Halfway to You(71)

“It’s fine. Do you need a moment?”

What Maggie really means is, I need a moment.

When Maggie first read about Todd and Penny online—Aunt Penny, her own family!—she’d been a moth in a rainstorm: dazed, disoriented, dodging water droplets. Realization had knocked her to the ground, practically drowned her. She knows exactly how Ann felt at Mohonk—the betrayal, the shock, the fury.

But this is what the Whitakers do: they try to bury truths that are impossible to hide. Truths that later sprout up like weeds.

It’s clear why they didn’t want Maggie talking to Ann—Ann knows too much. She must. Maggie has no idea how far the lies go, but judging by how her story has unraveled the family so far, she suspects Ann knows them all.

So it makes sense, now, why Ann would want Maggie to talk to Tracey before continuing with the story. Ann was giving Tracey a chance to tell Maggie the truth. Is her father the only piece of the puzzle Tracey knows? Or did Tracey blow her chance to open up to Maggie completely?

Maggie meets Ann’s tearful eyes. “I didn’t know there was another Whitaker sister until Natalie told me,” she says. “I was eleven years old when I learned her name.” She wonders if Ann finds comfort in not being the only person kept in the dark; Maggie does. “Natalie was the only one who’d talk about her, while the rest of the family . . .”

“Silence.”

Maggie nods. “For how ‘close’ the Whitaker family is, they’re terrible at sharing their emotions.” She plucks a tissue from a box on the bookshelf and hands it to Ann.

Ann presses it beneath each eye only once, then crumples it in her fingers. “Did Natalie tell you about Penny’s marriage to Todd?”

Maggie’s heart clenches tight, making her extremities tingle. “No, she left that out—as everyone seems to. I found out about them on the internet when I was a teen. The ‘personal life’ section of your Wikipedia article refers to Keith and Todd as brothers-in-law, referencing a news article about the fire. I pieced it together from there.”

Ann touches her fingers to her mouth, shaking her head.

“Pretty shitty, right? I never met Penny, of course, but it still stung.”

Ann unfolds the tissue, blows her nose, and appears a little sheepish balling it up again.

Maggie wishes she could talk to Ann about Todd being her father, but she can hear Grant’s words in the back of her mind, telling her to keep her mouth shut. Bottle it up. Maggie might not be a biological Whitaker, but she’s no stranger to keeping her biggest emotions underground. Still, she despises keeping secrets from Ann; Maggie is a hypocrite in the truest form.

“How did you reconcile with all the secrets Todd kept from you?” Maggie asks. How do I reconcile with them? she wonders.

Ann blanches. “Well, if that isn’t a whopper of a question.” Her nervous chuckle echoes through the room, and she again smooths her sweater, which was already smooth. “Reconciliation is, I think, too strong a word for what we did,” she finally says. “Todd and I got very good at moving forward, even when it hurt, even when we were dragging mountains behind us.”

“That doesn’t sound healthy.”

“It wasn’t,” Ann agrees. “It took us a long, long time to independently sort through our own baggage. It’s what we should’ve done all along. To see each other for our true selves—flaws and all, no ego—that is true love. I loved Todd since the moment I met him, but it wasn’t true until we got over ourselves and took responsibility for our own shit. No secrets.”

No secrets. Was Maggie a secret that Todd eventually divulged to Ann?

Maggie is bobbing on a tempestuous sea; to ask would be to admit her relation and abandon the lifeboat. This isn’t my story, she tells herself.

Maggie leans into the cradle of her chair, folding her hands together.

It doesn’t feel right to mention Todd.

But it doesn’t feel right to hold her tongue either.

“Should I continue?” Ann seems to have collected herself; her eyes and forehead are neutral again, yet her mouth wavers, revealing a flicker of remaining emotion. “We still have a lot of ground to cover.”

Maggie reaches for the recorder, her ears rushing with the sound of wind, ocean, and the threat of jumping overboard. “Yes, let’s continue.”





ANN


Mohonk Mountain House, New Paltz, New York, USA

December 1993

Alone in our room, I sank to the floor at the foot of the bed, leaning back against the hard frame.

Penny.

Penny.

Penny.

Her name pulsed in my temple. An avalanche of new information had buried me, and now I sat in the quiet aftermath, quivering and claustrophobic.

I was betrayed. Embarrassed. Angry.

But more than anything, I was confused. Why would he leave out such an important detail? Not only had he lost his wife and child in a fire, but his wife had been Keith’s sister. He should’ve warned me before we came to Mohonk, protected me from the inevitable perception: to the Whitakers, I was a replacement. And I would never measure up. How could I?

Yet I was torn. I couldn’t tell Todd how to grieve; nor could I force him to open up about something so traumatic and personal. A better person—a less jealous, less desperate person—might have been more understanding. But after nine years of knowing him, it hurt that Todd still didn’t trust me—or love me—enough to let me in.