Outside the Lines (28 page)

We said good-bye and I hung up before I realized I hadn’t told her about Jack spending the night. Jasper whimpered in the backseat as I drove, picking up, I was sure, on the stress I felt. “It’s okay, buddy,” I said, trying to soothe him. “Momma’s fine. I just need to take care of something.”

I let Jasper loose in my mother and John’s fenced backyard, then entered their house through the back door. “Mom?” I called out from the kitchen. “Where are you?”

“In the living room, honey!” she called in response.

I walked through their kitchen and down the long, narrow hallway. Pictures of my family hung all over the walls. My mother and John, Bryce as a baby, me feeding my brother a bottle. My graduation, then Bryce’s, then John’s award ceremony for bravery during an especially dangerous factory explosion. There was no evidence I ever had a father before 1990. My mother preferred it that way.

“Hi,” I said when I saw her sitting on the couch. Her legs were propped up on the coffee table and she wore a bright blue handkerchief over her head with a matching velour sweat suit. Her cheeks were flushed, and despite my anger, I was hit with an immediate fear the cancer had come back. “Are you feeling okay? You don’t have a fever, do you?”

She smiled and her eyes lit up. “I’m fine, baby. Just moving furniture around again while John’s at work. Are you okay? You sounded upset on the phone.”

“I am.”

“Well, come sit down.” She patted the cushion next to her on the sofa. “Tell me all about it.”

I stood in the doorway, unable to do as she asked. The rage I felt tensed my muscles, gluing me to one spot.

She tilted her head and furrowed her forehead. “What’s wrong? Did something happen with the new guy you’re seeing?”

I shook my head. “No. We’re fine. It’s about Dad.”

Her shoulders slumped, visibly disappointed. “Oh, Eden. I thought you might give that up.”

“Why would you think that?” I asked angrily.

“I don’t know. I thought maybe since you found a boyfriend and had something positive to focus on you’d let it go.”

“Well, I haven’t.” I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at her. “In fact, I went to dad’s old apartment building with Jack and we found some of his paintings. And a box of his things.”

The muscles in her face seemed to freeze beneath her skin; panic flashed in her eyes and she began to blink rapidly. “What kind of things?”

“Letters, mostly. They were addressed to me in 1989. And then returned to sender. By you, I assume.”

Her blue eyes widened and filled with tears. “Oh.”

“Oh?” I said, feeling the tightness in my chest begin to shatter into more of my own tears. “That’s all you’re going to say? ‘Oh’?” I took a deep breath and blew it out through my nose, trying to calm my pulse. “You lied to me, Mom. You said he never wrote. That he didn’t want to see me.”

She lifted her chin and it trembled. “I did what I thought was right.” She paused. “Maybe it wasn’t the best decision—”

“Maybe?” I said, cutting her off. “More like it was a completely fucked-up decision. How could you do that to me? I cried every night, missing him. You knew that. You
watched
that. You knew I wanted to see him and talk to him and make sure he was okay and you kept him from me. How could you possibly have seen that as the right thing to do?”

“He was a train wreck, Eden. Being around him tore you apart. You were always so busy rearranging yourself trying to make him happy. I didn’t want you to spend your life doing that, honey. I wanted you to be free of him. I wanted us both to be free.” Her voice shook with emotion but I had no sympathy. She brought this on herself.

“Free of knowing my father loved me? That despite everything wrong with him, he still thought about me? Yeah, I definitely should have been freed of that. Good choice, Mom.”

“I struggled with this, Eden. I swear I did.”

“You didn’t struggle half as much as I did not knowing it!” I shouted. I’d never yelled at my mother like this. But the anger was bigger than me, bigger than anything I’d ever felt. It took me over. My whole life could have been different. I could have seen my father, spent time with him. Maybe even convinced him to get help. But no, instead my mother let him rot on the streets. She let me believe he didn’t give a shit about me.

She cringed. “I just wanted to protect you. After what he did, after all you saw that night. No child should experience that kind of trauma. I just couldn’t stand the idea of him putting you through it again. I thought it was better this way, I really did.” She sighed. “Then when you got those letters from him at your house after you moved out and you didn’t want to see him, it confirmed for me that I’d made the right choice.”

“I didn’t want to see him because I thought he’d abandoned me, Mom!” I tried not to scream, but I felt my tone escalating toward hysteria with every word. “I spent the first ten years he was gone thinking he forgot about me completely and I was pissed as hell.
That’s
why I didn’t write him back. Now I find out he tried to keep in contact and you just let me believe he didn’t care. You let me cry and suffer and think he was a piece of shit. If I’d have known he’d written me, I wouldn’t have ignored him the way I did. He was
homeless,
Mom. He probably still is. And now I can’t find him and he’ll never know I love him and it’s
your fault
!”

She started to cry in earnest. Her shoulders quaked and she put her hand over her mouth to muffle the sounds. She looked small and vulnerable sitting on the couch. Regret sat like a block of cement on my chest, but I was too angry to apologize. She was the one who needed to apologize. She was the liar in this room, not me.

“Were there more letters? Ones that you didn’t send back to him?”

“No. He only sent those few.”

“Did he write to you? Did he say anything that might help me find him now?”

“No, Eden. He didn’t. I swear.”

“Does John know about this?” I asked, continuing my interrogation. “Does he know what you’ve been keeping from me?”

She shook her head and dropped her hand back down to her lap after wiping her tears away. “No. I didn’t tell him.”

“Because Bryce told me John’s upset that I’m looking for Dad. I thought this might have something to do with it. That he didn’t want me to find out you lied. That his perfect wife maybe isn’t so perfect.” I was hitting below the belt but I couldn’t stop. “Are you sure he doesn’t know?”

She nodded and sniffed. “He thinks you’re looking because he wasn’t a good enough father to you.”

“It has nothing to do with him.” My eyes darted around the room, taking in all my mother’s fine things. The picture-perfect world she’d built after the one she’d lived in with my father. She hadn’t wanted to be Rapunzel when she met my father, but she ended up letting John rescue her after all. And she was happier for it. At least she seemed to be. I suddenly understood her constant need to redecorate; always rearranging her outer world was a way to try to maintain a sense of inner calm. But she couldn’t. Not with the lies she’d told.

“Do you know where he is?” I demanded.

“No, Eden. I don’t.”

“Did he ever call? Did you talk with him?”

“He only called once, from the hospital, to tell me he’d sign the divorce papers. Never after that.”

“What else haven’t you told me?”

“Nothing. You know everything. He wrote those letters and I sent them back. That’s it.”

“That’s more than enough,” I said. My bitterness barbed each word.

“I’m ashamed I stayed with him as long as I did,” she said quietly. She wouldn’t look at me; instead, she kept her eyes on the floor. “I let you be exposed to so much of his illness that you never should have seen. I was so young. So stupid. I should have left long before he slit his wrists, Eden. I should have left the first time he refused to take his meds or after he slept with a stranger. Taking him back after he went to jail was the biggest mistake of my life. I spent a long time feeling guilty for that. Protecting you from getting hurt by him again was the only way I knew how to deal with it. I thought a clean break was the best thing. I honestly believed that.” She lifted her gaze to me, her eyes pleading for understanding.

I dropped my arms to my sides and glared at her. “You believed wrong, Mom,” I said, and for the first time in my life, I turned my back on my mother and marched out the door.

I didn’t know where to go. After leaving my mother’s house, I drove aimlessly with Jasper in the backseat. I ended up heading downtown, taking the Union Street exit and going west toward the waterfront. Where my parents first met. Where my father might still be. I found a parking spot beneath the viaduct and hitched Jasper to his leash. I didn’t have a plan. I only knew I had to look for my dad. He had to be down there somewhere.

It was a typically drizzly, gray Northwest autumn day and walking along the waterfront, I had to steer around the tourists who were crazy enough to come to Seattle in November. I watched businessmen and women on their lunch hour stopping at Ivar’s Seafood Bar for some of the city’s best clam chowder. I scanned the face of every homeless man tucked into a corner beneath an awning. I showed my father’s picture to several of them.

“Have you seen him?” I asked. “This picture is old, but I thought you might recognize him anyway.”

“Don’t know him,” was the answer, if I was lucky enough to get a response at all. Many of the people stared off into space, dazed or drunk or some combination of the two. I wanted to shake them. Didn’t they understand how important this was? What if someone in their own family was looking for them? Wouldn’t they hope someone else would offer to help? I felt desperate for this search to end but couldn’t fathom giving it up. Especially not now, knowing what my mother did. How hurt my father must have been when those letters came back to him. How deep did that hurt go? Did it lead him to attempt suicide again? Did he succeed? Is that why I couldn’t find him? Was I looking for a man who no longer existed? Was I chasing a ghost?

What bothered me most was not the fact that my mother didn’t give me the letters when my father’s suicide attempt was so fresh. I supposed I could even understand her reasoning, though I wasn’t sure I was ready to acknowledge this out loud. What bothered me was that she continued to lie about it, even after she had the chance to tell me the truth. To tell me about the letters when my father wrote me again. She was the parent I trusted. The one I turned to for security and support. When my father said she never wanted to have me in the first place, the very core of me didn’t believe him. Even at ten years old, I knew not to trust it. I understood that he lied. I’d seen it time and time again.

My concept of my mother had been the complete opposite. She was someone I could always rely on to give me the facts, no matter the consequences. Would I need to revisit everything she’d ever told me? Would I always question her version of the truth, never knowing if she was being honest or just trying to protect me?

As I stopped to let Jasper sniff at one of the artwork pigs on the pier, my cell phone rang in my pocket, interrupting my jumbled thoughts. I fumbled to answer, catching the call on the last ring, too late to see the caller ID.

“Hello?” I said loudly. My reception was always lousy close to the water.

“Hey, it’s me.” Jack’s voice came over the line and I was so happy to hear it, my breath caught in my chest.

“Hi, Me.” I scanned the pier for an empty spot on one of the benches to sit down. There wasn’t one.

“Are you okay? Did you see your mom?”

“I did see her, but I’m not sure if I’m okay, really. I’m not sobbing, though, so I guess that’s a good thing.” I took a deep breath. “How are you?”

“I’m glad you’re not sobbing.” He paused. “Are you busy? I have something I need to talk to you about.”

Oh no. He’s already regretting sleeping with me. I opened up too much too soon and he didn’t mean any of the wonderful things he said. I’ve got too much craziness going on with my family and now he’s going to tell me he doesn’t want me to come around anymore. I never should have let him in. I never should have believed something as good as this would last.

“I’ll be right there,” I said, figuring I might as well get the conversation over with. First the fight with my mom and now this. It was turning out to be one hell of a day. “I’m not too far away, actually. Down at the waterfront.”

“You didn’t go in to work, did you?”

“No, I’m where my parents first met. I come here sometimes, thinking my dad might come back.”

“And has he?”

“Not today.” I kept my voice hard, steeling myself against the disappointment already flowing through my veins.

“I’ll see you soon, then.”

“I have Jasper with me. Is it okay if I bring him?”

“Of course. Will you come around back, though, through the alley entrance?”

“Sure.” I decided that instead of trying to find another parking spot near Hope House, I would just walk the ten or so blocks over to get there. Maybe the exercise would do me good. I tried not to think too much about what Jack might have to say.

When Jasper and I turned the corner into the alley behind the shelter, I saw Jack and Rita standing by the back door. They waved and I picked up my pace to reach them. I really wanted to get this over with.

“Hi,” I said. “What’re you doing out here?” Though the drizzle had dissipated, they were both a little muddy and wet and wearing garden gloves. Why would Rita be with him if he was planning on breaking it off? Was he looking for a way to cushion the blow? If he broke up with me with Rita standing next to him, I was going to scream.

Rita tilted her head toward the deserted lot across the alley. “We’ve been working.”

I turned my head and saw that the lot had been completely cleared of any and all trash. The soil had been overturned and was now dark, not just from the rain. It looked as though it had been mixed with some kind of fertilizer. It smelled like it, too; the earthy scent of manure hung in the air.

“Working on what?” I asked, swinging my gaze back to look at Jack.