sort of reached a crisis point, where I was going to have to explain some things to the kids. I’m darned glad you came; you can have the job yourself.”

  And then, to Megan’s astonishment, he clumped up the steps, past Ben, and into the house. Was Grandpa angry with Mom, too?

  “Crisis?” Karen Collier echoed the word in alarm. “What’s happened?”

  “There’s a detective looking for us,” Sandy said. “From our other grandfather.”

  At the same time, Megan said, “I found my birth certificate.”

  Consternation swept over her mother’s face, and she put out a hand to the rail beside the steps to steady herself, as if her legs might give way beneath her. “Oh, dear.”

  She stared into Megan’s face, not far below her own. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I was going to tell you, I really was, only I couldn’t bring myself to do it yet, not until I knew we had somewhere to go, some way to support ourselves. . . .”

  She rested a hand on Megan’s shoulder, then reached out for Sandy, too. “What’s this about a detective? Tell me what’s happened.”

  Megan found herself unable to speak. She wasn’t sure whether it was relief that her mother had returned; resentment over the troubles her mother had left them with; or the devastating idea that she wasn’t really Megan Collier, that there was no such person as Megan Collier.

  Grandpa came out of the house carrying two steaming cups. “Thought maybe you’d need this,” he said, handing over one of them. “Hold mine, son, while I get a couple of chairs,” he said in an aside to Ben. It was not until both the adults were seated on chairs from the kitchen that anyone spoke again. Then Grandpa said, “All right, Karo. You’d better start from the beginning, and don’t leave anything out this time.”

  She sipped cautiously at the coffee, visibly composing herself, but not being entirely successful. “All right. Only first can I know what the crisis is? What’s this about a detective?”

  “Name’s Jules Picard,” Grandpa said. “Hired by Daniel Kauffman. The man was here yesterday and today. Daniel wants to see his grandchildren.”

  For a few seconds Mrs. Collier closed her eyes. “No.” The word was soft, in fact barely audible, yet it was firm. “No, Dad.”

  Grandpa ignored her response. “This Picard said that Daniel wants you to talk to him, at least. He says he is not threatening you, has no intention of causing any trouble for you or the kids. He only wants to talk to you, to try to persuade you to let him see the kids.”

  “Oh, it’s ‘persuade’ now, is it? Not threaten? Not intimidate?” There was both pain and bitterness in her face and voice.

  “Daniel is past seventy now, Karo,” Grandpa said evenly. “A man can change, can consider different viewpoints, when he’s getting on in years. His son is gone. Megan and Sandy are all he has left.”

  “They’re all I have left, too, except you. I won’t give them up, Dad.”

  “He’s not asking you to. Not anymore. He only wants to see them.”

  Megan had never seen hostility flare in her mother this way, certainly not against Grandpa Davis. “So you’re taking his side this time, are you?”

  “No. I’m not taking any side at all. I’m simply trying to tell you what this Picard wanted you to know, what Daniel Kauffman wants you to know.”

  “I don’t owe a thing to Daniel Kauffman,” Mrs. Collier said, and her head came up in a defiant way.

  “No, I don’t think you do. But maybe you owe something to the kids. Maybe they’ve got a right to see their grandfather before it’s too late.”

  Megan’s stomach was churning, and she couldn’t stop shaking; she felt weak and queasy. Her voice shook, too. “I want to know why you changed me from Margaret to Megan, to somebody that’s just made up, not real at all!”

  The hardness went out of her mother’s face. “I’m sorry, Megan, I never planned anything the way it turned out. I only did what I felt I had to do at the time. It was all for your benefit, and Sandy’s. I wanted to do what would be best for you.”

  There was pleading in the words. Megan wondered if she were supposed to melt at that. All she really felt was a fierce need to know the truth—and a fear of knowing, all at the same time.

  Mom took another drink of the coffee, then set the cup on the porch rail. “Okay,” she said. “It’s time you knew. You’re old enough to make your own decisions on this, maybe. The thing you have to understand is that when it began, you weren’t old enough. You were just babies, and I had to decide for you.”

  Megan waited, unwilling to admit there might be something valid in what her mother had said.

  Her mother sighed, then drew a deep breath. “Your father’s name was Daniel Kauffman, Jr. He was the only son of Daniel Kauffman, Sr., who was a very wealthy man who had great plans for his son. There had been a daughter, too, but she was killed in an accident when she was twelve. That made him even more determined that Danny—that’s what we called your father—should have the best of everything. As his father saw it, anyway.”

  It was obvious that telling this was difficult. While Mrs. Collier spoke, her fingers twisted her skirt, pleating and unpleating it.

  “Danny and I met, and fell in love. We wanted to get married, but his father didn’t want him to marry me. When we did it anyway, your grandfather was furious. He told your father that he would be on his own, that there would be no more Kauffman money to make life comfortable.

  “We said, ‘Okay, we don’t need your money,’ and we meant it. We were happy those first few years, or I thought we were. Poor, but we never went hungry. We were both thrilled when Megan was born. She was such a beautiful baby, with Danny’s red hair. And a little over a year later, we had Sandy, who was beautiful, too. I thought that the life that stretched ahead of us looked wonderful, even if we did sometimes have difficulty keeping up with the bills.”

  She was speaking directly to Megan now, silently begging her to understand. “Then things seemed to get easier. Your father got a promotion at the office where he worked. At least he said he did. He broug
ht home more money, and we bought a house, and a better car. We bought things for you kids, though you were too young to need much besides food and clothes, and we’d always given you those. And then I found out . . .”

  Karo Collier swallowed, and it was impossible not to see that this was increasingly painful for her. “I found out that Danny hadn’t been promoted, after all. He was . . . embezzling from his company, using the money to give us a better standard of living.”

  “Embezzling?” Sandy echoed, incredulous. “You mean stealing?”

  “Yes. Stealing. I found out by accident, and I didn’t want to believe it, but when I faced him with it . . .” She had to swallow again. “He acted as if it were no big deal. He’d been rich, spoiled, all his life. He didn’t see why he should have to give up all those luxuries, why he should have to struggle.”

  Megan felt numb. Her daddy, the beloved daddy of her imagination, had been an embezzler, a thief? She felt as if her world had suddenly tilted sharply, so that she was about to slide off into an abyss. She dug her fingernails into her palms as if to hold on.

  “I pleaded with him to talk to his father, to confess and ask for help in replacing the money he’d taken, before he was caught. He finally did, only Daniel Kauffman, Sr., didn’t see it that way. In effect, what he told Danny was, ‘You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.’ A month later, Danny’s employer discovered the shortage, and Danny lost his job. They couldn’t prove he’d taken the money, so they didn’t bring charges against him, but they fired him.

  “It was frightening. We couldn’t make our house payments, and Danny couldn’t get another job. Not without a reference from his old employer, who wouldn’t give it. So he . . . he held up a bank.”

  Megan felt as if her heart had stopped. Her chest ached, and her breathing almost stopped. Sandy was staring at his mother with horrified eyes.

  “They caught him with the money still on him.” Now Mrs. Collier sounded stolid, controlled. Megan glanced at Grandpa, and saw that he had known about this for a long time, that he felt compassion for what his daughter had gone through. “There was a trial, and he was convicted, and sentenced to prison. Your father had . . . had shot a teller. He only wounded her, so the charge wasn’t . . . as bad as it would otherwise have been, but he’d used a gun to commit a felony. He would be in prison a long time. And I . . .” Suddenly her voice broke. It was several moments before she spoke again.

  “We lived in a small town. Everybody knew about it, and I felt ashamed, disgraced. I had thought I loved Danny, but now I didn’t know anymore. Could I love someone who would shoot an innocent woman in order to rob a bank? I didn’t know. I packed up you kids and moved in with Grandpa and Grandma Davis, in a different town where nobody knew me. That’s when I told the first lie.” Her gaze met Megan’s again. “I let people there think I was a widow. That my husband had died. I got a job to try to support you kids.”

  Was she trying to tell Megan that the first one had been a little white lie? To protect the children, even more than herself? A lie that hurt no one?

  “Then Daniel Kauffman came to visit me. I hadn’t seen him since Megan was born, though he knew about both of you. He said I wouldn’t be able to take care of two kids, and he offered to take you and care for you. I told him no.”

  Megan wished an image of this grandfather would form in her mind. Had he been redheaded, like Daddy? Did he have a kind face, or a stern one? Was his voice gentle, or gruff? From what her mother had said, she didn’t think he had been either kind or gentle.

  “Two days later,” her mother was continuing, “I lost my job. I never knew for sure, but I thought Daniel Kauffman was behind it. Probably all he’d have had to do was tell my boss that my husband was in prison for bank robbery and assault, even though I had nothing to do with that. Anyway, I had to hunt for another job.

  “Maybe the word got around about my true background. At any rate, I couldn’t find another position in that town. At first Daniel Kauffman just kept pestering me, to let him take you kids. Then he filed suit to take you away from me.”

  The words were ugly, chilling. What kind of grandfather was this, who would take young children away from their mother?

  “I had no job. No money for lawyers. I had lost my husband. All I had left was you and Sandy, Megan. Can you understand how I felt? Your grandfather was rich enough to hire half the lawyers in Chicago if he wanted them. He said I couldn’t take adequate care of you kids, and that he only wanted to see that you were well cared for. Until I got on my feet.”

  The bitterness was back, and she didn’t try to conceal it. “The trouble was, with all the tension and anxiety, I got sick. I wasn’t crazy, but I was foolish. I said some wild things in front of other people. Daniel Kauffman tried to have me committed to a mental hospital. The doctors finally said I didn’t belong there, but not until after they’d held me for seventy-two hours’ observation. I was so angry and distraught it’s a miracle they didn’t decide I was having a nervous breakdown.”

  She cast a glance at her father, as if seeking his confirmation. He nodded ever so slightly.

  “Grandpa didn’t have the money for lawyers, either, but he had a friend who managed to get me released, so he could take me home. I was afraid by that time that Daniel would do anything to take my children away from me. I became convinced that he would take you, with his expensive lawyers and his testimony that I was unstable, unfit to care for young children. So I panicked and ran. I packed up your clothes, and put the two of you in my old car, and I ran.”

  Megan stared at her mother, not knowing whether she felt sorrow for her or only bewilderment.

  Her mother had run away, and kept on running, for eight years.

  Her father hadn’t died eight years ago. He had gone to jail for robbing a bank and shooting a teller.

  Megan closed her eyes against the tears that came, and felt them trickle through, then run down her cheeks.

  Chapter Seventeen

  All her whole life, Megan thought, she would remember this hour. She would remember the warmth of the boards of the porch steps, and the chirping of some small bird in a nearby birch, and the sound of Mom’s voice, telling her these impossible things. The things that hurt so much by themselves, and were made worse by the fact that the mother she had always thought so perfect had lied to her.

  She would remember the shine of tears in her mother’s eyes as Karen Collier leaned toward her, as if she wanted to reach out and touch Megan but no longer felt she had a right to do so.

  “Surely you can understand why I didn’t try to explain anything to you at first,” she begged. “You were too little to understand, only babies! And then the time never came when it seemed right to tell you. . . . It’s very hard to say to a child, ‘Your father is a criminal, he’s in jail,’ and what good would it have done? It would only have been hurtful.”

  Did she think it wasn’t hurtful now? Megan wondered dully. What would the other kids think, if they knew? Would they say cruel things and avoid her, as if it were her fault? Would anyone, even Annie, still like her? At the moment, Megan didn’t like herself. She didn’t want to be Megan Collier, or Margaret Anne Kauffman, either.

  Was that how her mother had felt? That she didn’t want to be the wife of a man who had held up a bank and shot someone?

  The thought pricked at her like a sharp sliver, and Megan pushed it aside.

  “Is he still there?” she asked, sounding muffled. “Is Da—my father, is he still in prison?”

  It hurt so terribly, to say the words. Even worse than hearing her mother admit that she had told lies. How could these things be true about the laughing redheaded man who had tossed her into the air and caught her, the man she was almost sure she really remembered, not just imagined?

  Her mother wiped impatiently at the tears that spilled over, with the back of her hand, as if she were a child. “No,” Mrs. Collier said quietly. “He died there, just a few months ago. Not violently, nothing like that. He just got sick a
nd died.”

  So the dreams had ended, once and for all, and Megan could never think of her father again as a loving man who would have been like Annie’s dad, if he’d lived.

  “I thought it was all over, then,” Mrs. Collier said, sighing. “That maybe, somehow, we could stop running. That I could stop watching the papers for his name, being afraid that he’d been paroled, that he’d robbed another bank or something.”

  She glanced at her father. “I don’t know how many times, over the years, I thought Daniel Kauffman was about to catch up with us. For over a year we didn’t even see Grandpa and Grandma Davis, and I wrote to them at a post office box, under an assumed name, to make it harder for anyone to trace us. By the end of that year, they had moved to another town, too, and I thought it was safe for a while. Then I saw a man I thought was watching our house, and I spooked and ran again. Grandpa Davis thought I imagined some of the things that made me think Daniel Kauffman was still looking for us. Maybe I did, I don’t know, but I couldn’t take the chance. This whole last year nothing had happened, and then I read that tiny piece in the paper about your father’s death, and I thought it was all over. I didn’t have to worry anymore.”

  She sipped at her coffee, which must have cooled off by this time. “That lasted until I saw the picture on TV, the picture that still looked like you two, even though it was taken so long ago. And I realized Daniel Kauffman was looking for you again, or still. That Danny’s death didn’t mean it was all over, only that his father would never have his son back, so he wanted his grandchildren. Not that he ever gave up wanting you, I suppose, but now he was going to really try hard to find you. I took it for granted that if he were doing that, he’d use his money and his influence to try to take custody away from me, the same as he tried before.”

  Sandy cleared his throat. “Don’t we have anything to say about what happens? Doesn’t it matter who we want to be with?”

  Mrs. Collier reached out and hugged him. “Of course it does! Only he can offer you so much, and I . . . I haven’t done very well in what I’ve been able to give you, have I? I guess I’ve always been afraid that you’d want to go with him, to that big house and all that money. . . .”