Safe in Noah's Arms

by Mary Sullivan

  He stared at the coffee table, where rings left by too many drinks had scarred the antique mahogany. When Monica had still lived here, that table had been spotless. The damage was recent.

  Sacrilege popped into Monica’s mind, her concentration stuck on a minor detail that was out of place in this moment. She quelled the thought. Who cared about furniture right now? All that mattered was the truth.

  “We married too young, straight out of high school. We were nineteen, Karen only just turned, but we loved each other.” His breath hitched, raising suspicion in Monica.

  “Is that completely true?”

  “Yes, but it was complicated. We thought we could make it work anyway.”

  “You’ve always led me to believe you adored her.”

  “I did. Deeply. I’ve never found anyone who could replace her.”

  His expression crumpled. His face grew older. For long moments, Monica waited for him to speak again without prompting. He’d gone somewhere deep and private.

  Then he said, “I loved her, at any rate.” His voice was weak. “As it turned out, she loved someone else.”

  Monica’s chill grew. In all of Dad’s stories he’d never said anything about Mom not loving him. “Not Judge Easton,” she said, voice flat. That would be the ultimate betrayal.

  “God, no.” John barked out a laugh. “She hated the guy. Couldn’t stand his arrogant and bullying ways. The man you saw in court? Just an older version of the teenager we went to school with. Gord hasn’t changed one iota.”

  “Then who was it?”

  “Her best friend.”

  “I thought you were her best friend. Why did she marry you if she loved another guy? Who was he?”

  “She was Donna Granger.”

  “She?” Monica startled. “Mom was lesbian?”

  “Yes. Same-sex marriage was illegal at the time—keep in mind it was nearly forty years ago—and Karen was trying desperately to deny who she really was. She thought she could make herself love me as more than a friend.”

  Monica reeled, stunned into silence. Her mother had been gay.

  “It wasn’t as open a time as it is now,” her dad continued, while Monica struggled to catch up to this new development.

  “Wait. Slow down.” She got up to retrieve a throw from the back of the sofa and wrapped it around herself, holding it so tightly her knuckles turned white as she curled into the armchair like a wounded animal.

  Dad sat back and gave her a chance to breathe. “This is big stuff, I know.”

  Could that be any more of an understatement? How about enormous? Huge? Catastrophic? She had a sister she hadn’t known about. Big couldn’t begin to describe the beast devouring her intestines.

  When she felt she could see clearly without her thoughts caroming around, she said, “Go on. Tell me everything.”

  “She was terrified her parents would find out she loved a woman, but after our one time sleeping together on our wedding night, we knew it would never work between us. It’s really hard for a guy to stay aroused when a woman is gritting her teeth to get through the sex.”

  “Too much information, Dad!”

  “God. You’re right. I’m sorry, Monica.” He reached into his pocket to take out his cigarettes then dropped his hand. Monica had been so proud of him when he’d given them up three years ago. Looked like his body still remembered the habit of reaching for a cig in times of stress. “I do want you to know one thing, though. There was true affection between us. We were good friends. Your mother was a warm, physical woman. We held hands and hugged. It was unfortunate there was nothing romantic on her side.

  “Anyway,” he continued, dropping his hands into his lap, “she was confused. Lost. So was I. She confessed how she felt about Donna. How were we supposed to make our marriage work? How could either of us live the rest of our lives without a physical relationship and without a romantic attachment to each other? We decided our only course of action was divorce.” He stood and wandered to the window, staring outside, but his gaze looked unfocused. “Then we found out she was pregnant from that one night.”

  “With me.”

  Over his shoulder, he smiled at her sadly. He didn’t state the obvious. With two of you.

  “Were you upset?”

  His smile turned sweet. “God, no. I was happy. Overjoyed.”

  “It complicated things, though?”

  He nodded.

  “So, what happened?”

  “Since she was pregnant, we couldn’t divorce.”

  “Why? It’s not like you lived in the Dark Ages. People got divorced, Dad, even when they were expecting.”

  “I know. The problem was her parents. They were deeply religious. They used to stifle her with their rules and prayers. Personally, I think they were so strict with her because they guessed how close she and Donna were. They would have been horrified. This went so far against their religious beliefs. At one point in adolescence, they actually forbade her to see Donna, so the two met in secret.”

  He jiggled the change in his pockets and wandered around the room restlessly. “She told me everything after our wedding night. Before you think poorly of her, I need to stress again that she had genuine affection for me. She apologized so often I grew sick of hearing it. Her intentions had been good. She’d been certain she could make it work, until the wedding night when she realized she’d made a catastrophic error in judgment. Too bad I was hurt in the process.”

  “I’m glad she loved you at least a little. Not just this other woman.”

  He sat back down and seemed to shrink. It must have hit him hard back then to learn the truth about his wife. If this situation was bad for her, what must it have been like for him?

  “Yes, she loved me, too, but not as much as she loved Donna. She loved me as a friend, a buddy. We had been friends since childhood. She knew I would never hurt her, but it was a mess. Foolishly, I hoped I could change her heart, that I could make her love me more. Of course, it didn’t work. I understand things better now.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “First, we moved away from Accord. It was too hard to figure things out with her parents constantly telling her how she should be living her life. We limited our contact with them. We needed time and space to think.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “We moved to a small town in Colorado. We didn’t tell her parents we stayed that close. We needed to be away to figure out a way out of our problems, by ourselves, without them breathing down our necks.”

  “But what about the babies? You must have found out there were two of us.”

  “Yeah. That was a shocker. We were thrilled and terrified. We were too young to make rational decisions.” He stood again, like a jackrabbit, unable to settle.

  “Your mom was caught between a rock and a hard place. She couldn’t marry the woman she loved. Her parents would have been horrified. They weren’t evil. They were afraid of something they didn’t understand. They wondered what they had done wrong to make her the way she was.” With a rueful twist of his lips, he added, “Even while they denied that she was the way she was.”

  “So what happened? You devised a diabolical plan?” Her anger might have abated, but only a bit. These people had rolled a pair of dice that had affected her life irreparably.

  Brow rising, he responded, “Diabolical? No. We didn’t think so.” His surprise that she would think it was seemed genuine.

  “There must have been something else you could have done,” she cried, pounding the arm of her chair.

  “Like what?” he demanded. “Tell me, in your great wisdom, what would have been a better course?”

  “There’s no need for sarcasm. Or yelling.”

  Dad gripped the hair on the sides of his head, leaving it to stand out like a demented
scientist’s. “Yes, there is. You don’t get to second-guess our decision. We were young, little more than half your age now. What would you have had us do?” He gestured toward her and her uptight, resistant body language. “It’s easy for you to sit there in judgment like some grand pooh-bah. You didn’t have to find solutions. Hindsight is easy, especially at your age in a different, more accepting time. If we had stayed together, we were looking at a lifetime of pain for both of us. And loneliness. We couldn’t even sleep together as husband and wife. Do you think either of us wanted that for the rest of our lives?”

  She had nothing to say. Maybe he was right. Maybe not.

  “Don’t you think we questioned our choices over the years? Don’t you think I did, especially after—”

  The guilt on his face had hairs on the back of her neck rising. “After?”

  He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. “Never mind.”

  “No, Dad. No more lies. No more omissions. I need to know everything.”

  “First I need a coffee.” He made a move to stand, but fell back onto the sofa like a dying fish. “I need a coffee,” he repeated, as though focusing on that detail could keep everything at bay.

  “I’ll get it.” She needed a break, too.

  When they were settled in with mugs of hot coffee, he said, “Let me finish what happened with the birth before we move on to the rest.”

  The rest?

  There hadn’t been enough already? What more could there possibly be?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “IN THE HOSPITAL, everything was fevered. Rushed. We were making decisions too quickly. We had chosen to deliver in Denver instead of locally and didn’t tell Karen’s parents when she went into labor—we didn’t want them showing up. Only Donna was there, with a car trunk full of suitcases.

  “Karen was worried but also excited. Her life to that point had been deeply unhappy because she hadn’t been able to express who she really was.

  “She said she wanted happiness. For once in her life, she wanted to be truly happy.” His voice cracked.

  Oh, Dad, you poor thing. “Was that hard for you to hear? That she hadn’t been truly happy with you?”

  He stared out the window and swallowed before answering. “Yes. I had already come to accept it, but to see her so happy to be leaving me, it...”

  Monica knew her dad well. “You tried really hard to make her happy, didn’t you?” A determined man, Dad wouldn’t have gone down without a fight.

  “Oh, yes.” His smile, sweet with traces of his remembered youth, turned inward, snagged by memories. “I used to bring home these little bouquets of violets. She called them posies. She loved them. Of course, I learned quickly that I couldn’t buy her love. She would smile and thank me sweetly, but I might as well have been her brother for all the romantic love she showed.”

  “That hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it make you angry?”

  “It might have if she’d been a different person. All of that great stuff I told you about her every night before you went to bed?”

  She nodded.

  “It was all true.” He traveled inward again on a private journey that Monica couldn’t follow.

  She would like to leave him to continue his trip down memory lane as long as he needed, but the here and now pressed in on her. “At the hospital, Dad?”

  “You have to understand that we weren’t fully mature adults yet. We were trying hard to be, but we weren’t strong, and now we were responsible for two young souls.

  “As I said, your mom wanted to be happy. She thought that if she returned to Accord with me, to live in close proximity to her parents, she wouldn’t be. So she and Donna were running away together.”

  “With the babies?”

  He nodded. “That was the decision she had made and I had truly thought I would be okay with that. You were born first and I made the mistake of holding you. I fell in love. There was a bond. I’d never felt anything like it. I couldn’t let my babies go.

  “We fought and it wasn’t pretty. Donna got involved, accusing me of being selfish. Goddamned right I was being selfish. You were my baby girls, too, not just Karen’s.”

  He jiggled one knee up and down. “We came to a compromise and decided to each keep a baby.”

  “Dad, that’s insane. An absurd decision. Things like this don’t happen in real life.”

  “Want to bet?” he snorted. “Read the papers. Go on the internet. For years I was obsessed with finding real-life stories about twins separated at birth. I read newspapers from the largest cities across America. I searched the internet for lost-twins stories, found tons of them from around the world and was heartened any time they found each other. It happens more often than you would think. Believe it or not.”

  Dad stared into the cold, empty fireplace.

  “You have to remember we lived in a small town, not someplace progressive like New York City. This was forty years ago. I know that doesn’t sound so long ago, but it’s taken time and years for people’s attitudes to change. Personally, I didn’t care what people thought. Karen did. Her parents had raised her to worry.”

  “Were they a good couple?”

  “Karen and Donna? Yeah,” he admitted. “They really were. They loved each other. Anyway, we both ended up with a daughter. Karen’s parents were furious that she had run off with Donna, angrier about that than about one of their grandbabies being taken away. Which really bothered me.

  “They disowned Karen and told everyone she had died birthing you. To my eternal regret, I went along with them so they could save face in the community. And so there I was, living alone in a strange town with you. I decided I wanted you to grow up in Accord. I moved back home. I needed there to be stability in your life, and we have a history here. Also, I moved back here with you so my parents could get to know their grandchild, but they died far too soon.”

  “Did they know that Mom was still alive?”

  “Yes. I told them. I couldn’t keep that from my own parents. They didn’t agree with the way in which Karen’s parents handled things, but your grandparents had always been liberal in their leanings. They accepted a lot.”

  “My mom’s parents died when I was a toddler. Why didn’t you contact my mother then so I could meet her, so I could know her over the years?”

  He reached his hand into his pocket again for a nonexistent cigarette and withdrew it. “Because, in the most...” He drummed his fist on his thigh hard enough that it looked like it hurt. His jaw tightened. “In the most perverse and unfair irony, your mom died only a week after they did, in a hit-and-run.”

  Monica sucked in a breath that froze in her lungs. So close. She had almost known her mother. Learning that she hadn’t died giving birth to her and now realizing she had lived for a few years afterward was like losing her again.

  “Why couldn’t I have met Marcie? Why didn’t you bring us together then?”

  “Because Donna disappeared with her after Karen’s death.”

  “Why?”

  Bleakly, he said, “Because I told her I wanted to bring Marcie home. The hell with what the town thought of our deceptions. Cripes, every town has its scandals. I wanted you two to be raised together.”

  “And Donna wouldn’t agree to that?”

  “No. She was grieving and said she had to keep the only part of Karen she had left. Her daughter. She said I could hire all of the lawyers on earth, and all of the detectives, but they would never find her and Marcie. She was going to raise Marcie as her own.” His voice cracked and he took a moment to pull himself together.

  “I offered to purchase her a home in town. She said she refused to live like Marcie’s aunt or a distant relative. She insisted she was now Marcie’s mother. I never heard from her again.”

 
“Then how—?”

  “Marcie contacted me two weeks ago. While Donna was in the hospital waiting for surgery, she shared Marcie’s history with her in case she didn’t make it. Now Donna is the one who’s been disowned, by Marcie who is very, very angry about everything.”

  “No wonder.” Monica was angry, too. She wasn’t sure how she was going to deal with it. “Where do we go from here? Do we all pretend we’re one big happy family?”

  Her dad sighed. “I wish I knew.”

  The gulf between them might as well have been an ocean. Monica had never felt this far away from the only family she knew. It hurt. It was sad. She couldn’t let it go. She had no one else, except apparently a sister.

  “May I come over there?”

  He stared at her with hope. He opened his arms. She crossed the divide that separated them and burrowed into him, tucking her legs under her and tossing the throw over both of them.

  She curled against his chest on the sofa, safe within the curve of his arm across her back, like old times, except that these were new, uncertain times.

  She rested her head on his shoulder.

  “It’s just you and me against the world, kid.” Dad’s old line.

  “Things have changed, though, haven’t they?”

  His sigh rumbled up from deep inside of him. “Yep, they sure have.”

  “Will she become part of our family?”

  “She already is. You two share DNA. You once shared a womb. Your mother is dead. Donna has been rejected by Marcie, who is the only parent she ever knew, but she still has a father here in this house. I assume she’ll want to get to know me.”

  “Do you want to get to know her?”

  “What do you think?” By not answering her question directly, she knew he was trying to soften the blow.

  “You do.”

  “She’s my daughter.”

  So simple a truth. So shattering.

  They sat in silence for a long, long time, lost in their thoughts.

  The doorbell rang, startling both of them.