Chapter 27
DEB
I BEND TO COLLECT THE morning paper, wet with dew. Billy likes the sports section, especially in July with Wimbledon and the Tour de France.
John and Brenda Miller are loading suitcases into the back of an Uber across the street. I wave as Brenda steps into the street with a tilt of her head. “Everyone doing okay?”
She’s referring to the fire. She doesn’t know about the Alzheimer’s.
“We’re getting by.” I smile. “Where are you off to? Need me to grab your mail?”
Her face lights up. “Paris, can you believe it?! Spreading our wings now that the nest is empty, you know how it is.”
Brenda is my age. Her kids grew up playing with mine, sharing walks to school and front yard soccer matches. Birthday parties and prom nights. Brenda and John’s golden years are ahead of them. But she’s wrong. I do not know how that is.
“Would the mail be a terrible inconvenience? We’re back next Tuesday.”
“Not at all.” I wave as they get into their car. “Have a good trip.”
“Thanks!” Their Uber motors around the corner, and the street goes quiet.
Billy and I haven’t really traveled. Our hands were always full, travel meant for tomorrow back when tomorrow was a given.
But barefoot here in my front yard, I have the sinking understanding that we will never go to Paris together.
I have no particular attachment to Paris, haven’t thought about it one way or another.
But now it looms in front of me as a thing we will never do.
I will never watch Billy watch the Tour de France in person.
I’ve always known we wouldn’t do most things in this wide world, but I didn’t know we wouldn’t do this thing.
It’s specific. And the specificity is a dull, spreading grief.
I turn toward the house, drying dew from the paper.
Inside, Sadie and Otto are at the dining table with their grandfather and bowls of oatmeal. Sadie’s tongue is peeking out of her mouth as she focuses on squirting the honey bottle.
I notice the time. “When’s your first patient?”
Billy follows my gaze to the clock. “Shoot. Ten minutes.” He stands as he spoons a few last bites of oatmeal.
He has officially given notice of his retirement, and not a moment too soon.
I worry he might give someone a crown who only needs a cleaning, or administer an anesthetic when they only need a fluoride treatment.
I toss the sports page onto the counter. “For later, then.”
He kisses my forehead, pausing to remark on my handsome set of teeth as though he’s only just noticed them. I chuckle and roll my eyes. “Go to work, you crazy dentist.”
He grins. A quick kiss for Sadie, then one for Otto. April comes around the corner in time to get one too. Billy looks deeply at her and pauses. “My beautiful family,” he says. “And to think we wouldn’t have had any of this if you hadn’t come along!”
Cameron enters the kitchen at this precise moment, so now two of our children are looking at me with confused expressions as I grab hold of the nearest chair, the air being sucked from the room.
Sadie looks up sheepishly. “Oops, I got too much honey.”
I blink down at her oatmeal, which can barely be seen through the amber glaze.
Billy is out the door, strapping on his bicycle helmet, all kisses and smiles.
It’s a complicated thing to be hurt by someone who doesn’t realize he did anything wrong.
How is it that he remembers the circumstances of April’s birth but not the shame of it?
Not the mutual commitment we had to keeping this secret?
We didn’t want April to feel unwanted. I’ve lost count of the times we lied to our kids about those early years.
We told ourselves it was for their protection, and we fictionalized a wedding. Baby showers, even.
April scoops some of the honey from Sadie’s bowl. “What in the world did that mean?”
But I know she’s already connecting the dots. Replaying memories. Noticing the way I’m gripping this chair, my color draining. I am twenty-four again, aflame with guilt and trapped by my own child—the very same one who studies me now, a mother herself.
Cameron too stares at me as he says conclusively, “You never lost any photos.”
We told them we lost April’s baby photos when we moved to Lexington Avenue. Our wedding photos. That we had looked everywhere. In reality, there were never baby photos of our firstborn, only her siblings. And there were, of course, no wedding photos.
Sadie slurps her honey and listens. This is how she’ll learn that her grandmother is a liar.
I sink into the chair. “No, we never lost any photos. We never had any.”
Cameron sits down. “Why would you tell us you did?”
April is quiet, busying herself around the kitchen.
I look over at her and implore, “Please sit?”
She shuts a cabinet. Pulls up a seat and crosses her arms. “This is for real? You only got married because you got pregnant with me?”
Sadie boasts, “Hey, I was pregnant! Means I lived in Mommy’s tummy.”
April gently corrects her. “Close. It’s the mommy who’s pregnant, not the baby.”
“Oh.” Sadie shrugs, taking another big, sweet bite.
“Why don’t you go turn on TV?”
Sadie’s eyes widen. Television isn’t normally allowed in the morning. She hops down from her seat and patters off.
“Wait up.” April holds out her daughter’s bowl. “Take your breakfast.”
“Food in the living room?” She shimmies her shoulders and says, “Fancy!”
We watch her go before I turn to April and say, “Yes, we got married because we got pregnant with you.”
Leo ambles in, unaware of my just-spoken confession wafting through the kitchen air. He smiles at us and goes toward the coffee as Cameron says, “I don’t get why you would tell us a completely different story.”
My explanation suddenly feels hollow, but April says, “I get why.”
Cameron and I both turn to her.
She glances at Leo, who stops short. “Uh, am I interrupting?”
I pull out another chair. “No, sweetheart.”
He sits tentatively as April says to me, “You told us a fake story because you didn’t want me to feel like I do right now, like I ruined your life.”
Leo sputters on his coffee, so April explains placidly, “Mom and Dad only got married because they got pregnant with me. Apparently.”
I command her eye. “Does this look like a ruined life?”
The morning sun reaches through the sycamore branches into our kitchen window.
Bowls overflow with fresh fruit, and children’s artwork hangs on the fridge.
Children who now surround me at our memory-rich table, a sticky spot where my granddaughter was sitting with her honey.
I reach for April’s hand. “You gave me this life,” I tell her.
Josie makes her entrance, her hair an absolute bird’s nest. “Whoa, what’s up in here?” she asks.
It’s only her second morning home, what a welcome.
Cameron leans back in his chair until it tilts onto its hind legs, which I’ve told him a hundred million times not to do. “Mom and Dad only got married because he knocked her up.”
Josie’s jaw drops. “What! But—they always said—” Then her shocked expression turns mischievous, and she pivots toward me. “Well, Debra Lyn Russo.”
This is not the first time I’ve scandalized my kids during breakfast. When they were teens, I would sometimes say loudly to Billy, “So, last night was fun.” The kids would gag, and I would wink at their father.
The night before might have only consisted of watching a movie or working on a commission, but that was irrelevant because Billy and I were in on it together.
Now our biggest secret has been exposed and I’m alone with it.
Our big fake wedding and our fabricated history of seamless happiness.
I don’t know why it’s so difficult to be straight with our own children: Kids, there are times when your parents are weak or wrong or wounded.
My mind goes to Billy. It’s as though the man who swore himself to secrecy all those years ago was a different man than the one in our kitchen this morning.
That’s the slippery grief of this illness: he’s disappearing while he’s still here.
Yes, it stings to be exposed against my will.
But more than that, it stings to be alone against my will, drifting into a solo parenthood where I’m going to need my kids in a new way.
They lost something today, however small: a lifelong belief about their own origin story. And I’m afraid they will lose more yet.