Chapter xl
xl
THE NEXT NIGHT, SAMMY WAS HELPING ME DO LAUNDRY . He was done with his homework, he’d already used up his hour of screen time, his room was relatively neat, and he was frustrated by the drawing of a sandwich he was working on (why a sandwich? I have no idea), so when I suggested he be the laundry delivery man, he reluctantly agreed.
I’ve told my kids that I wash, dry, fold, and deliver, but I don’t put away, that’s their job. And mostly they do, because they’ve all learned the hard way that it’s much more difficult to find your clothes when they are in unsorted piles on your dresser than when they are sorted and in drawers.
So Sammy had delivered Violet’s clothing to her room and Liam’s to his. Then he took my stack of clothes to deliver to my room. He came back to the living room, slowly, looking at a framed picture.
“What have you got there?” I asked him. Sometimes the kids find photos of me and Darren together and are fascinated by them—amazed, I guess, that we were happy once, married, in love.
“It was on your dresser, Mom,” he said.
And then he handed me the photo.
My stomach flipped. He’d found the photo of you and your mom, the one I’d taken out of the box a couple of weeks before.
“Is that me?” he asked, confused. “It looks like me. But I don’t remember that picture. Or the person I’m with.”
I thought I might—I don’t know what—faint or vomit or just spontaneously combust. After I didn’t say anything, he asked again.
“Is that me, Mom?”
His eyebrows were furrowed, clearly trying to make sense of this.
“It’s it’s someone named Gabriel,” I told him.
“Do I … have a twin?” he asked, still trying to puzzle it out. “Was my twin adopted? Was I adopted?” His face was still telegraphing curiosity, but I could hear a note of panic in his voice.
“No, no,” I said. “You were not adopted. I grew you right here,” I said, patting my stomach. “Right inside me, for thirty-nine weeks and two days.”
He smiled for a brief moment, but then his face went serious again. “But was I a twin?”
I shook my head.
“That’s not you, and it’s not your twin,” I said. “It’s a boy named Gabriel, who looks a lot like you, but that picture was from a long time ago. Probably the mid-1980s.”
I could see his brain trying to process but clearly still not having enough information.
“So why do you have the picture in your room? And why … why does he look like me?”
I swallowed. I stalled. “He died,” I said. “This boy became a man. And when he died, he left me this picture.”
“Because it looked like me?” Sammy asked.
I closed my eyes. Should I say yes , I thought, and leave it at that? But I knew I couldn’t. My son—our son—was asking me a direct question. The least I could do, as his mother, was answer it honestly.
“No,” I said. “He didn’t know what you looked like. He didn’t even know you existed before he died.”
“So why does he look like me?”
I took a deep breath. I was going to do this. I was going to set off this bomb—in his life, in my life, in Darren’s life, in his siblings’ lives. But it was time. The photograph made it time. My carelessness in leaving it out made it time. But also, Sammy’s curiosity made it time.
“Come sit down,” I said. “And I’ll tell you why.”
I thought about Eva, about what she had said about leading with love, about the familiar idea of having multiple parents.
Sammy sat down next to me on the couch. He was still clutching your photo.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” I echoed. I paused, and he waited. “So let me tell you about the man in the photo,” I said. “The one who looks like you.”
He nodded.
“His name is Gabriel Samson, and he was a very, very good friend of mine.”
I looked into Sammy’s eyes, which are the same shape as yours, but the same color as mine.
“We met in college, in New York City, and then he decided to become a photographer. His dream in life was to travel around the globe to find stories, and find beauty, and share those stories and that beauty with the world.”
“So he was kind of an artist?” Sammy asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I think a lot of people would call him an artist. And see his mom, the woman in the photo with him?”
Sammy nodded.
“She was a painter. And his dad was a sculptor.”
“That’s really cool,” Sammy said.
“Yeah.” I nodded. I was starting to think maybe just telling him about you might be enough for now. Maybe it would distract him. Maybe I shouldn’t tell him the whole truth, just a little piece of it. But how could I do that? I wished Darren had called me back, had actually spoken to me—and that he saw my perspective. Even Courtney agreed with me, for Chrissake. As I was sitting there, I made a new deal with myself. If Sammy asked again directly, I’d answer honestly. If he didn’t, I’d leave it be.
“Do you know what medium she used? The artist mom?”
I tried to remember what you had told me. I think at one point you’d told me she made images of desert sunsets, but that her real work was huge canvas abstracts with oil paint. Was that right? Did I remember correctly?
“Oils,” I told him, giving the word the weight of a certainty I didn’t feel. “She painted the desert in Arizona.”
He nodded seriously, taking that in. “Oil paints are hard,” he said. “You have to layer them just the right way, thin to thick is what Ms. Hammer says, otherwise your painting could crack.”
I nodded this time.
“Is she alive?” Sammy asked. “The mom?”
I shook my head. “She died, too,” I told him. “But maybe we can find some of her art online.” I’d never looked for it before, but you can pretty much find anything on the internet.
“Ooh! Can we?” he asked. “Do you have your phone?”
I pulled it out of my sweatshirt pocket and keyed in your mother’s name. I knew she had painted under her name from before she met your dad: Vivienne Gabriel. I typed Vivienne Gabriel artist into my phone and for the first time I saw your mom’s work. There were tons and tons of her desert sunsets. And then a few of her largerscale abstracts.
“Look at that one!” Sammy said, excited.
He was pointing to an abstract in shades of green and purple that looked sort of ocean-inspired to me.
“I love how the color wheel opposites are there, but also the shades of the same colors, too.” Sammy jumped up. “I have an idea for a picture!”
He ran off to his room. And I sat in the living room, alone with the laundry and your picture, feeling relieved, but also slightly disappointed that I didn’t get to tell Samuel who you really were to him.
But I knew that one day soon I would. Because he’d come back to me again with that question, and this time I’d have to be ready with an answer.