by Annie Jones
Chapter Nineteen
How long have you known? How can we ever trust you again? What else have you kept from us? Why, Daddy? Why?
Question upon question tumbled over one another in Sadie’s mind. Her pulse rose like the heat in her cheeks, until her head throbbed and her thoughts swirled into a muddy mess. What could she say to her father upon finding out that he’d lived most of their lifetime in lies? Where could she find the inner strength to look into the eyes of the man she thought would never hurt her and ask him why he had betrayed her?
She placed her hand on the wrought-iron gate surrounding the small, silent cemetery and closed her eyes. And in that moment uttered a prayer so simple that anyone hearing it might have accused her of being glib in her approach. But to Sadie it was a start. All things start somewhere, and here at this site of grief and confusion and, yes, even power and calm in the renewed relationship with Hannah and April, here Sadie chose to start, at last, to speak to God about herself again.
Lord, please, be with me now. Be in me. Speak through me. Do not desert me. Amen.
The gate creaked. She stepped across from smooth sidewalk to a well-worn stone path.
Hannah and April closed in behind her.
Daddy did not look up.
The sisters stopped and took a collective breath.
Only a hundred feet away or so, Moonie was in another world. One inhabited by only himself and the unyielding marble stone that he knelt beside. Now and again he brushed his trembling fingers over the small white marker. His little gray hat lay on the ground. His shoulders rose and fell. More than once they shook, his head bent low.
“Sadie, maybe we should—”
“Shh, April.” Sadie raised her hand to stop her sister from voicing their shared misgivings. “We’re here now. We have to go forward with this or go back to pretending, to never really talking to each other, to always wondering. And I can’t go back.”
Hannah gave Sadie’s shoulder a squeeze. “What will you say?”
The questions bubbled up to the surface of her consciousness fast and furious. She squared her shoulders and lifted her head.
How long have you known? How can we ever trust you again? What else have you kept from us? Why, Daddy? Why?
But when she reached the solitary figure kneeling in the shade of a gnarled old tree beside the grave bearing their mother’s name, all Sadie said was, “‘Why seek ye the living among the dead’…Daddy?”
“She was a woman of faith, your mother. Some might look at her choices and conclude otherwise. But I want you girls to know that she held firm to her spiritual beliefs. Always. She never let go of them. It was this world she couldn’t seem to keep a grip on.” He struggled to rise, his aging eyes rimmed in red.
“Let me help you, Daddy.” Hannah stepped up first and took one arm.
April moved in and took the other arm.
“Don’t know why you’d want to help the likes of this old man. I’ve made such an awful mess of things.”
“I’d deny that, Daddy, but after having chased you through two states only to end up staring at a headstone with Mama’s name on it, I don’t see how I can.” Sadie hoped he heard acceptance, not accusation, in her tone.
Moonie patted Hannah on the cheek, then April on the hand as he extricated himself from their aid. Bending down, he reached out and rubbed his fingers over the chiseled name on the stone. Teresa Owens.
Sadie’s eye was drawn to the dates below the name. “She was so young.”
“Thirty-one,” April murmured.
“Yes. Almost the number of years since she passed.” Daddy ran his weathered fingers under the final date.
“How long have you known, Daddy?” Sadie had to ask.
“So young.” He shook his head.
“Daddy?” Hannah lurched forward.
Sadie put her hand out to stop her younger sister from prying further. There was too much pain here now. The grief in their father was as fresh as if it had all just happened. Moonie would tell them everything, but they could not force it from him. Sadie understood that now, and despite all they had suspected he had done, she still trusted her father.
She bent and picked up the familiar gray hat from where it lay in the thick green grass. “Let’s go, Daddy. There’s nothing more for us here.”
“Now…now that I’ve found her again after all these years…” He folded his hands and bowed his head. “I hate to leave her.”
“It’s all right, Daddy,” April said, her voice hushed. “She’s not here now.”
“And besides—” Hannah stood over the grave, her face emotionless but her eyes filled with tears “—she left us a long time ago, even before she died.”
“Your mama didn’t abandon you. I left her.”
“What?”
He looked at the grave. “Your mother insisted.”
“Daddy, all my life you’ve told that story of how Mama ran off in the night.” Hannah stepped backward and crossed her arms as if to hold back the inevitable ache inside her as she added, “With me just three weeks home from the hospital.”
April and Sadie closed ranks around their sister. Sadie looked at their father and went into her role to speak for them all. “We’ve heard it a thousand times, Daddy. Mama ran off. Now you say you left her, taking along her blood child, a toddler and a newborn? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Sadly that’s about all it did make, was sense. It sure didn’t make us happy.”
April took a step toward Moonie. “I don’t recall Mama as ever being happy.”
His head snapped up. His gaze searched his stepchild’s. “She was, April, sugar.” Then he looked away. “At times. But…your mama was what we called back in those days ‘fragile.’”
“She suffered from depression, didn’t she, Daddy?” April persisted.
“I don’t know the right term for what had a grip on her, but suffer with it she did. Merciful heavens, girls—how your sweet mama did suffer.”
Silence enveloped the shaded plot.
Beyond them the sun shone in almost blinding light on the abandoned buildings and empty, weed-infested lots.
“The baby blues,” Moonie finally whispered.
“What, Daddy?” April leaned in to better hear.
“I recall that’s what Phiz called it when she came to help out.” Daddy nodded as he spoke, his head cocked slightly. “Said your mama had a bad case of the baby blues.”
“Postpartum depression, like Sadie…” Hannah started to point to her older sister, then froze midgesture and let her hand fall to her side. “That’s what it’s called, Daddy.”
Moonie looked to his middle daughter and nodded knowingly. “Phiz claimed Teresa might have fared better if she hadn’t had you two girls, Hannah and Sadie, so close together.”
Sadie tried to remember how she had felt after giving birth to Ryan and Olivia, desperate to find a pattern that might bring the answers she had sought for so long. “So are you saying it all started when I was born?”
“Pretty soon after. Yes, I think so.” Moonie glanced down again, then motioned toward the old convertible waiting beyond the side entrance. “I always carried some guilt over that, but back then, we didn’t know. We just thought she needed to perk up.”
“Or pray harder. Or put it behind you.” Sadie knew all the suggestions by heart. And she knew the greatest fear she had felt when she could not live up to the simplistic, well-intentioned suggestions. The all-encompassing sense of failure. Her greatest fear that those she loved the most would finally see her for what she was: flawed and ineffectual, a waste of time. Worthless and then…
She shut her eyes and pulled the warm summer air deep into her lungs. She asked the Lord again not to desert her and in that same instant asked her father the one thing that she now had to know from him. “But if she suffered so much, if she was that ‘fragile,’ as you put it, why would you leave her?”
Their father edged close to Sadie and, extricating his beloved hat f
rom her white-knuckled grip, said calmly, “Like I said, she insisted.”
“Why?”
“For the sake of you girls.”
“How could anyone come up with that, Daddy?” Hannah held back and did not follow the rest of them. “All our lives we missed out on having a mama because you two had split up. What possible benefit could anyone have seen in that?”
“That it spared you having a mama right there in front of you every day who couldn’t give you the most simple basic daily care that you three needed. And to spare you, I see now, the pain of losing that mama so young.”
“You don’t think she asked you to leave because she planned to…?”
“Kill herself? No.” He started again for the car. This time all three sisters followed, surrounding him to hang on every word. “I don’t believe that for one minute. But I do think she lived every day in a world of hurt, so much so that there weren’t enough tranquilizers and pain pills in the world to dull it.”
“There are so many things they’d do differently today.”
“I wish I’d done things different, that’s for sure. But your mama, she had one wish in this world, and I had to honor it.”
“That you leave her?”
“That I keep you girls together.”
“Why wouldn’t you keep us together?”
“Oh, I would. But there were some who said…To understand it, you have to remember that your mama had her good days and her bad ones.”
“I do remember that, Daddy,” April said. “I remember more bad days than good.”
Moonie nodded, his eyes cloudy. “I wish I could say the good days were a blessing, but in some ways they only served to remind her of what she might do—and give and have—if only she didn’t wrestle with that monster, that, tell me again that thing you called it—post…?”
“Postpartum depression,” Hannah said.
Moonie sighed as if the very term weighed heavy on his bones. “It was one of those days, one of those bad postpartum ones, that made up her mind. It came on the heels of a respectable spate of days so good that life almost seemed…”
“Magical?” Hannah asked.
He shook his head, slowly. “Doable.”
Sadie shut her eyes and mouthed the word again, feeling the full weight of understanding for her mother for the first time in her life.
“On one of those days your mother called me at the insurance office and asked me if I’d be willing to adopt April.”
“Which you did.” April moved ahead of them, probably intending to open the gate for Daddy when they reached it. “And then?”
“No. I never did. I never legally adopted you, April, honey.”
She stopped, blocking the path. “Daddy, yes, you did. I have your last name. All my school records show you as my father.”
“I fudged the documents. It wasn’t so hard to do back then. But I didn’t adopt you. I couldn’t.”
Sunlight brightened the top of her head. She squinted and ran her fingers down her braid. “Why not?”
“Because we waited too late. Starting up the adoption proceedings brought your mama’s fragile state to the attention of the child welfare.”
Sadie started to give the proper name for the agency that might have come to investigate their home life, then thought better of it. Her father was finally telling them everything, and picking at details wouldn’t make things easier.
“Teresa was pregnant then with our little Hannah. And weak as a kitten and withdrawn. But not so much so that she didn’t grasp the severity of the situation.”
“What situation?” Hannah pressed.
“That if a social worker looked too hard at our family, she might not like what she saw,” April said.
“She feared she’d be judged an unfit mother, unworthy of and unequal to the task.” Moonie studied his hat.
Sadie’s knees wobbled. How well she knew that feeling! Until this very moment “Mama” had remained an abstract to her way thinking. A concept, bittersweet and beautiful, but just not real. Intellectually Sadie understood that they shared the same DNA, but now to hear they also shared the very same fears and failings?
She could hardly breathe for imagining her mother carrying that pain…and all alone.
“And Teresa wasn’t far wrong. There was talk around town, and some said maybe they should take you girls away—or at least April, as she wasn’t my blood kin.” He reached out and took the eldest girl’s hand. He held her gaze only a moment before he turned his beseeching eyes on the others. “I couldn’t let that happen, don’t you see? I couldn’t let my girls get torn apart. I couldn’t let them take you away, April.”
“So you took us and left town?” No emotion colored Sadie’s question. She felt stunned and angry and afraid all at once.
“At your mother’s insistence,” he reiterated.
“In a station wagon in the middle of the night,” April whispered.
“Well, after dark, but you were already in your pajamas, so it probably seemed later to you.”
April blinked, still fingering the end of her braid. “And we stayed at a motel with a park, with horses on springs and teeter-totters.”
“How’d you ever remember that?”
April pressed her lips together, a softness coming over her expression. “And Mama came to see us once. I remember her in that park.”
“Yes, to tell me she wanted to go away to get better and that we should move on, find a town and make a home and that she’d come when she could. When she drove off that day, I had no idea I’d never see her again.”
“Then Mama did leave us.” Always the stickler for details, Hannah gave a curt nod to emphasize the correctness of her assessment.
And though it humbled Sadie to admit it, she felt just as smug and satisfied with that conclusion as anyone. Daddy had not walked out on a woman in pain—he had done what he thought he had to in order to rescue the children he loved. It was a small distinction and not one she’d have thought noble at the time, but it was all they had, and so much time had passed since he’d made his own Solomon’s choice that she simply could not dwell on “what ifs.”
“That’s right,” Sadie said with the finality of closing a door to the past. “Mama left us.”
“I…I suppose. But the way she was…I don’t think she felt she had any choice. It was this thing that consumed her that compelled her to leave, don’t you see? It wasn’t the woman I loved who left. It wasn’t your mama.” Moonie turned his head to try to make sure each girl understood. Then he whisked one open palm along the brim of the hat in his hand and shrugged as if trying to get out from under a heavy mantle. “Got divorce papers in the mail a couple years later. I didn’t want to sign them, but I had to protect you girls. I couldn’t leave an open end. I had to let Teresa go.”
It wasn’t their mama who had made the choice, the depression had chosen for her. Sadie had to take that away and consider it more before she could either accept or reject it. But one thing she had to know and she wanted to know it now. “And the news of her death, when did you get that?”
His watery eyes met her gaze. He winced, just slightly. Then he looked down at his hat and in a shaky voice confessed, “About an hour before you did.”
“Today?” Sadie looked around them at the cemetery surrounded by decades of decay. “You can’t have just found out today!”
“I suspected, yes, but that’s why I came to Alphina.” He cleared his throat. “I came to make sure. Old insurance man, me, I’d bought these plots for your mother and me as a wedding present.”
“Wow!” Sadie crossed her arms and glanced at the tombstones around them. “And I thought Ed lacked the knack for romance!”
She got a chuckle out of her daddy. That eased her heartache, just a touch.
“Your mother asked for the plots in the divorce,” Moonie went on. “Teresa loved Alphina, and she knew we had settled in Kentucky, so…”
He started toward the car again.
Hannah dogg
ed his heels. “So why didn’t you try to find out what happened to her before now?”
He stopped in his tracks but did not turn to look at his daughters. “Because as long as I stayed away, as long as I didn’t know if she’d found use of this little piece of land, I could dream.”
The three of them shared a guilty glance. They all knew that feeling all too well.
“And now…” He threw back his shoulder and started to walk forward again, this time with the uneven gait left over from the car accident. “I can’t anymore.”
Hannah dashed to his side. “If it cost you your dreams, Daddy, why did you come now?”
He stopped, and again did not look directly at them when he said, “To keep my girls together.”
“What?” Petulance finally broke in April’s usually steady voice.
“I saw the signs in Sadie.” Now he turned on her. He could not hold her gaze, but he did lift his eyes time and again as he spoke. “I saw the sadness, but I thought as long as she had her family, nothing bad could befall her.”
“Because they wouldn’t leave me.” Sadie wished she’d shared his faith. But then he was her daddy, the last person who would ever see how truly undeserving she had become of the people who loved her.
“Then she told me that you three had quarreled and weren’t speaking. And Hannah had these plans to go off with Payt to who knew where and I thought…what if they lose touch? What if the greatest sacrifice their mother and I ever made ended up for nothing?”
Just like when they were little and the pieces of a puzzle they worked on finally began fitting together, Hannah had to be the first to announce her version of the whole picture. “So you came here knowing we’d follow?”
“I came here knowing it was time to tell you the truth, the whole of it. But until today, I didn’t have that, I only had the pieces that I had saved and the ones that I had wanted to believe still existed.” He looked out toward their mother’s grave again, his face pinched and worn in the bright sunlight. “Can you forgive a foolish old man who only wanted the best for his children?”
