It hit her when she got home. In fact, as Anna pulled into the garage, she felt the emotion welling up inside her like a pressure cooker and she broke down in the car. She pushed the garage door button, lowering the door, leaving her to sit in the car in the semidark. And she came apart like a cheap watch.
Chad had been dead for five months. In that time she’d learned that his long-ago affair had born fruit and the strain of trying to figure out how she was going to tell her kids had been wearing her down. She’d been trying to decide if she hated him for keeping such a thing secret or, more often these days, if she longed for their life back. She struggled with whether she owed it to the kids to tell them she had been the one to bring up the possibility of separation and divorce. Her idea, not Chad’s. Their marriage hadn’t been perfect, but by comparison to the lives of many of the women she had helped through the legal system, it was heaven. That was small comfort at the moment. Chad left a mess for her to clean up alone.
She realized, not for the first time, that she didn’t miss Chad so much as she missed marriage. It had worked for her. It had worked for Chad for that matter. It was convenient; there was always another person to share the weight with even when things in the relationship were stormy. There were times, she had come to realize, that having a close enemy or stranger can be slightly more helpful than having no one at all.
If missing her marriage wasn’t challenge enough, she was losing her mother and possibly gaining a brother. All in one day. Just how many people in her life lived in such secrecy? How had her mother, her best friend since birth, never let it slip before? And why hadn’t she? She should have known that Anna wouldn’t consider it shameful or embarrassing to have a child while not married! Even twice!
She reminded herself that perhaps it was a delusion born of dementia, and that was somehow more painful. And she fell into hard sobs, still sitting in the car. She had cried for her lost husband before now, but most of that had been the self-pity side of grief, missing him and feeling alone, anger with him for leaving her to deal with everything, craving just one more discussion about what was wrong with them now. And of course she wondered if he was planning to come home from his adventure and tell her about Amy and his first grandchild. He had said he wanted to have a serious talk.
Her kids were having a very hard time with Chad’s death—Jessie was angry, Michael was devastated and Bess seemed to have withdrawn even more than usual. Of course, Bess was in law school, a perfect excuse to avoid the whole group dynamic, but Anna worried about what was going on in that head of hers. She was the quietest and perhaps emotionally the most vulnerable.
She moved into the house, sweating from being closed in the steamy garage. She mopped her face and threw a fistful of soggy tissues in the trash can. The tears kept coming with the occasional hiccup or small gasp. Her face was wet and hot and it felt like there was no end in sight and she didn’t know where to turn.
She felt she had put all her emotional energy into trying to figure out who she was supposed to be now that she was no longer Chad’s wife and these other issues had come up, issues that would complicate what was left of her family even more. Untangling all of this and putting things back together was going to be harder than ever. Her brain was sludge and she couldn’t make a bit of sense of anything. Was I the wife betrayed and left behind or the wife who failed? Was I the sister who never knew it, was I the daughter who never heard the truth about her family? My life was built on so many lies. My mother was devoted to me and I thought she told me everything, no matter how hard the truth was, but apparently that was not the case. And my husband...?
She couldn’t believe the irony. Her birth story mirrored Amy’s. Her father was a married man who obviously wasn’t committed to either his wife or his mistress, and Chad had done the very same thing. And yet she wondered why? He said he wanted to talk when he returned from his trip and she’d assumed their marriage was over. Why didn’t he tell her the truth? She drew in a jagged breath. Did he ever love me?
Her phone chimed and she saw that it was Joe. She thought about letting it go to voice mail but instead she answered and blubbered. In her head she was making perfect sense but into the phone she was just tossing out random words like lost my mother, and Chad’s secret family, and I just don’t think I can take much more. Finally she said, “I’m sorry. I just can’t talk about it now. I’m at the end of my rope.” She was still crying, sounding a bit out of control.
“Anna, where are you?” Joe asked.
This was personally so humiliating. She never fell apart. She argued emotional and complicated cases all the way to the Supreme Court and never caved into tears. Even Chad had rarely seen her cry and never like this. And it just wouldn’t stop.
She disconnected. She would call him back after she got control and could actually speak. She turned off her phone. After about ten frustrating minutes, she stripped and got in the shower, letting the warm water run over her while she cried.
Joe had been visiting his daughter, Melissa, and on his way home when he passed the Mill Valley exit he thought of Anna. It had been almost a week since he had talked to her. He pulled up her number on the dashboard and called. The connection wasn’t very good, what with the freeway and engine noise, but even so he could tell she was crying. The gist of what she was saying was that her mother had died and she didn’t want to talk because she was at the end of her rope. Then she rang off.
He tried calling her back straightaway but his call went directly to voice mail. He drove probably five miles before he decided to go to her house to make sure she was okay. When he thought of all she’d been through lately, his feeling about that brief exchange was not good. He hadn’t ever thought of Anna as depressed or suicidal—she was the most stable and capable woman he knew. But as he drove toward her house, he became more desperate. He hadn’t been in touch with her for several days. What if she’d spiraled downward and he missed the signals, having been out of touch.
When he arrived at her house, his fears only intensified. The garage door was closed but he could hear the car engine running inside. He tried banging on the front door, but there was no response. He had to climb over the locked gate into the backyard but was rewarded by finding the kitchen slider unlocked. He opened it and called her name, then went immediately to the garage. He had to step over her discarded shoes and her purse, dropped with the contents spilling out. “Anna!” he yelled.
The car was still running in the garage but there was no one inside so he turned it off and doubled back into the house. He picked up the purse, absently scooping the contents back inside. Once inside, he called out again, “Anna!” And again, “Anna!” He walked through the kitchen, great room, into the hall, calling her name as he went.
“What are you doing?” she said. She stood in her bedroom doorway, wrapped in a terry-cloth bathrobe, her wet hair dripping onto her shoulders.
“Oh, Anna, thank God,” he said. Before he could stop himself, he rushed to her and pulled her into his arms. “Thank God!”
She stood still against him. “Thank God for what?” she asked.
“Thank God you’re okay! You scared me to death. You were crying hysterically! You said you were at the end of your rope! I had no idea what you might do.”
She pulled back from him slightly. “That I might take a shower must not have come to mind...”
“The car was still running in the garage,” he said a bit desperately. “You had sounded so...out of control.”
“Yes, that,” she said, dropping her gaze. “For a little while I had lost my mind.” She shook her head. “Humiliating.”
He was still holding her upper arms. “Anna. Your mother? You lost your mother?”
“Well, not in the usual way. Blanche is thoroughly alive, but while I was visiting with her she asked after her daughter. Me. She didn’t know it was me.”
It took a moment for Joe to digest that. Then he just grabbed her close in his arms again. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry.”
“I should have been prepared,” she said. “I knew it was only a matter of time. In fact, we got a lot of time, thanks to a good doctor and the right medication. But somehow I thought it would happen more slowly, not a normal visiting day gone suddenly around the bend. One minute she was asking about the kids and the next asking me if I knew her daughter.” She laid her head on Joe’s shoulder as if that last statement made her weirdly tired. Her hands rested lightly on his arms and she said, “Joe? Is this my purse?”
He pulled back a bit. “It was on the garage floor and the car was running. I picked it up but I don’t know what I was planning to do with it. Give it to you, I guess.”
“Whew, I guess I was really out of my head.”