Two Truths and a Lie(81)

“Alexa! He was your real father.”

“Well. But he wasn’t. Morgan was his actual daughter, the one he had from the beginning of her life. I was just this . . . this interloper who was always hanging around. This barnacle attached to you. He couldn’t pry me off, but he wanted you, so he took us both.”

“Stop it. Alexa! That’s ridiculous.” Rebecca considered her daughter. For such a long time after Peter’s death she’d been consumed by her own grief—its inability to be contained, its bewildering peaks and valleys. Her sadness was so unwieldy, sometimes unpredictable, irascible. And Morgan was so young and needed so much. Sometimes Rebecca forgot to acknowledge that Alexa had her own grief that was complicated in its own way. She saw now that this had been a failure of hers. “You know, when your dad and I first split up, I figured there was no hope for me. A single mom with a three-year-old! Even though you were the cutest three-year-old around, I just wasn’t sure.”

“Yeah,” said Alexa, smiling weakly. “I can see how I might have cramped your dating style.”

“I was prepared to be alone,” Rebecca said. “Forever. I thought it would be just you and me, and we’d have this tidy little life, and then you’d grow up and leave me eventually, and I’d just, I don’t know, shrivel up and die or something. Or get a cat.”

“Not a cat,” said Alexa. “Never a cat.”

“The first time I went out with Peter, years later, I waited to mention you until the very end of the evening. Not because I was ashamed of you. No, don’t look at me that way! But just because I wanted to know what kind of person he was before I trusted him with the idea of you. Does that make sense?”

Alexa nodded.

“And then when I told him, do you know what he said?”

“‘No can do’?” said Alexa.

“Stop. No, of course not. His eyes lit up—I mean, they lit up, that’s an overused expression but honestly they did—and he said, ‘When do I get to meet her?’”

Alexa’s eyes were wet. “He did? He said that?”

“He did. The second time we went out, we took you to the Big Apple Circus. You might not remember that.”

“I don’t.”

“You were terrified of the elephant, and we had to leave early.”

“Oh no!” said Alexa. “I’m sorry! Were you and Peter bummed out?”

Rebecca laughed. “Not at all. I think you did us a favor. Barnum and Bailey it was not.”

“I’m so jealous of Morgan sometimes,” Alexa said. “Because she got him from the beginning of her life. She got a good one. And my father—well, he’s just gone.”

Rebecca hesitated. Now would be—could be—the time to tell Alexa that her father had initiated contact. But then she thought about all the times he’d promised to change and hadn’t been able to. She knew he had a disease from which a lot of people never recover. She knew he might not be better.

“I know we haven’t talked about this in a while—” she said. “But when you turn eighteen, the official custody agreement allows you to get in touch with your father if you wish. And if that’s important to you, I’ll help you find him. But there’s no hurry. You have your whole life to do that. Please believe me when I say that Peter was your real father for all of those years you had him. He was as real as it gets.”

Rebecca put her greasy, clam-roll hand over her daughter’s chickeny hand and they sat like that for several seconds while the sounds of the evening settled around them: the cars going by on their way to and from the island, the kid at the next table having a temper tantrum, raucous laughter from a group of teenagers. In this moment Rebecca felt a shift, as quick as the heartbeat of a bird. It was, maybe, a shift toward possibility. Toward a new kind of happiness.

Although there was still the Colby thing. Which wasn’t happy at all. “We’ll talk about the Colby thing later,” she told Alexa. “We are not finished with this discussion.”

Eventually Alexa took her hand back (clearly, enough was enough) and she said, “Are you done with this?” And she gathered up the paper containers and the balled-up napkins and she shuttled them into the garbage.





62.





Alexa


Alexa studied her face in the mirror behind the sun visor in Cam’s minivan. She looked the same, but she had felt different, since things between her and Cam had really heated up. Since the race. They’d hung out nearly every day. They’d gone mini golfing and go-carting and swimming. She spent a night at the Winnepesaukee house, safely installed in one of the guest bedrooms, hoping the whole time Cam would sneak in in the middle of the night—he did, but only until unexpected hallway noises put an end to their tryst. Cam took her around the lake in the speedboat, and they stopped to fool around on the far side of Rattlesnake Island. He’d put in a lot of shifts at Market Basket, and Alexa had done the same at the Cottage. She had continued to record her Silk Stockings videos, even, with Cam’s help, choosing a few topics she hadn’t thought about on her own.

Cam got really into the research. Sometimes too into it, maybe, but it was helpful having someone off whom to bounce ideas, and his assistance freed her up to do more planning for her L.A. move. She found a couple of long-term Airbnbs where she could potentially stay while looking for an apartment.