Whisper Me This(33)

Once through the doors, I keep moving. Sidewalk under my stranger feet, bits of sand and gravel crunching. Amazing how these feet—my feet, even though they feel so awkward and numb—know exactly what to do. I can’t think. Can’t feel. Instinctively, I keep walking, away from Bethany’s sympathy and the weight of her curiosity. The sunshine is bright and blinding, but I don’t feel any warmth. Don’t feel anything at all.

I forget to check for traffic before stepping into the crosswalk, and a horn blares at me.

That wakes me up enough to draw a breath on purpose. Sensation rushes back in with that conscious breath and the next one. My feet, my hands, are all pins and needles. I realize I’ve been hyperventilating, and I slow myself down, counting in and out breaths in my head and coordinating the count with my footsteps.

This is not my first attack of panic, not the first time I’ve felt like the entire fabric of reality has unraveled and left me floating and terrified. It’s just the first time that there has been a legitimate, identified reason.

Usually, what Mom always called my “anxious fits,” as if they were nothing more than a childhood meltdown over bedtime or a denied treat, come and go without rhyme or reason. The raft of counselors I’ve seen for this have offered a variety of explanations, my favorite of which is that sometimes the body just does things for no reason whatsoever, and my anxiety has no basis in my psyche.

As I walk, focused on my breath and my feet, my body becomes fully mine again. And every solid step, every conscious breath, cements the new reality in place.

I am not an only child, and all those false memories are not false after all.

Marley.

The name stops my feet, right in the middle of the sidewalk.

My mother lied to me. Deliberately. Repeatedly. She told me Marley was the product of my overactive imagination. Sent me to a counselor so the counselor could tell me I was delusional. “No more looking for Marley,” Mom said. “No more asking about her. No more telling stories about her. She is not real, Maisey. Grow up and let this childishness go.”

But the birth certificates don’t lie, and at my parents’ house I have the shredded picture of my mother holding two babies. I don’t need to have the copies in my hands to revisit the details. My brain retains the evidence. I can see the legal seal, the important information in three-dimensional font.

Mother: Leah Lenore Garrison.

Father: Alexander Lloyd Garrison.

Which means not only was Marley real, but my father is not my father. How is it possible to live thirty-nine years on this planet and never guess that your parents are harboring secrets of this magnitude?

The first clear emotion I feel is anger. Not a slow-blossoming, warming anger, but a solid wall of rage that hits me like a sledgehammer and nearly knocks me over sideways.

How dare my parents—both of them, not just my overcontrolling mother but my beloved father, too—lie to me like this? Because now I have a secret, a secret I don’t want and never asked for. My entire middle-class upbringing has been a lie, and the people I need to confront with that are not available for questioning.





Leah’s Journal

Let me begin with the smallest of my regrets, and that, my dearest Walter, is you.

When I first found you, even when I married you, I confess I did not love you. I wormed my way into your life and your heart like a parasite into an apple, and for most of the same reasons. From the first minute that I sat in your office and looked at your kind face and your honest eyes, blurred by those finger-smudged lenses in those old-man glasses you used to wear, I knew that above all things you were safe.

And that is all I was looking for. A shield. A new identity. A father for Maisey.

That, and somebody I could manipulate into letting me keep my secrets.

Any guilt I feel over those old machinations is small and fleeting, because I fell in love with you after all, beyond my expectations or intentions. You—us—the love we found together, that was a surprise, my Walter. The rest of my life has been rigorously planned, I suppose. Maisey thinks me rigid and obsessive. She uses softer words, but I hear the tone behind them. I saw it in her eyes the last time she visited, and I know why she never comes home.

The truth is, I don’t know any other way to be.

I always thought you never knew I had been splintered and glued back together, but I wonder now if I’ve underestimated you. I’m not going to ask. We are what we are, after all these years. Some things should be allowed to slumber undisturbed.





Chapter Eleven

When I get to the hospital, I charge up to Mom’s room. I have some things I need to say to her.

She’s lying there, eyes closed, an oxygen mask covering her nose and mouth. Her breath rattles in her chest. She looks tiny and shrunken, like an unearthed mummy, and the better part of me regrets the pain I’ve caused her by keeping her alive.

The better part of me is small and weak and completely subsumed by grief and betrayal and rage.

I put my lips close to her ear and whisper, “How could you lie to me like this? What happened to my sister? What did you do to Marley?”

She stirs for the first time since I’ve entered the room. Her head rolls side to side on the bed. Her right hand lifts an inch above the covers.

An impossible hope blossoms. She’s going to wake up, just like that, and talk to me.