Chương 5
No excuse.
No denial.
Just yes.
Claire pressed both hands against her knees.
“I agreed to it.”
Daniel looked at her.
“I signed an affidavit I knew was false. Tom signed one. Howard arranged the rest. We got a corrected certificate. It named us.”
“You erased her.”
Claire looked at Eleanor.
“Yes.”
Eleanor turned away.
The late-afternoon light outside had begun losing color. The hallway lamp seemed warmer now, throwing a yellow strip across the floor between them.
Daniel said, “Did she fight it?”
Claire nodded.
“How?”
“She came to the house.”
Eleanor’s fingers tightened.
Daniel remembered nothing.
Of course he remembered nothing. He had been a baby.
“She wanted you,” Claire said. “She said she was clean. She had a job. She had a room in a house with two other women from treatment.”
“And you said no.”
“I said she needed to go through Howard.”
Eleanor gave a dry laugh.
“Howard wouldn’t return my calls.”
Claire ignored it.
“Then she came again. Tom called the police.”
Daniel looked at Eleanor.
“Were you arrested?”
“No. I left.”
“Why?”
She stared at the floor.
“Because I was scared.”
“Of the police?”
“Of myself.”
He waited.
“I wanted to take you.”
Claire whispered, “You tried.”
“I picked him up.”
“You ran to the car.”
“I made it to the sidewalk.”
Daniel felt suddenly cold.
Claire looked at him.
“You were screaming. Eleanor stopped.”
Eleanor’s face folded inward.
“I put you down.”
Daniel could see the scene without remembering it: a younger Claire, a younger Eleanor, a baby between them, neighbors watching from windows.
“What happened after?”
“I left Ohio,” Eleanor said.
“Just like that?”
“No.”
Nothing was just like that.
That was becoming the rule of the day.
She spent six months in county jail after another possession charge. When she got out, she moved to Kentucky with a woman she had met in treatment. She stayed clean for almost three years, relapsed, returned to treatment, stayed clean again.
She wrote letters.
Claire kept them.
Daniel stared at her.
“You have letters from her?”
Claire nodded.
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many?”
“Thirty-two.”
He stood.
“Where?”
“In the attic.”
Daniel walked toward the stairs.
Claire followed.
“Daniel.”
He turned.
“If you tell me not to read them, I swear to God—”
“I wasn’t going to.”
He went upstairs.
The attic stairs pulled down from the ceiling in the second-floor hallway. Daniel had climbed them hundreds of times as a child. Christmas decorations lived up there. His father’s fishing equipment. Old tax files. A box of cassette tapes Claire refused to throw away because, according to her, “music did not improve after 1989.”
Daniel pulled the cord.
Dust shook loose.
Rachel came upstairs behind him.
“You want me to come?”
“Yes.”
It was the easiest answer he had given all afternoon.
They climbed.
The attic smelled like insulation and cardboard.
Claire followed more slowly.
She pointed toward the back.
“Blue plastic bin.”
Daniel found three.
“Which one?”
“The one with the cracked lid.”
He opened it.
Inside were old school papers, medical receipts, photographs, and a manila envelope tied with kitchen string.
His name was written on it.
DANIEL.
The handwriting was not Claire’s.
He sat on the attic floor.
Rachel sat beside him.
Claire remained near the stairs.
The first envelope was postmarked 1993.
Daniel opened it carefully.
The letter inside began:
Claire,
I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m asking you to tell him I exist.
Daniel stopped.
He looked at Claire.
“You read these?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“Yes.”
“And you never answered?”
“I answered some.”
“Where are those?”
“I don’t know.”
Eleanor’s letters were not elegant.
Some were angry.
Some apologetic.
Some contradictory.
In one she accused Claire of stealing her child. In the next she thanked Claire for taking care of him. She asked what foods he liked. Whether he was afraid of thunderstorms. Whether he still had the cowlick at the back of his head.
Daniel touched the back of his hair without meaning to.
A letter from 1998 contained a photograph.
Eleanor stood outside a diner wearing a white apron and holding a paper cup.
On the back she had written:
Two years clean today. I know that doesn’t make me his mother. I just wanted someone to know I made it this far.
Daniel handed it to Rachel.
He read another.
Then another.
By 2001, the letters had become less frequent.
In 2004, Eleanor wrote that she had married.
In 2007, she wrote that her husband had died.
In 2010, she asked only whether Daniel was healthy.
The last letter was from 2015.
Tom,
You called me, so I am answering you. I will not come to the wedding. He deserves one day that is uncomplicated. But if you are serious about telling him, do it because he has a right to know, not because you are sick and frightened of dying with it.
Daniel stopped.
His father had been diagnosed in 2018.
The wedding had been in 2015.
He read the line again.
“Dad wasn’t sick.”
Claire said nothing.
“He wasn’t sick when he called her.”
“No.”
“Then why did she write that?”
Claire sat on an old trunk.
Daniel looked at her.
“Mom.”
Claire’s face went blank in the way people’s faces did when they had finally reached the thing they had been protecting.
“Your father had a biopsy.”
“In 2015?”
“Yes.”
Daniel frowned.
“He told me his first biopsy was in 2018.”
“It wasn’t.”
“What happened?”
“It was benign.”
Daniel stared at the letter.
His father had been frightened.
For a few weeks, perhaps, Tom Reed had believed he might die.
And in that fear he had called Eleanor.
Then the biopsy came back benign.
And silence became easier again.
Three years later the cancer was real.
This time he had not called.
“Did he want to tell me in 2018?”
Claire nodded.
“And you stopped him.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I was afraid.”
May you like
“Of losing me?”
Claire looked at him.
