Chương 3
“He called me.”
“When?”
“Three weeks before the wedding.”
Claire’s face changed.
That was the first clue Daniel trusted completely—not Eleanor’s claim, not the changed birth certificate, not even Claire’s admission.
Claire had not known about the call.
Eleanor continued.
“He asked if I would meet him. I wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I was a coward.”
Her answer came without decoration.
Daniel had expected justification. He almost wished she had offered one.
Eleanor looked down at her hands.
“I had spent thirty years telling myself that leaving you alone was the kindest thing I could do. Then your father called and said you were getting married, and suddenly I had to decide whether that was true or whether it was just something I’d repeated because it let me sleep.”
Rachel finally touched Daniel’s arm.
He did not pull away.
“Why did you give me up?”
Eleanor looked at Claire.
Claire’s jaw tightened.
Daniel saw it.
“Stop doing that.”
Eleanor nodded.
“I was twenty-three. I was using drugs. Mostly pills at first. Then heroin.”
Daniel said nothing.
“I was living with a man named Mark Hayes. He wasn’t your father.”
The room seemed to contract.
Daniel leaned against the window frame.
“Who was?”
Eleanor’s mouth opened, then closed.
Claire whispered, “Eleanor.”
“No. We’re done.”
Eleanor looked at Daniel.
“Your father was a man named Michael Trent.”
The name meant nothing.
That somehow made it worse.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if he’s alive?”
“No.”
“You don’t know where he lives?”
“No.”
“You don’t know anything?”
“I know who he was then.”
Daniel turned toward Claire.
“And you knew this?”
“Yes.”
He walked into the kitchen.
Rachel followed.
“Daniel.”
“I need a minute.”
He opened the refrigerator, stared inside, and shut it.
Then he opened it again.
Rachel waited.
“What am I doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“I came in here for something.”
“Water?”
“No.”
She gave him a glass anyway.
He drank half of it.
His hand was shaking badly enough that the water clicked against his teeth.
Rachel leaned against the counter.
“You don’t have to decide anything right now.”
He stared at her.
“Decide what?”
“Anything.”
“That’s not helpful.”
“I know.”
“I have a biological mother dying on my mother’s couch.”
Rachel’s eyes moved toward the doorway.
“We don’t know that she’s dying.”
“She has metastatic cancer.”
Rachel went still.
Daniel had not told Claire that. He had barely told Rachel. The words felt indecently clinical now.
He set the glass down.
“I brought her here.”
“Yes.”
“I just drove her here like some idiot.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I knew something was wrong.”
“You knew she knew Claire.”
“She knew my full name before I told her.”
Rachel folded her arms.
“That would’ve been useful information.”
“I know.”
“I’m not attacking you.”
“It sounds like it.”
“I’m scared.”
That stopped him.
Rachel rarely admitted fear while she was still feeling it.
Daniel looked at his wife.
She lowered her voice.
“Your mother hit you because you brought that woman to the door. Then we found out she gave birth to you. Your dad knew. Your aunt apparently knew. Your birth certificate was changed. I’m standing in a kitchen where I’ve eaten Thanksgiving dinner three times and I suddenly don’t know what anybody in the other room is capable of.”
Daniel stared at the refrigerator magnets.
One held a photograph of him and Claire at the county fair when he was nine. Claire had cotton candy stuck to her sleeve. Daniel was missing a front tooth.
“She’s my mother,” he said.
Rachel nodded.
“I know.”
“I mean Claire.”
“I know what you mean.”
He rubbed his cheek.
Rachel stepped closer.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not as much as my dignity.”
“Your dignity was questionable before today.”
He looked at her.
She gave him a small, helpless smile.
For two seconds he almost smiled back.
Then Eleanor coughed in the living room.
The sound pulled them both toward the doorway.
Claire had moved to the sofa. She was holding the water glass for Eleanor while Eleanor drank.
Daniel stopped.
The gesture was practiced.
Not intimate exactly.
Familiar.
“How long since you’ve seen each other?”
Claire set down the glass.
“Twenty-eight years.”
Eleanor said, “Thirty-one.”
Claire looked at her.
“Your mother’s funeral.”
“You didn’t speak to me.”
“You were there.”
Daniel said, “Thirty-one years?”
Neither corrected him.
“You haven’t seen her since I was four?”
Claire nodded.
“And you recognized her instantly.”
Another nod.
Daniel sat opposite them.
“Tell me from the beginning.”
Claire looked exhausted.
For the first time he noticed she was still wearing the black slip-on shoes she used for yard work. There was dirt on one toe. She had probably been pulling weeds before he arrived.
He had called forty minutes earlier.
Forty minutes ago she had been an ordinary sixty-one-year-old woman complaining that rabbits were eating her hostas.
Now she looked twenty years older.
Claire began.
Eleanor had grown up two streets from Claire’s family in Ohio. She and Susan became friends in high school. Claire, six years older, knew her mostly as the skinny girl who stayed for dinner because she did not want to go home.
Eleanor’s father drank.
Her mother disappeared for days at a time.
By seventeen, Eleanor was living wherever someone let her sleep.
At twenty-two she met Michael Trent.
He was married.
Daniel closed his eyes.
“Great.”
Eleanor said, “Yes. I had excellent judgment.”
Claire shot her a look.
Daniel almost appreciated the dry answer.
Almost.
Michael was thirty-eight, a sales manager for a regional building-supply company. He told Eleanor he was separated. He was not. When she became pregnant, he gave her money and told her to leave town.
She did not.
Mark Hayes entered the picture several months later. He had drugs, a spare room, and a temper.
Daniel listened until he could no longer sit still.
“So I was born into this.”
Eleanor looked at him.
May you like
“You were born into a hospital.”
“You know what I mean.”
