Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six(58)

“Yeah,” he’d lied. “We’re in touch.”

“Good. That’s good,” said West sounding relieved. “It’s important to stay connected to family.”

Was it though?

Or was that just something people said. He and Piper were very connected to Piper’s family and it wasn’t always easy, or pleasant. At their small backyard wedding, Piper’s mom and dad had a big fight in the kitchen that carried out into the yard. Some distant relatives who Henry was meeting for the first time asked him pointedly: Where are you from, son? His dark skin, and mass of black curls communicated to them something suspicious about his heritage.

Racist fucks, Piper complained. Don’t worry. We don’t see them much.

Henry had a hard time understanding racism. People were just people, right? They might differ in the color of their skin, features, or cultures, but under the skin, they were all the same. He’d read that all humans shared 99 percent of the same DNA. That it was only like 1 percent that accounted for the superficial differences of appearance.

Miss Gail felt more like family than Alice ever had, and she was just some stranger who had taken him in, raised him as best she could. He loved her in a way he wasn’t sure he had loved Alice.

All these thoughts churned as he sat listening to the wind in the trees. Finally, he saw the door to the house open and a woman stepped out onto the stoop and waved.

She looked a little like Alice, but fuller bodied, prettier. She had fluffy blond hair, and wore a flowered dress, simple flats.

He waved back. He couldn’t just drive off now, which is what he had been considering doing before she came out of the door. That’s what happened—thoughts of Detective West, and Alice, and Piper’s family, and their baby, and who Henry had been or would be were like a hurricane in his head, a chaos of thoughts that spiraled until he couldn’t hear or think anything else.

She approached as he crossed the quiet road to go meet her. At the sidewalk she put both her hands to her heart, and started to cry, then took him into a warm, tight embrace. He stood stiffly, awkwardly, letting her hold on—simultaneously touched and surprised, a little scared. He wasn’t really a hugger. Finally, he closed his arms around her.

“I’m Henry,” he said, though she clearly knew who he was.

She pulled back and looked at him, put a hand to each of his cheeks.

“I see her in you,” she said, tears streaming. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m a wreck. It’s just that I’ve waited so long for any piece of her. I’m so glad you’re here, Henry. Thank you for coming. I know nothing has been easy for you.”

She took him by the hand and led him inside the house that was everything it promised from the outside—warm, filled with photos, tastefully decorated. She’d baked cookies, the scent still hanging in the air.

“I don’t mean to overwhelm you,” she said when they sat at the table. There were white tulips on the counter, dipping in a crystal vase. Everything was clean, surfaces shining.

He noticed the stack of photo albums then, other notebooks, some files. Detective West said that his aunt was an amateur genealogist, tracing the roots and branches of her family tree back into history. The idea of that, that there was all that data about her family, about his family, was as exciting as it was frightening.

“I want you to know, Henry, that we would have taken you after she passed. I would have raised you as my own. But Margaret—she didn’t want us. Her family. She just, I don’t know, always wanted to get away.”

“Margaret.”

“You knew her as Alice, that’s what Detective West said. But that wasn’t the name our parents gave her. She always loved that book—Alice in Wonderland. She went down the rabbit hole, didn’t she?”

His aunt had started crying again. He wanted to comfort her but he didn’t know how. He reached out an awkward hand and she took it.

“By the time Detective West and I connected, you were grown, heading off to college. And you didn’t answer my emails.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just—I don’t know why I didn’t. I should have.”

“It’s okay,” she said. Her smile was warm, understanding. “There’s no rule book for dealing with a mess like this one, is there? We’re all just trying to get through, aren’t we?”

She got up and came back with a cup of tea and a plate of cookies.

“Detective West says that I had the birth certificate and social security number of a dead child. Do you know anything about that?”

She sat with a long exhale, rubbed at her eyes. “Margaret...we called her Maggie...got pregnant in her senior year of high school. It was a big deal. Our parents were devastated, you know. They wanted so much for her, for us. But they planned to help her raise the baby so that she could finish school.”

She opened the first stack of photo albums, slid it between them. They flipped through the thick pages. A picture of Alice as a child—holding out the skirt of a yellow dress, smiling, coquettish. Then as an adolescent, lithe and striking, if not pretty, in the embrace of a younger girl, Henry’s aunt. There was a family portrait, everyone stiff and smiling against a gray backdrop. Alice wore a blue dress, eyes sullen. Picture after picture of the girls—Christmas morning, Hawaiian vacation, riding on horseback, playing tennis. His aunt paused at each, sharing memories. Oh, my, Maggie hated horses—everything about them. But Dad wanted us both to know how to ride. The fights!