Casey stood and paced around the room, settling by the window. She leaned against the wall, staring at the picnic table.
“I wanted you to know each other, even if I couldn’t explain why,” Alex said. Rushing now. “How could I have told you? What your father was like, that me and Katherine were so young. I couldn’t even say the word out loud until I was twenty-five. Rape.” She said it clearly, not lowering her voice, so that Casey and I didn’t have to say it first.
She went on more gently. “And the odds that one of you would get sick... But after they isolated the gene, and I read how families were getting tests, I thought, if I could only make sure you were okay, maybe I could tell you someday. When you were old enough. You were both seventeen when I found out I could test you. So I—”
“I told her,” Casey said.
“I thought it was the answer to everything. So clever. I hoped you’d both get lucky.”
She added quickly, touching my knee, “You don’t have the gene, Laura. I got your results two months ago.”
“But my blood spilled, I saw it.”
“Then you needed blood. Now you can use other tissue. Like hair.”
“Mom, what the hell?” Casey whirled from the window to face Alex.
I knew Casey was picturing a covert op, someone dispatched to pluck my hair on Market Street. It wasn’t beyond imagining, after everything else Alex had pulled off.
“Your hairbrush,” Alex said. She closed her eyes in shame, acknowledging the absurdity of what she’d done. “Elle was rooting around in a box of stuff from your drawer and asked who it belonged to. It was in winter, right around when Casey first got symptoms.”
“Jesus,” Casey said.
“And that’s why you invited me now,” I said. “Because you knew I was okay.” And because Casey knew she wasn’t.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Alex said, opening her eyes. “It’s as simple as that. As simple and complicated as that. I always thought you’d come back. I was... I’m sorry, Laura, but I was angry with you, for how you left Casey. I knew she’d need her best friend.”
“I thought...” I said.
Alex looked at me, anxious, desperate.
“I’ll tell you someday what I thought.”
“It was your idea to foster Elle.” Casey jumped in. “You’re not going to say she’s a Collier, too? Some goddamned orphaned Collier?”
“No. She’s just a little girl whose mother was not so different from Katherine. Or me.”
For a few minutes the three of us didn’t speak. Casey paced, and Alex fiddled with the ponytail holder securing the goody bag, looking nervously from me to Casey.
I started to whisper something, then stopped myself.
Casey crossed the room, sat on the floor by my side, and touched my arm. “Laur wants to ask something else but she’s scared.”
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“Anything,” Alex said. “Ask anything.”
“The music box song,” I said softly. “It’s meaningless, then? She didn’t even know what it was?”
Alex took a long time to respond, casting about for a gentle answer. So I knew before she spoke that I was right. “She loved it. Does it matter why?”
I shook my head. Though the tears came, finally. I’d wanted it to be a message from her. I’d wanted that more than anything.
I pulled my knees to my chest and hugged my elbows, resting my forehead on the bridge of my arms, letting the tears go inside this dark, private shelter. Neither of them spoke, but after a minute I felt someone’s warmth on my back, a comforting weight that seemed barely heavier than the red wool blanket, and I knew it was Casey who had draped herself over my shoulders.
* * *
When I raised my head, the room was in shadows and Alex was gone. “Where’s your mom?”
“Waiting downstairs.”
“Well,” I said, wiping my nose, looking up at her. “Some prize.”
I couldn’t say it out loud yet: a sister.
“I like the prize.” Casey smiled, almost shyly, for her, eyes darting around the room before connecting with mine. Then her smile ebbed. “But Daniel. I always imagined...”
“Someone different. Someone good.”
All those years of fantasizing about why my mother had given me up. “Poor Alex. The two of them, they were kids.”
“She’s still a kid,” Casey whispered slowly. She shook her head slightly, disbelieving.
It explained so much. Part of Alex would be forever frozen at thirteen.
Casey tilted her head at the doorway to the hall. “So do we forgive her?”
We could punish Alex for her secrets. Refuse to speak to her. Add more hurt and wasted time to the pile, the tangled result of her good intentions. I knew that Casey wouldn’t have posed the question if she wasn’t going to at least try to forgive Alex. And I knew I would try, too. Alex had done her best in an impossible situation.
“It’s not her fault I left, Case,” I said. “Do you forgive me?”
“I will if you don’t run away again.”
I shook my head. Never. “Casey. I wish—”
A little girl’s laughter floated up through the open window. J.B. was outside entertaining Elle, giving us time.
We rose and walked to the window, but couldn’t see them. Their voices were coming from the front.
Together, we breathed in the night wind side by side, staring out at the swaying dark arms of the tree.
epilogue
September 2016
Coeur-de-Lune
I checked over the dining room table. Teapot, cups, saucers, lemon slices, chicken-tarragon sandwiches, apple-currant salad. Place settings for two: blue-rimmed china I’d bought specially, polished silver, the ecru cloth napkins my mother had embroidered with silver Cs. She’d given them to me for my thirtieth birthday but I’d never used them.
The house was spotless. Even Jett, in her new run by the side of the house, was brushed to black satin.
But I’d almost forgotten the most important thing: the cakes Elle and I had baked yesterday afternoon while Casey was napping.
I pulled the white platter from the fridge, unpeeled the plastic. A dozen golden squares with shiny cobalt crescents of blueberry filling inside. Elle had arranged them with the crescents open to the right.
“So they look like the lake,” she’d said.
There was way too much cake for two people.
Surveying the lunch spread for the hundredth time, I wished I hadn’t overdone it. The dated menu, my mother’s signature cakes, the low September sun bouncing off the good silver: It all looked desperate. Anxiety spread out on a pretty blue tablecloth.
My mother was finally here.
I’d been asking her to visit for weeks. Ever since I rented my place in San Francisco to a twenty-three-year-old tech whiz girl from New York and moved into our old house on the lake with J.B.
My mother knew everything now. I’d told her one afternoon in July, after I’d dropped Casey off at UCSF for her monthly clinic visit. We’d sat on her tiny, sunny balcony and she’d listened quietly while I’d shared Alex’s story. My story.
Then she’d gone into her bedroom, returning half an hour later looking tidy as always, but with a faint rosy shine rimming her eyes and nostrils.
Casey and I decided it was progress, that she hadn’t powdered over the evidence of her tears.
But she’d resisted visiting Coeur-de-Lune. “Too many memories,” she’d said brusquely, the first time I’d asked.
I knew a little about that.
So I’d worked on her, showing her photos of the house every time I’d visited. Pictures of Elle, gangly and laughing in purple shorts, throwing Jett’s tattered tennis ball off the dock. Of the new white paint on the shutters, the pine out back at its most vi
vid jade green.
“It’s such a long drive,” she’d say, though I’d always offer to shuttle her both ways, that she could stay over, or not. Her choice.
“Soon,” she began saying, sometime in August.
And now she was here for the night.
I’d given her a quick tour. She’d walked into each room silently, taking in the new furniture, the new counters in the kitchen and baths. When she’d seen everything, she nodded. “It fits. It’s not trying to look too modern.”
Then she’d disappeared into her room to rest after our long drive.
She’d been in there for almost an hour. I was considering hiding the Blue Moon cakes and serving store-bought oatmeal cookies instead when her door opened. She’d brushed her hair and changed from the pantsuit into a drapey cream blouse and green skirt.
“Isn’t this a nice luncheon?” she said, inspecting the table. Her glance lingered on the cake platter for a long time, her smile not quite covering her surprise.
* * *
She made an effort to show an interest in my new life.
“How is she doing?” she said, meaning Casey.
“She gets tired, but she’s managing. Her doctor even lets her swim if she takes it easy.”
She glanced out the kitchen window at the lake, as if Casey would appear in the water on cue, showing off her slow but still-graceful sidestroke.
“I’ve missed it,” she said, looking at the slash of blue out the window.
That was one thing we’d always had in common. We’d missed our lake.
She asked about Elle, who’d just started fifth grade and was obsessed with tetherball and her birthday party at the skating rink next Saturday.
As we were finishing up our cake she even said, “Your Julian did a marvelous job on the built-ins in the den.”
Your Julian meant J.B.
She didn’t ask about Alex, but I hadn’t dared hope for that. Not yet.
As I was gathering the last of the dishes, congratulating myself on how well everything had gone, how much less awkward our “luncheon” had been than I’d feared, she said, “I have something to tell you.”
The strain in her voice commanded me to sit.
After a long pause she shared a secret she’d been wanting to tell me for weeks, ever since I’d told her about Katherine and Alex.
The summer before she married my father, she had volunteered twice a week at the youth bible camp where my birth mother met Alex and Daniel. It was held on the same woody acres of church property, up by Buck’s Peak, where she’d gone for her women’s retreats when I was a girl.
She stared out across the lake, remembering. “I made felt cutouts with the youngest children. Bitty things. Lambs and crosses. I taught embroidery once or twice. And I drove the older girls to the beach.”
She’d been forty-seven then, living alone in the house she’d grown up in in Coeur-de-Lune, and had long before accepted that she would never marry or have children. So that summer of her engagement to Bill Christie, licensed contractor, confirmed bachelor from Sacramento and fellow odd duck, was one of immense joy. He had worked on her house, replacing the dock with a fine new one, righting the foundation where it had subsided.
She had watched the kids at camp and thought, Maybe. Maybe there was a chance they could still have a child, though they were latecomers to the business of setting up a family.
“We called it a change-of-life baby, back then,” she said. Formal as this expression was, I knew it was excruciatingly intimate for her to share. My mother did not discuss her bodily rhythms or functions; I had never seen her undressed, and when I visited her she slid her green plastic Mind-a-Pill, with its tiny square compartments stamped Su-M-T-W-Th-F-Sa, behind the toaster oven.
She said she’d noticed one girl in particular. A girl with bright red hair.
The girl stuck in her mind because after the church split up—the new, extreme branch splintering off, eventually heading to Idaho, the rest staying behind in California, taking over the camp property—there had been whispers in the congregation about a girl in the Idaho-bound group who ran away. A redhead.
“What about my... Katherine?” I said.
She stiffened at the my.
But I couldn’t help myself. I dashed over to the sideboard in the living room, grabbed the music box that Alex had given to me, and pressed the photo from the lid into her trembling hand.
She blinked rapidly, barely glancing at the small photo.
“You don’t remember her, too?” I said, pointing at the girl with the brown hair. “Think back, someone who looked like this. Like me?”
She shook her head. Certain. Stubborn.
“Wait.” I rushed to the den. Pulled my old “Love is Blue” record from the sleeve and set it on the turntable.
A swirling orchestra, a tune that had fallen out of fashion. Lost to the cold and brutal judgment of time.
Except it wasn’t. Because Casey had kept the album for me, all these years.
I stared down at the 33 album cover in my hands, the woman on the front transformed into a butterfly with body paint. Ashamed that I was hurting my mother, even now, when I’d planned our day so carefully.
The last note rang out before I dared look at her. “Does it mean anything? Did they play it at the camp?”
She shook her head. “I only remember the red-haired girl. When Barbara called us about you being available for adoption, she said your mother had been a sad case, a runaway who overdosed. Just like we told you. She didn’t tell me your mother had been at the camp. But when Alexandra moved to town, I wondered if that redhead had possibly been the same girl. She was the right age. I wondered if...”
“If she wanted me back. You thought I was hers and she wanted me back.”
Scratch-bump. Scratch-bump. The lonely static of the needle on the finished record.
Her head moved a degree, as if to shake away this idea, though her stillness after this barely perceptible gesture told me I was right. “The children did scavenger hunts at the camp, did Alexandra tell you that?” she said.
I nodded.
“On the beach.” She traced the photo’s jagged edges with a fingertip. “It was a game I’d played with my parents. We called it Flotsam and Jetsam. I thought the campers would enjoy it.”
“Alex got the idea from you?”
She shrugged, handed me back the picture.
“I wish I’d known.”
“It was a crazy thought, that she could be your birth mother.”
“But it wasn’t so crazy. Mother? It wasn’t.”
She shifted her eyes back to the lake again, toward the distant brown blur of The Shipwreck’s dock. “The way she looked at you, at that church concert. As if she knew you were performing only for her. And the way you ran to her after! Ran.”
She continued, more softly, “You never believed in God like I did, I know that. And now you’ll say religion was to blame for what happened to those girls. But you worshipped just as blindly, as if she was the only one who could save you from me. And that decrepit old house...” She nodded at the window. “That was your church.”
I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t even breathe.
Because she was right.
How much that must have hurt her, when she’d wanted me so badly. Casey had said—Life’s too short for if-onlys. But if only I’d known.
I could try to explain to my mother that I was a lonely, confused child, that I didn’t feel that way anymore, that no one person could save another—not a minister shouting from a pulpit and not a man playing guitar and not a woman passing out a list of clues.
In the end I simply said, “I’m sorry.”
I clasped my mother’s soft, cool hand and she didn’t pull it away. Not at first.
Scratch-bump. Scratch-bump. I would not be the first to let go
.
“I think I’ll walk down to the water before it’s too dark,” she said, pulling her hand from mine and rising.
“Mother,” I said to her broad back. “I wish...”
She stood, turned to face me.
When I didn’t go on, because the list of things I wish I’d done differently was too endless to voice, she only nodded.
She wished, too.
* * *
So I have more answers now.
But I’ll never know why Katherine left me the music box. The driftwood was the beginning of so much sadness for her, and the song might have been any song.
It was foolish to think it held a message for me, that I could ever understand it the way I do the objects Casey keeps on her nightstand: five blurry Polaroids, a blue tile, a cheap toy mermaid, a leaf, a napkin, a postcard.
Others would see it as junk, just household flotsam, but we know it’s not, and it makes us smile.
The music box will always be part of the lake, and that seems right. It’s lying there, keeping its secrets under the blue-black water.
California
1968
“This,” Katherine says, one chubby finger punching the album cover. “Mama. This.”
“What, Kathy? You want to hear the song?”
Her mother slips the record out and plays the song.
Katherine shakes her head. “This.”
Finally, her mother realizes. The song is pretty, but it’s not what her daughter wants.
They paint their faces like the lady in the picture.
Katherine is two, her small hand is clumsy. But she concentrates, trying her best to make orange-and-black wings on her mother’s cheeks.
Her mother does a better job on Kathy’s face, tickling her with the cold paintbrush.
They smile into the bathroom mirror together.
Two butterflies.
* * * * *
acknowledgments
Thank you to my brilliant agent, Stefanie Lieberman at Janklow & Nesbit. This book wouldn’t exist without you.
Melanie Fried, my gifted and generous editor, loved these characters from day one and expertly wrestled with three narrative strands.
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