I Can’t Even

Chapter Eight

O f course, Paisley refused to leave as easily as that, but I tried. She was very concerned with how she would know we were following the dictates of the will. Mr. Loren suggested that trust would be involved. Yeah, Paisley, didn’t take that sitting down.

“I think there should be some way to check in,” Paisley said. “Maybe we could put a tracking device on the urn and on all of you so that I know you are tucked in right and tight where you’re supposed to be, you know, some sort of app or even better a body cam.”

“Don’t you mean ash cam,” Em said. She delivered it without even a hint of sarcasm, and I had to turn away before I laughed out loud.

“This is utterly ridiculous,” Soph said. Clearly, she was not in a joking mood. “Mom couldn’t expect us to just give up our lives. I mean that’s crazy, right? And there will be no tracking device or app. End of discussion.”

Paisley planted a hand on her hip and tipped her chin up in full argument mode. “No, it isn’t. There needs to be transparency as I intend to carry out my beloved aunt’s wishes to the letter.”

Em made a low growling noise in her throat. I looped my arm through hers just in case she made a diving tackle at Paisley. It seemed I wasn’t the only one that Paisley brought out the best in.

“Whatever you decide to do to monitor the situation is up to you, Ms. Lawson.” Mr. Loren scanned the room as if just realizing that he was outnumbered, four women to one man, and the women were getting agitated. “But I can assure you the two dictates of the will are simply that you sleep in your own beds at night and that her urn remains on the window sill for a period of three months.” He sighed. “I tried to talk her out of this, but...the will is air tight. There is no wiggle room.”

“But I live in New York and have pets,” I cried at the same time Soph said, “What about my children?”

“I know and I’m sorry.” Mr. Loren looked genuinely aggrieved. He turned to Paisley and in a voice that brooked no dissent, said, “Now if you’ll excuse us, Ms. Lawson, there are some matters I need to discuss with Barbara’s daughters in private.”

Paisley looked like she’d argue so I made a preemptive strike. Circling the table, I caught her by the elbow and hauled her out of her seat. I pulled her toward the door, barely opening it before I shoved her outside. She tottered on her spike heels for a moment, but I didn’t pause to see if she keeled over. I gave her a jaunty finger wave and slammed the door.

I returned to the dining room table to find Mr. Loren alone. I glanced around for my sisters, but they were gone. Interpreting my confusion, Mr. Loren said, “What I have to share next is just for you, so I took the liberty of asking Sophie and Emily to step out of the room for a moment. Would you mind closing the door?”

My inner alarm system was clanging really loud. I couldn’t imagine why Mr. Loren would want to talk to me alone. All right, I could imagine why but none of it was good. Given our difficult relationship, perhaps Babs had cut me out of the will. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to say so in front of the others. I supposed I should be relieved because then I could get back to my life, but instead I felt the hurt bubbling up inside of me, making me feel vulnerable and on the edge of tears.

I shook it off. I was not going to cry. I would accept whatever horrible thing my mother had done as just another twist of the knife in wounds that would likely never scar over. I closed the door and took my seat. I folded my hands on the table and waited.

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’m ready for whatever Babs has cooked up next.” Lies, but I hoped if I said it often enough, I’d start to believe it.

“This isn’t from your mother,” Mr. Loren said. “It’s from your father.”

I blinked and sat up. “Dad? But he’s been gone for seventeen years. Why now?”

“When he gave me this twenty years ago, he instructed me that should he die before your mother, I was to wait until she passed before giving it to you,” the attorney said. He took a large manila envelope out of his briefcase and handed it to me.

I studied it and then glanced at him. Howard Loren had been my parents’ attorney since forever. He and Dad were golf buddies back in the day and he kept Babs’s affairs in order after Dad passed. I had known him my whole life and never had I seen him appear ill at ease. Until now.

I ran my thumb under the sealed edge and peered inside. When I reached in, I removed an official-looking document, several photographs, and a letter written in my dad’s distinctive spidery handwriting. A quick glance at the photos showed a much younger version of my dad in them with a woman I didn’t recognize. My gaze strayed to the document. It was my birth certificate except where Babs name should have been there was a different name. It read Lisa Michaels. My hands started shaking and I tucked them under my arms as if I was a bird folding my wings, trying to stay warm.

“That’s not my birth certificate,” I said.

“It’s your original,” Mr. Loren said. “The one you’ve seen is your amended birth certificate, which is what the court issues when a child is adopted.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, even though deep down I did.

Mr. Loren met my gaze. I saw sympathy and kindness in eyes, and with everything in me I wanted to flat out reject it, but I didn’t.

“About twenty-eight years ago, your parents were in a rough patch in their marriage,” Mr. Loren said. “Your father’s work schedule left Barbara feeling neglected and unhappy which drove a wedge between them. Your father did what a lot of men do and sought solace elsewhere.”

“Is that lawyer speak for he played hide the salami with someone else?” I tapped the papers. “Might her name be Lisa?”

Mr. Loren looked pained. I wasn’t sure if it was my false bravado or the fact that I’d forced him to spell out for me what all of this meant. He started to explain but I couldn’t hear him over the loud rushing noise in my ears. I watched his lips move but there was no sound. It didn’t matter. I was just stalling. I knew what I was looking at. I knew what all of it meant. And for the first time in my life, I even knew why Babs had hated me all these years. She wasn’t my mother.

The words clicked in my brain like the opening of a lock. My entire life story smashed like a mirror under a heavy fist. The shards tried to reorder themselves into making sense, but I couldn’t put the pieces together. They simply didn’t fit anymore. As if an escape hatch opened, I glanced to my right to see the floor rushing up to meet me. For the first time ever, I blacked out.

“You have her hair,” Soph said. My older sis was sitting in a chair beside the couch where I was lying with a bag of frozen peas on my noggin. I had clipped the table on my way down and now had a nice lump the size of a robin’s egg on my hairline. Apparently, Mr. Loren had managed to catch me before I crashed to the floor otherwise the damage likely would have been worse.

At the sound of his yelp, my sisters had come running. Neither Mr. Loren nor I thought to hide the papers from them and after they hauled me to the couch, Em jogged back to the dining room to retrieve my glass of water and saw the birth certificate. Freak out is a woefully inadequate way to describe her reaction, but it’s all I’ve got. It took us another twenty minutes to calm her down.

I gave Mr. Loren permission to tell them everything and when he left, he looked like a man who had climbed Mount Everest without a Sherpa. I sort of felt bad for him but thought it might be an excellent life lesson for him to screen his clients more carefully in the future. Clearly, my parents were the worst.

“I always thought you had Dad’s hair.” Soph had not set down the pictures since Mr. Loren had given them to her.

“Me, too,” I said. Suddenly, the image of Babs coming at me with a straightening iron made much more sense.

“I can’t believe they did this,” Soph said. “I was so sick with the measles right before you were born that I didn’t remember much about it. I never remembered Mom being pregnant with you. I always thought it was because I was sick, but it was because she wasn’t. I remember they even told me she had to go away because my illness might harm her or the baby. She must have been hiding out, pretending to be pregnant while just waiting for you to be born.”

“It’s mental,” I said. “Who does that sort of thing?”

“Mom,” Soph said. She stared off at nothing. “I remember Nana came to stay with us and she made me peanut butter and chocolate chip sandwiches every day for lunch.” I just stared at her and then she said, “Sorry. I’m just trying to put it all together.”

No one spoke for a while and then Em, sounding stressed, said, “You have a letter from Dad.”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to read it?” she asked. I thought I heard a note of jealousy in her voice.

“When I’m ready,” I said. Another lie. I would have read it right then and there except I didn’t want to share it. It was mine. All mine.

“Oh.” Em was sitting in the chair beside Soph’s. Even though we were not as close as we’d once been, I knew the look on her face. It was the one she got when she wanted something but didn’t know how to ask. I wasn’t going to help her out. Not this time.

“Are you going to search for her?” Soph’s voice was soft as if the question would have less impact if she spoke quietly.

No such luck. The thought of having a mother I’d never known shook me to the core, as if the very foundation upon which I’d built my life had suddenly fallen into a sink hole, or more accurately, a bottomless pit. I felt like I was free falling, with no idea where I would land.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Soph stared at me for a moment. She put the pictures on the coffee table and said, “I’m going to make some coffee.”

Em and I were quiet for a while, each lost in our own thoughts. Babs’s urn still sat on the table in the other room. In my mind, I had flashes of such anger that I pictured taking the stupid thing and throwing it through the picture window she had asked to be placed beside. I wouldn’t do it, but I imagined it.

“Why?” Em asked.

I glanced at her from under the bag of peas and saw the confusion in her eyes.

“You’re going to have to give me more if you want an answer,” I said. “Why didn’t they tell me? Why hide my original birth certificate? Why didn’t Babs just tell me why she hated me all these years? Give me a direction, Emily.”

“That.” Em waved her hand, making a circle in the air. “All of that.”

“I have no idea. Honestly, I don’t know who I am more furious with right now, Babs or Dad. All I know is my entire life was a lie.”

“Not all of it, we’re still sisters,” Soph said as she came into the room bearing a tray with a coffee press, three matching mugs, milk, and sugar.

“Sisters, yes,” I said. “But apparently only half sisters, at least I’m only a half.”

We were silent while Soph fussed with the coffee. It was weird to feel as if I was suddenly less a part of the three siblings we had always been. I didn’t know how to feel about it.

“Bullshit,” Soph said. The word boomed in the quiet room and both Em and I started. “You survived growing up here with her , there’s nothing half about you.”

That helped. The three of us nodded in understanding as only siblings who have shared their life journey with each other and know what a long, strange trip it’s been can. Growing up with Babs made for an unbreakable bond. There was a survivorship in navigating a relationship with a volatile woman who viewed her children as reflections of herself instead of people in their own right and we had each developed our own coping skills.

Soph went to college and got involved with Stan Timmons, a medical student at the same university, and by the end of freshman year, she was pregnant and getting married. It was a rather dramatic way to put some distance between herself and Babs, and ironically, since Babs bought Soph and Stan their first house, not coincidentally in Gull’s Harbor, they had settled nearby, meaning Soph never managed to go too far.

I had bailed by going to school as far away as humanly possible without leaving the country, and Em, well, she had done the opposite of Soph and me. She had stayed with Babs and become her primary companion, her best friend, her caretaker.

I’d never understood why Em didn’t fly the coop when she was eighteen and ready for college, but she didn’t. She commuted to school in San Diego, got a degree in communications, and now worked for an insurance company. Despite the bombshell sitting in my lap, of the three of us, I was most worried about Em and how she would deal with the loss of our...her...mother.

Soph pushed down on the top of the press filling the carafe with hot coffee while moving the grounds to the bottom. She then poured three cups and passed one to each of us before she sat down.

“I imagine Mr. Loren will be in touch and tell us what Mom meant exactly about us living together,” Soph said. “Probably, she just meant we needed to stay together until the estate is settled.”

I sipped my coffee and arched my brow in her direction. “This is Babs we’re talking about. That will sounded pretty tight to me.”

“Please stop calling her that,” Em said.

Both Soph and I glanced at our baby sister. Em’s long hair was loose, a beautiful wave of honey that cascaded over her shoulders to ripple halfway down her back. She had two bright spots of pink on her cheeks and her brown eyes looked sad.

“I’m sorry, what?” I asked.

Em didn’t meet my gaze but stared resolutely down at her coffee.

“Stop calling her ‘Babs,’” Em said. Her voice held a note of panic. “Even if she wasn’t your birth mother, she still raised you and you should call her ‘Mom.’”

“Other than when talking directly to her, I haven’t referred to her as ‘Mom’ since I left home,” I snapped. “And I’m not going to start now—especially now.”

I tried to keep the emotion that was boiling just below the surface from showing. I could see that Em was upset and I didn’t want to make her more so but I was the one who’d just found out that I wasn’t who I thought I was and that my parents had hidden it from me for twenty-seven years.

“I just think if you tried to see things from Mom’s perspective—” Em stammered.

“It wouldn’t matter. My relationship with Babs was always doomed,” I said. “Don’t you get it? She hated me. Hated. Me. Because of course she did. I was walking talking proof that her husband had strayed. It must have eaten at her every single day.”

“We don’t know that—” Em took a deep breath and tried again. “I mean just because it looks that way—”

I didn’t want to shatter Em’s fuzzy ideal about our family, but the reality was that while Babs and I shared a few quasi-tender moments at the end I wasn’t going to remember her in soft focus for the rest of my life. We weren’t even blood. Too much damage had been done for me to remember Babs as anything less than the vindictive angry woman who’d never forgiven a baby for where she came from.

“I’m sorry, but no,” I said. “I can’t forgive her or Dad for keeping this from me. They had no right.”

“Fine. Cling to your righteous anger. I hope it makes you feel better.” Em pushed back her chair and stomped from the room, leaving her coffee behind.

I pulled the partially melted peas off my head and dropped them onto the coffee tray. I glanced at Soph and said, “If she didn’t want coffee, she could have just said no.”

Soph’s gaze was full of sympathy as if she understood that I was suddenly in the unfortunate spot of being the one Em was going to direct her anger about Babs’s death upon. Oh, lucky me.

“She didn’t mean it,” Soph said.

“Yeah, she did.” Then I met her gaze. “But I’m okay with it. Em had a different relationship with Babs than I did. I imagine it’s hard for her to understand why I am so angry and I am. God, Soph, I am so pissed.”

“I know.” She nodded and her blonde bob swept across her cheeks. “You have every right to be. I can’t believe they did this to you.”

We sipped our coffee. The bitterness of the brew curled my tongue. Soph had always like her coffee strong enough to sprout chest hair. I resisted the urge to glance down the front of my dress just in case tweezers were going to be required later.

“I saw Liam today,” Soph said after a few minutes. “He said he was sorry for my loss.”

“He said the same to me. I wonder how long he had to practice to get the words out.”

“He never took his eyes off of you.” Soph sipped her coffee, watching me over the rim.

I snorted, ignoring the relieved flutter inside my chest that at least the man wasn’t immune to me despite our past. “You sound like your daughter. Hannah told me I should "tap that.’”

“What? My Hannah?” Sophie lowered her cup.

“The only Hannah Banana I know,” I said.

“Do you think I need to talk to her?”

“No, she admitted she hasn’t “tapped” anything yet,” I said.

Soph’s spine relaxed, and she sagged against the seat back. “Oh, thank god. I am not up for that. I barely got through the discussion on how tab A goes into slot B and makes baby C and why you don’t want to do that until you are at least thirty.”

I briefly closed my eyes. “Please tell me the sex discussion between you and your kids did not go down like an IKEA furniture manual.”

“It might have,” Soph said. “I even used visual aids, which I really think upped my birds and bees game.”

“Do we have any vodka for this coffee?” I lifted my mug.

Soph laughed. “You should have seen the twins’ faces when we got to the STD portion of my PowerPoint presentation on why they should keep a lid on it. Nothing screams “abstinence” quite like the image of a cankered wanker with a full-blown case of syphilis.”

“Sweet baby Jesus!” I shook my head. “And how is their therapy fund?”

“Plentiful,” Soph said. “They’ve grown up so fast. I feel as if I’m losing them and if they go away this summer...I don’t know if I can let them go, Jules.”

“I know,” I said. I didn’t. I mean I only had two cats, which was not even close to the same thing, but I hated the idea of not being with them for three months, so poor Soph had to be reeling. “Maybe Mr. Loren can find a loophole. I mean, we can’t really give up our lives for three months. Babs can’t reasonably expect that. Maybe we could contest the will.”

“Maybe.” Soph glanced over her shoulder at the stairs. “But I think I know why Babs asked this of us.”

“Why?”

“For Em. She’s never lived alone. I think Mom wanted us to watch over her for awhile.”

I nodded. That, at least, made sense. It was still impossible but at least there was some rationale behind it.

We finished our coffee. Em’s cup sat untouched. I knew my younger sister was upset with me, but I still felt like I was the one taken out at the knees and I just didn’t have it in me to coddle her right now.

“So, what are you going to do?” Soph asked.

“About?”

“Everything,” Soph said. “Your birth mother, New York, Liam, all of it.”

“New York isn’t going anywhere,” I said. “I can work just easily from here as there, although I do miss my cats.”

“How are Spaghetti and Meatball?”

“In good hands,” I said without elaborating. I was going to have to cry, beg, and plead to get Jessie to continue watching them for me, but desperate times and all that.

“As for my birth mother, I don’t know,” I said. “It’s been twenty-seven years. Who knows where she is or if she’d even want to see me.” The mere thought of looking for her made me queasy.

“We can ask Mr. Loren, I guess.” Soph looked at me as if this whole situation was surreal, which it totally was and then shook her head. “So, what about Liam? Any idea what you’re going to do about that?”

I knew I could have put her off. I could have denied my feelings but to what purpose? To protect myself? As if that had ever done me any good.

“It might just be on my end,” I began, wanting her to know that I wasn’t being stupid, “but I think there is still something there, something worth investigating. At the very least, I need to tell him I’m sorry.”

Soph opened her mouth to speak but then closed it, tilting her head to study me. The affection in her gaze was as warm as the sun.

“If he doesn’t give you another chance, he’s an idiot,” my older sister said, ever my protector.

Soph rose from her seat and took the coffee tray back to the kitchen. She’d sent Hannah and Harry home with enough leftovers to keep the family of four eating for a week. She picked up her purse and glanced through the dining room doorway at Babs in her pretty urn on the table. “I guess I’ll go get my toothbrush and prepare to sleep in my old room.”

“Is Stan going to be okay with this?” I asked.

“Until we can figure out an alternative, he’ll have to be, won’t he?” Soph shrugged. “Back in a flash.” She ran her hand over the knot on my head and nodded. It was weird to have her doing the mom thing with me. Weird but also kind of nice.

I hugged her before she left just because we both seemed to need it. Soph was much thinner than I remembered, the bones of her shoulders evident beneath my touch. When my older sis was stressed, she didn’t eat. I blamed whatever was going on between her and Stan. Would she tell me if I asked her flat out?

I rolled up from the couch, planning to make it an early night. I paused by Babs’s urn. I put my hand on the top and a rage so intense it made my fingers shake filled me. I wanted to knock her to the floor. But I didn’t.

Instead, I dropped my hand and gazed out the window at Liam’s house. His workout room was dark. Not a big surprise, but I was disappointed not to have at least a glimpse of my favorite distraction. Given that I had memorialized the life of my mother, rather my adoptive mother—okay that was weird—today, the fact that I was hoping to ogle the boy next door made me a complete reprobate. Yeah, I was pretty sure I was going to hell.

But honestly, in that moment if I could have looked my fill at Liam, hell would have been totally worth it.