“Well, she did! She sure did,” my mother insisted. “Go ask Melanie if you don’t take my word for it. Where’d she duck off to anyway?”
It was starting to get dark, which meant there wasn’t much time left before I’d have to start the drive home. I felt ridiculous having bothered my mother for what I knew to be a lost cause. With a two-hour drive ahead of me, and a whole chest of drawers to finish making by the end of the week, it was time to call it a day. I took Mom by the arm and led her back toward the dining room. Along the way, we crossed paths with a pretty nurse, who gave me a sweet, compassionate smile. What was a pretty girl like that doing in a place like this, constantly surrounded by death? My eyes were drawn to the woman’s breasts. I could just picture her, later tonight, describing her long day to some lucky guy before they made love. Why couldn’t that lucky guy be me? I wondered how it would feel to sleep by her side, to discover what she smelled like, the touch of her skin . . .
Then my mother chuckled and shattered the vision. “If Melanie could see you now! Anyway, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” she said under her breath. “She’s impossible to please, if you catch my drift. Don’t ask how I know, I just do. Full stop!”
Mom may have lost her mind, but she had managed to hang on to her obsession with always being right, down to her favorite catchphrase, “full stop”: an odd Britishism in her otherwise North American vocabulary.
She took a seat in front of her dinner and peered down at the plate with blatant disdain, gesturing with her hand that it was time for me to go. I leaned down and she offered me her cheek for a kiss. Her freckles had long since disappeared, replaced by age spots and wrinkles.
Considering that October day’s particularly strange start, it was more than fitting that it should end with another twist. My mother drew me in close, her grip stronger than usual, and whispered right into my ear.
“He didn’t leave us, honey. He never even knew.”
My heart started beating faster—faster even than the time I slipped and nearly lost my hand to a circular saw. For a moment, I told myself she couldn’t possibly be lucid.
She quickly proved me wrong.
“He never knew what?” I asked.
“That you even existed, my darling.”
I stared deep into my mother’s eyes, not even daring to breathe as I waited for more . . . and then the moment passed.
“Go on, get out of here,” she muttered, lost again. “Snow’s on its way, first snow is coming . . .”
Across the way, Mr. Gauthier was howling with laughter again. Mom tilted her head upwards, looking to the ceiling of the dining hall, her eyes sparkling and full of wonder as though stargazing on a summer night.
My mind was made up. I had no idea how, but I knew once and for all: I was going to find my father.
13
ELEANOR-RIGBY
October 2016, Croydon
While Maggie had more or less decided to ignore the whole thing, I was more determined than ever to find the truth behind the anonymous letter. I lay stretched out on my bed, rereading the letter aloud in a hushed voice, at times speaking right to the author as though he could somehow hear me.
Your mother was a brilliant and remarkable woman, capable of great good . . . and great evil. Until now, you have only known the good. “What exactly do you mean, good and evil?” I said, gnawing at the end of my pencil. I sat up and jotted down in a note, The “evil” must have been before I was born.
As I glanced over what I’d written, it suddenly hit me that I knew next to nothing about my mother’s life before she had children. All I knew came from little anecdotes my parents told, basically snapshots from their “first chapter,” and their conflicting accounts of why they eventually split up. Then, the story jumps years ahead to the night my mother came knocking at Dad’s door again.