Whisper Me This(77)

“Oh, Maisey,” Dad says. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could fix it. Such a helpless feeling to be an old man and not be able to do anything.”

“There is something you can do.”

“I can’t see what. But tell me.”

“Talk to me about Marley. Tell me what Mom was doing with a gun. How did she break all of those bones?”

All the clarity leaches out of him. I watch his gaze go from clear to fuzzy, his jaw slacken, his shoulders go soft. He turns the chair away from me and rests his hand on top of the papers. “I can’t.”

I come up on my knees and turn the chair back so he has to face me. “There’s no point pretending. Marley was at the funeral. You had to have noticed. And if Mom suddenly went out and bought a gun, surely you noticed that, too.”

He sighs and rubs his forehead with both hands, fretfully, like Elle does when she’s been up too late and had too much sugar.

“So many secrets, Leah,” he whispers. “So damned many.”

I think he’s drifted away from reality again, but then he drops his hands and looks at me, and I can see that he’s in the here and now.

“She was only twenty when I met her. You were three. She applied for a front-desk job in my office, and I hired her on the spot.” He lights up a little, remembering. “You know why I hired her, Maisey? She had no experience running an office, no education beyond a GED. You might think it was sympathy for a young single mother. Sympathy was not something I felt. I hired her because she told me I was going to. She looked me directly in the eyes—you know that look—and explained to me that she was going to be a top-notch receptionist for me, and I’d be making a mistake if I passed her over for ‘the deceptive benefits of age and experience.’”

I picture my mother, young and fierce and determined. Where was I while she had this job interview? Where was Marley?

“She ran my office fearlessly from day one,” Dad goes on. “Changed up my operating system. Found me new clients. Read books from the library about office management. My business had been okay up until then. Most of my money for the year I made during tax season. The rest of the time I skimped. I was shy and socially awkward and didn’t have a clue about business. Leah changed all of that.”

He falls into silence, lost in memories, and I call him back.

“Dad? How did she get from secretary to wife?”

“What?” His gaze comes around to me as if he’s surprised to see me in his office, then clears again. He laughs. “She told me I was going to marry her. That’s how that happened. Not that I had any objection, other than a little worry over what people would think. I was almost forty. Geeky. Reclusive. And she was beautiful and not yet twenty-one. I would never have dreamed of even asking her out.

“She was an orchestrator, your mother. She would bring in coffees for both of us, and come sit in my office while she drank hers. And we would talk. She had a way of drawing me out of my shell, getting me to tell her things about my life, my family, my thoughts on the world. Somehow I never noticed that she told me nothing about hers.

“One day I actually asked. ‘My family is not worth the words it takes to discuss them,’ she said. ‘That part of my life no longer exists. We don’t need to talk about that.’

“And that was it. I let it go, Maisey, God forgive me. I told myself she was young, and that was certainly true. She would have been seventeen when you were born. I didn’t ask myself questions about her parents or her first husband or why she’d slammed the door between herself and them. She was so fierce, so determined. She could make me believe anything.”

This I know to be true. My mother’s word was law. If she said it, then it was true. End of story. Even if she told you that a real, living, human being—your twin sister, say—was imaginary, then that became truth.

“I came to believe,” Dad says, “that I really was your father. I mean, I always knew that I couldn’t be. Wasn’t there for the making of you or for your birth. But somehow the meaning of that would fade out of my consciousness. So yes, I helped your mother in what I see now was a deception. Was it a bad thing, really, not knowing you had a different biological father?”

This is a question I don’t yet know the answer to. I can see this lie as a protective one. What good would it have ever done me to know I had another father somewhere?

The other lie is so much more shattering.

“But you knew about Marley,” I tell him, speaking the greatest betrayal of all. “You let Mom tell me I was crazy.”

“I didn’t,” he says, shaking his head. “I didn’t know then. I swear to you, Maisey. Leah didn’t tell me about Marley until after the doctors found the aneurism. Looking back, there were times, in the beginning, when I should have guessed. You would go on about Marley, and she would get so irrationally distressed. ‘Don’t all kids have imaginary friends?’ I would ask her. I couldn’t understand her reaction.

“And then, in the days of shock right after the MRI results came in, Leah had a nightmare. She was screaming for Marley. When she woke up, I insisted that she tell me, and she said that Marley was her baby, and she’d lost her. And that was all. When I tried to ask her questions—Was it adoption? Did the baby die? What happened?—she said, ‘That part of my life does not exist. We won’t speak of this again.’