Please Remember This (4 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The manuscript Nina had left unfinished had been published in its incomplete form after her death, but Tess knew nothing more than that.

“Don’t you have her contracts?
The Riverboat Fragment
would have been the option book under the initial contract, but it would have been a different deal.”

Tess still didn’t know what he was talking about. “We don’t have any papers of hers. I cleaned up my grandparents’ house after they died, and there was nothing.”

“There wasn’t a contract for
The Riverboat Fragment?
It would have been between the publisher and
Nina’s estate. Your grandparents would have been involved in the negotiations.” “I know nothing about it.”

He had no choice but to accept her words and change the subject. He closed his menu. “So do you have questions for me? Things that you want to know?”

What kind of man leaves his suicidally depressed partner and his newborn baby?
“No.”

“I never talk about Nina, not to anyone, but of course you’re different.”

Tess had had her little episode with being different because she was Nina Lane’s daughter. She wasn’t going to repeat it. “No, I’m fine.”

“All right.” He sounded as if he didn’t believe her, but surprisingly, he let the matter drop. “Sierra Celandine said that when you were in Kansas, you and she had a wonderful conversation.”

“In Kansas?” Tess was puzzled. “I had a wonderful conversation with someone in Kansas? I hardly talked to anyone.” Then she remembered. “You don’t mean that lady who sold the herbs, do you?”

Duke nodded and smiled. “So it seemed a little different from your end?”

“She was too intense for my taste.” Tess realized that she needed to be careful. He might be good friends with the woman. “But of course I had no idea that she knew who I was.”

“She claims to have recognized you instantly, although I never know how much to believe. All one can know for sure is that she fervently believes herself.” He paused. “You do know who she is, don’t you?”

Tess shook her head.

“She came to Kansas when Nina and I were there. In fact, she was there when you were born. I mean that literally. She cut the cord, all that. She was the midwife at your birth. After that she was your nanny. She took care of you for the first three months of your life. Apparently it about killed her when you were taken back to your grandparents.”

“Oh.” That woman had been her midwife and her nanny? “Oh.”

“You didn’t know any of this?” he asked.

“No.” She really hadn’t liked that woman. Not at all.

“Who did you think took care of you?”

“I never gave it any thought, but I would have assumed it would be my mother.”

“Nina? Take care of a newborn baby?” This was clearly an impossible thought. “I don’t know what Nina would have done if Sierra hadn’t been around, but that was the thing with Nina. There were always people like Sierra around to take on her responsibilities.”

There was an edge of bitterness to his voice. He certainly didn’t have very fond memories of Nina Lane. Tess made herself change the subject. “I was abrupt with her, with this Sierra. I wish I hadn’t been. Do you have her address? I feel like I should write and apologize.”

“Don’t. Not unless you want to have a relationship with her. You can’t write a nice note to her and be done with it. There’s no halfway with Sierra. Either don’t get in touch with her at all or be prepared to have a very intense relationship.”

“Those can’t be the only choices.”

“No, trust me on this one. She’s—” He broke off. “But you have no reason to trust me, do you? And my saying there are only these two options must sound self-serving, that I am trying to justify the choice I made to have no relationship with you. But that’s not why I’m here. I have to live with what I did. It’s my cross. I won’t ask you to help carry it.”

“Then why
are
you here?” she asked. “I didn’t see anything in the papers about you teaching a workshop. You just made that up, didn’t you? So I wouldn’t feel that you had made a special trip to see me.”

He nodded, acknowledging that she was right. He had flown across the country just to see her. “Your turning up at the Nina Lane Annual Birthday Celebration seemed very odd. I have two kids of my own. I’m enough of a dad that I wanted to be sure you were okay.”

Two kids of his own? What was
she?
“My grandfather asked me to go to the Nina Lane thing. I went for him, not for myself.”

“Your grandfather? Not your grandmother?”

“No, it was my grandfather … after my grandmother died.”

He nodded as if her reply made sense.

Tess didn’t like that nod. It was as if he knew something about her grandparents that she didn’t. He could know all he wanted to about Nina Lane, but Grandma and Grandpa, pills, television, and all … they were her property.

“I did feel an obligation to you, Tess,” he continued. “I knew that you had no other family, your grandfather had been an only child and that your
grandmother’s sisters had died in early adulthood. So clearly, if something would have happened to your grandparents, if you had been on your own, I would have felt responsible for you. I would have brought you to New York. It would have been a disaster. My wife and daughter have always felt we were living in the shadow of Nina Lane, that Nina was somehow the main character in our story, so I’m sure they would have resented the hell out of having Nina Lane’s daughter live with us.”

Tess sat back in her chair. Duke would have “felt” responsible for her. What was this “felt” business? He would have
been
responsible for her. Feelings had nothing to do with it. And his other children resenting her? Was this the Middle Ages? They could spit on her because she was legally a bastard and they weren’t?

She had to speak. “This doesn’t add up. You seem like a decent man. You came because you were concerned about me, but what you just said was appalling.”

He blinked. He was startled. Then he thought for a moment. “Yes, it must have sounded that way.”

“Why do you mean ‘sounded’?’ “ she asked. “It
was
appalling.”

He took a breath. “Tess, I have been appalling people for twenty-four years. I am used to it.” He sounded weary, resigned to her thinking badly of him.

This was not the whole story. Her instincts said that he was not a bad man. He was decent, he was honorable. He was sensible and sensitive. Yes, he had done something reprehensible when he had been twenty-two, but he had paid for it. Over and over.

“Is there something I should know?” she asked.

“I’m not lying to you,” he answered. “Everything I’ve said, everything I’ll ever say to you, is the truth.”

“But is it the whole truth? My grandparents never told me that Nina Lane committed suicide. I found out on my own when I was twelve. Lies of omission can hurt as much as the other kind.”

His lips tightened beneath his beard. He glanced around the restaurant as if checking to see who was there, and when he spoke, his voice was low. “You aren’t mine, Tess. You aren’t my daughter.”

“What?” She couldn’t have heard him right.

“Only my wife and children know. Even Sierra thinks I am your father, but I’m not. That’s why Kristin would have resented having to raise you … it would have been one more responsibility that Nina dumped on someone else.”

“I don’t understand. You aren’t my father?” That was a stupid thing to say. Of course she understood. He wasn’t her father.

“My name is on your birth certificate. I was with Nina when they took her to the hospital. I wasn’t going to argue at a time like that, especially since none of our friends knew.”

“But why …”

“Why? Nina lived by her own rules. You know how—” He stopped. “I don’t know what you know. When she was in a manic stage, she hated being alone. She wanted someone else in the room when she wrote. She left the door open when she went to the bathroom. I see now that it was genuinely pathological, but at the time, it just felt very hard to take. Anyway, the winter before you were born, she was really
over the top, and I was looking for a break. A couple of us started planning to go to Mardi Gras. When you live in Fleur-de-lis, you hear a lot about New Orleans, since that’s where many of the riverboat passengers were coming from. So we decided to go. Nina, of course, didn’t want to go because she was working, and she didn’t want me to go. She was furious with me, calling me selfish, but I went anyway.”

“And so she punished you by sleeping with someone else?” Was there anything good about Nina Lane as a person?

“That was part of it. She also truly couldn’t bear to be alone. Being with someone at night was one way of not being alone. She just didn’t think like the rest of us, didn’t think of herself as having obligations to anything except her work. I know that makes her sound so selfish,” Duke continued, “which, of course, she was. But her selfishness was so uncalculated. She didn’t walk around thinking, ‘I expect Sierra to make my dinner; I expect Duke to keep the car running.’ She simply never thought about it. If dinner was on the table, she didn’t wonder how it had gotten there.”

“If she was so self-focused”—Tess could hear how tight her voice was—”why didn’t she have an abortion?”

Duke paused, before saying, “I’m not sure she realized she was pregnant. Sierra was the one who finally asked her if she was. Sierra was thrilled, and Nina must have known that if she had an abortion, Sierra would have left, and we were very dependent on Sierra.”

So here was another reason for Tess to be grateful to Sierra Celandine.

“Do you know who the father was?” Tess asked. “My father.”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I had one foot out the door of the relationship anyway—I wouldn’t have gone to Mardi Gras otherwise. So I figured that it didn’t make any difference who the fellow was. I held on, hoping that maybe the baby—you—would change her. When it didn’t, I gave up. He probably was one of the painters who were there for a couple of weeks that winter, but they had left by the time Nina realized she was pregnant. He wouldn’t have known about you.”

“When you say ‘painter’ …”

He smiled. “I do mean artist, not house painter.”

Tess had occasionally thought it odd that the offspring of two writers should have as little literary talent as she did. Whatever gifts she had were visual. She had a good sense of design and an excellent eye for color.

Now she knew why. But what difference did it make? “Why haven’t you told anyone that you weren’t the father?”

He shrugged. “Because I decided a long time ago that I wasn’t going to try to explain or excuse myself. That was my only hope for a life with any dignity. I had told Kristin before we left Kansas, and I did feel like I needed to tell my own children. I didn’t want them thinking that there was a family member we were ignoring, and I certainly didn’t want my son believing
it was okay to conceive a child, then walk away.”

He didn’t have any good answers, he said, to questions about what were one’s obligations to the mentally ill. “Running away as I did isn’t the answer,” he said, “but Nina wouldn’t let me have a life of my own. I had to live for her, and I couldn’t do that. But believe me, Tess, I had no idea she was suicidal. I was stunned when she killed herself, and then when people started saying she had done it because I had left her … that isn’t right. I just wasn’t that important to her. I was useful, but she didn’t love me. She didn’t love anyone except your grandmother. It makes no sense that she would kill herself over me.”

“She was mentally ill.” Tess had studied manic-depressives in school. Suicide attempts most often occur when the depression is starting to swing back into mania. She reached into her purse and took out a small, flat, tissue-wrapped parcel. She had brought it impulsively, unsure whether or not she would give it to him. “Does your wife like lace?” she asked. “Would you give this to her for me?”

She handed the gift to him, and he gestured, asking permission to open it. She nodded and he unfolded the tissue. “My God,” he exclaimed. “I know nothing about this, but it’s unbelievable. And so beautiful. Is it old?”

“The linen in the center is.” It was a table topper, an eighteen-inch linen circle surrounded by a three-inch crocheted border. “But I made the lace.”

“You made this? You
made
this?”

Tess could feel herself flush. She liked it when people had this reaction to her work.
This is me. This is
what I do. I can’t write. I can’t tell stories. I’m not Nina Lane. But I can take old things and make them beautiful again.
“Crocheted lace goes pretty quickly, and I like working with vintage linens.” The center of this piece had come from the back of a turn-of-the-century blouse whose front had been mottled with stains.

The restaurant was dimly lit. Duke Nathan was holding the work up to the candle in the middle of the table, shaking his head as people who knew nothing about needlework always did. “I can’t imagine Nina ever doing anything like this. She’d never have had the patience.”

“I’m not Nina Lane.” They hadn’t understood that, the people she had known at Stanford; they hadn’t understood that she was not Nina Lane.

“No, of course you aren’t. But I suppose that was part of what Kristin dreaded about you, that we would end up raising a mini-Nina, a child as difficult and selfish as Nina had been as an adult.”

“There may be a lot wrong with me, but one thing I can say for sure is that I’m not difficult or selfish.”

He smiled. “That’s a good thing to know about yourself. Kristin is going to have a million questions for me when I get home, so tell me everything you can bear to have me—and her—know. What kind of place do you live in? Do you like your job?”

Three days later Tess got a note from Kristin Nathan, thanking her for the linen. It was written on thick, expensive paper with a calligraphy pen. Kristin wrote that she would always think of Kansas when she
looked at it, and she hoped that if Tess was ever in New York, they could have dinner together.

The week after that, Tess got a call from someone named Alexa Surcast. She said she was with the contracts department of a publishing company. It was a big company, one that Tess had heard of.