“I know, I know—the heart thing.”
He is rubbing his left arm now. A long plane trip has probably aggravated the stiffness there. “No, Lu. She was mentally ill. She was a depressive. I’m sorry. I assumed that dad had finally told you everything.”
She stops on the path. “What ‘everything’?”
“I always promised—and I thought by now he would have—look, you have to talk to him. He has to tell you the rest. Because there are questions only he can answer.”
Hadn’t AJ said the same thing about sex almost forty years ago? There are questions only he can answer. Lu was eight and still trying to piece together what really happened when babies were made. But it turned out there were a lot of questions their father could not, would not answer. Most particularly—Why would anyone do that? “Well, we have to have babies,” her father said then. And she knew, the way children always know when they are being lied to, that he was withholding something important. That’s why she had ended up talking to Teensy about the whole messy affair.
But had she really never guessed that their mother’s sadness, which now seems obvious in every anecdote she knows about her, was something more than mere moodiness? That Adele’s parents had guarded her not from the dragons outside their Roland Park castle, but from demons within? Lu cannot wait to get home, send AJ and Lauranne back to Baltimore with the leftover cherry pie, deposit the children in their beds, and confront her father. She wishes she could leave her brother standing here, plunge into the lake, and swim a straight hard line toward the large, light-filled house on the other side.
But life doesn’t work that way when one is an adult. There are Penelope and Justin, who need to go to bed at a decent hour because there’s school tomorrow, a kitchen to clean. Life goes on. Life is relentless. And when the house is finally quiet, Lu discovers her father dozing in his usual chair. She cannot bear to wake him, much less start peppering him with questions.
Instead, she goes to his desk, the planter’s desk that Noel broke all those years ago, scattering her father’s papers, and finds the slen der file that loomed so large in her imagination, one that she used to sneak peeks at when she was a child. It is a plain manila envelope with her mother’s name on it. There are photos, a birth certificate, a marriage certificate.
A death certificate, too, which Lu doesn’t remember ever seeing in this envelope before.
Maybe that’s because it’s dated 1985.
MAY 26
“Nineteen eighty-five,” Lu says, not for the first time, waving the death certificate as if it were an exhibit in a trial. She is standing over her father, who sits at their dining room table, his eyes downcast, but his demeanor defiant. “She lived for fifteen years after I was born. How could you keep this from me?”
She has called work and said she will be late because of an “urgent family situation” and were truer words ever spoken? The situation goes to the heart of her family, and if the situation doesn’t seem urgent to anyone else—her mother has been dead for thirty years, her father has been lying to her for forty-five—she cannot imagine doing anything until she has this conversation. It took great resolve last night not to shake her father awake and demand to speak to him then and there. She has not slept at all, and she snapped at the twins throughout the morning routine, then snapped at their babysitter for being all of five minutes late.
And yet her father, the true object of her wrath, is unrepentant, even if he cannot meet her gaze.
“Lu, you were never going to have a mother. Adele was not capa ble of taking care of anyone, including herself. She wasn’t fit to live outside an institution.”
“But to lie to your children and say that she was dead—”
“She was, in a sense. She attempted suicide several times. In 1985, she managed to slit her wrists with a knife she conned a staff person to smuggle in. If you want to berate me for something, then focus on the eight years that I lived in denial of the fact that my wife was severely mentally ill, the terror that her disorder visited on your brother. The day after you were born, she had a full-blown psychotic episode and attempted to kill herself for the fourth or fifth time. She was admitted to the psychiatric wing at Johns Hopkins. And, as far as I knew, she was to spend the rest of her life there. I tried to visit her once or twice, but she was truly a hopeless case. It did no good. For either of us.”
“But—the death certificate says she died in Spring Grove? How did she end up there?” Spring Grove was the state psychiatric hospital in Catonsville. Her mother had been perhaps ten miles from her family through much of Lu’s childhood.