Ellie couldn’t look at her, but she nodded, her eyes on the cupcake, the smudged corner of the little frosted flag. She didn’t know exactly how to answer, but a flood of words had welled up inside of her anyway, and she felt exhausted by the effort of holding them back.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” she whispered, and then a lump rose in her throat, and the rest of it came out thick and choked. “It’s my fault. You told me this would happen, but I just couldn’t—I couldn’t help it. It’s not like I was seeing him this whole time. I stopped. But it was awful, not seeing him. I was completely miserable. And then it just happened again. But the thing with the photographer wasn’t really his fault. He was trying to keep them away from me, and they were horrible. Just like you said they’d be.”
She was half crying now, fueled as much by exhaustion as emotion. Mom was sitting across from her, watching the words tumble out with a strained expression, and Ellie couldn’t tell if it was anger or worry or something else entirely. She sucked in a breath of air before continuing. “It was awful,” she told her. “He had no choice. And this morning, they still hadn’t figured out that it was me who was with him, and I thought it would be okay, but now it’s obviously not, and I’m sorry. I know this is a huge mess, and I’ve probably ruined everything, but I didn’t mean to, and I’m just so, so sorry.”
For a moment, there was no reaction at all. Mom simply sat there, staring at Ellie, the untouched plates of food on the blanket between them. Then she leaned forward. “You haven’t ruined anything,” she said quietly, and Ellie opened her mouth to protest, but Mom shook her head. “Would I rather this hadn’t gotten out? Of course. It’s a chapter of my life that I’m not particularly proud of, and when I left D.C.—when I left your father—I felt like I was running away, which is never a good thing.”
She paused, looking thoughtful. The sky had darkened several shades, and the orange streetlamps that lined the edges of the green winked on behind her.
“But look what happened,” she said, sweeping an arm out. “We landed here. And much more important, I got you out of the deal. How could I ever regret that?”
Ellie bit her lip. She’d spent the day in search of her father, like Ahab going after the whale. But she realized now that she’d been on the wrong quest all along. In the end, she was much more like Dorothy. In the end, what she’d been searching for was simply this: home.
She lowered her eyes, wondering whether she should admit where she’d been today; it would be so easy to pretend it had never happened, to block out the memory of her father entirely. It was painful to think about even now, and talking about it—being forced to examine it and analyze it and argue about it—was the last thing she wanted.
But there’d been so many lies already—about Graham and about Harvard and about the boat—and this one was far too big to hide, far too important to keep quiet. She ducked her head, examining the forgotten plate of food.
“I saw him today,” she said quietly. She was about to continue, to say who she meant by him, but it was clear by the look on Mom’s face that this wasn’t necessary. She was sitting cross-legged across from Ellie, a paper plate with a cob of corn on her lap, and it rolled onto the blanket as she straightened, her whole body going tense. When she made no move to pick it up, Ellie reached out and did it herself, brushing off the fuzz from the blanket and then putting it back onto Mom’s plate with an apologetic shrug.
“You saw him?” she repeated, her eyes glassy.
“That’s where I was today.”
“In Kennebunkport?”
Ellie sat back, stunned. She hadn’t ever considered the fact that Mom might keep tabs on him too, follow his progress the same way Ellie always had. She’d always assumed they never spoke of him because Mom didn’t want to talk about it. But now, for the first time, she realized she might have been wrong. Maybe it was because she did want to talk about him; maybe all the silence was just a way to stanch the flow of memories like a bandage.
Maybe she left him all those years ago not because she hated him, but because she loved him.
After a moment, Ellie nodded. “Graham went up there with me,” she said, leaving out the part about the boat for now. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I just wanted to see him.”
Mom’s face was still oddly blank. “And you did?”
Ellie nodded again. “He was in town, meeting people for the campaign,” she said, and then, to her surprise, her voice broke. “He didn’t know it was me. He didn’t recognize me.”
“Oh, El,” Mom said, scooting closer, so that they were side by side. “I didn’t know. I had no idea you wanted to meet him.”
“I didn’t either,” Ellie said, feeling suddenly miserable. “Not really. I guess it was stupid to think he might know who I was.”
Across the lawn, the band finished their song with a trilling crescendo and then fell silent. There was an air of anticipation as people found their blankets. Pretty much everyone here had been coming to the festival for enough years to know that when the sky turned a soft denim blue, and the band finished their last number, and the clapping petered out in the warm evening air, the fireworks would soon begin.
“Do you know how I first started talking to him all those years ago?” Mom asked, and Ellie nodded.
“You were his waitress.”
“Right, and I always just took his order, and that was it,” she said. “But there was this one week when it rained every single day. He’d come in each morning with his coat dripping and his hair soaking wet, and slide into that booth that never seemed like it was big enough to fit those long legs of his. And then one morning, it just stopped.”
“The rain?”
She nodded. “As I was taking his order, I looked out the window and said something about how it was a miracle. And you know what he said?”
Ellie shook her head.
“He said, ‘There will be no miracles here.’ I remember we both looked around the table, and I was thinking he was right. I mean, it was a diner, and kind of a crummy one at that. We were surrounded by overcooked eggs and water stains and torn plastic seats and pies that had been sitting out for way too long. But when I asked what he meant, he told me a story about this town in France in the seventeenth century that was supposedly the site of all these miracles. When too many people started flocking there, all of them filled with hope, the authorities posted a sign: THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE.”
Overhead, the first firework went whistling past the roof of the hotel and into the night sky, a tiny bead of light; as it sailed higher, it grew quieter, and Ellie lost sight of it entirely. But a moment later it exploded into the air with a fizzle, its spidery golden legs arcing down toward the ground again.
“But that’s the thing,” Mom said, her voice soft amid the noise. “There was a miracle. We just didn’t know it yet.” She smiled. “The miracle was you.”
“Mom—” Ellie said, but she was cut off.
“He might not have recognized you today,” she said, shaking her head. “But he loves you. I saw the way he looked at you when you were little. He always wanted a daughter.” She reached out and gave Ellie’s hand a squeeze. “And staying out of our lives? That wasn’t easy for him either. You have to know that. It was my decision—I was the one who cut it off. He was ready to go public about you, even though it might have ruined his career. But I wouldn’t let him do it.”
“Why not?”