This Is Not Over Part 11

"Good." He smiles. "Keeping busy is good."

So this is how he sees me. As a woman who's so bored that she's scaring herself, that she's making mountains out of molehills, credible threats out of nothing. He thinks I just need something to do.

He's not entirely wrong, though. I'm barely a mother anymore, and I'm not really a daughter, I'm a flower delivery service, and I'm not a host anymore, Dawn's seen to that, and I'm not yet a landlord, not that I've ever wanted to be one, and soon I won't be a board member, and I haven't volunteered in weeks.

So I guess I'm just a wife. A wife with a secret, and a big problem.

I thank Officer Llewellyn and wander out into the sun, dazed. As I sleepwalk toward my car, I trip on the legs of a homeless man. He snarls at me, "Watch it," as if I'm the one who's not supposed to be here. He's living a block from the police station, without fear, and if they won't even move him along, if they let him feel like he owns the sidewalk, then I never had a chance of them calling the Tucson police about Thad, let alone pursuing a woman hundreds of miles away.

I'm truly on my own.

21.

Dawn

Hey, Salina.

Hey, girl.

I can't come to cla.s.s today. Take notes for me?

Def. Hot date with Rob?

It's my dad.

Gross.

No, I mean, he died.

s.h.i.+t! So sorry.

I have to go to Eureka.

Soooo sorry.

Yeah, I know.

How are u?

Fine. I barely knew the guy.

But still.

I have to help my mom. She's a mess.

Make sure Rob takes care of u.

He always does.

"Morning," my mother says wanly. She's standing in the doorway of my kitchen in a long T-s.h.i.+rt and nothing else (except, hopefully, underwear). It's not like I think her scrawny frame would hold any appeal for my husband, but still. She's a widow now.

Even though Rob and I sprung for bright-colored curtains, it hardly remedies the dinginess of the kitchen. The walls are gray with tons of tiny holes like an ear piercer's run amok; the linoleum has a pattern of faded yellow diamonds with an overlay of ineradicable grunge; the oven is the color of an old avocado; the refrigerator moans constantly. It pains me to realize that this place isn't much nicer than the ones I lived in with my parents. But since it's located in the Temescal neighborhood, just a few blocks from Telegraph Avenue with its wine bars and cheese shops, it costs five times what an apartment of similar size and quality would in Eureka.

But my mother wouldn't know that. Seeing through her bloodshot eyes, I feel like I haven't come so far after all.

As she colt-legs forward to take a seat across from me at the kitchen table, I slam my laptop screen shut. I couldn't even begin to explain why I have a picture of Miranda, Larry, and Thaddeus up on my screen-to her, or to myself.

I know where Miranda lives. I figured it out on Zillow. The Feldts bought their house twenty-five years ago, in Beverly Hills. It cost a million and a half then, so it's got to be worth way more now. Funny how you can have all that money, and the Internet offers you no protection at all. I don't just know her neighborhood; I know her exact address.

Between my mother at one pole and Miranda at the other, I find that I'm scanning my kitchen with far greater distaste than usual.

"I have to tell you something," my mother says. "It's about your father."

I listen for the words I've been wis.h.i.+ng for my whole life: Your father is not actually, biologically, yours.

"I wouldn't tell you this if it wasn't going to come out anyway."

Way to embrace truthfulness, Mom.

"Your father and I weren't legally married."

"But you have his name. I had his name." I was thrilled to shed it but it feels oddly as if my mother is taking something away from me.

"We went down to the courthouse to get married," she continues, pus.h.i.+ng a strand of hair back from her face so it can join the great unwashed ma.s.ses, "and we found out my parents had signed the wrong form. Your father said we didn't need some piece of paper to prove we were meant for each other, definitely nothing signed by my parents." She stops, tears welling in her eyes. She actually thinks it's a romantic tale.

I'm illegitimate. A b.a.s.t.a.r.d, or whatever the female equivalent is. What would Rob's perfect parents think about this? For years, his mother's been making a valiant effort to think I'm good enough for him.

My mother's been lying to me for thirty years. She would have lied for another thirty, if it wasn't "going to come out anyway."

"We were in love," she says, in her defense. "You know how we were."

"That I do."

"Don't be like that, Dawnie." She reaches a limp hand across the tabletop in my general direction, as if she doesn't actually want it to make contact with me; she's content with proximity, the illusion of connection.

"So you changed your name to his?"

She shakes her head. "I just used it. I signed everything that way, and you know what? No one ever checks. I guess now, with computers, they could find it out quickly, but back then, all you had to do was say it. I became Wendy Xavier. I figured that it would be true soon enough, that we would be man and wife. Common-law man and wife, since we were spending our whole lives together. And you know what else is funny?"

"No, I really don't."

"What's funny is that your dad did the same thing I did! He made himself an Xavier, without any help from the courts. He wasn't born that way."

Generations full of fraud. How adorable. Babies having babies. Free love. Call yourself something, make it so.

I want to throw up. "Are you my real mother?" I ask.

"Now that's not funny."

"So why's it going to come out now?"

"Because California has no common-law marriage. I'm scared to find out how I'm going to get his body now. It belongs to me, Dawn, after all these years. All I've been through."

Does she mean the other women, or his breathtaking level of disregard for her emotional and physical well-being, or his abject failure to provide while he left her with all the household and child-rearing responsibilities? Is it all of that, or is there some other reason she left his body, unclaimed, back in Eureka, other than she didn't have a marriage certificate or money?

"Good morning." Rob swoops into the room, placing his hand on my shoulder. I look upward, at his freshly shaven chin. He asks my mother, "Could I borrow Dawn for a minute?" as if she should have any say in the matter.

I follow him into the bedroom, shutting the door behind us. It's all white in here: the canopy bed, the comforter, the end tables, no TV. Not a hint of color, not even on the throw pillows. Life, in here, is pristine. That's why it's so galling that Miranda would accuse me of staining anything. I've tried so hard to get clean after what my father did to me.

"Did you overhear my mother's big confession?" I say. "She never legally married my father, and there's no common-law marriage in California. She might not even be able to claim the body. Can you believe her?"

"She's grieving."

"What does that have to do with anything? This was years ago! She couldn't even manage to get married right."

"I feel sorry for her, that's all. She was old school, relying on your dad completely. She just wasn't very competent."

"I spent my whole childhood feeling sorry for her. Enough is enough." When he doesn't respond, I add, "Old-school moms were very competent. They worked. In the home. What was she doing?"

He comes toward me, arms outstretched.

"No, I'm okay. I don't need a hug. I need her out, ASAP."

He drops his arms. "ASAP might be a while. We can't just send her back."

"You make it sound like we're deporting her."

"I just mean, she's got no job. We have to help her."

"She should have gotten a job years ago. Now she has no choice. Necessity is the mother of invention."

"If she's never worked, how's she going to start now? Her husband just died. She's got to be depressed."

Laziness is not a disability. Sucking at life is not a disability, and it's not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It's not a mooch-off-your-grown-daughter card. But I'm not about to say any of that. Rob's full of compa.s.sion toward her, and he wants me to feel the same. "What do you think we should do?"

"Well, first, we need to get your dad. I did some quick research. If we don't claim his body, they're going to cremate him."

"That doesn't sound so bad." Fire and brimstone, a day of reckoning. That doesn't sound so bad at all.

"He's your father, Dawn."

For Rob, it's simple: You don't leave your dad to be burned up. For me, it's simple, too: Yes, you do, if you had that kind of dad. The gulf between our life experiences is rearing its head, prominently. But Rob thinks neglect is the whole story when it comes to my father. I was too ashamed to tell him the truth; I didn't want him to see me in that light. I've tried so hard to forget any of it ever happened-to forget that I was just the sort of girl something like that would happen to.

"You've been working your a.s.s off to support us while I finish school," I say. It never occurred to me until just then that I've been mooching. Like mother, like daughter. But I'm going to earn it all back soon enough. I'm going to outearn Rob. Professor Myerson recognizes my potential, and he sees loads of students. "We don't have extra cash lying around for a funeral." Not the gift money from the wedding. Not our savings. Not for that man.

"It's not the funeral I'm talking about; it's the burial. It's having a final resting place for him, someplace your mother can visit. Someplace you can visit."

"Is this about religion?" I say. "Because you know I don't believe like you do." I thought he'd accepted that about me. "I wasn't raised in a church like you were."

"This is about doing what's right for your family. We have savings for important things like this."

I can't get him to see what I see, not without telling him what my father did. He doesn't see my mother as I do either: a woman who didn't need to choose her husband over everything else in life. She didn't need to choose him over solvency, or happiness, or her only child. It's her fault-what my father did, what I let him do-all in the name of protecting her. It's her fault, even though she never knew about it.

My mother's lost, all right, but it shouldn't be my job to find her. When I've been lost, she never came looking.

Now that she's shown up here, I'm stuck with a terrible choice. I can allow my husband to think badly of me for not wanting to take care of my mother and bury my father, or I can tell him the truth and he can think badly of me for another reason. I'll be dirty in his eyes, the same as I was in my own for so long.

It's a terrible choice, all right, but an easy one.

22.

Miranda

Sorry for being MIA. I was on an art binge.

To use that word so casually . . . Is he just torturing me? There's only one kind of binge as far as I'm concerned, and he must know that. He has to know that I've been on edge the past two days. Going from all that contact to nothing made me understand what withdrawal symptoms must be like. The Tucson police were as unhelpful as I'd feared, and while I tried to listen to Officer Llewellyn's advice about staying busy and a.s.suming Thad's fine, my nerves were jangling nonstop.

I dig my toes deeper into the sand. It's nine A.M., and I managed only a few hours of fitful sleep last night. I imagine Thad's been awake just as long, bingeing.

There are plenty of people running and biking along the path, but I've got the sand to myself. Blue skies, blue water, as far as the eye can see. I wish I could enjoy it. I wish I could believe that art's the reason he disappeared.

I'm glad to hear from you, I choose my words with care, but I have to tell you, it's been rough on me.

What has?