Secrets of a (Somewhat) Sunny Girl

by Karen Booth

  We got thirsty after awhile and went into the kitchen to find some water. We had to open nearly every cabinet to find the glasses, and we were terrified of being found out, like we were tiny thieves in the night. I remember exactly how unsettling it felt like to be in that strange house, brought there by our own mother. It was no less surreal now. But Amy and I had lived it. Of that much I was sure.

  I sucked in a deep breath and set my temple against the train window, letting the force of it knock my head. When would this feeling ever go away? This deeply-seated sense of damage, an open wound that refused to heal. Would it always stay with me? Would I never be free of it? I would've wished for amnesia if Amy and Eamon and Fiona and my dad didn't mean so much to me.

  I reached the stop closest to Amy and Luke's new place and filed off with the other passengers, trudging up the stairs and out into the night air. It was cold tonight and it almost smelled like snow, but it was still early for that. Mother Nature playing tricks, or maybe I was just missing our time back at Dad's, a trip I had been so apprehensive about, but that turned out surprising and wonderful. I would've done anything to go back in time just a few days.

  My walk was only four blocks, but I was freezing by the time I got there. I jabbed at the button for their unit and immediately put my mitten back on. I was buzzed up right away.

  Amy was waiting at the top of the landing, wearing a fuzzy sky blue sweatshirt, leggings, and slippers. She looked like hell, even from a distance. “Thank God you're here. I'm freaking out.”

  I rushed up the stairs and into her arms. She'd been crying. I wanted to cry, but I wasn't there yet. All I could think at that moment was how unfair this was to both of us. We never asked for this. Not a single drop of it. And we couldn't shake it. It was starting to feel like a curse.

  Luke was standing in the doorway to their apartment. “Thanks for coming over, Katherine. Amy has been really upset and I have to admit, I'm a bit out of my depth on this one. I've only known for a few weeks about your mom and everything that happened to you girls.” He stood there like he was looking to us for guidance. “What can I do? Open another bottle of wine?”

  Another bottle? At least that gave me a better sense of my sister's state of coherency.

  Amy shook her head. “It's okay, hon. I just need to talk to Katherine. It'll be okay.” She popped up onto her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “Love you.”

  I swear to God, he gazed right into her eyes in the most romantic, loving way I could've imagined. “I love you, too.” Luke flickered his attention at me then headed down the hall.

  Amy and I settled on the sofa in the living room. The cleansing breaths I'd been taking since first coming up on her building were doing nothing to calm my heart or my head. The letter was sitting right there on the coffee table, like a death sentence or FIN at the end of a French film, and it struck me how impossibly simple this moment was…weeks and months and years of worry about this coming out, and what it would do to my relationship with my sister, and it all came down to a piece of paper stuffed into an envelope. I had to believe that she and I were stronger than whatever was in that letter. We'd weathered so much impossible shit and we always came out on the other side of it, stronger.

  She handed it to me. “I’ve read it fifty times. I understand the words, but it doesn't make any sense. It has to be a sick joke or his brother is trying to get money out of me, but that doesn't make sense either.”

  My hands were shaking as I unfolded it, which was nothing more than cheap printer paper. For a moment, all I saw were marks of black on white, but then it came into focus.

  Dear Amy,

  By the time you receive this letter, I will be gone. I have late stage lung cancer and don't have long to live. I guess all those cigarettes I smoked when I was a teenager finally caught up to me. One thing you learn when you're facing death is that there are certain things you must say before you leave this world. You can't rest until you've said them. I need peace. That is the aim of my letter.

  I want you to know that I loved your mother very much. No, it wasn't right for us to be together, but we couldn't stay apart. We tried many times over the years, but some bonds are simply unbreakable. They won't go away no matter how hard you try. I know I didn't lose as much as you and your sister did on that January day, but I lost the love of my life. She was my one bright spot. I could never marry anyone else. No one could hold a candle to your mom. Losing her left a void that was impossible to fill.

  I don't have much family, Amy. In fact it's just you and my brother, who was instructed to mail this letter to you after my death. You will receive a more formal notification from the attorney about the terms of my will. I didn't have much to leave you, but there's some money, as well as a few of your mother's things. They're not much, just small things she'd left at my house:

  Two lipsticks (one red, one pink)

  One pair small gold hoop earrings

  One bottle of perfume

  The makeup is so old by now. I probably should've thrown it away. But I could never bring myself to do it. She meant that much to me.

  I also saved the letters your mother wrote to me over the years. I don't know if it's appropriate for you to have them, as they contain a lot of romantic sentiments. But they are a piece of her, and I kept them, so I'll leave that decision up to you. You may contact my brother if you would like to have them. He's under instructions to dispose of them if he doesn't hear from you within a year.

  I hope you live a long and happy life. I hope your sister does as well. You girls were the light of your mother's life and she loved you both very much. I hope you know that. I hope you felt it during the years you had with her, because I know first-hand that those years were not enough. She had a very generous heart. That is the thing I will remember about her most. It's impossible to forget.

  I'm sorry we never got to have a traditional relationship. It never felt right to reach out to you after your mother passed away. I didn't want to intrude on the life you had with the family you had left. Your mother and I were never certain whether you are my biological daughter. All I can say is that every time I looked at you, I knew with my heart that you were mine.

  With all my love,

  Gordon Stewart

  Tears ran down my face. It was as bad as I'd imagined, but somehow worse. As sad as my mother's story was, it was now even more tragic. He had adored her. Everything she had said to me that morning about how much she loved him was apparently returned, in equal measure. And had I been nothing more than a clueless kid who didn't get it? Absolutely. Had the feelings between them been stronger than what was between her and my dad?

  How do you even measure the strength of love?

  By seeing how long it lasts? Whether it can survive the tests life throws at it? All these years later, as recently as a few months ago, Gordon Stewart was still walking this earth and loving my mom.

  But what if things had been different? What if we had gone to live with Gordon Stewart? Would she have been happy? What would have happened when the supposed drudgery of routine—school lunches and weeknight dinners and laundry and the same sex every Saturday night—took over? Would she have eventually become unhappy with him? Was there some gene in my mother's line that made hearts want to wander? She might have felt trapped in her marriage, but if she'd gone to be with Gordon, she could've very well been walking into another trap.

  “Well?” Amy asked, with all the impatient agitation a rightfully freaked out person could muster.

  “I don't even know where to start.” It was the truth. There was a lot to unpack. Decades of an unproven secret, of a guess my mother let slip, left lurking in my brain.

  “Do you think it's true? Do you think I'm really his daughter?” She sprang from her end of the couch and started pacing on the other side of the coffee table, flapping her hands and shaking her head. “What if it's really true? My dad isn't who I think he is?”

  “It says that he wasn't certain about it.”

 
“But he left me money. Nothing is more certain than money. Why do that?”

  I shook my head and put the letter back where it belonged—in the damn envelope. “He said he had almost no family.”

  “Almost, Katherine. Almost. If you aren't sure, you just leave it all to your brother. You don't write the letter. You only write what he wrote and talk to a lawyer about putting someone in your will if you're really, really, really fucking sure about it.” Her face was ruddy with frustration all while my heart was sinking to my stomach.

  “I have to tell you something.”

  She froze for a heartbeat or two then turned to me. She was impossibly still, like a cat waiting for the perfect moment to pounce. “Why are you not more freaked out about this? You hated him just as much as I did. Maybe more.”

  As much as I wanted to, I could no longer shrink away from the thing that had been between us all these years. It had to come out. It was no longer my secret to keep. “I don’t really know what to say other than I’m sorry, but I knew about this.”

  “The letter?”

  I shook my head. “No. In fact, when we found his obituary, I thought this was all over, but apparently not. I knew, Amy. I knew that he and Mom suspected this.”

  She didn't blink. There was no realization crossing her face, not the tiniest twitch of a muscle. “You knew? How long have you known?” I got up from the couch and went to hug her, but she recoiled and stepped back. “Don't touch me right now. I need you to just answer the question. How long did you know?”

  “Mom slipped and said something the morning of the accident. When she was packing the suitcases and I was in a panic, trying to figure out what in the hell she was doing. When she told me that we were going to live with him, I blurted out that he wasn't even family. That’s when she said that he might be your family.”

  Her mouth went slack and she wrapped her arms around herself. The look she shot at me was both devastating and devastated, damaging in equal measure, scorching the world we shared, just the two of us. “Luke!” she yelled. “Come here, please. I need you to tell my sister to leave.”

  “What? Amy, no. Come on. Let's talk about this. Please. I never told you because I wasn't sure. What good was it going to do to tell you something that I wasn't even sure was true?”

  Luke rushed into the room. “What's going on? Is everything okay?”

  “Katherine needs to leave. And never come back.”

  “What?” He looked at me, then at her, and back again. “What happened?”

  “She knew about the stuff that was in the letter. She's known for more than twenty fucking years and she never told me. We slept in the same bedroom every night and told each other every deep dark secret and she never fucking told me.” Her voice was falling apart at the seams and my heart was breaking just as fast, but I didn't think it was a good idea to move closer to her, no matter how badly I needed to hug her. She would only push me away. “I should've known that I couldn't trust you when I found out about Eamon. No normal person keeps him a secret.”

  “Amy. Come on. I didn't keep him a total secret. I just didn't tell you the whole thing, and that was out of guilt. I was off having fun in Ireland and you were dealing with Dad. It wasn't right and I felt horrible about it.”

  “Eamon told Luke that he proposed to you and you said no. You don't want to be happy, do you, Katherine? You just want to be miserable and you want everyone else to be miserable, too. That's why you've been such a pain in the ass about our wedding. That's why all of the snide looks at the engagement party and clamming up at the florist.”

  My shoulders dropped in defeat. “I’m helping you the best I can. I don't know what else to say. Most of the time it feels like you don't want my help. I'm not going to force that. And I said no to Eamon because it didn't feel right to get engaged right before your wedding. It didn't feel right to get engaged in that house. It holds too many terrible memories for me.”

  “You have always held that over my head.” She pointed at me and her jaw tightened. “That you had to endure the worst of it from Mom. Well, I'm sick of it. I suffered, too, dammit. It's not my fault you were sick that morning and had to stay home from school.”

  “I feel like I should probably go in the other room,” Luke muttered.

  Amy shot him a look. “No. Stay. I need you here.” She then turned her attention back to me. “I listened to you when we were kids and you said we should tell Dad about what was going on. But I wish we hadn't. Our lives would've been totally different if you'd just shut your mouth, Katherine. Everyone's lives. Our entire family.” Her eyes blazed with something so hurtful I couldn't put a name on it. I only knew that it was designed for me. “Not just my life or yours. Dad's, Mom's. Even Gordon Stewart's life would've been different. Do you have any idea what you stole from me? My childhood. My mother. And even after all of that was gone, you stole the only chance I had to possibly have a relationship with the man who might have been my real dad. He's dead now and I can't get him back, either.” She bent over at the waist and rested her hands on her knees, completely out of breath. “Fuck. You just stood there and let me put his obituary in the fireplace. You didn't say a single thing. I think I'm going to be sick.”

  “We don't know that you're his daughter, Ames. And I'm still your sister. We've always had each other. Nothing will ever change that.”

  She straightened, but her head bobbed back and forth like she was drunk. “No. You're not my sister anymore. I don't see any way I can ever forgive you for this. You lied to me for twenty-two years.”

  “Lying and keeping a hurtful fact from someone are not the same thing.”

  “Don't get technical with me. You were the one person on the planet I felt I could always count on and now I realize that was all bullshit.” She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I can't talk to you anymore. I need you to leave.”

  I slowly picked up my purse from the couch. “I understand. You need time to think.”

  “No. I don't need time to think. You and I are done.”

  “What does that even mean? What about the wedding?”

  “You'll still be my maid of honor. It will be weird if that changes. But I don't want you to be involved in any other way. I'll get Luke's mom or sister to do it. Show up for the shower. And the rehearsal. Please try to keep the sarcasm to a minimum that night if you would. I'm so fucking tired of it. Now if you don't mind, I need you to leave so that I can write a letter to the man who might be my uncle and see if I can get some shred of memories of my mother back.”

  With no other options, I skulked out of the apartment, closing the door behind me. As soon as I made it down the first flight of stairs, I heard Luke.

  “Katherine,” he whispered. “I’ll talk to her. I'll try to find a way to fix this.”

  I knew exactly how horrible I'd been for doubting him for even a minute. “You're the best thing that ever happened to her.” And I was convinced that I was the worst.

  “It'll be okay. We'll figure it out.”

  I drew in a deep breath. Maybe Luke really was that magical. Maybe he could get Amy to see past the secret I kept from her. But it felt so unlikely right now. “Just love her and I'll try to figure out a way to fix the rest of it. I think this is a disaster only I can clean up.”

  He glanced back into their apartment, nodding, before returning his sights to me. “Call me at work.”

  “I will.” I slinked down the stairs and opened the front door to their building. It was snowing. Big, fat silvery flakes floating to earth. It wasn't sticking, except to the patches of ground skirting the trees along the sidewalk. I trudged down the steps and sat on the bottom tread. It was freezing and I didn't care. I didn't even put on my mittens. Part of me wanted the cold to just take me.

  I pulled out my phone and called Eamon.

  “What happened?” he answered.

  “It was bad. Really, really bad. She never wants to speak to me again.”

  “What? No.”


  “What, yes.”

  “She’s in shock. Give her a few days to cool down. You two will patch things up. She loves you. I know that much for sure.”

  I rested my elbows on my knees and looked up at the black sky, letting the snow land on my cheeks and lips. I couldn't feel them melt when they hit my skin. I was already too frozen. “I’m not so sure.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Sitting on the steps outside her building, hoping to become part of an eventual snow bank. Maybe the borough of Brooklyn will just scoop me up in a plow.”

  “Do you need me to call you a car?”

  “Yes, please. Thank you.”

  “I love you, Katherine. It will all work out. I'm positive.”

  “I love you, too,” I said, understanding in that moment exactly how much I needed him.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  In the days following my cataclysmic visit to see Amy, I began subsisting on cheese-flavored crackers and wine. It wasn't like I cared that much about heart disease any more. If that ended up being the reason I croaked, at least I could first slip into a deliciously salty coma.

  Eamon had been busy writing during the day while I was at work. Supposedly. He declined to play a single song for me, not even a few bars, insisting that nothing was ready yet. Frankly, he was being weird about the whole thing, avoiding the topic or getting testy when I brought it up. “You can't force creativity, Katherine,” he'd say. Who was I to debate him?

  After another day of avoiding Miles at work and getting exactly zero phone calls from my sister, I'd settled in on the couch with a fresh red box of crackers, paired with a passable Cabernet. Eamon waltzed into the living room and sat next to me on the couch.

  “I thought you were keeping off the carbs. Your bridesmaid's dress.”