Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six(33)

As Hannah started serving Bruce some potatoes, Liza rose quickly, her chair scraping back against the floor.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to lie down.”

She slipped away from the table and was gone.

Mako rose to go after her. “Excuse me. She hasn’t been feeling well.”

Murder, ghost stories, mounted skulls, her husband’s secrets. The ailing hostess. Her daughter far away for the first time. The things she had been pondering and puzzling about herself but had been buried deep and were a dark riptide, threatening to pull her under.

She pushed her swirl of thoughts away, and took a long sip of her wine. An awkward silence fell over the remaining guests.

Even Cricket had stopped smiling.

Everyone who remained at the table started to eat in silence.





13


Trina

It’s nice here. The house, the trees. The perfect getaway really, just like it said online. There are so many windows, it’s like a doll’s house. From where I stand, I can see inside clearly. The happy gathering of family and friends around the big table, a feast prepared.

They smile and laugh, served by the tall chef and his assistant. The served and the servers. I try to imagine myself sitting among them, maybe beside Hannah. I can’t. Story of my life.

I am the puzzle piece you think will fit—but doesn’t. People always try to guess my nationality. They might ask: Are you Italian? Or I might get: Habla espa?ol?

The truth is, until recently, it was a mystery, even to me.

My mother is French and Turkish, raised in Paris; I always knew that much. But her parents died young and she always thought of herself as an American, since she moved to New York City in her twenties to become an artist, met the love of her life, Scott, when they were both living in the East Village. My mom, Giselle, became a US citizen after she married, finally settling into life as a grade school art teacher before having me. She grapples now for her French, even her accent faded.

My father—well he was a biological wildcard, even to my mother.

My dad, Scott, the man who raised me and who I have always thought of as my father, had a vasectomy at an early age. The child of abuse, he decided before he ever met my mother that he never wanted kids. When he changed his mind after they married, the reversal didn’t work. So my mother got pregnant via a sperm donor. Anonymous. Records sealed.

Like everything about the world, they gave it to me straight. I don’t remember not knowing that about myself, or thinking it was strange. My mother always said things like: Love comes into our lives in all sorts of mysterious ways. Or: Any man can be a father, but it takes a special one to be a daddy. How I came to them was the unique texture of the fabric of our particular family.

Maybe if Scott hadn’t died, I never would have even been curious about my donor father. Because my dad? He was enough, more than enough. A big loving bear of a man—full of stories and belly laughs. The smell of Old Spice can conjure him, his big hugs, the scratch of his stubble.

I always think of it as sadness that killed him, a deep incurable unhappiness that he carried with him, a note I heard beneath every laugh, a riptide pulling at every happy moment. This thing he’d carried since childhood, a voice in his head, a shadow in his periphery. It caused him to drink too much to quiet it, to drive too fast to outrun it.

He fought it for us, I promise you, my mother always said. But it was too much for him.

I was fifteen when he crashed his Indian—the motorcycle he’d restored, worked on tirelessly, polished and babied. We’d drive to swap meets—seeking this obscure part or that. Big, crowded places, dusty and hot, people selling, buying, passionate about old machines. He was happy on those days. I know he was—I remember that smile, the crinkle around his eyes.

But it wasn’t enough.

We weren’t enough.

I wasn’t enough.

Maybe it was because I wasn’t really his, that’s why I wasn’t enough to keep him around. If I’d been his biological daughter, something more powerful would have kept him bound to this world. I offered this theory to my mother only once. She wept.

He loved you. More than anything. Her fading French accent lilted, her dark eyes gleamed. She told me I didn’t understand depression, how it was a con and a thief of joy. How it lured people away, making them believe that the world was better off without them.

She was right. I didn’t understand it then. I do now.

He did it for us. He thought he was doing it for us. The insurance payout.

He was gone and we were set for life. That’s what he thought was important. Money.

And we would have given it all back for one more day with the man who was my father in every way that mattered.

I am thinking about Dad now as I watch the chef put big piles of meat before the diners. I don’t know why, except that I am always thinking about him, really. I wonder what he would have had to say about this enterprise of mine.

“Dad,” I say out loud. “I’ve done bad things.”

Sometimes when the world is topsy-turvy, bad things are good things.

That’s what I imagine he’d say. But probably he’d say what Mom says. I’m worried about you, kitten. Come home.

My parents. They’re good people. They loved me, did their best. I mean, my mom and my dad.

Now my biological father, well, that’s another story. We don’t have to get into that right now.