The Last of the Stanfields(2)
My parents were deeply in love from the very first night they got back together. As with all couples, there were some wintry patches when things ran cold. But they always made up and never failed to treat each other with the utmost respect and admiration. I once asked, after a particularly rough breakup of my own, just how they managed to stay in love for a whole lifetime. My father replied, “The key to lasting love is knowing how to give.”
My mother died last year in the middle of a dinner out with my father. The waiter had just brought out dessert—rum baba, my mum’s favorite—when she suddenly dropped facedown in a mound of whipped cream. The paramedics couldn’t revive her.
Dad went to great lengths not to weigh us down with the pain of his loss, knowing that each of us was suffering in our own way. Michel kept trying to call Mum every morning, and my father would invariably explain that she couldn’t come to the phone.
Two days after we buried Mum, Dad gathered us all around the kitchen table and declared that wallowing in misery would be strictly prohibited from that point forward. Mum’s death should in no way ruin the close-knit, joyful family that my parents had painstakingly built over the years. The next day, he left us a note on the refrigerator door. My sweet children, all parents die eventually, and it’ll be your turn one day, too, so enjoy the day. Love, Dad. A “logical point,” as my brother would say; don’t waste a single moment feeling sorry for yourself. When your mother kicks the bucket by doing a face-plant into her rum baba, it certainly puts things into perspective.
Every time I’m asked what I do for a living, I get to sit back and watch people turn green with envy. I write for National Geographic, and am paid a salary—a meager one, but still—to travel, take photos, and write about the world’s diversity. The strange part is that it took traveling to the ends of the earth for me to realize that what I was looking for was right there in front of me the whole time. All I had to do was open my eyes and start noticing the wonder of the world outside my front door.
It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. Imagine spending all your time on planes. Or sleeping three hundred nights of the year in hotels, sometimes comfortably, but more often uncomfortably due to budget restrictions. Imagine writing your articles aboard bumpy buses, and nearly dying of pure joy at the sight of a clean shower. In a job like mine, once you finally make it home, all you want to do is put your feet up and sink into the sofa, not budging an inch, with a TV dinner in front of you and your family close at hand.
My love life has been a handful of flings and short-lived relationships, as rare as they are fleeting. Traveling constantly is like being condemned to singledom for life. My longest relationship was with a Washington Post reporter. It lasted about two years, though I had wanted it to go on longer. What a lovely feat of self-delusion it was. We shot emails back and forth and tried to tell ourselves we were “close” without ever having spent more than three days in a row in each other’s company. All in all, the time we spent together over two years added up to just over two months. Our hearts would flutter wildly every time we reunited, and again when we said goodbye. Eventually, the palpitations got to be too much, and we had to call it quits.
While my life was already anything but banal next to most of my friends’ lives, things took a turn for the truly extraordinary one morning when I opened my post.
My father had come to pick me up at the airport after an assignment in Costa Rica. I’ve been told that thirty-five is a little old to be so attached to my father. Although I’m fine when I’m away, as soon as I come home and see my father’s face in the sea of people waiting at arrivals, I instantly revert to the sweet bliss of childhood. Try as I might, it’s useless to fight off that feeling.
My father had certainly aged since Mum died. His hair looked thinner and his belly rounder, and there was something heavy-footed about his stride. And yet he was still just as wonderful, dignified, brilliant, and wacky as ever. For me, nothing was quite as comforting as burying my face in Dad’s neck when he wrapped me in a big bear hug. Call me a daddy’s girl all you want, but I was happy to be one as long as I could.
Not only had the trip to Central America been utterly exhausting, but I’d spent the whole way back crammed between two sleeping passengers whose heads bobbed and lolled onto my shoulders every time we hit turbulence. Seeing my tired and wrinkled face as I washed up back at my dad’s flat, I could understand how they might have mistaken me for a pillow. Michel came over for dinner and my sister joined us halfway through the meal. My heart leapt back and forth between the happiness of being all together again, and a strong desire for some time alone in my childhood bedroom. While I hadn’t officially lived there since I was twenty years old, in truth, I’d never really left. I rented a studio flat on Old Brompton Road, on the west side of London—rented solely on principle and out of pride, since I almost never slept there. On the rare occasions when I was back in England, I preferred staying under my father’s roof, right where I grew up.
The day after that particular trip, I did stop by my studio to check my post. There, amid the myriad bills and junk mail, I discovered a strange letter addressed in elegant and ornate cursive handwriting, with flourishes and thick and thin lines, as though it had been written a century ago.
The letter inside revealed parts of the secret my mother had kept from her family for years. It hinted at something hidden among her belongings that could help shed light on the person she once was. But the anonymous letter writer—the “poison-pen,” as I immediately began to think of him—didn’t stop there. The letter seemed to imply that Mum had taken part in a masterful crime committed thirty-six years ago. The letter gave no further details, but there was enough information given to be alarming, and it just didn’t add up. First off, thirty-six years ago put us in the year leading up to my own birth—it was difficult to imagine a woman pregnant with twins as a criminal mastermind, let alone my kind, rational mother . . . The anonymous letter called on me to seek out the truth, to follow a trail which would take me to the other side of the world. Lastly, the poison-pen implored me to destroy the letter after reading, and not to mention its existence to anyone—especially not Maggie or my father.