Ruby never asked where I went, maybe didn’t care, but if she had, I think I would have told her the truth.
It wasn’t that hard, finding my birth mother’s name. Ruby could be careless with paperwork, leaving sensitive things in places where anyone could find them.
I was fourteen when I saw the name for the first time.
Penny Halliday.
It didn’t even bother me that in the space for Father’s Name on my birth certificate, there was just one stark word: Unknown.
And I never planned on seeing her, on making these borderline-creepy drives to Knoxville, but as soon as I had my license, that’s where I’d found myself heading.
I’ve never spoken to her, never tried to make any contact with her. It wasn’t about that.
It was about reminding myself that whatever it is that runs through the McTavishes––whatever made them cruel like Howell, or dangerous like Ben, or even benignly neglectful like Ruby––was nothing that lived inside of me.
And hell, it was possible that Penny Halliday was all those things, too. But for some reason, I didn’t think so.
For one, she taught art at a community center for underprivileged kids, a place I couldn’t imagine any McTavish ever stepping foot inside. And when I parked my car outside that building, watched her walk out the front doors that first time, she’d been smiling. Laughing with another woman, in a carefree way I’d never seen from anyone at Ashby House––even though no one had more reasons to be carefree than they did.
I stopped making the drives when I was eighteen. I started feeling weird about it, like I was intruding on her life, even if I never talked to her. And anyway, what did it matter?
She’d given birth to me, but she was only my mother in the biological sense.
Ruby McTavish was my true mother.
For better and for worse.
So I don’t know exactly why I’m making this drive now, or why I looked Penny up on Facebook to see whether she still teaches these classes.
But I am, and she does, so I park where I used to park, and I wait for her to walk out of the building. For the sight of her to remind me that there’s another side to me, a part of myself that Ruby had nothing to do with.
Penny Halliday was only sixteen when I was born. I learned that the same day I learned her name, and I remember thinking, on that first drive over here, that I was the same age as she had been. How foreign it felt to me, the idea of being a parent.
I never resented her for giving me up. I understood it, honestly. She simply did what she thought was best. But I wondered if she ever learned what happened to me, if she saw those pictures in that magazine and her heart swelled and broke all at once seeing me called “The Luckiest Boy in North Carolina.”
The doors open across the street, and kids pour out into a courtyard, excitedly chattering. I wait for the adults that follow.
Penny is one of the last ones to leave, but there she is, wearing a red shirt and jeans. She’s only forty-eight, and she hasn’t changed much in the last decade, her brown hair, the same shade as mine, tucked behind her ears.
She has other kids now, I learned on Facebook. I have a half brother and a half sister. They’re twenty and eighteen, and the boy, Brandon, has my eyes.
One blue, one brown.
I’d looked at his picture forever, waiting to feel something, a connection, a link.
But he was just a stranger. A boy with my eyes, but a different nose, a different smile, and as I look at Penny now, I realize she’s a stranger, too.
“Family” is a complicated word––more complicated for me than a lot of people, I’d guess. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to figure out what that word even means to me.
Sitting there in that parking lot in Knoxville, though, it all becomes clear. Simple, even.
Jules is my family.
Jules, who sees the darkest parts of me, the worst thing I ever did, and loves me anyway.
Just like I see the darkest parts of her, the worst thing she’s ever done, and love her, too.
She doesn’t know it, though.
Oh, she knows I love her. It’s the rest of it.
The darkest parts, the worst thing.
It took me awhile to put it together, I can admit that.
When she first slid into my life, I mostly thought how stupidly lucky I’d gotten, this gorgeous girl who wanted me, even though I was still the human equivalent of a locked door when we met.
And then, once the sex haze wore off and I started paying a little more attention, I thought maybe I was just being paranoid. Ruby was dead, after all––she couldn’t have had anything to do with this pretty-eyed girl in my bed, in my heart.
But Jules knew things about me she shouldn’t have, things I hadn’t told her. Things that would slip out, like the name of the soccer team I’d played on in middle school, or that I was allergic to cats. I’d thought about how desperate Ruby had been to keep me tethered to her, how no one hedged their bets quite like she did, and how, when I looked into Jules’s eyes, I saw that same deep green, dark enough to seem black, fathomless.
I tried to use the money Ruby had left as little as possible, but you need cash to pay for the best and most discreet private detectives, something Ruby had known when she found Claire Darnell.
My guys found Claire Darnell, too. She was dead by then, but she had a daughter, Linda.
Tragedy stalked the Darnells, though, because Linda had also died––in a car accident in 2011, which had left her nineteen-year-old daughter an orphan.
Caitlin Julianne Darnell.
A real mouthful. Didn’t blame her for switching to Jules, although I still can’t tell you where Brewster came from. Never did figure that part out.
Did Ruby reach out first? Did Jules?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that the great-granddaughter of the man accused of kidnapping my adoptive mother showing up at the shitty wing place where I worked seemed like too big of a coincidence to explain away.
I could tell you that’s why I stayed with her. That I was waiting to see what she’d do. If Ruby had put her up to this, that plan had to be fucking toast now, given that Ruby was dead.
I admit, I was curious.
How long could she keep it up?
Trouble was, I did the dumbest thing I could have, given what I knew.
I fell in love with her.
And then she did the dumbest thing she could’ve done.
She fell in love with me, too.
Sometimes I want to ask Jules if those feelings surprised her, like they did me, but that would mean telling her I knew the truth, and I’ve never been able to make myself do that.
Because if there’s one thing I learned from the deep, dark secret that Mason McTavish killed to hide—in the end, it doesn’t matter. The truth isn’t some finite thing, it’s what we all choose to believe. Ruby was Dora Darnell, yes, but in the end, wasn’t she Ruby McTavish, too? And Jules might have been born Caitlin Darnell, but she was Jules. My wife. She loves bad puns and can quote just about every line of the movie Labyrinth, and when she has more than two beers, she’ll dance to any music playing.
And she’s the woman I fell in love with, the woman who fell in love with me.
That’s the truth.
Ten years. A decade together, born out of fucked-up circumstances, yes––but despite all that, what we have is real.
How could it not be when she heard the story of Ruby’s final night, and not only did she not run from me, she walked straight into my arms?
I don’t care what—or who—brought her to me. I only care that she’s here, with me, now.
It’s the only thing that matters.
I watch Penny Halliday get into her car, and in my mind, I know this is it. I won’t see her again; I’m saying goodbye for good. I hope her life makes her happy, and if I hadn’t decided to give the whole fucking inheritance to Ben, I’d write a big check for this community center right now, fund it into the next century.
Instead, I start the car and head back home to Jules.