The Silent Sister


45.



Jeannie was in the middle of writing up an offer for a house buyer when I called her, but she must have caught the quaking of my voice because she said she’d be over the second she was finished. I spent the next hour shredding my father’s dated utility bills and medical records. It was blessedly mindless work and slow going, and I’d only made it through one of the trash bags by the time Jeannie pulled into the driveway.

I opened the door and walked barefoot onto the porch, watching her as she got out of her car and hurried up the sidewalk, her white blouse neon bright in the darkness.

“What’s going on?” she asked, shading her eyes against the porch light with her hand. “You sounded upset on the phone.”

Wordlessly, I sat down on the top step and she climbed up to sit next to me. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I found a copy of my birth certificate.” I looked at her squarely. “Tell me the truth, Jeannie. Is Christine my mother? Are you my grandmother?”

Her eyes flew open. “No!” she said. “Of course not! Why on earth would you think that?”

“Don’t lie to me!” I snapped. “I can’t handle any more … lies and deception.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was born in Asheville,” I said. “I’d forgotten that, but I just found a copy of my birth certificate. Verniece said my parents found a baby to adopt in North Carolina. How do you explain my being born in Asheville when my family lived in Virginia?”

Jeannie looked into my dark front yard, not speaking right away. “Christine left home when she was seventeen,” she said finally. “She was living in Amsterdam when you were born, most likely so stoned she didn’t know her own name. She’s only been clean a few years, now. That’s one reason why this estate sale work is so important to her. She wants to make a career out of it. She needs that.”

“Oh,” I said quietly, aware that Jeannie had revealed something painful to me. I was too wrapped up in my own thoughts, though, to pursue it. “Then why does it say Asheville on my birth certificate?” I asked. For a fleeting moment, I thought Jeannie herself might be my birth mother.

She looked toward the street again and let out a heavy, defeated sigh. “Lisa never went away to study the violin,” she said. “She was living with me in Asheville, waiting to have her baby.” She turned toward me, her face ghostly white in the porch light. “To have you.”

It took a moment for her words to sink in. I felt queasy, the porch spinning around me, and I gripped the edge of the step to make the world hold still. “Oh, no,” I whispered. I stood up, ignoring the dizziness as I walked blindly down the steps and onto the dark lawn. The grass felt strange and cool beneath my bare feet. I took a few steps toward the street, then turned to look at the house I’d grown up in. The living room windows glowed with a golden light, and the porch light illuminated the ornate trim and a patch of peeling yellow paint. All of it blurred in front of me. I’d led a counterfeit life inside those four walls.

Jeannie’s gaze was on me and she perched half on, half off the top step as though she might need to run to my side any moment to hold me up. She was saying something, but she may as well have been in the next town. No words could make it through the buzzing in my head.

I sank onto the lawn, only vaguely aware of Jeannie rushing down the steps toward me. How could my parents have kept this from me my entire life? I’d been lied to. Whispered about. They were never going to tell me the truth.

But then I thought of Lisa, who had never had the chance to live in this house. What fear and pain she must have endured. What shame and embarrassment. And her career … No wonder her playing had suffered. There was no mystery teacher. Only a mystery child. Me.

Jeannie had reached my side. I heard her hard breathing as she sat down next to me in her crisp Realtor suit and rested a hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

I looked wordlessly at the sky. The stars and moon were nothing more than a fog of light and dark.

“No one ever wanted you to know,” she said softly.

I shut my eyes, holding still until I could find my voice. “What happened?” I asked finally, looking at her. “They sent her away when she was pregnant and told everyone she was studying with another teacher?”

“That’s exactly it,” she said. “Deb—your mother—called me in tears and asked if Lisa could live with me during her pregnancy. With her being so famous in music circles, Deb and Frank were worried about her getting a lot of negative attention and ruining her career. She was already four months along when she told your parents. At first she planned to put her baby up for adoption, but as she got closer to her due date, she realized she couldn’t do it. So your parents decided to adopt the baby—adopt you—when you were born.” She raised her hand to my cheek to brush away a strand of hair. Her touch felt tender. “Lisa stayed with me a couple of months after you were born so it wouldn’t seem so obvious to the rest of the world that the baby was hers. And they told Steven and everyone that she’d decided to study with someone else for that period of time.”

I was too stunned to say a word.

“You have to forgive your parents,” Jeannie said. “They’d always planned to tell you the truth when you were old enough to understand, but with everything that happened with Lisa—the charges against her and her suicide—they felt it was best for you never to know any of it.”

“So … you were the person who gave her the pendant.”

She nodded.

I thought of the photograph on the coffee table inside the house. Lisa and Matty. Like Siamese twins, Jeannie had said. “Was Matty my father?”

The reflection of the porch light bounced in her eyes as she nodded. “We always thought so, though Lisa adamantly denied it, so your parents never talked to him or his parents about it. Lisa said it was a boy she met at one of the music festivals she went to. The one in Rome. I suppose that’s possible, but Lisa and Matty were so inseparable, and when you were born with that full head of dark curly hair, we all just assumed. They were so young, her and Matty. They may have been … I don’t know, experimenting or whatever. She never told him, as far as I know. She talked to him on the phone a lot when she was with me, but I’d overhear her telling him about violin techniques she was learning, when the truth was, she barely picked up the violin while she was in Asheville. She was quite depressed.” Jeannie’s voice cracked. “I always wished I could have helped her,” she said. “Done more for her. She probably should have been on medication.”

“I need to get that picture,” I said, standing up. The muscles in my legs shivered as I walked toward the house. I climbed the porch steps and walked into the living room. It felt like days had passed since I’d been in that room, going through the cabinets. I picked up the photograph of Lisa and Matty from the coffee table. It suddenly seemed even more precious to me and I held it tenderly. When I brought it outside, Jeannie was sitting on the top porch step again, blotting her eyes with a tissue. I sat down next to her, holding the picture on my knees so that it caught the light. That curly mop of Matty’s hair seemed like a dead giveaway. “Do you know where he is?” I asked.

“Matty? I have no idea. He was still studying with Steven Davis right up until Steven’s death, as far as I know.”

“His last name is Harrison, right?”

She nodded, then rested her hand on my knee. “Lisa was a good girl, Riley,” she said. “She became very dear to me while we lived together. I felt like I’d failed with Christine and I really wanted to help Lisa, and she was so easy to be with after dealing with my own difficult daughter. She helped around the house while I worked. I was an accountant for a group of doctors’ offices in Asheville. I had a dog and he got so attached to Lisa, he nearly ignored me, and he grieved for her when she left. So did I, actually.” She smiled. “I got to know her very well. Probably even better than your parents did, because she felt like she could be more open with me than with them. You’re a counselor. You know how that is sometimes.”

“But she didn’t tell you if it was Matty?”

“And I never pressed.” She changed position on the hard step. “That’s how I got her to talk to me,” she said. “By not pushing her. I loved her.” Her eyes clouded over again. “I was sad when she returned home. I missed her. She was such a dear soul.”

How could she leave me? I thought, feeling more alone than ever. She faked her suicide and left me and never looked back. How could I ever move past that fact? But I couldn’t say any of that to Jeannie. She still thought Lisa was dead.

“Were my parents angry with her?” I asked. “For getting pregnant, I mean?” With a jolt, I realized that my father had been my grandfather. My mother, my grandmother. Danny was actually my uncle. I hugged my arms across my chest, suddenly terribly sad. In the space of a few minutes, I’d lost the family I’d known. I’d lost my only brother.

“If they were angry, they didn’t let me see it. Once they accepted what was happening and made the decision to adopt Lisa’s baby, I think your mother was excited.”

“Were you there when I was born?” I asked.

Jeannie hesitated, then sighed, as though she’d made up her mind to answer any question I had. “Let’s go inside,” she said. “I can’t sit on this hard step any longer.”

I followed her into the house and we circled the hulking trash bags to reach the couch. She sat down heavily, taking the photograph of Lisa and Matty from me to look at while she talked.

“She called me at work one morning to say her water had broken and the contractions were starting,” she said. “She knew what to expect, because we’d talked about it a lot. I called your parents right away so they could set out for Asheville. They left Danny with some friends. Your parents didn’t make it in time. I was able to stay with Lisa in the delivery room. I can’t lie and say it was a piece of cake. That she didn’t suffer. She was afraid and so was I, but we muddled through together.” She smiled into the distance and I knew Jeannie really had loved my sister. My mother.

“And then she cuddled you,” Jeannie said. “Covered you with kisses. I don’t think she would have been able to give you up for adoption to anyone other than her own family. She couldn’t have parted with you. She loved you very much.”

I blinked back tears at the thought of Lisa cuddling me.

“Her pendant.” Jeannie pointed to the photograph. “I gave it to her right after you were born,” she said. “I lied when I told you what the Chinese symbols meant. The symbol on the front actually meant ‘mother’ and the one on the back meant ‘daughter.’ She said she’d never take it off.”

* * *

When Jeannie left, I sat on the couch in the dark living room, staring into space. I was more numb than anything else. I had a living, breathing mother somewhere. Now I wanted to find her more than ever, but she didn’t want to be found.

Then, as I sat there in the dark, I began to think about the living, breathing man who was, in all likelihood, my father.



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