by Kelly Rimmer
“No. You and Father were grieving and you felt guilty about
how you’d cut yourselves off from Grace, and you tried to alle-
viate that guilt by taking her children. That wasn’t fair. Patrick
is a good man, and he was and is doing the very best he could
with them.”
“If that’s true,” Mother said slowly, “then what on earth are
you doing on my doorstep today?”
To my horror, I felt hot tears in my eyes, and then the sobs just
would not be suppressed. I hadn’t cried on my Mother’s shoul-
der since I was tiny, but even her stiff, perfunctory hug only
reminded me of the children. Of Beth…sweet little Beth…who
would surely be wondering where her “Mommy” was. Who
was hugging her? Who was wiping away her tears? I resisted
that job in the beginning, but I’d come to treasure it.
“Mother, I don’t have anywhere else to go. But I swear to
God, if you and Father try to disrupt that man’s life again, that’ll
be it—I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Did you marry him?” Mother asked, and that’s when I re-
membered that I’d never actually gotten around to sending her
the photo of our wedding day. Life had moved on so fast.
“I married him,” I whispered miserably. “And then we fell
in love. But…we’ve had a falling out, and I can’t go home until
he calls for me.”
I moved back into my family home that day, shifting my
things into my old bedroom. To their credit, my parents didn’t
ask too many questions about Patrick; they simply allowed me
to shift back into their lives as if we’d never argued. After a few
days, Mother even opened up to me.
“What happened with Patrick after we lost Grace was my
fault, not Father’s,” she admitted. “I wanted those children for
myself. I was grieving and miserable, and I thought they’d offer
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me a distraction. It wasn’t right, and I promise you, I’ll never
do it again.”
“But… why, Mother? Why distance yourself from Grace like
that when she needed you, then try to take the children as soon
as she was gone?”
Mother stared into her teacup as she whispered, “I visited her
a lot after she had Timmy, but I just couldn’t stand to see her
like that. It reminded me of what happened when you girls were
born.” She looked up at me, cheeks flushing. “I never wanted
you to know. But… I had to stay in the hospital for a long time
after I had you.”
“After you had Grace, you mean. I know you had the hys-
terectomy—”
“No, Maryanne. After you were born. I…” She cleared her
throat, then looked at the table. “I tried to harm myself. It was
the strangest thing—it was as if I’d lost my mind, and then I
took too many pills and…the housekeeper found me, luckily.
We weren’t going to have any more children, but then Grace
came along, and it seemed I couldn’t handle her, either.”
“Mother,” I whispered, looking at her in horror. “Are you
saying you were depressed after Grace and I were born?”
“Depressed? No, that doesn’t sound right at all. I can barely
remember either of you before your first birthday. They said the
electroshock therapy would probably damage my memories of
that time, but it was more than that, I think.” She stared at her
lap, her expression pinched. “I wasn’t just sad. I could barely
function. I just wanted to be…gone. I was completely broken.
Hopelessly broken.”
“But maybe Gracie felt like she was broken, too, Mother,” I
whispered thickly.
“Father and I agreed we’d never tell you girls what happened.
Heavens, he went to great lengths to hide what I’d done from
our friends and family so I had at least a chance of coming back
to normal life one day. And I suppose, when Tim came along,
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I couldn’t bear to even consider the possibility that Grace was
suffering like I had. It was easier to blame Patrick…easier to
blame her for choosing that life, especially after I tried to help her leave him.” Mother gave me a sad look. “It was a test, you
see. I thought if she was as mentally unwell as I had been, she’d
rush to come here for a rest. So perhaps she wasn’t going through
what I went through.” Mother said, and for a moment she looked
almost hopeful, but it passed quickly and her expression soon
sank again. “Or perhaps she was, and I just underestimated her
loyalty to him.”
Mother rose from the kitchen table to walk, as if on autopi-
lot, toward the medicine cabinet. She withdrew her little bottle
of pills, swallowed one dry, then looked back to me.
“It’s a good thing you don’t want children, I think,” she whis-
pered, gnawing anxiously on her bottom lip. “I can’t even tell
you how frightening it is when your own mind turns against
you. I really should go to bed now.”
“Mother,” I said as she went to leave the room. She glanced
back at me uncertainly. “Do you think that maybe it wasn’t
your fault that you got sick after you had us? That maybe it was
something biological?”
“The psychiatrist told me that it was just nervous tension. He
said that I was simply too sensitive…simply too anxious. That’s
why they gave me the hysterectomy.”
She then wandered out of the kitchen, leaving me with the
feeling that I understood her, perhaps for the first time in my life.
I waited around for days hoping to hear from Patrick, and
after a week, I couldn’t bear it anymore. I called Mrs. Hills and
asked how he was doing.
“They’re moving, Maryanne.”
“What? Where would they go?”
“I don’t know. He won’t tell me. But he doesn’t look good at
all. Now, you know I don’t like to stick my nose into other peo-
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ple’s business—” I’d have struggled not to snort, if it all wasn’t
so awful “—but if you were planning on trying to convince
him to see sense, you’d best be doing it quickly.”
I knew that by nine o’clock, the children would all be deeply
asleep. That had been our magic hour, the time when the world
rested and Patrick and I were alone. I was sick with dismay when
I arrived at the house and glanced through the front window
to see moving boxes in the living room, and then somehow felt
even sicker as I approached the front door—uncertain about how
I might be received. I knocked quietly, and then I walked to
sit on the chair on the porch. Patrick opened the door, peered
outside, and bathed only in the light from inside the house, I
watched his expression shift.
There was fru
stration. Weariness. And then, to my surprise, an
undeniable shame. For just a moment that shame gave me hope.
“Give me just a minute,” he said heavily.
Patrick walked back inside, then came to sit on the porch chair
beside me, leaving a gap between us that felt like an ocean. In
his hands he held a folded piece of paper, but he made no move
to offer it to me. Instead, he drew in a deep breath, and stared
out at the road that ran past the house as he spoke.
“Grace was right about so many things…she was so much
smarter than she knew. She said that I had been running from
responsibility for my whole life. She said that I was a child in a
man’s body. I’ve read those notes so many times over this past
week, and I finally understand just how badly I let her down.”
“You were young…”
“Don’t make excuses for me! You and your family do not get
to pass judgment on me, and you sure as hell don’t get to absolve me.” He was frustrated, but so much more self-contained than
he had been when we argued the previous week. Patrick drew
in a deep breath, then glanced at me. For a moment he seemed
to hesitate and I rushed to plead with him, feeling a delicious
hint of hope that I might still change his mind.
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“Please, Patrick… I love you. I love them. Please don’t make
me leave.”
“You lied to me for two years. How could I build a life with
you based on a foundation like that?” he whispered brokenly.
“I’m absolutely certain that we’ve both made mistakes, and per-
haps we temporarily outran the consequences, but we both have
to pay for those sins now. Your penance is that you have to live
with what you did, and you have to live without your sister and
my family.” A sob broke in my throat, and he turned away, his
face set in a mask of agony. “And I have to be the man I couldn’t
be for Grace. I have to do it for my kids and for myself. And I
have to do it without you, because that’s my penance.”
He passed me the note, then. Our fingers brushed, and I felt
a shiver along my arm. Maybe I knew that was the last time I’d
feel his skin against mine.
“What’s this?” I whispered through my tears.
“It’s the last note. The one where she talks about the…” He
swallowed, then finished with obvious difficulty, “This is the
note where she talks about you arranging the abortion.”
I looked at him in shock.
“But why would you give this to me?”
Patrick looked back to the road.
“You need to read it. You need to face what you did to her.”
He sounded furious, but then he choked up, and he glanced at
me, his gaze swimming in tears. “I’m so angry with you. I’m so
hurt that you let things get as far as they did with this secret between us. But God help me, I love you, Maryanne. I want you
to go back to the life you were meant to live, and not waste the
rest of your years worrying that some note is about to bring it
all down around you. And… her other notes were about how
I’d let her down. This one…this is the only one wasn’t about
me. It just feels right to give it to you.”
We sat in silence for a while. I held the folded piece of paper
between my palms, my fingers interlinked around it. Locking
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my hands together was the only way I could stop myself from
reaching for him.
“How will you juggle it all?” I asked him eventually.
“I’ll manage,” he said. It was a calm statement of fact, and it
was a promise I was instantly certain he’d keep.
“But where will you even go?”
“That isn’t your problem anymore.”
“Just tell me one thing,” I choked, tears finally spilling over
onto my cheeks. “Are the children okay?”
“They are grieving their mother,” he whispered miserably.
“Just as I should have made them do in the first place.”
Beth
1996
“I remember how it felt when you hugged me,” I choke out,
eyes suddenly brimming with tears as Maryanne finishes her
story. “I remember how safe I felt. How you smelled so beauti-
ful. How you read me so many stories and let me sleep in your
bed when I was scared.”
“Sweet girl,” Maryanne whispers unevenly, “I remember
those moments, too. How could I forget them? I’ve done some
extraordinary things in my life, but those times with you are
some of my very best memories.”
We’ve been talking for hours. Maryanne got up at one point
to make a call back to her office to tell them she was taking the
afternoon off then returned to the table. She talked until her
voice was hoarse, and then she kept on talking while I fed Noah
and we walked to the restroom so I could change him. Now
we’re walking around campus to stretch our legs.
And she’s right here. She’s real, and she’s alive, and it’s not too late.
“Could you really have been charged?” I ask her when I’ve
composed myself.
“Who knows?” she sighs. “Abortion was a felony offense,
and people had been jailed for arranging them. I’m not sure
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how much an unsigned letter would have counted as evidence
in a court of law, but the climate was so hysterically antichoice
at the time, I may well have faced serious consequences, espe-
cially since Grace died during the procedure. At the very least,
the letter might have ruined my academic career, and without
your family, that’s all I had left.”
“You kept it for all of these years.”
“Well, yes. Because what Patrick read as proof of my guilt,
I came to see as absolution. I made so many mistakes, but my
worst was lying to him. If I’d come clean and he’d read this with
an open mind, perhaps he’d have focused on what Grace was re-
ally saying here—that she wanted this desperately, that perhaps
she even needed it. I was only helping her to do what she wanted
to do. But in giving me this note, he gave me a gift, because at
times my guilt at her loss would crush me, and I could go back
to re-read this note and be reassured that Grace’s mind had been
made up long before she called me home to help.”
“What did you do after you left us?”
“I stayed with Mother and Father for a few months. I didn’t
want to—but I had no alternative. They then gave me the money
to set up on my own again, and I moved to the city so I could
study. I finished my master’s, and then eventually my PhD and
I built that career I’d always dreamed of,” she says sadly. “Father
died suddenly later that same year, and Mother and I gradually
rebuilt our relationship. When
she got sick some years later, she
came to live with me and I cared for her until she died.”
I swallow a sudden lump in my throat, and my voice is small
as I whisper, “I missed you all of these years.”
Maryanne gives me a sad smile.
“I missed you, too, sweet girl.”
I raise my gaze to hers, blinking rapidly as I ask, “Why didn’t
you try to track us down?”
Her gaze is surprisingly gentle as she murmurs, “You love
your husband, don’t you, Bethany?”
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“Of course.”
“I loved your father enough to let him go. I don’t know if you
can understand that, but it’s the simple truth rooted in an ex-
ceedingly complicated situation. He always felt guilty that he’d
fallen in love with me so soon after her death, and then learning
just how badly he’d let her down and that I of all people had or-
ganized the procedure that killed her… I realized that I’d always
be a reminder of what happened to Grace. I simply had to walk
away to let him move on.” Her gaze becomes guarded as she
asks, “Do you blame me now that you know what happened?”
“Of course I don’t.” I frown. “And… I don’t think Dad did by
the end, either. Just before he died…” My voice breaks. Those
moments are still too hard to talk about it, but she’s been so
generous sharing with me—I have to tell her about them. “He
thought I was you, and he was obviously trying to apologize
to you.”
“When Ruth called,” Maryanne sighs, “I thought perhaps
Patrick was ready to clear the air…”
“Maybe if he’d remained well, he would have someday.”
“He had a good life?”
“A wonderful life. We had to hire an event space for his wake
because so many people adored him and wanted to pay their
respects.”
“I’m so glad,” Maryanne says, offering me a sad smile.
“And what was life like after he asked you to leave us? Did
you ever fall in love again?”
Maryanne straightens, smooths a hand over her hair, then
raises her chin.
“Make no mistake, sweet girl—I’m not the victim in this sad
tale. I’d never intended to marry in the first place. I only mar-
ried Patrick to help him, and he was the last man on earth I ever
thought I’d fall in love with. The five of you absolutely won my
