“No one! It was just a joke. Paige is your sister. Warren Ahlberg is her father, just like he’s your father.”
I recalled what she had said a moment ago about my father being the cause of the miscarriages and the idea that the reason might have been his chromosomal abnormalities. If other people questioned the paternity of my younger sister, then certainly my father did.
“Look, twice everything worked just fine,” Marilyn continued. “Two times. What more could you ask for?”
“So when you and my mother talked about the miscarriages, she never mentioned a lover?”
“Never.”
“Or, I don’t know, a sperm bank?”
“Of course not!”
“Does Paige suspect anything?”
“There’s nothing to suspect, Lianna. And even if she did, wouldn’t you know better than me?”
“Probably,” I agreed.
She tilted her head sympathetically and smiled. “I know you want answers to what happened to your mom. We all do. But I just don’t see us ever getting them. I’m sorry, sweetie. I really am.”
When I left, I was unmoored, as baffled by the world as I had been at any moment since my mother had died.
That afternoon, I spent hours with our collection of photo albums and searched for old pictures of my aunts and uncles and grandparents. I had never really thought about what they had looked like when they were young. My cousins’ hair was light and my aunt—my mother’s sister—was a strawberry blonde. But what had my grandparents looked like before their hair had gone gray? What had my father’s aunts and uncles looked like forty years ago? I found some images from a family reunion in one of our oldest albums; I was a toddler. I was always, it seemed, in either my father’s or my mother’s arms. I was wearing a floral pink smock dress with ruffles and clutching a small stuffed bunny in a similar outfit. Her name was Bunny Jo; I still had her. She was in the unmade piles of sheets and blankets on my bed that very moment.
Most of the people in the photos had Scandinavian hair and Scandinavian cheekbones. But not everyone. The reunion had been held at my mother’s parents’ house in Concord, Massachusetts—the reunion was for her side of the family—and there in the group photo was the man I was confident was her uncle Arvid. Uncle Arvid had cocoa-colored hair. Yes, he had blue eyes, but I took a Mendel-like satisfaction in the proof that deep in the recessive genes on my mother’s side of the family existed the DNA for Paige’s dark hair.
Next I pulled out my parents’ wedding album so I could look at the Ahlberg side. Again, there were individuals with brown and black hair, though how many were guests and how many were Ahlbergs I couldn’t say. But there were people with dark eyes. There were yet more people who could have been the genetic precursors to my kid sister.
Nevertheless, that afternoon as I practiced for a magic show I had the next day for one of the kids in the Sunday school, I found myself hugging Paige the two occasions when, bored, she put her head into my bedroom to see what I was doing. I think she found me more maddening than usual.
My father suggested that the three of us go see a movie that Saturday night, and the two choices at the theater in Middlebury were a film about aging astronauts and a tale of competitive cheerleading. We went with the astronauts. But we had dinner at an Italian restaurant beforehand, where our father could get a scotch and Paige could have pizza. We had a booth, and after we’d ordered, I asked my father about his parents. My grandmother had only died two years earlier, and so I had known her well. I had loved her Swedish meatballs and Swedish pancakes with lingonberries and maple syrup. She had been a lawyer for an insurance company in Manhattan before she retired; over the years, she had taken me to wonderful, glamorous lunches in restaurants on Park Avenue South. At least twice she had taken both my mom and me out after we had been shopping for magic tricks on lower Broadway.
My grandfather, however, had died suddenly when I was in kindergarten, and so I had never really gotten to know the man who had raised my father. He had been an advertising executive, though precisely what he did was beyond me.
“Oh, my parents are a very broad topic,” my father said in response to my question. He was sitting across from Paige and me, leaning back against the wall of the settee with his arms folded across his chest. “What would you like to know about them?”
“I don’t know: tell me about the time you introduced Mom to them. What was that like for you? For them? How did they respond?”
“Well, there’s probably what actually occurred and then there’s the way I massaged my recollections over time. That’s how it is with everything, isn’t it?” my father answered.
“Lianna’s clearly about to bring someone home for you to meet, Dad,” Paige said. “It’s why she didn’t come home a couple of nights the last few weeks.”