Ask Mariah (32 page)

"The girls blame me."

"They're children.  They don't know anything."

Where are they?" he muttered. "Where are they?"

"We'll find them," Sophia said. "Did you call Joanna?"

"I tried. She didn't answer."

"Then go get her."

He hesitated.  "After everything --"

"She'll come, Michael. She loves your children. And I think there's a good possibility she loves you, too."

* * *

Joanna opened the door to her mother's apartment. Normally she would have called out, "Mom, I'm home," but the words were no longer true. Caroline wasn't her mother, and she wasn't home.

She walked down the hall to her bedroom.

The door was open. Caroline was sitting on Joanna's bed, her arms wrapped around the pillow. She had been crying. Her makeup was smeared, her hair tangled, her clothes wrinkled. She hadn't looked this upset since Edward died.

When she saw Joanna in the doorway, she let out a sigh of relief. "Joanna, thank God, you're all right."

"I'm not all right."

Caroline's arms tightened around the pillow. "I'm sorry about everything."

"It's too late. Mother. I mean Caroline." Her voice came out cold and bitter. She couldn't help herself. If she weakened, if she let the anger go, she would start crying again, and she was tired of crying, of railing against what was already done.

Caroline's eyes turned bleak as she considered Joanna's words. "That's it? I'm no longer your mother? After everything we've been through together? Being a mother is about more than giving birth. I changed your diapers. I helped you learn to walk. I pulled your teeth out when they got so wiggly you were afraid you'd swallow them."

"I don't want to hear this."

"That's too bad, because I want you to hear it. I want you to remember." Caroline's voice grew stronger as she tossed the pillow aside. "I taught you how to ride a bike. I bandaged your knees when you fell. I held you in my arms when you cried. Everything I had to give, I gave you."

"You didn't give me the truth!"

"I gave you thirty years of nurturing and care, worrying about you, loving you -- it means nothing to you?"
             

She couldn't dispute the logic of her mother's statement, only the heart of it. Love and lies didn't go together. There had to be trust. If not, there was nothing. She walked over to the dresser and picked up the music box. She lifted the lid and watched the tiny ballet dancer do a pirouette.

"This was hers," she said softly.

"How do you know that?"

"Her initials are on the bottom. Michael told me Sophia gave all her children a music box on the day they were born, with the inscription -- to my son or daughter with love. That's how I knew."

Her mother didn't reply, and Joanna let the music play for another minute before it became too painful to bear. She snapped the lid shut, cutting off the music. When she turned back to her mother, she saw her charm bracelet in Caroline's hand, and the floodgates to the past opened again.

"We bought you a charm every time we went somewhere, remember?" Caroline asked. "The unicorn came from Disneyland, the oyster from Sea World, the skier from Aspen, and the theater mask from New York City." She smiled wistfully as she twirled the bracelet, letting the tiny gold pieces sparkle in the light. "We had a lot of fun together."

Yes, they'd had fun. Her parents had given her the world. They'd treated her like a princess instead of a daughter, but she couldn't let go of the hurt. "You lied to me over and over again. That's all I can remember now. Everything else is hazy in comparison. When I think of all the times we talked about our family, all the stories you told that weren't true, I feel sick to my stomach."

"The stories were true. They happened to our family."

"To your family, not to mine. I wish you had told me the truth, let me decide for myself what I wanted to know, what I wanted to do."

"I was protecting you, the way I always did. I wanted to keep you safe and happy."

"Well, here's a news flash. I'm not happy."

"Do you think you could have had a better life with her?"

"I never had the chance to find out."

"She didn't want you to find out," Caroline said, her voice no longer quietly pleading, but angry. "Your biological mother gave you away. She might have brought you into this world and given you a music box, but after that she abandoned you. If you want to hate someone, don't you think you should hate her?"

"I do hate her. I hate both of you. And since I'm almost thirty years old, I don't need a mother anymore. In fact, I'd probably be better off without one." She opened the top drawer of her dresser and pulled out some clothes, tossing them onto the bed. When she was done with that drawer, she moved on to the next.

"What are you doing?" Caroline asked.

"I'm moving out."

"Where are you going?"

"To a hotel for tonight. Then I'll find an apartment or a house, something that's mine. Something that has land and trees and flowers."

"I could help you look."

"I don't want your help."

Caroline stood up. She walked over to Joanna and put a hand on her arm. The warmth of her touch was too familiar, too painful, and she pulled her arm away. She didn't want to remember all the times she'd crept into her mother's lap to watch a movie, snuggled with her parents under the big quilt on their bed, or given them a hug or a kiss. They hadn't been a tremendously affectionate family, but they had loved one another. At least she thought they had.

"I love you, Joanna. You can't change that. You can't drive me away with your anger. I'm your mother, no matter how much you wish I weren't."

"You can't excuse what you did in the name of love. If you truly loved me, you would have told me the truth." She paused, her glance catching once again on the music box. "What I can't understand is why Dad went along with you."

"It was his idea."

"I'll never believe that. You were the possessive one. You horned in on every party I ever had. You even followed me to my senior prom."

"I was the chaperon."

"Most chaperons don't dance with their daughters' dates."

"I was trying to be cool," Caroline said.  "My mother was none of those things. She was a slow-moving matron. She embarrassed me with her tacky clothes and her old-fashioned views. I wanted you to have a mother who fit in, who was fun."

"Why was fitting in so damn important to you?" she asked in bewilderment.

"Because I never fit in. When I was a child I had asthma. I couldn't run or play games with the other children. My mother sewed all my clothes, gingham dresses that made me look like a poor orphan. We weren't poor, but she refused to buy anything from the store. And every afternoon when I came home from school, she'd insist that I help her with the housework and the cooking. Lord, I hated to cook."

"Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"It didn't seem important."

"That's why you never wanted to cook or garden or work around the house."

"No, because that's all I did as a child. I had few friends growing up. Everyone else seemed prettier than me, smarter, nicer. When I finally got married I thought the lonely times were over, but when I couldn't get pregnant, everything came back, the insecurity, the sense of failure. Once again I'd come up lacking." She paused. "Then one day your father brought home a baby girl. I couldn't believe it. We'd only begun looking into the possibility of adoption. When he put you in my arms, I couldn't believe you were mine. In fact, I was afraid someone would take you away, but Edward promised me that wouldn't happen. He said no one would know you weren't our real child. I liked that idea. I wanted us to be a normal family. I was afraid that if you knew I wasn't your real mother, someday you would want her instead of me."

Caroline's words explained her possessiveness, her overwhelming presence in Joanna's activities.

"Your father had the birth certificate in his pocket when he came home that day," she continued. "I don't know how he did it. I didn't want to know. It made everything neat and clean."

"What did you burn the other night?" Joanna asked.

"Letters. I never read them. I knew they were from her to you."

"Letters from my mother?" Her stomach turned over.

"Yes. Edward told me they were there in case you wanted to know anything after we were both gone. Once he died, I was afraid you'd find them, that you'd leave me right then. I couldn't take that chance, so I burned them."

Silence followed her blunt statement. Long minutes of painful, deafening silence. Joanna looked around her bedroom, at the stuffed animals on the bed left over from childhood, the lingering posters of rock stars from her youth, the casual pants and vests from her academic life hanging in the closet. She had gone through a lot of changes in this room, but none so great as those she had gone through in the past two days.

Caroline held out her hands to Joanna in a helpless, apologetic gesture. "I'm sorry. If I have to apologize to you every morning and every night of my life, I will do it, because that's how sorry I am."

"Sorry doesn't mean anything to me right now."

"Maybe it will when you've had time to think about it. Nobody did anything to hurt you. We wanted you to have the best life you could have. If we hadn't taken you, God only knows where you might have ended up."

"What about my real father? Do you know who he was?"

"Your real father?" Caroline asked in confusion. "Wasn't that Sophia's husband?"

"No, she said she had an affair." Joanna's heart sped up as she looked into her mother's eyes. Their thoughts turned in the same direction at the same time, colliding in a mutual gasp of disbelief.

"Oh, my God." Caroline put a hand to her heart.

Joanna shivered. Goose bumps ran down her arms and legs as once again she was confronted with the unthinkable.
Her father -- and Sophia?

Caroline wrapped her arms around her body. "It couldn't have been him. Edward wouldn't have had an affair."

Up until a week ago she would have agreed with her. Now she wasn't so sure. "If he was my real father, then he wasn't lying to me," she said slowly. "It makes sense. Sophia didn't give her baby away to a stranger. She gave her baby to the real father."

"Which makes me the only imposter," Caroline said bitterly. "No wonder Edward kept the secret. If he'd told you the truth, you might have gone looking for Sophia, You might have found out about them." She drew in a long, shuddering breath. "I thought he was protecting me, but he was protecting himself, and he was protecting her." Caroline paced around the room. "No, I can't believe this. I won't believe it. Not until I know for sure."

"You can always ask Sophia. She seems to be in a talkative mood these days."

The doorbell rang and they both started.

"I don't want to see anyone," Caroline said. "Don't answer it."

Joanna didn't want to see anyone either, but the bell rang again and again and again. Finally she got to her feet and went to the front door. She flipped the button on the intercom. "Yes?"

"Joanna."

Michael. She closed her eyes at the sudden wave of longing.

"Joanna," he said more urgently. "I need your help."

"I can't talk to you right now."

"The girls are missing. They've gone to find you."

"What? I'm right here."

"They left this morning. I called the police, but I need your help."

"I'll be right down."

She almost tripped over her mother as she turned around.

"What's wrong now?" Caroline asked.

"Lily and Rose, Michael's children, have run away. They're trying to find me. It's all my fault. I shouldn't have taken off without saying good-bye to them. If anything happens I'll never forgive myself."

"I'll go with you." Caroline picked up her purse.

"You can't."

"Why can't I?"

"Because you're not part of this. You're not my mother. You're not a De Luca. You don't even know Lily and Rose."

Caroline stared back at her steadily. "I love you. That makes me part of it."

'I don't want you involved."

"Tough. You're not getting rid of me that easily."

"Aren't you afraid to see the De Lucas -- to meet Sophia?" Joanna tried one last argument. The last thing she needed was a confrontation between her two mothers.

"I've already met her," Caroline said, surprising her again.

"When?"

"Last night, when I went to look for you."

She suddenly had a million more questions to ask, but no time in which to ask them. "I have to go. I can't do this now."

"Then let's go."

What the hell, Joanna decided. She might as well let Sophia and Caroline battle it out. They were the ones who'd started it in the first place.