The Lost Husband (25 page)

When she realized I was staying, she dog-eared her book and set it down.

“I need to ask you about something,” I said then.

“Okay, shoot,” Jean said.

I hesitated. I wasn’t sure what her reaction would be. And I had this funny awareness that once I’d shown her the picture, I couldn’t unshow it. If it was a moment from her life, and it clearly was, then I wasn’t sure I had any business prying into it. I was curious about the mystery, but maybe that wasn’t fair. After all, this was Jean, and her own tender life, and her memories and secrets, and her lost love—and this child I had never even heard about.

But curiosity is a powerful thing. So before long I had set the photo down on the table in front of her. “I found this last week,” I said.

Jean froze with her eyes on the photo.

“This is clearly you,” I said. “And this must be Frank.”

“Where did you find this?” she asked.

“At the haunted house. In a drawer by the telephone.”

“You went inside,” she said—not a question but a statement.

“Yes,” I said.

Jean stroked the edge of it with her finger. “A lifetime ago,” she said. “A whole different life.”

“So,” I said, “it is you?”

“Yes, it’s me,” Jean said.

“And the man is Frank?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s Frank.”

“He was cute,” I said with approval.

Jean smiled, but sadly.

“That was the year we convinced the town to fix up the old German dance hall. We started up a square-dancing society called the Lucky Dog Dance Club. We were the young people then,” she said, lost in the photo. “People tell you it slips away, but you never believe them.”

“I believe them,” I said.

Jean didn’t seem to hear me.

“What’s a picture of you doing up at the haunted house?”

Jean looked up. “You haven’t guessed?”

I hadn’t, but as soon as she said the words, I did. “Because that was the family homestead?”

Jean nodded.

“The mansion my mother is so mad about?”

She nodded again. “Though not a mansion.”

“And you don’t live there now because …?”

“Because Frank built this house for me, and I like it better.”

“But you still take care of the old one.”

“Yes,” Jean said. “It’s not good for a house to sit empty, but I never could bring myself to rent it. I keep it up and keep an eye on it. It’ll be yours one day.”

“Mine?”

“Who else would I leave it to?”

I hadn’t thought about it. I wasn’t sure what to say. “Thank you.”

We both looked at the photo again.

“You and Frank seem very happy,” I said.

“We were, most of the time.”

I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. She seemed lost in the photo.

“And the baby?” I finally asked, since she wasn’t offering. “Was she your daughter?”

Jean looked up then, like she couldn’t believe I was asking the question. She studied my face as if trying to decide if I was serious or not. Then she put her hand over her mouth, and I saw her eyes fill with tears.

“Jean,” I said in the gentlest voice I could muster, “did you lose a child?”

Jean shook her head and rubbed her eyes. “You really don’t recognize that baby?” she asked. “Sweetheart, that baby is you.”

I took the picture from Jean and peered at it closely. Me? Why would it have been me? My brain turned the idea around like a puzzle piece, trying to make it fit.

“I don’t have any pictures of myself as a baby,” I told Jean. “They were lost in a move.”

“Lost in a move?” Jean said, her face bitter. “Is that what she told you?”

I didn’t know how to answer the question, but Jean wasn’t waiting for an answer. She stood up, walked out of the room, and climbed the stairs. I didn’t move—couldn’t move. I just sat there staring at the photograph of a baby version of me. I wanted to feel
a click of recognition. Really, though, it could have been any baby at all.

When Jean came back down, she was carrying two photo albums and a shoe box. Without a word she set them on the table in front of me.

I looked at her and then back at the albums. “I don’t understand.”

“Open them,” she said.

I took the top album off and opened it to the first page. Inside, arranged under cellophane, were more photos just like the one I’d found. Jean in a blue jean skirt with brown hair, Frank in dark glasses on a motorcycle—and, in almost every picture, a little baby. Me.

After the initial shock, I started flipping the pages faster. Me with Frank on a picnic blanket. Me in a tire swing with Jean. The three of us in front of a birthday cake. Me on a little pony. Me standing on the front porch. Me looking out the window. Me giving Frank a kiss on the nose.

There were people in the photos I didn’t recognize: an old lady in a flowered housecoat, an old man with horn-rimmed glasses and coveralls. “Grandparents?” I asked Jean.

She nodded. “Mimi and Papa.”

I kept flipping. And I started to notice someone absent from the photos: my mother. There were photos of me in the hammock with Papa and of Mimi giving me a bath. There were photos of me teething on a plastic ring on a picnic blanket. “Where’s my mom?” I asked Jean, but she didn’t answer right away.

I opened the next book. In this one, I was older, running around the same yard. I recognized the porch and the yard of the haunted house. It was yellow then, too, and had an Oldsmobile parked in the driveway.

Jean kept her hand pressed over her mouth as she watched me flip.

“Jean?” I asked as a new idea occurred to me. “Did you throw the pictures of my mom away?”

Jean couldn’t seem to pull her eyes from the photos. It was almost like she didn’t hear me. “Hey! Where’s my mother?” I asked again, and this time her eyes met mine.

She took a deep breath. “California.”

“California?” I asked.

Jean closed her eyes, then opened them again. “For the first four years of your life,” she said then, “your mother lived in California. And you lived here. With us.”

My mind started to spin. This was not the conversation I’d been expecting. Why would my mother have been in California? What would keep a mother from her child? Unless—and the idea made me woozy—unless she wasn’t my mother after all. Maybe that’s why we’d never liked each other. And then another thought, right on top of that one: Maybe Jean was my mother! Anything was possible at this point. It would explain the animosity between them, and the way Jean and I got along so beautifully. But why would Jean have given me up? What on earth would convince someone like Jean to give her child to someone like Marsha?

Jean watched my mind race, no doubt giving me a second to catch up, waiting for the onslaught of questions that were about to come as soon as I could form them.

“So,” I began, “is my mother …” I hesitated. “Not actually my mother?”

“Oh, no,” Jean said. “She’s your mother.”

I felt relief and disappointment at the same time. And now the beginnings of frustration, too.

“Then why was she in California?”

Jean heard the tension in my voice.

“I’m going to tell you what happened—start to finish,” Jean said. “It’s way past time you heard the story of your life.”

She took a breath. “Your mother was always the good girl. I was sneaking out, and your mother was home, studying. I was a constant disappointment to my parents, especially after I dropped out of college and started shacking up with Frank. Your grandparents were kind people, but very traditional, and they weren’t sure a girl needed an education, anyway. Once I quit school, they announced to your mother that they wouldn’t be sending her to college, either. Within the month, she ran away. She was seventeen.”

Jean gave me a minute.

“Our parents were frantic, and they looked everywhere for weeks. Finally they started receiving weekly postcards from her, saying she was fine and living in California and not to worry. Of course, they worried anyway. And the irony wasn’t lost on them that trying to keep her with them had driven her away.”

Jean stood up to pour us both fresh cups of tea, and I took a breath.

“A year later,” Jean went on, “she showed back up at our parents’ door with a baby.” She raised her mug in a toast. “You.”

I shook my head at her.

Jean went on. “My parents were terrified she’d leave again. They made her promise to stay with them. I think you were about two months old at the time. She wouldn’t tell them anything about her life. But she did confess that she wasn’t married and that the father had left her.

“It was a scandal, but your grandparents didn’t care. They were just happy to have her back—and you. They took the two of
you in for about a month before your mother got a letter from your father saying he missed her. That night she left a note of apology, took our dad’s truck, and drove across the country to go back. And she left you behind.”

I don’t think Jean wanted to defend my mother, but she didn’t seem to be able to stop herself. “She knew you were in good hands,” she said. “Our parents were great with children.”

I could feel a
“but”
coming. “But?” I said.

“But my mother was sick with rheumatoid arthritis by then—like I have now, along with some other things we didn’t know about yet. It was too much for her to handle.”

Jean took a sip of tea.

“So they called me,” she went on. “And Frank and I moved back here. Neither of us wanted to come. We both had big dreams, and Atwater, Texas, didn’t seem like the place to follow them. But we told ourselves it would only be for a little while. Frank said he just wanted to be wherever I was, which was sweet.

“And then we met you, and we fell in love. You really were way too much for my parents at their age, so you became mine. Frank took odd jobs around town—he was a painter by training, but he was handy, too. Taking you on seemed to cure my wildness. We settled down. We started saving money. We became responsible and thoughtful. We became better people.”

I tucked my hair behind my ears. “And my mother?”

“Postcards,” Jean said. “No return address.”

“Did she come to visit?”

Jean looked at me a good while before she said, “No.”

I looked down at my hands.

“It was just as well,” Jean said. “We didn’t want her to visit. As
far as we were concerned, you were ours. When you were about two, our pal Russ, a lawyer, suggested we start adoption proceedings so she couldn’t take you away from us.”

“Russ?” I interrupted. “Your Russ?”

“Yes,” Jean said, as if she’d forgotten I knew him. “Of course. My Russ.” Then she went on. “But because Frank and I weren’t married, we couldn’t make that work.”

“You couldn’t just get married?” I asked.

“Well,” Jean said, “that was complicated. Frank was married to someone else.”

It really was too much. But there was no stopping it now.

“She wouldn’t divorce him,” Jean said. “Even though they’d been apart for years. He begged for a divorce, but she wouldn’t give in.”

Jean rubbed her eyes. She looked tired.

“And then one day, the week after your fourth birthday, your mother showed back up. She was getting married, she said, and she wanted you back.

“We told her she couldn’t have you. We told her she’d given up her rights to you. We actually locked her out of the house and ourselves in. But she came back with the sheriff, and they took you from us.”

Jean walked over to the sink. “I should have told them you were mine. I should have forged a birth certificate. I’ve thought about it so many times. Everyone in town had watched us raising you. They all assumed you were ours.”

Jean turned back to me.

“My mother died not long after that. And my father—a month later, to the day. Frank and I used up our savings fighting for you in court, but we lost. After a while he wanted to try for a baby of our own. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want ‘a baby.’ I wanted you.
Nothing short of you would work. That’s when he started building this house. We walked the path every day, and Frank imagined this place for us while I followed him in silence. I hated those walks. But I think they really saved me.”

“Why didn’t you leave town?” I asked.

She gave a quiet shrug. “I kept thinking she’d give up and bring you back.”

“You were waiting for me?”

Jean looked up and nodded. “We had to stay. Just in case.” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Later, we did try to have a baby. But it never took. Many miscarriages later, we gave up.”

“Jean,” I said, “you’re killing me.”

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” she said, laughing the way you do sometimes with sadness.

“And that’s the fight between you and my mother?” I asked.

Jean nodded. “Though
‘fight’
is too puny a word. The things you feel about the person who took your child from you—there are no words for that. The way she ripped you from us was so incomprehensibly cruel. To me, but especially to you. This total stranger showed up at our house one day with the sheriff and took you away from everyone who loved you. The terror on your face … I can’t even think about it without feeling sick.”

She paced the kitchen.

I said, “We lived in Hawaii for a while. Then San Diego. Then we followed a guy named Phil to Schenectady. Then Tulsa, Miami, Little Rock.” My head was starting to hurt. It wasn’t the moving that had been so bad. It just meant that I never had anyone to depend on besides that one crazy woman. The husbands and boyfriends didn’t last, and the friendships I made got broken every time we moved. And now, with the pictures in the photo albums ticking through my head like a flip book, the idea of
growing up in a real family, with Jean and Frank and two grandparents—the idea that this could have been my life … It was too much.

I stood up. “It’s time to get the kids.”

“I’ll go,” Jean said, and picked up her keys.

“Jean,” I said, stopping her at the door. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

She rubbed her eyes. “I always meant to,” she said. “I’ve written countless letters that I never mailed. As soon as you were old enough, I meant to—on your sixteenth birthday, I thought. Or your graduation. But what would you have thought, getting a letter like that from a crazy old lady? I was a stranger to you by then. I didn’t want to mess with your life, or confuse you. And I was afraid,” she went on, “that if I did it the wrong way, I might frighten you off forever. So I just kept waiting for the right moment. Which never came.”