Halfway to You(55)

“Your biological father is Todd.”

The fact lands on Maggie’s consciousness like a leaf on a pool. It doesn’t sink in. “That doesn’t make sense,” Maggie says, her voice muffled. “Todd Langley?”

Tracey’s voice is anguished as she confirms, “Yes.”

“How?” The word is a strangled sound as the news morphs from leaf to anvil, dragging her under, displacing everything she thought she knew.

“Bob and I tried for so long to have a child of our own, and then with Todd, well, we stepped in. We wanted you so badly, and we love you so much, and it seemed only right to keep this secret from you because—”

“Because abandonment would be too hard a pill to swallow?” How is this possible?

“Todd didn’t abandon you,” Tracey says. “He needed . . . help. After he lost . . . he couldn’t handle responsibility. He wasn’t ready.”

Maggie knows all about Todd’s tragic loss and how it overlapped with the Whitakers’—she came across it accidentally, via Wikipedia, when she was a teenager.

Because no one ever told her.

It was an awful way to find out something about her own family. Sobbing in the computer lab at school. Realizing that’s why Tracey cried on the same day every year.

Anger bubbles up from her core. “So, I was an accident, and because he lost a child before, he just . . . gave me up? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Bob’s voice is gentle when he says, “Grief never makes sense.”

Maggie reaches up to cradle her face and finds it slick with tears. “He didn’t want me? What about the woman he—”

“We wanted you,” Tracey says, her tone fierce and comforting. “You were wanted. You were loved. You are loved.”

“If Todd is my father, who is my mother?” She’s unable to ask the real question, unable to even think it outright.

“Not Ann,” Tracey says, her voice impossibly low.

Maggie flinches. “How do you know?”

“I know.”

“But—”

“Not. Ann,” Tracey repeats.

If not Ann, then who? Maggie can’t force the words out. If not the love of Todd’s life, then Maggie’s mother must be some random woman—and for some reason, the implied insignificance of half her DNA hurts.

After a long pause, Tracey says, “I’m sorry we’re having this conversation over the phone. It’s not how I intended—”

“Did you ever intend to tell me?” Maggie snaps. “Did anyone ever intend to tell me how messed up this family is?”

“Ann shouldn’t have—”

“Ann,” Maggie enunciates, “is the only person who has been honest with me.”

“Sweetheart,” Bob says, “will you be all right tonight?”

How could her parents have kept this from her? Was it an act of protection, to keep Maggie’s abandonment from her? Or something else? Something to do with Ann and Keith’s falling-out?

Does Ann know who Maggie truly is? Or was this stipulation made on a hunch?

“I can’t handle another moment of this,” Maggie says. “I’m hanging up.”

“Maggie, we love—” Tracey’s voice cuts out as Maggie ends the call.

She drops her head to the steering wheel, allowing herself a few minutes to shudder and cry and then, collecting herself, texts Ann—per Ann’s request—to confirm: I called Tracey.

Ann responds shortly thereafter: I’ll email Grant. How’d it go?

Maggie sets her phone facedown on the passenger seat and starts the car.

Sitting on her bed at the B&B, Maggie oscillates between numbness and the acute sting of emotion, slippery and without shape but deadly as a jellyfish. It’s not one feeling but many, tentacles of anger, curiosity, betrayal, and a deep-burning pain. She feels stupid. She’s disbelieving. Todd gave her up. The whole family lied to her.

It seems that the more Maggie learns, the less she knows.

Maggie’s phone blips with a text; she flips it over and reads the cracked screen. Missed calls from family members clog her notifications—but the new text is a simple Check your email from Grant. Maggie toggles over to her in-box.

Dear Grant,

I know you are aware of my agreement with Maggie to have an open dialogue off the record. After a compelling bid from Maggie—

She pauses. Since when is admitting a crime a “compelling bid”?

—it has come to my attention that my unwillingness to be recorded has threatened Maggie’s long-term career with SBTS. My behavior has been unfair to your time and the efforts of your employee. Therefore, I have decided to renegotiate the terms of my original agreement and resume the interview-recording process.

That said, I have some concerns and stipulations. After thirty years of battling the media’s skewed interpretation of my life, I have grown wary of misrepresentation. Please call me tomorrow at ten so we may hash out the details over the phone.

Best,

Ann Fawkes

The email should feel like a victory—her job is safe, the assignment is back on track—but instead, her mind is crowded with questions. She rubs her tear-gritty face, as if she can massage away the stress. But it doesn’t work like that. Tomorrow, she’s going to have to listen to Ann’s story . . . knowing full well that Ann’s story is the prologue to her own.