A Family Affair(31)

“She specifically spoke of giving him away. And then ‘the girl’ came along and she kept her—that would be me. My mother always told me everything, but I’ve never heard of that. Could this be true? Could this be something she’s never talked about before?”

“It’s true our Alzheimer’s patients remember old memories better than recent memories, so if something that happened fifty years ago comes to mind they talk about it. But it’s also true they tell wild tales that no one can make any sense of. Is it possible your mother had a son before you were born and had him adopted and never mentioned it to you?”

“I’ve never heard mention of it before,” Anna said. “She was twenty-eight when I was born. She said the man she was involved with had been married, had no intention of leaving his wife or, even if he did, was not inclined to marry her. Without even thinking twice about it, she said she was going to have me, raise me, and we’d be fine one way or another. And we were. But she never mentioned another child. Never.”

“You can chalk it up to dementia,” the nurse said. “Or you can research it. You know where your mother lived before you were born. You can try one of these ancestry DNA services. I hear some are very good.”

I’m a judge, Anna thought. I know how to get information.

But the larger thought she had was how much vital family information was hanging out there, stuff she wasn’t sure of. Could she have a brother? Did Chad have any more children? How had he managed to give money to Amy and her mother without Anna ever knowing? How many branches were there on her family tree exactly?

Suddenly, her body felt very heavy, as if each step she took, emotionally and physically, took great energy.



SEVEN


It hit her when she got home. In fact, as Anna pulled into the garage, she felt the emotion welling up inside her like a pressure cooker and she broke down in the car. She pushed the garage door button, lowering the door, leaving her to sit in the car in the semidark. And she came apart like a cheap watch.

Chad had been dead for five months. In that time she’d learned that his long-ago affair had born fruit and the strain of trying to figure out how she was going to tell her kids had been wearing her down. She’d been trying to decide if she hated him for keeping such a thing secret or, more often these days, if she longed for their life back. She struggled with whether she owed it to the kids to tell them she had been the one to bring up the possibility of separation and divorce. Her idea, not Chad’s. Their marriage hadn’t been perfect, but by comparison to the lives of many of the women she had helped through the legal system, it was heaven. That was small comfort at the moment. Chad left a mess for her to clean up alone.

She realized, not for the first time, that she didn’t miss Chad so much as she missed marriage. It had worked for her. It had worked for Chad for that matter. It was convenient; there was always another person to share the weight with even when things in the relationship were stormy. There were times, she had come to realize, that having a close enemy or stranger can be slightly more helpful than having no one at all.

If missing her marriage wasn’t challenge enough, she was losing her mother and possibly gaining a brother. All in one day. Just how many people in her life lived in such secrecy? How had her mother, her best friend since birth, never let it slip before? And why hadn’t she? She should have known that Anna wouldn’t consider it shameful or embarrassing to have a child while not married! Even twice!

She reminded herself that perhaps it was a delusion born of dementia, and that was somehow more painful. And she fell into hard sobs, still sitting in the car. She had cried for her lost husband before now, but most of that had been the self-pity side of grief, missing him and feeling alone, anger with him for leaving her to deal with everything, craving just one more discussion about what was wrong with them now. And of course she wondered if he was planning to come home from his adventure and tell her about Amy and his first grandchild. He had said he wanted to have a serious talk.

Her kids were having a very hard time with Chad’s death—Jessie was angry, Michael was devastated and Bess seemed to have withdrawn even more than usual. Of course, Bess was in law school, a perfect excuse to avoid the whole group dynamic, but Anna worried about what was going on in that head of hers. She was the quietest and perhaps emotionally the most vulnerable.

She moved into the house, sweating from being closed in the steamy garage. She mopped her face and threw a fistful of soggy tissues in the trash can. The tears kept coming with the occasional hiccup or small gasp. Her face was wet and hot and it felt like there was no end in sight and she didn’t know where to turn.

She felt she had put all her emotional energy into trying to figure out who she was supposed to be now that she was no longer Chad’s wife and these other issues had come up, issues that would complicate what was left of her family even more. Untangling all of this and putting things back together was going to be harder than ever. Her brain was sludge and she couldn’t make a bit of sense of anything. Was I the wife betrayed and left behind or the wife who failed? Was I the sister who never knew it, was I the daughter who never heard the truth about her family? My life was built on so many lies. My mother was devoted to me and I thought she told me everything, no matter how hard the truth was, but apparently that was not the case. And my husband...?

She couldn’t believe the irony. Her birth story mirrored Amy’s. Her father was a married man who obviously wasn’t committed to either his wife or his mistress, and Chad had done the very same thing. And yet she wondered why? He said he wanted to talk when he returned from his trip and she’d assumed their marriage was over. Why didn’t he tell her the truth? She drew in a jagged breath. Did he ever love me?