She came into my room at about ten that night and stood in the doorway and said: “Why didn’t Grandpa tell you?”
And I gave her the version I had worked out — the corridor, the midnight, the two different childhoods — and she listened to the whole thing and then said the sentence that has become the family’s official position on Marlon Crane.
“So he took the sad part.”
“What do you mean?”
“There were two sad parts,” my eleven-year-old said. “Mom d*ed, and you were there. He gave you one and kept the other one.”
I have not been able to say it better in two years.
And then she said, “Is that allowed?” — which is the actual question, and which I did not have an answer to then and have only a partial one now.
There was one more thing I had to do, and it took me until the second spring.
I found my biological father.
Not to confront him — he is seventy-four, he lives four states away, he has two other children and a business selling boat parts, and I had no speech prepared.
I wanted to ask him one question, which is whether he knew.
About the crash. About a four-year-old in a back seat, in a town he had left eleven years before, in a newspaper he would never have seen.
He didn’t know any of it.
He did not know my mother was d*ed. He had not asked in forty-one years, and when I told him on the telephone he said, “Oh,” and then, after a pause, “she was a nice girl,” which is the sum total of what that man has ever given me.
He asked whether I wanted anything.
I said no, and he sounded relieved, and I have not called again and I will not.
I am not writing that down to be cruel about him. I am writing it because of what it clarified, permanently, in about ninety seconds on a phone.
Two men had a share in my life.
One walked away before I was born and never once asked a question. The other one wrote a letter every October for forty-one years to the worst night of his life, in order to keep asking the only question left.
Everything all right?
Bl*od did not enter into it in either direction.
It is not allowed.
He lied to me for forty-one years. I do not get to make it beautiful and skip that: there were a thousand days he could have chosen differently, and choosing wrong a thousand times is not the same as choosing wrong once at midnight.
What I have arrived at is smaller than forgiveness and much steadier.
He was wrong, and he carried the consequences of being wrong entirely by himself, and the only person who ever paid for that lie was him.
I have never been able to find the part where it cost me anything.
Chapter 5: October
I drive out to Abner’s on the second Saturday of October now.
That started by accident and has become the thing my family arranges itself around: my husband knows, my kids know, and my daughter — who is eleven and relentless — came with me for the first time last year.
He tells me about my mother.
