I was losing him to some memory I
knew nothing of. To only know so much and begin to lose him was shredding my
heart. Knowing who my mom was wasn’t enough anymore. I had to know what had
happened. I had to know who she had been to him.
“What happened?” I prompted, my voice
pleading and anxious.
His watery eyes found mine, and
seemed to find an anchor to this reality along with it. “Sorry,” he muttered,
dragging his hand across his eyes.
“What happened?” I repeated when he
didn’t begin to answer.
He sighed heavily. “We started seeing
each other; at first casually, but then we were together more and more
frequently. It was no longer a friendship, but more of a partnership. She had
the uncanny ability to know just what to say to make everything better or
worse. And her bright, flighty personality drew me closer in until I seriously
considered divorcing Kenzy.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Shush, you’re getting ahead of the
story,” he reprimanded. I waited impatiently as he recollected his thoughts of
the past. “She went missing,” he started again. “No one knew where she had
gone, or why she had left. When she reappeared nearly a year later, Kenzy and I had
come to an—um, an agreement in our marriage.”
“What?” I screeched. As the story of
my mother and father unfolded, despite being abridged, I found I had curled up
on the chair as I used to when he would tell me stories of romance and
chivalry. “What arrangement?”
“Calm down,” he said, motioning for
me to sit with him again. This time I obeyed, hoping that, if anything like my
mom, I would better understand what came next. “Kenzy had found out about my
relationship with Ty. After months of arguing about divorce, equality, and
children, we agreed to stay married and be faithful to each other. Supposing
the arrangement held, we would consider adopting a child. A huge concession for
Kenzy considering her tenacious feelings toward adoption.
“But then Ty returned, and I couldn’t
see myself ever keeping to something so inane. I loved her; how could I give
her up?”
“You couldn’t,” I answered gently. “So
you saw her again.”
“The first time we met privately,
after her return,” he continued, “we went to a hotel. It was where she was
staying. I had thought it was temporary, but couldn’t imagine anyone denying
her a place to stay. Everyone loved her.”
“Dad, what was important about that
time?” I sensed that if I didn’t pry him from his thoughts, I would never hear
the end of the story. It no longer was just something to know; it was a need. I
needed these answers, this story, some kind of control in my life, something
true—really true—to believe.
His pearly whites gleamed at me. “That
was the first time I met you. You were so strong and determined for an infant. All
the world was a wall to be torn down and rebuilt for you.” He squeezed my
shoulders in a one-armed hug. “After the initial shock, I was hurt. My thoughts
weren’t possessive…they were dismissive. I was ready to storm out before she
told me you were little more than four months old. You were mine…” his voice
trailed, seeming to leave the past behind. The hazel eyes found the current me
and settled on the image. “You're mine.”
A silence swallowed us as he reasoned
out fact from the imaginary accumulated over the years. He laughed to himself
at some point, saying, “I had convinced myself it was all a lie. That she
really was waiting somewhere. Ty couldn’t be dead. She was too special to die
so young.”
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