In the Cradle Lies

by Olivia Newport

  “Then we’ll fix it,” Patrick said. “I’m working on amends all around. I’m not very good at it. Just ask Seamus and Nana and Big Seamus. But I know it’s time to try.”

  Nolan pushed beans around his plate. “You’re not the only one, Patrick.”

  “I told you, Nolan. I’ve stopped hiding behind blaming you.”

  “But I’ve been keeping this from Jillian her whole life,” Nolan said. “I told myself I wanted to protect her from the hurt of the past, but I was protecting myself. If I told her the truth, I’d have to let her see my own sense of responsibility.”

  “Dad.” Jillian shifted her eyes to his.

  “I know. You’re not a child.”

  She nodded. “I’m a genealogist. Finding the hurt of the past, along with the joy, is kind of my thing. And healing it in family mediation is yours.”

  “You are not wrong.” Nolan’s voice seized. “I tell people all the time it’s never too late to understand the truth better, even if it doesn’t change the circumstances.”

  “Wow.” Patrick leaned back in his chair. “Where did you learn that?”

  Nolan met his brother’s eyes, the third pair of green orbs in the room. “Bella used to say it when I felt stuck.”

  “Someday I want you to tell me all about your wife,” Patrick said. “I’ll bring Grace. You can tell us both.”

  “Paddy would have liked that.”

  “I’m going to hold you to it,” Jillian said.

  Patrick shifted in his chair. “Speaking of grandfathers, I can’t stick around to help, but the two of you have to straighten out your friend Tucker. He didn’t say vile things to his grandfather like I did, but something happened at the end to ruin their relationship just the same, and you can’t let him leave it like that. It’ll eat him up like it did me—and you, Nolan.”

  Nolan nodded. “You’re right. Something spoiled it at the end. Something about their last conversation—and then the letter he mentioned and that envelope he’s afraid to open. But he loved his grandfather. Maybe there’s still time to help him understand the truth better even if it doesn’t change the circumstances.”

  Patrick slapped the table. “There you go.”

  Beside his plate, Nolan’s phone vibrated with a text. “Speaking of Tucker, he wants to bring Laurie Beth and come over.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Maple Turn, Missouri, 2018

  How is she doing?” Matthew caught the eye of Sheila, the caregiver he knew would give him the most truthful report.

  “The music therapist was here this morning for the group time,” Sheila said. “She seemed to really like that. She always does.”

  “Does she still sing along?”

  “Better than most in the group. Especially the old hymns.”

  “Is she eating?”

  Sheila half-smiled. “Meat and dessert.”

  Matthew nodded. It had been that way for years. For someone who had pestered him about his eating habits for so many years, Jane would no longer abide eating anything she wasn’t truly interested in.

  He’d kept her at home as long as he could, even hiring a rotating crew of home health workers when he couldn’t manage everything on his own. If Jane started to fall, he wouldn’t be able to stop her. More likely they would both fall. He could hardly turn his back long enough to fix her a simple microwave meal before she would be into something that could be harmful. There weren’t enough high shelves in the house to put everything out of reach, and Jane would just climb for them anyway. Debra had said she would quit her job, move home, and look after both of them, but Matthew refused the offer. Debra didn’t know what she would be getting into. That was two years ago, and it was the right decision. Jane’s dementia was so advanced even then that she barely noticed that Matthew moved her into a care facility where there were people to look after her around the clock and it was impossible for her to get out of the building and wander the neighborhood in her nightgown and slippers, oblivious to traffic.

  Matthew was eighty-six now but still had a driver’s license, which he used primarily to go see Jane.

  “Where is she now?” he asked Sheila.

  “Try as we might, we can’t keep her out here in the afternoons anymore. It’s not good enough to doze off in the chair like she used to. She insists on lying down.”

  “She always hated napping.”

  “The disease changes everything.”

  “In her room then.”

  Sheila nodded.

  Matthew traipsed down the hall and let himself into Jane’s room, grateful that she was there rather than in one of the public areas. If tears broke out of him, he’d rather be in the room.

  He had spilled tears often enough for what had become of Jane. Those tears he could spill with his children or Tucker or many friends who knew and loved her.

  But these tears—these were for the words he had never spoken to her, the truth he had never told to the one person who mattered most.

  Now she would never understand.

  And now it was too late for him as well. Too late for truth. Too late for apologies.

  Matthew pulled a chair up to her bedside and picked up Jane’s hand. She didn’t stir. He stroked her hand and then her cheek. She gave no sign of response but only kept breathing deeply and rhythmically.

  “Jane, sweetheart,” Matthew said, “I’m here.”

  Only breathing.

  Most days she woke for him, even if she didn’t recognize him. Some days it was better if he saw her in the common areas so she didn’t wonder why there was a man in her room, or some days she might look at him with a prolonged expression while she tried to sort out how she knew him. She might pretend that she remembered him. He might remind her.

  “I’m Matthew, your husband.”

  “I knew that.”

  But she didn’t.

  He could tell her now, but she would never keep facts straight from fiction, and there was no predicting what she might say to someone, what isolated bit of conversation she would remember and repeat. That would set off a storm if the wrong person decided there was fact mixed in with what sounded like outrageous fiction. The days of trusted confidence were past.

  Two to four months, six at the outside, the doctors told him about his own condition. He didn’t have much time. Pancreatic cancer. Not likely a treatable form, and definitely not a treatable location.

  Why would he tell her now when he had spared her for more than sixty years? She could not absolve him of anything. She could not redeem any of the stolen lives. Speaking aloud the hideous words to this tender soul would change nothing. If anything, Jane had redeemed him a long time ago with her faith in a good God and resilience to have a good future after her own loss. And they did have a good future. Wasn’t that what mattered? He stopped Judd, and they had a good future. Alyce did too—better than if Matthew had left town and let Judd continue.

  After Alyce died—not until she was ninety-eight—Matthew unsealed his envelope, which had come to him yellowed and brittle from the hands of an entirely different generation at the law firm where Judd had first left it. At least Judd had told the truth about leaving the envelope. Matthew had his information, scant as it was. But it had not come to him until he was seventy years old, and by then he had let it be.

  He couldn’t quite imagine saying to Jane and his grown children and their children, “I just found out I was adopted.” That wasn’t true.

  Neither could he say, “I promised to keep my adoption a secret for the last forty-five years because of a hideous family secret you will all wish you didn’t know.”

  No. He’d let it be.

  But the room. The way it shredded him. Gnawed at him all the more once Alyce was gone and there was nothing to protect her from. The more hideous secret was that he’d lived another sixteen years and never done anything with it or the information it contained. He’d had his good future, but what about all those other people whose love and futures were stolen? The impossible scale
of redemption, of putting everything right, snuck up on him like scattered moments of grief all his life and made him understand his mother’s decision simply not to know all those years ago.

  The problem with a secret is that the truth of it did not die with the last person who knew it. And as long as that room, with the old files, still stood, the secret lived. As long as anyone who lived anywhere in the country had a whisper of memory of any of those children, the secret lived. The evil lived. The lies lived. The empty cradles lived.

  Jane was not going to wake up this afternoon. Matthew kissed her forehead and drove home. He found a padded manila envelope, set out three smaller envelopes, and arranged three keys. Then he began to write.

  Dear Tucker…

  CHAPTER THIRTY–ONE

  I wish you didn’t have to go.” Jillian kissed her uncle’s cheek at the front door.

  “Next time I want to hear all about your work.” Patrick squeezed her hand. “From what Seamus and Gwen say, it sounds fascinating.”

  “Next time. I like the sound of that.” Patrick had never said those words to her before in her twenty-eight years. No one ever knew when—or if—he’d ever be present at a family event. “And if you don’t bring Grace and Brinlee, I shall storm the gates of Seattle.”

  Patrick laughed. “And I like the sound of that. But I know they’d both love to come for a good long visit with everyone here, and I owe it to them. I’ve still got some explaining to do to Brinlee, but I’ll work on that.”

  As her father clasped his arms around his brother, something Jillian had never witnessed before, he squeezed his eyes closed. Tears leaked out the corner crevices nevertheless, and Jillian’s chest clenched. She sniffed back the sudden drip in her nose.

  “Give me a good report to Big Seamus,” Nolan said.

  “Ma is the one who matters most,” Patrick said. “You know that.”

  Jillian laughed. “All the cousins know Nana is the one!”

  A timer went off on Patrick’s wrist, and he tapped his watch. “I had to set an alarm. I knew we would stand here and get stuck at this part.”

  “Get to your meeting,” Nolan said, “but call me later. I promise, no more dodging your calls.”

  “I guess I won’t have to break your kneecaps after all.”

  Jillian and Nolan walked Patrick outside and shivered on the porch as they watched him get in his rental car and pull away. Then Jillian swatted her dad’s shoulder.

  “See? Isn’t this better than declining his calls?”

  “So much!” Nolan said. “In penance, I shall go on snow shoveling duty for the rest of the month.”

  “Right. You watched the forecast last night, didn’t you? Warming trend right around the corner is what I heard.”

  “Might be.” Nolan pivoted back into the house. “We’ve got guests coming.”

  Jillian followed her father. “I predict Laurie Beth is someone who can appreciate a fine latte when one is placed in her hands.”

  “At the very least, she’ll say she does.”

  Jillian stuck out her tongue. “I want to show you something serious—about Tucker.” She ducked into her office for a folder and pulled out a paper to hand Nolan.

  “A vintage retirement press release?” he said.

  “Essentially. Over sixty years ago. It’s Matthew’s father—adoptive father, that is. I got it from a library in St. Louis.”

  “It’s so short.”

  “And to the point, don’t you think?”

  “Terse, even.”

  “Where are the accolades for a man who built a company from the ground up?”

  “I looked up Judd’s death record,” Jillian said. “He didn’t die for another twenty years after the date on this release. Why would he suddenly announce retirement and hand his company over to a son who was barely twenty-five when he wasn’t particularly in poor health?”

  “Interesting question indeed.”

  “I don’t think Tucker knows about this.”

  “Seems doubtful. But you’ll have a chance to tell him soon enough.”

  Jillian went into her office for the file she had on the Ryder family, which seemed to grow by the day but raised more questions than it answered. The family tree she’d assembled for Tucker had only one branch she could trust—his grandmother Jane’s. She knew nothing of the Kintzlers, and news of Matthew’s adoption meant questions about his biological family were unanswered—if he was even asking them. The abrupt retirement of Judd. Jackson’s reference to Alyce’s mental health. The mysterious locked door that nearly ruptured a lifelong friendship. Matthew’s wrestling with truth and family. How much of this did Tucker even know?

  The breakfast mess in the kitchen would have to wait. Jillian would find the largest clean mugs for her caffeinated creations, and they could sit either in the dining room or living room with Tucker and Laurie Beth. She had supplies lined up just in time when the doorbell sounded, and she turned the machines back on while Nolan went to the door.

  Jillian followed him, ready to brightly offer refreshments.

  The pair’s faces reminded Jillian immediately that they could use fortification, but bright was the wrong tone. She hadn’t quite made the emotional shift from elation at resolution between her uncle and father to the complexity of what lay ahead now. Nolan took the guests’ jackets and gestured toward the sofa, and Jillian offered hot beverages, which they seemed grateful for. She’d been right about Laurie Beth’s preference for a latte over black coffee, but it wasn’t the time to gloat.

  In the kitchen, with her machines grinding beans and whirring to steam and froth milk, Jillian didn’t try to hear conversation from the other room. The few bits that wafted in were muted. When Jillian carried in a tray of four generous steaming mugs to distribute, Tucker and Laurie Beth sat on the sofa with strained, exhausted faces but with hands clasped and shoulders leaning in against each other. Whatever familiarity she thought she’d seen between Tucker and Kris faded in comparison. She could easily believe they had been up all night talking, Tucker unburdening himself finally to the person who knew him best, and deciding what to do.

  And now they had presented themselves to Nolan and Jillian for help. Jillian sat on the edge of the ottoman, tucked her folder of papers into the purple chair behind her, and picked up her own latte, ready to listen.

  “It’s hard to know where to start,” Tucker said.

  Laurie Beth reached out a hand to calm his jiggling knee.

  “Take your time,” Nolan said.

  Jillian raised her mug and sipped coffee laced with Irish Cream syrup, letting the warmth sliding down her gullet occupy her mouth and mind and still her tongue while Tucker’s face roiled with uncertainty.

  “He had cancer,” he finally said. “He didn’t tell any of us just how bad it was or what decisions he’d made about not fighting it when the odds were stacked so high against him until there wasn’t much time left. I spent time with him, of course, but he waited until the very end, when we were alone one night to say something. It happened one night when the hospice chaplain came to visit. Looking back, I think he made sure the chaplain was coming. Maybe he even called her. The others stepped out, and he asked me to stay. It was so… calculated… carefully timed, even as sick as he was. Down to the minute.”

  “Maliciously?” Nolan asked.

  Tucker exhaled. “I hope not. But it didn’t feel like love. It undid everything.”

  Laurie Beth reached around and rubbed Tucker’s back. “Tell them what he said. Just the way you told me. That’s why we’re here.”

  Tucker nodded. “He said it was all a lie, everything the family was built on. Any chance of being happy depended on getting out from under the hideous burden of being afraid of the truth.”

  “That’s a strong phrase,” Nolan said.

  “I thought he was delirious or something. I didn’t feel any burden. What was he talking about? He was in pain, and he wouldn’t let them give him morphine until he talked to me, but I thou
ght the disease had gotten to him anyway. Maybe it had moved to his brain. It didn’t make any sense.”

  “And now?” Jillian said.

  “The last thing he said was ‘Find the letter,’” Tucker said. “Then my mom and her brother and sister came back in. He accepted the morphine, and he died the next morning without being fully conscious again. I never got to ask a single question.”

  “But you found the letter,” Nolan said.

  “It wasn’t easy,” Tucker said. “I almost didn’t bother looking at all. I mean, he could have been hallucinating, and I could have been looking for months. Years. For something that might not even exist.”

  “But you weren’t. You found it.” Jillian set her mug on a side table, taking no risk of distraction.

  “Not for several months. The family funeral. The public memorial. All the condolences. Settling the estate. Getting back to work where the whole company was mourning someone they loved. I felt like I had to be a steadying presence. And he didn’t even tell me where to look for the letter. My mother was on her own for so long. She divorced my father for abandonment when I was little. Eventually she heard that he’d died, so at least she knew that much. She ran the company for a while, and she did a good job. Grandpa Matt always said she did. But she met someone and remarried and moved to Europe a couple of years ago. She didn’t stay around long after the funeral and the memorial service. My uncle doesn’t live in the area either. My aunt spends a lot of time looking after my grandmother, who has dementia. It fell to me to go through a lot of my grandfather’s things when I had time. There didn’t seem to be a big rush.”

  “And there it was,” Jillian said.

  “In a box of old puzzles we used to do together, as if he knew I would be the only one who would care about anything in that particular box. I don’t know why he even still had them.”

  “Sounds like he was a sharp tack even at the end.”

  “Like I said. Calculated.” Tucker opened a palm, and Laurie Beth pulled an ordinary white letter envelope from her handbag and handed it to him. “Maybe I should just read it to you.”