One Speck of Truth

by Caela Carter

“Get to the bottom of what?” I ask.

  “What happened,” she says. “To your dad.”

  “But nothing happened to him. I just told you. He’s still here. He’s a landscaper. He never left Lisbon.”

  “Yeah,” Leonor says. “But why? Why did your mom tell you he was dead?”

  To keep him from me.

  “Why did he have that big fight with avó? Why do they have such a hard time getting along? Why doesn’t he ever come to family gatherings, like the one we’re having this weekend?”

  I freeze. I had forgotten all about the cousins and aunts and uncles all coming to Lisbon to meet me. “That’s this weekend?” I ask. I shiver. “Do you think he’ll be there?”

  Leonor shakes her head. “He’s invited of course, but he never comes. We’ve only seen him every few years since you were born, and it’s gone badly each time. Then years go by before avó begs him to come around and then when he does they fight again.”

  “Why?” I ask. I do sort of want to know. How did I cause a fight between avó and Jorge? And how did that end up meaning I thought he was dead for all these years?

  “Let’s try to figure something out,” Leonor says. “When did your mother first say he died?”

  “The story was that he died right when I was born,” I say.

  “No,” Leonor says. “I mean when did she tell you? How old were you? Where were you?”

  I close my eyes and let my brain rewind through the entire History of Questions. I’m remembering so many I’ll tell you when your olders and Please don’t ask me thats. My brain gets stuck on a loop until it finally reaches through to the beginning.

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “She didn’t . . . She didn’t tell me he was dead.”

  “She didn’t?” Leonor says.

  “No . . . it wasn’t her.”

  “Then who did?”

  Before I can answer, we hear my name screamed through the graveyard. Someone must have told my mom about all my sneaking around.

  “Alma! Alma! You come here right this minute.”

  Leonor’s face turns beet red. My heart skips a beat. We both look toward the entrance to the graveyard and see my mom running toward us.

  “Come on!” Leonor says. She looks like she’s never been in trouble before.

  Maybe she hasn’t ever been in trouble before.

  Maybe I taught her to lie and sneak to graveyards. The same things I taught Julia.

  I follow behind her slowly.

  As soon as she can reach me, my mom grabs my wrist and yanks me so that I’m standing next to her. She towers over me. “Do you want to explain to me what you’re doing in this graveyard when you are supposed to be studying Portuguese at school?” she demands.

  Every other time she’s towered over me, I’ve cowered beneath her. Every other time I’ve been afraid. But that’s because my heart was open. That’s because I was standing there aching for love. Now my heart is closed and I know my mom was at least as wrong as I was. So I stand up straight.

  “I think Adam already told you,” I say. “That’s how you found me, isn’t it?”

  Leonor is quiet next to me. She stares at her shoes.

  “Thank goodness Adam told me,” Mom says. “You two are too young to be running around by yourselves without anyone knowing where you are.”

  “I guess Adam only keeps your secrets,” I say.

  Leonor breathes a small gasp at my rudeness.

  “Alma Meredith McArthur!” Mom says, like I’m a tiny kid. Usually this is where I would be shrinking. Today my closed-up heart keeps me my rightful size.

  She doesn’t say anything else, just yanks me toward the trolley. Leonor follows.

  Once we’re seated with her hand still clutching my wrist so tight it may bruise, she says, “It’s going to take me a long time to think about a consequence for this one. I took you to Portugal. I gave you the best adventure a kid could ask for. And here you are sneaking around and lying. You have broken my trust big-time.”

  I snort. It’s a laugh-snort. Somehow in the middle of my life falling apart, I’m laughing.

  “Don’t you laugh, young lady,” Mom says.

  I laugh again.

  “What’s so funny?” Mom asks.

  I raise my eyebrows. She’s asking me a question in the middle of a lecture. I must be breaking her.

  “You said trust,” I say. “You said I have broken your trust.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mom says.

  I take a minute. I don’t know what she knows that I know at this point but I do know that this whole chain of knowing and not-knowing isn’t all her fault. Not completely.

  Mom says nothing else the entire way back to our apartment.

  I don’t care.

  I don’t care that her bun is wrapped tighter than ever and her lips are pulled into such a deep line her mouth looks like one big wrinkle.

  Right now, I don’t care if she loves me.

  Right now, I don’t care if anyone does.

  As soon as we’re in the hallway of our apartment and out of Leonor’s hearing distance, she starts talking again. “Alma, I am incredibly disappointed in you,” she says. She follows me into the kitchen, where I put my bag on the table and hang my sweater on the chair. “I cannot believe you would sneak around this way.”

  She’s repeating herself.

  I let her words wash right over my head. I don’t even hear them. They don’t apply anymore. She can’t yell at me for sneaking and lying. I learned it all from her.

  She puts her phone down on the table.

  “You had better start explaining,” she says.

  I walk toward her. Then I pick up the phone and walk right past her.

  “Alma!” she says. “Alma! I don’t think so!”

  But I’m already dialing.

  “You are grounded from the phone, young lady,” Mom says. “You’re grounded from everything.”

  But it’s already ringing.

  “It’s too bad for Julia because it’s not her fault but you are grounded from all electronics until further notice.”

  But I’m not calling Julia.

  When Nanny picks up I ask right away. It would usually be harder to ask my questions. It would be hard to ignore all the memories of cooking with her in the kitchen and the drawer she kept full of crayons just for me. Today, I open my mouth and the question comes easily.

  “Why did you tell me my dad was dead when he’s actually alive?”

  My mom gasps behind me. She puts her hand down and stops reaching for the phone.

  “Hello, Alma,” Nanny says. “It’s nice to hear from you.” She speaks evenly, as if I’d only asked about the weather. She doesn’t let me know at all if she heard me.

  Something is connecting in my head. It’s like bells are ringing.

  “Would you put your mother on the phone, please?” she says.

  My mother has frozen behind me in the hallway. She’s frozen.

  Scared, I realize.

  She’s scared of Nanny.

  Instead of handing her the phone, I pull it away from my ear and turn on the speakerphone.

  “Hi, Mom,” Mom says. “I’m sorry about this. We’re having a bit of a day here, as you can tell.”

  “Mercy,” Nanny says, the same way my mom just said “Alma” in the graveyard a few minutes ago. “I told you she was too young. I told you she wasn’t ready for this trip.”

  My jaw drops.

  Mom lunges for the phone. I hold it away from her.

  “I told you she was too young to know her dad was nothing but a deadbeat.”

  “Mom,” my mom says. “Stop.”

  “You’d better come up with an explanation for that little girl,” Nanny says. “She shouldn’t have to deal with this. It wasn’t her fault her parents got irresponsible and had a kid so young. It wasn’t her fault. And she shouldn’t have to know it all. She’s too young.”

  “Mom!” my mom says.

  “I’m not too
young, Nanny,” I say.

  “Alma!” Nanny says, shocked. “I thought you gave your mother the phone.”

  “You’re on speaker,” I say. “And I met my dad, Nanny. I wish I knew about him all along. Even the bad stuff. I wish I hadn’t spent so long mourning a person who was alive.”

  “Alma, now you hang up the phone. You’re turning into a sneaky kid just like your mom was.”

  I look at my mom’s face. Her eyebrows are raised and her mouth is open like she wants to say something but her words aren’t coming. She looks shocked and panicked, the way I often feel around her.

  Connections zip between us like electric currents: from my brain to my mom’s brain to Nanny on the phone. I see it so clearly.

  Nanny says my mom was a sneaky kid.

  But that’s because Nanny is sneaky.

  And now I’ve become a sneaky kid.

  And Nanny was probably a sneaky kid.

  And if I don’t stop this, our whole family will be an electrical chain of sneaky kids.

  “You met him?” Mom whispers behind me.

  “Didn’t Adam tell you?” I whisper back.

  I turn to look at her. She shakes her head. “Not that part,” she says. There are tears in her eyes. Nanny is still talking about how irresponsible Mom has been to let me have this, this one teaspoon of my dad.

  “Mom,” my mom says. “Alma’s right. She’s ready. We’re going to hang up now so that I can tell her the truth.”

  She reaches for the phone. This time I let her. She hangs up.

  Then she walks into the kitchen and sits on the couch.

  “Come on, sweetie,” she says to me. “This is going to take a while.”

  Twenty-Five

  What If I Have Questions?

  MOM PUTS HER ARM AROUND ME. I settle into her. I’ll give her that, my shoulders and back, in exchange for finally, finally getting the truth.

  But the first words out of her mouth form a question.

  “How did you find him?” she asks.

  “No,” I say. “No. You go first. You tell me. Everything. Then I’ll talk.”

  Mom swallows. She opens her mouth then closes it again. She makes her eyes do that weepy thing.

  I won’t let myself feel bad for her.

  “You have to,” I say.

  “What do you want to know?” Mom asks.

  “I want to know everything. The answers to all the questions I’ve been asking my whole life!” I exclaim.

  Mom looks down at her feet.

  When she doesn’t say anything, I say, “Why? Why did you let me think he was dead?”

  Mom sighs. “I have to back up to explain that,” she says.

  “Then back up,” I say. “Back up and tell me the whole thing.”

  “OK,” she says. “Here goes.” She takes a deep breath. “When I was in college, I majored in the romance languages.”

  “What?” I say. “What does this have to do with anything?”

  Mom shakes her head. “Alma, I’m going to try to tell you this story. The story of you. Of how you came to be and how we became a family. But I don’t know how to do it. So I may stumble a little. You’re going to have to stay quiet and listen.”

  “But what if I have questions?” I say.

  Mom smiles. “Let’s leave all questions until the end of the story, OK?”

  Those words swirl through my ear canal and into my brain. They do a happy tap dance on my brain cells.

  Let’s leave all questions until the end of the story.

  That’s the best answer to a Bad Question my mom has ever given me.

  She tells me the story.

  “I was studying in Portugal for my junior year of college. I was nineteen years old, only seven years older than you are now. I was young. I was supposed to spend the first semester in Portugal and the second semester in Paris. Instead, I met Jorge.”

  She goes on with the story, telling me they met in art class and he was funny and sweet. They would spend mornings drinking espresso at the local bakery and eating pastéis de nata. They would paint together in the afternoons. She says pretty soon she fell in love and then suddenly she was pregnant.

  “With me,” I say.

  Mom nods. “And then everything changed. I changed everything. For you. I changed my whole life for you.”

  My mom had to do more than leave Portugal and skip a semester in Paris. She had to come home and drop out of college. She ended up finishing college online, but only after I was a few years old.

  She had to move back in with Nanny and PopPop because she didn’t have a job and she didn’t know how to raise a kid.

  “Nanny and PopPop were all I had,” Mom says. “I had to listen to them. I had to get my act together. I couldn’t just drink coffee and paint all day the way I used to. I needed to be a grown-up. For you. I got organized. I wrote lists. I followed routines so that I could take care of you and make sure you had enough sleep and food and the right sort of educational toys. I had to grow up in an instant. And I only had Nanny and PopPop to support me.”

  “You started wearing your hair in a bun,” I say. My heart is sinking. It’s so low it might slip out onto the couch.

  I’m thinking about all the stuff I forced her to give up. Paris. College. The chance to grow up on her own without having to do everything Nanny and PopPop said.

  Mom must notice somehow or something. “Alma,” she says. “Sweetie. You were worth it. You were always totally, completely worth it. For all of us.”

  My heart wiggles a little. Maybe some of the roads are starting to open.

  “And my . . . and Jorge?” I say.

  “Jorge was . . . he wanted to . . . Alma, I don’t want to speak for him. I’ll just tell you what happened. He agreed I had to move back to Pittsburgh with my parents and he said he’d be there right after me. He even filled out some job applications for work in the States. I saw him do it.

  “But then I moved home to Pennsylvania and I had you. Then Nanny and PopPop moved to Florida and I had no choice but to follow them.”

  “OH!” I say. “That’s why it says I was born in Pennsylvania on my birth certificate even though my first memories are in Florida.”

  Mom lowers her eyebrows. “That part I would have always explained to you,” she says.

  “But you didn’t,” I say.

  Mom shakes her head. “Anyway, Jorge never came. I wrote to him all the time. For a while he said he’d come soon. In the next six months. He’d promise. He made so many promises. First Nanny and PopPop stopped believing him. Then I did too. He kept saying that he was coming when you were six months old, a year, eighteen months.”

  “Wow,” I whisper. “He never even met me.”

  All these years I’ve been imagining my dad as this perfect person. In real life, he never even met me.

  “I didn’t think I could tell you that you had this sort of dad. One who won’t do anything for you. I don’t know, Alma. He sent you a little stuffed lion when you turned two. And then that was it. The next thing I knew, you were asking Nanny about him and she told you . . . Well, you know.”

  “Why did you let her do that though?”

  Mom shrugs. “What else could I have done?” she asks.

  I turn to look at her. Her eyes look more open than they ever have. Her bun is loose and sagging. It’s time for the truth. For both of us.

  “You should have told me,” I say.

  “Told you what?” Mom asks.

  “The truth,” I say.

  “Alma!” Mom says. “You were four years old. You were just a little girl.”

  “So?” I say.

  “So,” Mom says. “I couldn’t look into your little eyes and break your heart. I couldn’t tell you your dad knew about you but didn’t do anything for you. I couldn’t tell you he disappeared.”

  “Why not?” I ask.

  Mom shakes her head.

  “It would hurt too much,” she says. “It would hurt you too much.”

 
“Mom,” I say. The word is salty. I realize there are tears. There are tears on both of our faces. “How old did you think I would have to be so that it wouldn’t hurt so much? Because it hurts pretty badly now.”

  “Oh, Alma,” Mom says. Then she opens her arms and I fall into them.

  “I never stopped writing to him,” Mom says. “I never gave up hope that he’d someday get his act together for you. But when Adam asked you that question, the one about . . .”

  She can’t seem to say it. “I know which one,” I say.

  “When he asked that, I realized that Jorge was one thing. Consistent. Consistently gone. He was never going to show up for you. And if I ever wanted you to understand the truth, I had to take you to see him. To find out for yourself.”

  “Why?” I ask, muffled into her shoulder. “Why wouldn’t he . . .”

  She doesn’t need me to use the rest of the words.

  “Baby, he says he’ll be at the family gathering this weekend. I’ll have Flávia check in with him again now that you’ve seen and talked to him, but before he was saying he would be there. So, when you see him there, you ask him. You ask him why he disappeared. You don’t let him walk away until he’s answered. I couldn’t tell you. It’s been the biggest mystery of my life. Every day I look at you and I wonder what the heck he was thinking. But I will say this. This is the biggest truth I know. He missed out. You are perfect. He missed out. He missed everything.”

  It’s bigger than the speck of truth I used to have.

  The truth that he loved me.

  It’s more true too. I’ll lean on this piece of truth from now on.

  He missed out. He missed everything.

  Twenty-Six

  Where Would We Be Without My Mom?

  MOM LETS ME STAY HOME FROM school the next day. She calls it “Emotional Exhaustion Personal Day.”

  Mom still won’t say what I want her to. What I need her to. I want her to say, “You’re right. I should have told you.”

  And I’m still sad. Sadder than sad. I’m grieving the dad that I thought I was burying notes for. I’m grieving the dad I did find who thought it was OK to go away after a month of guitar and video games. I’m grieving the mom my mom could have maybe been if she’d gotten a chance to grow up a little bit more before becoming a mom. And I’m grieving the dad I should have had. The one who went away and stopped telling me the truth. The one who will never be more than ex-stepdad now.