With shaking hands, she clicked on the third message. Sign in to your account using the user name and password created during the kit-registration process.
User name and password? She struggled to remember them. It took three tries before she got into the site. Stop being emotional. It was important to approach this as she would any new information that required analysis: Methodically. Professionally. Detached.
After a few minutes of clicking around, she felt more relaxed and in control. She focused on the Ancestry Composition section, which had a global map on one side of the page and a list of percentages and regions on the other. At the top, it told her she was 99.2 percent European. She would have guessed 100 percent, considering both of her parents’ families were from the UK, but probably in this day and age, no one was purely 100 percent anything. The 99.2 percent was probably remarkable in itself.
The map was colored in the regions where Marin’s ancestry was located. Not surprisingly, the UK was lit up—her father’s great-great-grandparents came over from England and Scotland, and her mother was Welsh. But oddly, the region of Southern Europe near Spain and Portugal was also highlighted.
She checked the percentages on the right and frowned. According to the site’s breakdown, she was 50 percent Southern European. That didn’t make sense. Even if one of her parents had an ancestor from Spain or somewhere in the region, she wouldn’t be 50 percent Southern European.
Well, that explained the strange e-mail. There had been an error.
She was tempted to ignore the e-mail, but if she just left it out there, the woman might try to contact her again. Better to just terminate the inquiry.
Dear Ms. Moscowitz:
Thank you for getting in touch. Unfortunately, there seems to be some mistake. I wish you the best in your family research.
Marin hit Send and logged off.
She didn’t need the distraction of abstract information about her alleged family tree. Her real family, her here-and-now family, was coming apart at the seams.
And she had no idea what to do about it.
Chapter Six
When in doubt, garden.
It had been Blythe’s personal motto for years. Her love of gardening came from her mother-in-law—the most valuable gift the woman ever gave her. It was prompted by Blythe’s confessed frustration with Kip’s fifteen-hour workdays and his weekend devotion to the golf course.
“No need to feel like a golf widow, my dear,” said Nina Bishop. “It’s not that your husband is too busy. It is that you are not busy enough.”
Blythe had looked across the room at toddler Marin. Not busy enough?
But later, when she thought about it, she realized there was busy that made you feel like you were treading water every day and busy that gave you a sense of accomplishment. It wasn’t that motherhood didn’t give her satisfaction, but it was a different kind than what she’d felt when she danced.
“Start simple,” Nina had said. “Lettuces. Pole beans.”
And she did. She learned about ground pH and working the soil. Buying and sowing seeds. Transplanting. When to harvest. Weeds. Pest control. By the time Marin was in second grade, Blythe had a robust, rotating crop of lettuce, French beans, tomatoes, beets, kale, rhubarb, and—to Marin’s delight—pumpkins. Kip, not a huge fan of vegetables, had requested only one item in all of Blythe’s years of gardening: corn for popping. And she grew it.
This morning, Blythe knelt in the soil in front of her Brandywine tomatoes checking for invaders. Yesterday, she’d spotted a tiny green fruitworm inching its way up the side of the stake. Blythe had swiftly vanquished it.
She only wished she could do the same to Kip’s new girlfriend.
Candace Cavanaugh, the divorced daughter of one of Kip’s golfing buddies at the club. She was twenty-five years his junior. Who’d have thought Kip would turn into such a cliché?
“It’s a delicate situation,” Kip had said to her. “If it was anyone else, I wouldn’t worry so much about appearances. But we need to do the right thing here…”
In other words, sometimes people had flings and there was a lot of looking the other way, because marriage was marriage. But this time, there was no looking away. Other eyes were on the ball; specifically, eyes from the Philadelphia Racquet and Hunt Country Club. Kip would not be party to a scandalous situation. The divorce papers were being filed.
For the first time since she was nineteen years old, Blythe would have to plan for a life without Kipton Bishop. Perhaps she was just lucky it had lasted as long as it did. After all, he’d arrived in her life when she needed a safety net.
Blythe had moved from Michigan to Philadelphia to join the corps of her third-choice ballet company, the Pennsylvania Ballet. Both the ABT and Joffrey had rejected her.
With each passing day, all she heard in the back of her mind was her parents’ plea—logical, maddening, and ultimately ignored—to go to college and keep one foot in ballet (so to speak) and then pursue a professional dancing career later if that was what she still wanted. But why should she put off what she knew she wanted? There was no if.
The if became a what if.
What if she failed? What if she wasn’t asked to return the following year?
By the spring of that first year, her confidence was at an all-time low. The night she met Kip had been the Pennsylvania Ballet’s annual gala. The theme was Diamonds on Broad Street, an homage to the third act of Balanchine’s Jewels.
Blythe remembered the dress she wore that night—a white silk sheath, size 0. She still had it in storage.
Select dancers had been chosen to perform that evening, and Blythe was not among them. Instead, she stood among the crowd of wealthy dance benefactors—some of whom had paid ten thousand dollars a plate to be there—listening to the company’s artistic director introduce the evening’s theme.
“‘Diamonds,’ brought to life by the music of Tchaikovsky, conjures the spirit of the Mariinsky Theater, where Balanchine trained. Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp have written: ‘If the entire imperial Russian inheritance of ballet were lost, “Diamonds” would still tell us of its essence.’”
Blythe clapped politely, wanting to be anywhere else. She was an ornament, like the white calla lily centerpieces, the hundreds of shining silver candlesticks on loan from a Philadelphia socialite, and the ice sculpture in the center of the room evoking imperial Russia. The guests came for the food, the photo ops, the performances, but above all, they came to mingle with the dancers themselves.
An older couple approached her, a man in a tux and a woman with silver-threaded blond hair wearing an elegant white-beaded gown. Even among the hundreds of other well-heeled dance patrons, they made an impression. Out of everyone she’d met that night, these two seemed the most excited to be there.