What's Left Unsaid

by Emily Bleeker

  But sleepy or not, Mamaw answered thoughtfully, “I don’t think I mind telling it now. A brush with death is good for my courage,” she said, surprising Hannah with her response.

  “Are you sure? I don’t want to force you . . .”

  “No. I’m startin’ to think you’re right. Some stories need to be told,” she said, arranging her thoughts for a moment before starting. “I never knew I was adopted till I was pregnant with your daddy. My momma, Florence Patton, lost eight babies after my brother was born—some kind of problem with her blood and the baby’s blood mixin’.”

  The row of tiny headstones flashed through Hannah’s memory, digging up another memory right after it. “Oh, what is that called? Rh factor? My friend Karen had that when she was pregnant with her second baby. She had to get shots. It seemed kinda routine. I had no idea it could be so deadly.”

  “Scientists eventually figured out what it was, but it was too late for my parents. I was always told that I was their miracle child. But when I was pregnant with my first baby, I told my doctor about my momma’s struggles bringing a child to term, and he told me what he thought had likely been the issue. When I went to ask my momma about it, she wouldn’t say a word, not one. She was in poor health by that time and had turned ill-tempered. I was desperate to know more, so I asked Daddy. At first he told me that he wouldn’t know such things, but then he came to my house the next day and sat me down and told me the truth.

  “He got deeply serious, the most serious I’ve ever seen him, and said, ‘Mable, you are a grown woman. I don’t care what your mother says, it’s time you heard the truth.’ Which scared me into silence because Daddy never went against Momma. Never. So I sat on the maroon armchair in the front room—you know the one—and listened.

  “I already knew the first half of the story, but I sat there as he worked his way through it. He said that Momma was once a lovely and sweet-natured girl. They fell in love at sixteen and eloped together. The Patton family owned a cotton distribution company that worked with the new railroad that came through town and made money fast. My parents built the big house on Summit Ave., the one with the dark-blue siding and columns out in front. The Hermans bought it in ’84, and I think it sold a few years back.

  “Anyway, back then there was one thing my momma wanted more than anything, and that was children. Right away, within the first year they were married, she had my brother and was pregnant again within a year, but that baby was stillborn, and my momma was brokenhearted. She told my daddy that the only thing that would heal that fissure was a healthy child.

  “So they tried again, and again the baby died. Five more babies were born, some would make it all the way to delivery but then die a few hours later; others came too early and couldn’t survive. Finally, after endless years of loss, not just of the babies but of my momma’s health and patience, she had her last baby, a little girl. I’d always been told I was that little girl, a miracle child. He confessed that morning that the Mable Patton who’d been born on that cold spring night died in my momma’s arms like all her other babies, and she told my daddy she wanted to die too.

  “The next morning, Daddy said that he left the house and didn’t come back for two whole days, and when he did he had a baby—a little girl. Me. He never told me where I came from. Your papaw liked to joke that he’d bought me from the whorehouse in Memphis, but I always believed I was born to a teenage mother at the Home for Wayward Girls. In the end it didn’t matter where I came from; Daddy said that Momma nursed me as if I were her own, and no one ever mentioned the fact that the real Mable was buried six feet under.”

  Mamaw told the story like a fairy tale read to sleepy-eyed children at bedtime, like she’d distanced herself from the emotion enough that it was just a story to her. Hannah let all the pieces finally click fully into place, making a detailed image in her mind. It all made sense—why Evelyn’s voice sounded so familiar and why her plight felt so real.

  Evelyn was Mamaw’s birth mother and Hannah’s great-grandmother. Hannah wasn’t a spiritual person in general, and if she were checking boxes on a survey asking for her religious preference, she’d probably check agnostic, but she believed in genetics and in the undefinable “something” that connected family through generations. Hannah sat up, rod straight, her body filled with a light that burned with understanding.

  “Mamaw, I think I know who your birth mother was.” Fumbling with excitement, Hannah took out her phone and showed Mamaw the documents. Mamaw grabbed her glasses from the side table so she could make them out. It had to be true. Impossibly true. After a few minutes of Hannah vomiting information, proof, and backstory, Mamaw closed her eyes.

  “You mean your Evelyn is my . . . ?”

  Mamaw stopped before saying the phrase that meant stepping out of the tolerable fiction her family had built around themselves for the past nine decades.

  “I really think so.” Hannah said each word with purpose and wiped away her grandmother’s tears, waiting to find out if they were from sorrow or joy. Hoping to bring her more toward the side of joy, she took out her phone again. “And here is the insane bit. You have a brother,” Hannah said, looking up a picture of Jack Dawson. Mamaw’s lower lip trembled as soon as she focused in on the image. She touched the picture and traced the line of his jaw.

  “He looks a bit like Sammy, don’t you think?” Mamaw shuddered and removed her glasses, but didn’t move to wipe away her tears. Hannah used a tissue from the bedside table to dry her grandma’s face, wanting to know what was going on inside her mind.

  “He kinda does, you’re right.” Hannah stared at the photo. There was something in the crinkle of his eyes and the creases around his mouth, the cut of his jawline, that brought up a younger man laughing at Thanksgiving dinner in a way that would make an outsider wonder if he’d ever experienced sadness. Hannah knew better—still waters did not mean safe waters. She flipped to the next picture, this one of the whole Dawson family. “And you have an aunt and nieces and nephews. You have a whole family out there,” Hannah declared, like a doctor calling out the gender of a newly born baby. Mamaw smiled but then recoiled.

  “I don’t think they’d like to meet me,” she said in a very small voice. “I’m sure they’d rather leave the past in the past, and all that.”

  Hannah wanted to scream OF COURSE THEY WANT TO MEET YOU, but she wasn’t sure. The Dawsons had invested so much in keeping Evelyn’s rape and subsequent pregnancy a secret, it was unlikely they’d jump for joy at the connection being made in such a concrete and provable way as modern-day DNA evidence.

  “Well, maybe, but I wonder if all of them would feel that way.”

  Peter’s face came to mind. He was her—what was the connection—second cousin? The idea was both disgusting and hilarious. No wonder he’d felt so familiar. Pete would want to know. Pete had to know. Maybe this wasn’t as much of a dead end as it had seemed at first glance.

  “I can’t do that to them. It’s not fair.”

  “Not fair? Are you kidding? Mamaw—let me tell you about Evelyn’s life and fairness. What’s not fair is that no one even knows she exists. It’s not fair that the Dawsons have thrown money around for decades to hide the fact that before he became governor Fred Dawson impregnated an unwilling teenager who tried to end her own life out of desperation. It’s not fair that this is not the first or the last time a powerful man will force a young woman into sex and then discard her. The Dawson family doesn’t need you to protect them, Mamaw.”

  Hannah desperately wanted her grandmother to see her value, that it was no less than her brother Jack Dawson’s. In the original narrative, Evelyn had been seen as disposable. And her baby a secret to be swept into hiding. Their stories, Hannah thought, shouldn’t be so easily deleted.

  “And that’s why you wanted to tell Evelyn’s story?” Mamaw asked, unhurriedly.

  Passionate emotion constricted Hannah’s reply at first, knowing the opportunity to share this particular outrage had passed. She coughe
d and answered concisely.

  “Exactly.”

  “Hmm, well.” Mamaw stared at the Google images of the family she hadn’t known existed for the entirety of her long life. “Maybe you should.”

  Hannah stared, amazed. Her grandmother, so afraid of truth that she couldn’t bring herself to visit her own son’s headstone, wanted to air her family’s dirty laundry. The desire inside Hannah to write the truth was nearly overwhelming, but it was impossible to fulfill. Finding out the truth for Mamaw and the rest of the family would have to be enough.

  “I can’t, though. Remember? I signed the nondisclosure agreement. There is no way I can . . .” Hannah noticed something as she explained the impossible situation they were in. Every statement about the article used a personal pronoun that referred to Hannah. Hannah kept saying “I . . . I . . . I . . .”

  “Wait, Mamaw!” Hannah gasped. “I have an idea.” She pushed her knees up against the side of the bed, turning her phone off. “I can’t write the story, but you could.” She pointed at her elderly grandmother, unfolding her finger slowly.

  “Me?” Her voice pitched, and her warm eyes widened, wrinkles rippling across her cheeks. “Heavens no. I can’t do that.”

  “Listen. Yes, you can.” Excitement bubbled inside Hannah. It could work. “It could fail . . . yes, but it could possibly work. I won’t push you, but you are a writer. You taught this stuff at the women’s college, and it’s your story. If Evelyn could do it, you can.”

  “I’m an old woman. No one wants to hear from me.” She stared at her hands, neatly folded in her lap, the IV taped down to her nearly translucent skin.

  It killed Hannah to see how little her grandmother knew of her own value. Was this what women had become used to? Men became more powerful, wise, and experienced as they grew older. Women became . . . irrelevant.

  “I think you’re wrong,” Hannah said, her last push before giving up on the idea, at least for now. “I think a lot of people would like to hear this story from you.”

  Mamaw listened and then closed her eyes for a moment. “I’ll think on it,” she mumbled. Almost immediately, her head bobbed like she was wrestling against pure exhaustion, and Hannah knew she’d stayed too long. Hannah collected her things and then pressed the button on the hospital bed to move it into a more comfortable resting position. Mamaw needed her beauty sleep before Mr. Davenport’s visit, and Hannah would be back for another visit before she and Pam returned to Chicago.

  With a kiss on her grandma’s forehead and a quick sniff of gardenia, Hannah wiggled into her jacket and then put her bag over her shoulder. When she’d come to this town, the bag had been empty besides a notebook with not one mark inside. At various times during her stay here, she’d thought she was leaving with a bag full of files that would result in a good story, that would get her back her old job, her old boyfriend, and her old life. But it turned out she was carrying far more than papers, or articles, or even boyfriends, or past lives. She’d collected a life story, one that ended with tragedy but lived on in flesh and blood and in rejected articles in the basement of a small-town newspaper.

  She hoped Evelyn’s plight would be told, and she hoped her grandmother would tell it, but what Hannah knew for certain was that Evelyn’s story wasn’t the only one out there. If her satchel, full of one story, was heavy enough to throw her off balance and change the way she stood and walked as the strap dug into her shoulder, then what could the weight of ten . . . or more stories do?

  CHAPTER 37

  Ten months later

  Hannah drove down Main Street in Senatobia. American flags were everywhere—big ones on top of light posts and small ones shoved into the ground along the side of the road. The hotels were full in town, restaurants bustling with patrons. It was beautiful to see the city so alive. The larger-than-usual crowds were not the only unique sight. Large television vans lined Main Street and filled random parking lots. Hannah knew who they were here to see.

  Today Mamaw was going to officially meet her birth family. She wrote the piece, and Guy worked as editor and consultant prior to submission. Hannah stayed away from the project, which was made easier by her return to Chicago, but the entire time she felt like a father from the fifties pacing in the waiting room while his wife birthed their baby. But what Guy and Mamaw created together turned out better than any story Hannah could’ve developed on her own.

  The only way Hannah did help was by introducing Mamaw and Guy’s piece to her former editor, Tom, at the Tribune. She’d gone to visit him when she moved back to Chicago in December and shared with him the real reason she’d been AWOL during her last days employed there. She’d hidden from that truth for so long, surrendering her position rather than allowing her father to tell her editor about her mental state, which would’ve allowed her to take a leave of absence rather than be let go. Her December confession to Tom was not made in an effort to get her old job back, but to fill in the backstory of how she came upon the Evelyn idea and to build the bridge between the major newspaper and the two individuals who were now in charge of the story.

  Tom fell in love with the pitch, and working with Guy and Mamaw, they ended up collaborating on a six-part feature article detailing Evelyn’s story and the secrets Hannah had learned about the past and the present as well. The article was published right as the presidential primary season was starting. Jack Dawson won by a landslide and accepted his party’s nomination.

  Which is exactly what Pete had predicted would happen. When Hannah shared the news of his long-lost aunt, Mable Williamson, and the circumstances surrounding her birth, he was fascinated but also concerned about the backlash. Shelby tried to pay off Mamaw and manipulate Hannah with offers of a campaign job, but they refused. It was time for Evelyn’s truth to come out.

  In those prepublication days, Hannah braced for a legal battle with the Dawsons, but it never came. Pete explained that after much convincing, Shelby had finally agreed not to push Monty to enforce the NDA, as had become standard practice for many companies in cases of sexual harassment or assault in the post-#MeToo era.

  Besides, with a simple DNA test, it was impossible to deny that Mable Williamson was Evelyn Kensley and Fred Dawson’s daughter. Faced with an impossible-to-stop leak of information, the Dawson family changed their tune. Instead of attempting a long-term cover-up like Fred and eventually Shelby had with the Record, Pete encouraged his aunt Shelby, Mamaw’s aunt, to embrace Mable and her grandchildren as a part of their family.

  Hannah liked to think Shelby and the rest of the Dawsons had been so welcoming out of the kindness of their hearts, but she’d been observing the Dawson family long enough to have picked up on the fact that they didn’t do anything that wasn’t helpful to Jack’s or Pete’s political careers as well. A touching special interest story was exactly what Jack Dawson needed to nail down the nomination, and what Pete needed to win his reelection campaign. Soon after the article came out, Monty closed up shop at the Record, and Tonya Sellers took over the entire building for her boutique. Hannah never found out the entire reasoning for the swift liquidation of that news outlet, but she could guess. The money had run out.

  The Dawsons weren’t the only ones to benefit from the popularity of Mamaw’s article. Hannah started a podcast where she could tell not only Evelyn’s story but the other hidden stories of normal, everyday women throughout history who had faced some of the same challenges as Hannah’s great-grandmother. And just before heading down south to Mamaw’s great reunion/photo op, she received an offer to write a monthly column at the Chicago Tribune about the stories she shared on her show twice a month.

  But every time she returned to Senatobia, it felt more and more like coming home. Hannah had spent most holidays in this little town since moving north. Guy and Rosie felt the most like home, next to Mamaw, of course. Hannah knew that everyone in town was expecting them to end up together, but after the kiss in the woodshop she and Guy hadn’t kissed again. Like protagonists in a TV sitcom, they clearly car
ed about each other, but neither one had been willing to take the risk and say anything about those feelings. So they remained close friends, really close friends, but everyone knew better.

  Mamaw’s house was rented out to a young family, so Hannah had taken a small studio apartment above one of the little shops in town, sharing time between Chicago and Senatobia. It had no air-conditioning, and sometimes she had to run the water for a few minutes to get rid of all the rust deposits, but Hannah could see the courthouse from her window and got to watch the magnolias bloom in the spring, so she kept renewing her short-term lease.

  She also had made a special visit in January to speak on Guy’s behalf during his grand jury trial, but the charges were dropped that day for lack of prosecution, his record expunged and job restored.

  But the past few months had been busier than ever, and today was the first time since July that Hannah had found her way home again. The presidential election was six weeks away, and Uncle Jack wanted to squeeze a few more drops of good luck out of the Evelyn ordeal. It seemed that standing firm, telling the truth, and making amends were the key ingredients in clearing the negative effects of the scandal.

  Hannah pulled her rental car into the parking lot of the Sunrise Nursing Home. After her stint riding a bike everywhere, she’d made it a point to never be in Senatobia without access to a vehicle.

  The parking lot was already full, and Hannah was relieved to find one last space around the back of the large white structure that was built to look like a classic plantation home. The end of September in Illinois was a time of crisp winds that predicted frozen, subzero winters. However, here in Mississippi, it was still a time of sticky humidity and temperatures in the nineties. Hannah wore a nice pair of slacks and a loose-fitting tank top that allowed some air to circulate against her skin. She wore a low heel, which was not her usual footwear, but knowing that pictures were going to be taken and published all over the world she’d decided to take her effort up a notch.