She was crying again.
“It’s not fair, Mom. It’s not her fault. She didn’t do anything. She just got born.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time. I sat on the cold tile and looked at my daughter, who had stayed up four nights in a row sewing a dress for a sister she’d never had a real conversation with. Who’d given away her father’s sweater and her grandfather’s watch and every single dollar she had.
Teresa was right.
I didn’t know my daughter at all.
She was so much better than I’d ever realized.
After Lily went upstairs to shower, I went out to the garage.
It was cold and smelled like old cardboard. Michael’s boxes were stacked along the back wall, where I’d put them three years ago and never touched them again. MICHAEL — OFFICE. MICHAEL — CLOTHES. MICHAEL — MISC.
The one marked MISC was open. The tape had been cut neatly with scissors. Lily’s scissors, probably. Her good fabric ones.
I didn’t look inside. I didn’t need to. Lily had the pictures under her bed.
I just stood there and looked at the boxes, and I thought about something I hadn’t let myself think about in seventeen years.
There was a phone call. When I was seven months pregnant. Michael’s cell phone rang late one night while he was in the shower. I picked it up. A woman’s voice said, “Mike?” And then, when I said hello, she hung up.
When he came out of the shower, I asked him about it.
He said it was probably a wrong number.
I looked at him for a long moment. And I decided to believe him.
That’s the thing nobody tells you. Sometimes you don’t find out the truth because you don’t want to. Because the truth would cost too much. So you choose not to look. You choose not to ask the next question. And you call it trust.
I’d been doing that for seventeen years.
And my sixteen-year-old daughter had looked straight at it. All by herself. And she hadn’t run.
I called in sick to work.
I’d never done that before. Not when Michael died, even. I went back after three days because I didn’t know what else to do.
I drove to Maplewood Assisted Living, where Michael’s mother lives.
Ruth was in the sunroom, doing a crossword puzzle with a pen. She’s eighty-one and sharp as a tack. When she saw me coming, she smiled and put the newspaper down.
“Beth! What a surprise. Where’s my girl?”
“At school.”
Her smile faded a little when she saw my face. “Sit down, dear. What’s wrong?”
I sat down across from her. I’d practiced what to say in the car. I forgot all of it.
“Did you know about Annie?” I said.
I watched it happen. Her face didn’t change at first. Then her hand moved slowly to the collar of her blouse, the way it always did when she was upset. And she looked out the window at the parking lot.
“Who told you?” she asked quietly.
That was all I needed.
“You knew,” I said.
“Beth…”
“You knew. For how long?”
She was quiet for a long time.
“Since the beginning,” she said. “He came to me when he found out the woman was pregnant. He was a wreck. He didn’t know what to do. He asked me if he should tell you.”
“And what did you say?”
Ruth looked down at her crossword puzzle.
“I told him no,” she said. “You were pregnant with Lily. You were so sick that year. I told him it would break you. I told him to take care of the child, quietly, and never let it touch his family.”
I stared at her.
