Chapter 33
Ava
Tucker’s recovery went perfectly, and he was discharged right on time. After making sure he and Gram were settled at the hotel, I arranged for a ride to a Mexican restaurant my father had chosen.
He had a headshot on his company website, so I felt reasonably sure I could spot him. We bore only a passing resemblance. Maybe something about our eyes or nose.
The restaurant was quiet, caught in the lull between lunch and dinner. Colored flags fluttered in the air conditioning as I searched for him.
One man sat alone in the center of the sea of square tables.
He matched the photograph, his dark hair peppered with gray, cut short in a corporate style.
He dressed on the high end of casual in a pale blue polo shirt and khaki pants.
He could’ve been anyone’s middle-aged father. However, he was mine.
I wound my way through the tables and headed for him. He noticed me and stood. I extended a hand as I got near. Rather than call him the wrong thing, Dad or Marcus or Mr. Roberts, I simply said, “Hello.”
He clasped my hand in both of his, like an embrace. “Ava. What a lovely young woman you’ve become.”
He pulled out my chair. I sat, feeling off balance, my stomach quivering. Nothing about him felt familiar.
“So how is work with the oil company?” I had prepared opening questions. I wasn’t sure exactly how we might break the awkwardness.
“Good. I like it. Helps me prepare for college bills.”
My heart plummeted. The other daughters. I’d learned since the first email that he had two of them. Ones who didn’t forget him.
“What are their names again?” I tried to make my voice normal, but it still wavered.
My father must’ve heard that note and shifted his gaze. “My oldest daughter is Amanda. She’s hoping to go to Tulane when she graduates high school.”
My heart thundered down to my belly. I was his oldest daughter. Not Amanda.
“And the other?”
“Jennifer. She’s twelve.”
Jennifer and Amanda. The sisters I’d never met.
“Your name is on my birth certificate,” I said. “But, given the circumstances, I wanted to confirm with you personally that you are my biological father.”
He sat straighter, his hands on the table going still. “Did your mother suggest that?”
“No, I don’t have a reason to question it, other than the fact that…” I hesitated. “You left us.”
He didn’t answer right away, his fingers drumming lightly on the wood surface.
“Your mother and I were married and very much in love when you were conceived. I have no reason to doubt that you are mine.”
The server chose that moment to approach with her bouncy walk and bright smile. “Can I get you two something to drink?”
“Just water,” I said.
“Me too.”
“Chips? Salsa? Appetizers?”
“No, thank you.” I accepted both of the menus and flattened them on the table.
By the time she walked away, my father had composed himself.
“I’m not proud of what I did, but I tried to stay in contact with you.”
“How?”
“I sent a gift every year on your birthday. All the way until the police called, saying you were missing.”
Years of gifts, and I had none. My anger at my mother burned hot.
“Why did the police call you?”
“Your mother thought I’d kidnapped you.”
She did? “I ran away.”
He fingered the corner of a menu. “That’s what I was told. You went to a shelter.”
“They took me in. I had no one to help me.” I lifted my chin, a challenge.
“They told me not to come,” he said.
“Would you have?”
He hesitated.
“I thought not,” I said.
“That’s not fair, Ava—”
I cut him off. “You know what’s not fair? Having to fend for yourself after you’ve been forced to live alone with a crazy woman. When I ran away, I didn’t even know how to use a telephone!”
He looked beyond me, running his fingers through his hair. I recognized the gesture. I did it, too. This fueled my anger.
“I’d like to know why I have no relationship with any family. No grandparents. No aunts or uncles. Don’t I have anyone?”
He cleared his throat. “Your mother had two brothers. They’re probably still around somewhere. She ran away from home when she was seventeen. I met her about a year later. My parents died when I was thirty, before you were born. I am an only child.”
He was tense, like he was trying to evade the hard stuff. I could read his expression as well as my own.
“Your mother moved in with me rather fast. Neither of us had any money, and it was economical to share a place while I got my engineering degree. She told me about life with her family, and it wasn’t pretty. There was a lot of abuse. She’d been desperate to get away.”
He held my gaze for a moment, slate blue and intense. The world tilted as it seemed I was staring into a mirror, his eyes were such a match for mine.
“I’m not surprised that she was on her own with you after I left. I didn’t want to abandon her. But she made me leave.”
“I don’t believe that. There was this one movie we watched. The Sound of Music. And many times when the man sang to Maria, she would escape to the bathroom. I didn’t understand it when I lived with her, but now I know. That was all about you.”
His nervous hands stilled. “She never indicated that to me.”
“What ended things?”
“You were in kindergarten when I moved out. It was a rough year for you. You had your first seizure when you were four. It wasn’t clear right away that your memory was impacted.
You forgot things, but you were small. It wasn’t until you were in school and we had specific things that we knew you’d learned that we realized the seizures were stealing your memory.
You still knew letters and shapes, but lost all the stories you’d been told.
Books we read to you were forgotten. But you were little. It was pretty muddy.”
I wanted to write this down, or record it, but I could only pay fierce attention, hoping I’d remember it all.
“I was determined to get you the best help I could. We went to a lot of doctors and even flew to other cities. I wanted to keep you in school, give you as normal a life as possible. Your mother didn’t. She wanted you home with her. She was terribly afraid something would happen to you.”
The woman set our drinks on the table, but we waved her away before she could interrupt us again.
“Was I on any medications then?”
“Several. And some of them were, frankly, horrifying. We looked into brain surgery. Your mother was opposed. There came a time when it made sense to let one parent’s vision take precedence over the other.
I had to work. I couldn’t go to every single one of the appointments and hear exactly what was being said.
Your mother wasn’t always truthful. She only listened to what she wanted to hear.
Mainly that her little girl needed her mother and should stay home. ”
“None of that sounds like a reason to abandon us.”
“You’re right.” He set his elbows on the table, bracing his head with his hands. I almost felt sorry that I was making him so frustrated and upset.
But Survival Ava said, No, forget it. You have over a decade of upset to make up for.
His voice dropped a notch. “I’m listening to myself tell the story, and it sounds horrible.
But it was different to be there. To feel as though you had no voice, and your wife was going to do things her way, even when I felt strongly that she was wrong.
We fought all the time. We yelled and carried on. It upset you a lot.”
I clutched my napkin, shredding the edges. “You left me with her.”
“Nobody loves you more than her.”
“Least of all you.”
“That’s fair. Absolutely fair. I moved out.
I came to see you every weekend. But you were getting worse.
I’d be talking to you and you’d freeze up, look away, and quit responding.
Your mother talked in circles about your care.
And then one day, when you were six years old, I came over for the weekend and you didn’t know who I was.
You clung to your mother, asking who the scary man was. ”
“And so you decided to quit tormenting me, right?” My anger rose like a pot boiling. I couldn’t bring it down. My napkin tore in two.
“No, I didn’t give up then. I had private consultations with your doctors away from your mother. The best course of action was to find a medication that would stop the seizures, and that was what they were working on. For all my faulting her, it seemed your mother was doing the right thing.”
“When did you stop coming completely?”
“When I got this.” He removed a small note from his pocket. He unfolded it and flattened it on the table.
It was a stick-figure drawing that showed a woman and a girl smiling.
Underneath it, in childlike handwriting, were the words: I am happy with mommy. Please don’t scare me anymore. Ava.
I dragged the paper closer. I’d read my old notes. I knew my handwriting, the quirks of my language, and how hard I pushed down on a pen.
But for this, I would have been very young. I couldn’t compare the handwriting to my wrist, but I did anyway. I pulled up my shirt sleeve, exposing the tattoo.
“What is that?” my father asked, but I ignored him for the moment.
The comparison was useless. Crayon versus pen. There was no way to tell if I’d written this myself, or if my mother had sent it on her own. I pulled my sleeve back down.
“The woman that you left me with would make up stories after I lost my memory. She would put them in my diary. She would make me think they were my ideas and thoughts.”
I pushed the paper back at him.
“I have no idea if I wrote that or not. But given my mother’s history, I think there’s a good chance she did this. But like you said, I was getting upset around you. You saw that with your own eyes. Who’s to say who’s right?”
“Did you ever confront your mother about what she was doing?”
“Are you kidding? I was helpless and scared. When I realized I was old enough to leave, not sixteen like she’d told me, I ran away. I have an amazing boyfriend. He’s known me since before I left her. He helped me piece together my life through pictures and stories and accounts by other people.”
He rotated the glass of water between his hands. “Ava, if you want me to be here for you now, I can do that.”
“Why would I want that? I already figured everything out!”
He stared at the folded paper. He’d been led astray, sure. Either by my mother or me, or a combination of the two of us. But he should’ve known. He should’ve tried harder.
“I want to leave that door open. Amanda and Jennifer know about you. I have pictures of you still. So if you ever—”
My anger dissolved in the light of this news. “You have pictures of me? As a girl?”
“Of course I do. Baby photos. Right up until,” he looked down at the paper. “Up until this. Your mother never sent any. To me, you were always six years old.”
“I would love to see them. I have no idea what I looked like as a child.”
He pulled out his wallet.
“I have this one on me.” He tugged out a small photo, somewhat faded and rough around the edges.
I examined it. A young version of myself stared up at me. My dark hair was short and curled beneath my chin. I wore a red headband that matched the long-sleeved shirt beneath my dress. My smile was huge and genuine.
“Kindergarten,” he said. “The last good days. I wanted to hold that image of you in my heart.”
My eyes pricked as a rush of emotion coursed through me. He still carried my picture.
“I know you could have used me there. In hindsight, I see my mistake was enormous. I made sure you always had a home. I sent your mother money every month.”
“What I needed was you.”
“I see that. I wish I could go back and change things.”
“I think she kept me sick so I wouldn’t leave her.”
He sucked in a breath. “My God, Ava. What did she do?”
“I don’t know. I had prescriptions that quit getting filled. She stopped my education. When I piece together my notes, it seems every time I started sneaking out or seeing boys, she would move us, and then I couldn’t remember anything from before.”
He shoved back his chair with a squeal and stood up. “I’ll have her arrested. She will rot in jail for this.”
I held up a palm to make him sit back down. “How would we prove it? Accusations from a girl who can’t remember, who has a condition nobody understands?”
He leaned across the table to gather my hand between his, like when we first said hello. When I lifted my gaze to his, I saw what I’d been looking for, the things I’d seen in other fathers and daughters but had never experienced for myself.
Gentleness. Care. It was there.
My father had it.
“I need a dad,” I choked out. “I got away from her, but I still need a family.”
He rushed around the table. “Ava, I’m here. I’m totally here.”
He folded me into his arms. I tried to remember him, tried so hard. I had seen what fathers do with their children, swinging them in the air, pulling them against their chests.
I couldn’t picture myself that way. I couldn’t see that girl with her headband held in his protective embrace.
But maybe I could feel it.
Dad smelled of expensive clothes and hair products. That didn’t connect.
But the curve of his chest. The pull of his arms. The press of his chin on my head.
I felt that. I surged with a sense of calm, of letting go, as if I wasn’t in charge anymore. Someone else was at the helm. The impression ran deep, below memory, beneath understanding, and into the marrow of who I was.
I was a daughter.
“Come visit me for a weekend,” he said against my hair. “We should all get to know our Ava.”
I could only nod against the grip of his arms.
With my seizures, our past had been erased. But Tucker was right. We could make new memories.