Chapter 39
TWO DAYS LEFT
Out on the back roads, we turned onto a one-lane gravel drive that twisted through forest slowly reclaiming its territory, forcing us to get out every few minutes and move a fallen branch or clear away brush.
I kept looking for a strange hook in a tree or a distinctive boulder, some trigger of recognition, but the trees were only trees. The rocks only rocks.
The cabin appeared, looking old and vaguely creepy, like the ones they used in horror films. A few of the slats on the porch railing were missing, and a tree had fallen into the roof on one side. I searched again for some gooey feeling of nostalgia, but there was nothing.
Hess studied the place through the window, wincing. “I’m sorry it’s such a disaster. It’s just been sitting here.” She seemed hesitant to leave the car, but once I was out, she followed.
The wooden boards of the porch were surprisingly sturdy under my feet. Hess pulled a tarnished gold key from her ring, and I wondered why she’d carried it around all these years. She turned it in the lock and pushed the door open slowly.
A pile of mail sat at the entrance, and thick sediment covered everything in the small living room. My steps made footprints in the dust as I toed aside the mountain of paper and moved farther in.
There was a table against the wall holding a collection of framed photos obscured by grime, and I used my jacket sleeve to wipe the glass of one.
It showed a barefaced Belle leaning against Hess with trees behind them.
Hess’s arms were wrapped around Belle’s waist, and her face was wedged into the crook of her neck.
It was an intimate, possessive position, like that of lovers.
I picked up the next frame and wiped. Hess held a baby against her freckled chest, her face serene and shining with the light of new motherhood.
In another, Hess and a young girl walked hand in hand through an orange grove.
The girl sat in Hess’s lap on a tour bus.
The girl flipped pancakes in the cabin kitchen, helping Hess make breakfast.
I looked up from the frames and studied the cabin with a new filter, and flashes came to me, of squatting on the floor of the living room with a Barbie in my fist as a guitar trilled in the background.
The smell of pancakes browning and a rush of water, and this warmth that was muscular in its strength and solidity.
I looked back at Hess, who was standing a few feet away and watching me with shining eyes.
I moved down the hall leading off the main room and opened the doors as I passed. Closet, bathroom, and finally, bedroom. There was a large bed in the middle, and I remembered taking a running start and leaping onto it.
Mom and Belly’s room.
Mom.
My head went light, and I floated from the room back into the hall. At the very end, there was one more door. I opened it, and there it was.
A tiny bed sat in the corner with a blue gingham comforter.
A pair of small brown boots were lined up next to the dresser.
A tiny wooden piano was pushed against the wall.
The room smelled old and dusty, like an antique store, not like the pine and static cling that I remembered.
More than the fantasy room at Bellewood, this was where a child had lived.
I sat down on the bed and fingered the blanket, trying to regain my bearings.
Hess came in and sat down next to me. There was that muscular warmth again, but now it was here, radiating from this woman.
“You were my mother.”
Hess nodded.
The unsettling, many-faced image of my mother that I had long held split into two distinct people in my mind. Two mothers.
“But, how…?”
Hess exhaled, her body shaking slightly. “Your mom and I got together when we were eighteen—she was the first and only girl I ever fell in love with. I’d had crushes before, but I’d never wanted someone until I met her.”
She smiled through her tears. “Clayton knew about us—they only got married for the album sales. And so he could control her, of course, but we didn’t know that at the time.
We were very young.” Her smile turned dour.
“Lou left both of us at the same time, when she was twenty-three. Broke my heart. I honestly don’t remember those years without her very well—I gave up control of my life to my parents and just watched from afar as it unfolded.
And then after your father died”—she eyed me sympathetically—“Lou crawled through my window an hour before my wedding and told me she loved me, and that she was pregnant and she wanted to start a family. I was still so mad at her. I wanted to say no. I told myself I would say no, and I wouldn’t back down.
But I couldn’t. She was the love of my life.
” She shrugged, as if she hadn’t had a choice.
“When you were born, we bought this cabin, and I raised you as mine.” She gazed at the walls of the room.
“This was our special place—me, you, and Lou. We could be a real family here. Not like in Nashville where we had to be so careful. We told people I was your nanny, or I was a relative. But here, we could be ourselves.”
I picked up another framed photo from a cluster on the nightstand, of me on Hess’s shoulders in the forest. We both looked up at the sunshine filtering through the canopy.
“If we were a family, why are there never any photos of Belle and me, even here?”
Hess’s brow furrowed, studying the photograph.
“She was careful to keep her distance. Not because she didn’t love you.
Lord, she loved you.” She paused, selecting her words.
“I think she was worried she’d hurt you.
She thought if I was your mother and she didn’t get too close, she wouldn’t infect you.
And when she did pass away, you wouldn’t be as upset.
When I look back on it now, I think that was her plan.
For us to be a family after she was gone. ”
My stomach dropped. “Then why weren’t we? Why did I live with my dad’s family after she died?”
Hess scowled. “When you were born, Lou got in touch with them through one of Tate’s friends.
She’d never met them—she was too upset to go to the funeral.
But they had little interest in Tate’s life after he dropped out of college, and that included any baby.
They wanted to pretend he’d disappeared one day and wound up in Heaven somehow. ”
“Then how did I end up with them?” I asked again.
“Lou wrote her will so that I would receive custody of you and her entire estate until the day in which it could be passed on to you. I was planning to buy a new house in Nashville for us to live full-time before you started kindergarten. We couldn’t live in Bellewood, obviously.
We almost never spent any time there—it was meant to be more of a showpiece.
We’d keep the cabin, but being out here didn’t allow you to go to a good school.
I was going to give you the best childhood I could.
“Then the lawyer told me Tate’s parents and sister had contacted him.
They had secured their own lawyer to sue for full custody.
I was shocked. They’d wanted nothing to do with you until then.
” She shook her head. “First, I tried to talk to them. But they refused to even meet with me. So I fought it hard. They didn’t understand that I was your mother.
There was no way I was going to let some strangers take you away from me.
There was a lot of back-and-forth. It got very ugly.
I might not have been ‘blood family’ as they liked to put it, but I had the legal will on my side.
My lawyers were optimistic their case wouldn’t hold up.
“As you know, a few weeks after the crash, we had a big funeral for Lou with an empty casket in Nashville. Tate’s parents and sister were there, and they asked to speak with me in a back room of the church.
With their lawyer sitting next to them, your grandmother told me they’d hired a private investigator.
He’d discovered that Lou and I had been lovers, the sin we’d been committing.
I remember she said it like she was spitting.
She said if I didn’t give you up, they’d leak it to the press.
At first I thought fine, bitch, leak it to the press.
See if I care. But then she kept talking.
Everyone will know what you are. Everyone will know what Rhea comes from.
I imagined the fallout. Lou’s legacy ruined.
And you were about to go to school. Everywhere we went, we’d be ostracized.
It was possible Child Protective Services would try to take you away.
The beautiful, normal life I’d imagined for you was no longer possible, except, maybe, if I let you go with these people.
For all of their vinegar, they seemed to genuinely want you.
And they were your family. They weren’t, in all honesty, strangers.
Even as I reasoned with myself, a part of me screamed that I’d never give you up.
“But, as is my nature, my rational self won out. I was afraid. It was such a different time. If it was now, we might have had a chance. But back then… I don’t know.
Maybe we could have moved overseas to a place where people didn’t know us.
I still have a lot of shame, that I let you go.
It’s the greatest regret of my life.” A tear snaked down her cheek and she wiped it away.
“I asked your grandparents if I could come visit, and they said yes, when you were settled. They wanted to take you right then, and I said I needed to pack your things, but they insisted they’d buy you new stuff.
They gave us a few minutes to say goodbye, alone.
I remember you standing there in the back room of the church, and I said to myself, Hess, don’t you dare break down.