Never Tell A Lie

by Gail Schimmel

  The waiter brings our eggs on toast, which gives me a small reprieve to absorb what she has told me.

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He said that you were looking for me, so you wanted to see me. That you were a clever woman, who knew your own mind.’

  We’re both silent. I’m not sure what I think. I kind of understand what happened, but I also don’t think it’s good enough. Yes, she had some sort of mental illness, and I know that I’m supposed to understand that, to have sympathy. I think about all the times that I’ve read posts about depression being an illness, and strongly agreed, and understood that I can’t put myself in the shoes of a depressed person any more than a person with cancer. But she got better. That’s the part that I can’t digest. She got better and still didn’t come for me.

  I eventually get my thoughts in some sort of order.

  ‘The thing that I don’t get,’ I say, ‘is why you didn’t come back. You’ve explained, but I don’t understand.’

  ‘Weren’t you happy with Sean?’ she asks. ‘Wasn’t he a wonderful – and sane – father?’ I hear her pause before saying ‘and sane’. And I understand maybe a little bit better – she still doesn’t believe that she is fundamentally sane. Maybe she isn’t.

  I sigh. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Dad was great. He did the best he could. But I really needed a mom and I didn’t have one.’

  My eyes are filling with tears, and I don’t want her to see. I bite down on my lip to try to stop the tears. I glance over at her, and she’s doing almost exactly the same thing – teary eyes, teeth clenching her bottom lip. It’s like looking in a distorted mirror, and our eyes meet, and we both let out a type of laughing sob.

  ‘I need time,’ I say to her. ‘I need time to get my head around this.’

  She nods. ‘I know.’ She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand, and her touch feels both foreign and familiar. I look down at our hands – mine has instinctively turned over, face up, to receive hers. I am holding hands with my mother for the first time in thirty-five years. I look at our hands, and so does she. We both have tears running down our cheeks. I suspect she would have sat there all day, holding hands, but eventually, I pull my hand back. I blow my nose on one of the paper napkins, and Lorraine does the same. We both take a deep breath – almost synchronised – which breaks the tension and makes us laugh.

  ‘Shall we?’ she says, indicating our food.

  We start to eat – the eggs are now congealed and cold.

  ‘So,’ says my mother, cutting into her toast, ‘tell me a bit about Django, if that’s okay. I can’t believe that I have a grandchild.’

  So I start telling her the usual stuff, and I find myself confiding in her about how much he hates school, and how few friends he has, and how much I worry about him. She’s a good listener, my mother, and I have an overwhelming need to tell her every single thing about me. Every moment that she missed. But I start with Django. She nods, and says small comforting things, but she doesn’t give an opinion or interrupt.

  ‘I never know if I’m doing the right thing?’ I end with.

  She puts her head to the side. ‘What I can hear is that you love him,’ she says. ‘And that you think carefully about what he needs. So I have no doubt that you will do the right thing. It sounds like you’re a good mom.’

  Part of me feels a warm glow when she says this, and part of me wants to spit, ‘What would you know?’ I settle for a ‘Thanks’.

  The waiter takes our plates and asks if we’d like more coffee. My mother raises her eyebrow. I know she doesn’t want this to end. But I shake my head. I am feeling overwhelmed and like I might start crying again. I want to be alone, to have time to absorb the reality of my mother on my own. I feel like I might have a panic attack if I don’t leave soon.

  ‘I think I need to go now,’ I say. And then, because that sounds harsh, I add, ‘Work.’

  She nods. ‘Of course,’ she says. She pauses. ‘I’d like to see you again.’ She sounds nervous. ‘I’d love to meet Django.’ She gives a small laugh. ‘Actually, I’d love to meet every single person in your life and grill them for hours until I know all about you. That wouldn’t be creepy at all.’

  I laugh.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. I’m pleased that she feels like this, even though it’s making me feel even more overwhelmed. But the part of me that wants her to know everything about me speaks first. ‘I don’t know about grilling all my friends, but if you want to, you can come and have supper with Django and me tomorrow night.’

  Her whole face lights up. ‘Do you mean it?’

  Actually, I’m not sure. I regret the words almost as soon as they come out of my mouth. I just want to get out of there, and I’ll say anything to make that happen. But I nod. ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Any dietary things I should know?’

  ‘I’m a kosher, lactose-intolerant vegetarian,’ she says, and then laughs. ‘Just kidding! Your face!’

  I smile. Of the things I expected, a jokey mother was somehow not one of them. She’s lighter than my dad. I can imagine that if she’d stuck around, we would have had balloons and pillow fights and songs and midnight feasts. For a moment my heart wants to break, and I don’t know if I can really pick up the pieces after all these years and forgive her. She took so much from me.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, wanting to get out. ‘I’ll text you the address. Is 6 p.m. okay? It’s a school night, so can’t be too late.’

  ‘Perfect,’ she says. ‘Although you could probably say 3 a.m. and I’d agree to that too.’

  ‘And go home and wonder what madness you’ve got yourself into.’

  ‘Nope,’ she says. ‘I’d be there.’

  I reach for my purse to pay, and she waves me away. ‘This one is on me,’ she says.

  I nod. She does kind of owe me.

  ‘Okay then,’ I say. ‘I’ll be off.’

  ‘I’m just going to stay a bit,’ she says. ‘Maybe have another coffee.’

  I stand up to leave. I don’t know how to say goodbye. Do we hug? Shake hands? Air kiss?

  But my mother takes control. She stands up and comes around the table. She puts her arms around me, and I can’t stop myself, I hug her back. We squeeze tightly for a moment, and I can feel the relief in her body that I haven’t stepped away. I don’t think I could have if I tried.

  ‘I love you, Mary,’ she says, holding me. ‘I never stopped.’

  I nod. I can’t say it back, but when I leave, despite everything, I’m smiling. At the very least, the lies are over.

  Chapter 34

  I am nervous about the supper with my mother. Part of me wants to invite her into every aspect of my life with open arms – force-feed her the details of my life until she knows everything from the name of my imaginary friend when I was five to how the day my husband died was the best day of my life. But another part of me wants to stay safe, keep her out, keep her away from the people that I love. I spend the day feeling like I’m on a roller coaster – elated, then scared, and then feeling like the bottom is dropping out of my world.

  I invite Joshua, to dilute the weirdness. Then I become convinced that this is a mistake, so I uninvite him and then reinvite him again. Eventually, he comes to the house early.

  ‘You sound like you’re falling apart,’ he says. ‘I thought you might need help.’

  I’m so touched and confused and anxious that I burst into tears, and Joshua holds me close.

  ‘I’m here,’ he says. ‘Let me help you.’

  So he does, both in practical ways, like setting the table (which he is surprisingly good at; it looks fancier than anything I would have done) and in other ways, like patting my shoulder as he passes me in the small kitchen.

  By the time my mother rings the bell – at exactly 6 p.m., I notice – Joshua, Django and I are all so wound up that we leap into the air as if it was choreographed, and Joshua and Django actually bump into each other like people in a comedy sketch.

  ‘Christ,’ I say, surveying them an
d my home. ‘She’s going to run a mile.’

  ‘She’s not,’ say Joshua and Django at once, which makes them both giggle, and me smile – so that’s what my mother walks into. This doesn’t stop her and me from behaving like we’re on a first date or something – unsure about whether to hug or not; me becoming flustered about what to do with the huge bunch of flowers that she gives to me and the even bigger box of chocolates she gives to Django.

  ‘I didn’t know what to get you,’ she says to Django. ‘By my reckoning, I owe you about twelve years of presents. But I think I should get to know you before I start shopping.’ Django, I can see, is completely won over. I make a mental note to tell him that he might not actually get literally twelve years of presents from her.

  Thank goodness for Joshua. He settles us in the sitting room and gets drinks and a bowl of crisps. He makes Django help him, and my mother and I are alone.

  ‘I’m so nervous,’ says my mother, as if she’s confiding a secret. ‘I’m so scared that I’m going to mess up.’ Then she laughs. ‘See?’ she says. ‘Usually I would have said “fuck up” but then I worried that you’d find that offensive, so I changed it.’

  I laugh. ‘It’ll take more than that to offend me,’ I say, but I’m pleased that she’s as nervous as I am.

  ‘So where in the UK did you live, Lorraine?’ asks Joshua, as he sits down. I wouldn’t have thought to ask her this, but I find myself leaning forward, curious.

  She tells us about her home in London, and her husband, a bank manager who she met when she was trying to get a loan to start her life in a new country. As she talks about his kindness and their life together, her accent thickens, and she sounds more English.

  ‘He was a good man, but all black and white,’ she says. She turns to me. ‘I played it over and over in my head, telling him about you, but I knew he would never forgive me for leaving you and for keeping it secret for so long. The longer I said nothing, the more I was trapped by my own silence.’

  ‘I understand, Lorraine,’ says Joshua, and I wonder if he perhaps thought that I should have said something like this. But I don’t entirely understand. Especially when she goes on to mention that she has a dog; and that as soon as she is settled in South Africa, she will send for it. I don’t know if this is supposed to make me feel that she is a good person, but all I can think is that she isn’t abandoning the dog, but she abandoned me, her child. It makes me hate her a bit, but Django is so excited by the mention of the dog, and my mother looks so wistful when she speaks about it, that I also feel myself softening to some extent. As she probably intended.

  Django is charmed by her and sits very close to her chair throughout the meal, and then makes her put him to bed, which isn’t something that I’ve done for years. I want to tell him to be careful, to guard his heart against her, that she will hurt him. But instead, I watch her take his hand and disappear into his room to read him a story, although he always tells me that he’s too old to be read to any more.

  ‘Do you think she read to me when I was little?’ I say softly to Joshua, when they are gone.

  ‘I’m sure,’ he says.

  ‘But I don’t remember it,’ I say. ‘She stole all of that from me. All those memories that I could have had.’

  Joshua nods. ‘You suffered for your parents’ mistakes, no question,’ he says, and I am pleased that he isn’t reminding me that people have worse childhoods than mine.

  ‘My dad did his best,’ I say.

  Again, Joshua agrees. ‘He did. And she probably also did her best, you know. It’s just that both of them are flawed human beings.’

  My mother looks so happy and peaceful when she comes out of Django’s room.

  ‘He’s wonderful, Mary,’ she says. ‘I hope that you will be able to let me be a part of his life.’

  I glance at Joshua, who smiles. ‘I think you already are,’ I tell Lorraine, with a smile.

  I know that while I probably will need to talk to her more, to understand better, my mother is a part of my life now. It’s a burden that I have carried my whole life that now has eased very slightly, and I can see that one day, in the hazy future, it might ease a whole lot more.

  The next evening after supper, when I am rehashing all these thoughts to Joshua, he agrees that I’ll need to talk to her more, spend more time with her to understand better, but that it can only be good in the long run.

  ‘I haven’t spoken to my dad about her yet,’ I say. ‘I keep picking up the phone, but I can’t. And he hasn’t called me. Like he doesn’t even care. Like he can just give me her contact details and then walk out of the drama. I’m so angry with him. He shouldn’t have lied to me for all those years. And I know why he did, but still. Now that I’ve met her, and heard her version, I’m angry.’

  ‘This doesn’t change that he’s the parent who was there for you through thick and thin,’ says Joshua. ‘Don’t lose sight of that.’

  ‘Don’t you see?’ I say. ‘It totally does change that. He could have done more. Gone after her. Helped her better. Made sure she came back. And if my mom had been there, I wouldn’t have been so empty, so needy.’ My voice has raised to almost a shout, so I take a moment to calm myself.

  ‘I have made so many bad choices, Joshua,’ I say. ‘And most of them are because I have this deep empty hole where my mother should have been. None of this needed to have happened. My life could have been normal.’

  ‘I hear you,’ says Joshua, and for some reason this annoys me. He’s always so reasonable. ‘I just think maybe some of it would have happened anyway, you know.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I would never have married Travis if I was a whole person, and marrying Travis ruined my life.’ I don’t know if Joshua is surprised by my vehemence.

  ‘And me?’ he says. ‘Am I another wrong turn in this tragedy of your life? And Django, who was born of that marriage. Is he a mistake?’

  I ignore what he has said about himself. ‘Don’t drag Django into this,’ I say. ‘It is rubbish to think that the fact that I adore Django nullifies the fact that it was all a massive mistake.’

  ‘Mom?’

  This discussion is taking place in my small living room. I thought that Django was asleep, but he’s standing at the door, his hair ruffled from bed, looking pale. I don’t know how long he’s been there.

  ‘Oh, Django,’ I say.

  ‘Was I a big mistake?’ His voice is small.

  ‘No, no, Django,’ I say. ‘You are the best and most wonderful part of my life. Didn’t you hear me say to Joshua now that I adore you?’

  ‘And that it was all a massive mistake.’

  ‘I didn’t mean you. I meant other things. My career. Stuff. Grown-up stuff.’

  ‘My dad?’

  ‘How could your dad have been a mistake when he gave me you?’ I say, hating myself for resorting to the same fatuous logic that I had just despised coming from Joshua. I get up and walk over to him. ‘Come, love,’ I say. ‘Let’s go back to bed.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ says Joshua.

  ‘If you want to,’ I say. ‘But don’t feel you must.’

  But Joshua is still there when I come out of Django’s room an hour later, and we manage to smooth over the disagreement, to the extent that I agree that he is right that I should maybe reach out to my father.

  ‘As a man,’ says Joshua, ‘I’m very aware of how forceful and bulldozing we can be. So when a woman tells me to give her space, or leave her alone, I do it. I’m not going to bulldoze her into contact. I’m going to let her come to me when she’s ready. Maybe your dad is thinking like that.’

  ‘Number one,’ I say, ‘my dad is hardly as aware of these things as you are. He happily bulldozes over everything, without any awareness that it might be wrong. Number two, I don’t think he knows I’m angry or that he’s done anything wrong. I never told him to give me space.’

  ‘Come on, Mary,’ says Joshua. ‘If he wasn’t feeling bad, he’d have been in touch by now. You guys normally talk ever
y day. I think you should take his silence as an admission. And an attempt to give you space to process meeting your mom.’

  Joshua has a point, I have to admit.

  ‘Okay.’ I relent. ‘I’ll call him tomorrow.’

  ‘Whenever you’re ready,’ says Joshua. ‘But I do think that’s fair.’

  I recognise that his opinion is coloured by the fact that in his own story, he is the father, and the estranged parent.

  ‘Can I stay over?’ he asks.

  On one hand, I am grateful for all the support that he is giving me. But part of me just wants to be alone. I somewhat reluctantly agree, making it clear that I am tired, and that this will literally be a sleepover.

  Joshua smiles. ‘I’m not just in this for the sex, Mary,’ he says. ‘Even though the sex is pretty great.’

  My phone rings at 1 a.m. It would usually be on silent, but in my state I hadn’t switched it over. Joshua groans next to me, and I reach for it, thinking to just turn it off.

  ‘April’ flashes across the screen.

  ‘It’s April,’ I whisper to Joshua, like anyone can overhear us.

  ‘You better answer,’ says Joshua, rubbing his eyes. ‘It must be an emergency.’

  ‘Mary,’ says April as soon as I answer. ‘Thank God you answered.’ She’s whispering – that loud whispering like you’re on a stage. ‘I need help. Please. Please can you come and get me?’

  ‘Get you?’ I’m still half-asleep. I must be misunderstanding.

  ‘Please, Mary,’ she says. ‘Come now. He’s going to kill me. Come and get me.’

  The phone goes dead, and I look over at Joshua. My heart is pounding and my hands are shaking slightly. I have no idea what to do.

  I tell him about the call, and I can see him thinking.

  ‘I’ll go,’ he says. ‘Someone has to stay with Django. And if it’s really dangerous, I don’t want you there.’

  ‘Maybe we should call the police,’ I say.

  ‘She would have called them too, surely, if it was that sort of situation,’ says Joshua. ‘If it is, I’ll call when I get there. It might be something easy to help with.’