What She Inherits

by Diane V. Mulligan

  Still, she hadn’t been prepared to consider what the answer meant and how much it mattered to her. So what if someone besides her mother had given birth to her? Her mother had raised her. The woman who gave birth to her had no claim over her as a mother, because she had chosen to abandon her, and the woman she’d always known as mother had loved her as if they were flesh and blood.

  Her parents lost their beloved son and were too old to have another child of their own, so they adopted her to fill the void in their lives. They saved her from a sad, unwanted life. It made sense. As Angela began rewriting her history to create a new narrative that included this truth, she began to feel better, calmer. Her parents were good people. They’d done their best by her.

  She supposed that this was what her mother’s spirit had been trying to keep from her, and she was certain that in unlocking the desk, she’d find some sort of proof. Her mother’s spirit didn’t want Angela going through the house and discovering it. But now she knew the truth, and she wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. Would her mother’s spirit go to wherever spirits are supposed to go? Would she have peace?

  Sitting in the living room with this stranger who was her aunt, Angela had more questions than she could keep track of. She sifted through them in her mind and finally said, “Here’s what I don’t get. Why did you think it was so bad for them to let me think they were really my parents? If they had me since infancy, and I know they did because I’ve seen the pictures, why not just let us be a regular family?”

  “Because I knew your biological parents.”

  Angela’s mouth formed the shape of an O but no sound came out.

  “Maybe we should all take a pause here,” Randy said. “Maybe we should wait until morning to talk more. Angela, you don’t have to listen to this. You don’t know this woman.”

  “Look at her,” Angela said. She was pointing to a family portrait on the side table. “Marilyn is obviously my mother’s sister.”

  “That doesn’t mean she isn’t lying.”

  Angela shook her head and sighed. “Will you go get a crowbar from the garage?”

  Randy gave her puzzled look.

  “Let’s open the desk.”

  Marilyn assured Angela that she would leave if Angela wanted her to, but Angela told her to stay. Randy returned with the crowbar, and the three of them went back to the study.

  “I might damage it,” Randy said as he tried to work out where to go at the desk first.

  “Bash it to pieces for all I care,” Angela said.

  She felt numb. She hadn’t even begun to take in the night’s events. All she wanted now was some concrete proof that she was adopted, and once she had that, she’d listen to everything Marilyn had to say. With a splintering of wood, Randy pried open the lower desk drawers, and Angela pulled them fully from the desk and dumped the contents on the floor. She knelt down and began sifting through them. As she did, her mind was flooded with sound, more of the now-familiar but still unbearable noises that seemed to come from inside her own head but that were not part of her. There were no words now, though, just hissing and rumbling, and she wondered if she was actually losing her mind, but she gritted her teeth and shook her head against the noise, silently telling it to leave her alone. Whatever it was, whoever it was, she wasn’t its plaything. She wanted it gone.

  Marilyn, lingering in the doorway, said, “What are you looking for?”

  When she spoke, the sounds in Angela’s mind evaporated. The silence that remained rang in her ears. She shook her head again and said, “Proof.”

  Angela heard Marilyn’s footsteps retreating down the steps, but didn’t stop her or ask where she was going. She wasn’t going far—she’d arrived by cab. A few minutes later, Marilyn returned with her purse. She sat on the floor beside Angela and pulled out a faded snapshot of Ryan and a girl. He was wearing a Chicago Bulls Jersey—a throwback to the era of MJ—and baggy jeans and his arm was around the girl’s shoulder. Both of them were grinning as if they’d been caught mid-laugh. The girl was short and slim with long golden-brown hair, and she wore an oversized painter’s smock.

  “I don’t need proof that you’re my aunt. I believe you,” Angela said, handing the picture back, and turning back to the piles of paper on the floor. Apparently her mother had never gotten rid of a single piece of paperwork in her life. Bank statements. Appliance warranties. Angela’s elementary school report cards.

  “Those are your parents,” Marilyn said, thrusting the picture back in front of Angela.

  Chapter 30

  Devil’s Back Island, Maine

  Rosetta knew that Brett had made plans with Casey for her day off, and had he been nearly any other man, she would have been thrilled. That girl needed to get out there and date, find a nice husband, and enjoy her life. She was entirely too serious and too gloomy. She needed someone who could provide a nice life for her. Brett was certainly a good foil for Jason, but Rosetta couldn’t have Casey getting close to Brett.

  Anyway, when Jason showed up at Rosetta’s the night before and told her about the letter, he had shown remarkable judgment. Sure the kid was a stoner, but maybe Rosetta had underestimated him. Casey shouldn’t jerk him around like that.

  Cranky from a sleepless night of worrying, she trudged along the gravel path to the café with Bentley. Kim was behind the counter when Rosetta pushed through the door. She got two big cups of coffee and then went back outside and around the back to the steps to Casey’s apartment. The door was locked. Sighing, Rosetta set down one of the coffees and fished her keys from her pocket. Pushing open the door, she sent Bentley in ahead of her.

  “Go get her, boy,” she said.

  The dog wagged its tail and took off through the apartment. Rosetta followed at a leisurely pace, giving the dog time to pounce on the bed and wake Casey up so she wouldn’t have to. When she heard Casey’s startled shrieks, Rosetta went into the bedroom with the coffee as a peace offering for the rude awakening.

  “Good God, girl, you reek,” Rosetta said, setting the steaming drink on the side table. Maybe she’ll be canceling her date with Brett without my intervention, Rosetta thought.

  Casey was frantically trying to untangle herself from the sheets and shove Bentley off. At last she managed to get free and ran to the bathroom. Rosetta could hear her retching, but she didn’t offer any kindly gestures like holding her hair off her face. Served the fool right. Instead Rosetta went to the living room and settled in on the futon to drink her own coffee.

  Casey came back a few minutes later, wiping her face with a washcloth and looking no less green for having lost her dinner.

  “What are you doing here?” Casey asked.

  “And good morning to you, too,” Rosetta replied, crossing her legs and sipping from her paper cup.

  “It’s my day off. It’s my one day to sleep,” Casey said.

  “Whining is unbecoming. Besides, don’t you have a date this morning?” Rosetta asked, raising an eyebrow. “You really need to give Kim a few more lessons. Her coffee isn’t half as good as yours.”

  Casey pressed the washcloth against her eyes and dropped back into the armchair.

  “Honestly, I don’t think you should see Brett today. Not in the state you’re in.”

  “Jesus, Rosetta. You’re always after me to date more.”

  “Well, he’s not really the right sort, is he?”

  “He has a girlfriend. I’m not going on a date with him.”

  Damn it, Rosetta thought. She needed Casey to stay away from him, and there was no way to tell her that without revealing more than she wanted to. She sighed and changed subjects.

  “I had a little chat with Jason last night,” she said, setting her cup on the coffee table and calling Bentley over to sit at her feet.

  Casey dropped the washcloth and looked warily at Rosetta.

  “He was worried about you.”

  Casey rolled her eyes and then tilted her head back and draped the washcloth over her face.

&
nbsp; “Looks like he had good reason to be,” Rosetta said.

  “I’m a big girl. I can get drunk if I want to.”

  “Were you going to tell me about your mother?”

  “Damn it,” Casey said. She grabbed the washcloth and flung it across the room. It smacked the far wall wetly and thudded to the floor.

  Rosetta had tried to hide her surprise when Jason told her about the letter he’d found among Casey’s things, but she had been shocked. Rosetta had given up reaching out to Maureen after her last entreaty was met with the question, “Have you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior yet?” That had to have been at least three or four years ago. Casey hadn’t spoken to her in much longer than that. Still, it was impossible to grapple with the fact that Maureen had gotten sick and died without either of them knowing. There should have been some kind of psychic connection between them. But no. Neither of them had had any idea that Maureen’s life had come to a close. Here, they’d both assumed she was out there being a do-gooder, saving the world by picketing abortion clinics and whatnot, but actually she had given up the ghost.

  “Well?” Rosetta said. “Is that all you have to say?”

  “He shouldn’t have read it.”

  “That may be, but he did. And he probably shouldn’t have told me, but he did.”

  Casey stood up, glowering at Rosetta, and went to her room to get the coffee that Rosetta had brought for her and what remained of the letter. She came back and threw the melded blob of paper at Rosetta before sitting back down in the armchair.

  “What’s this?” Rosetta asked.

  “Oh, he didn’t tell you how after he read my rather personal letter he put it through the wash?”

  Rosetta put the lump of paper on the coffee table and sighed. Jason had told her that the letter was from Casey’s mother; that it said if she was reading it, then Maureen was dead; that it was an apology of sorts; that it said Maureen’s cancer was the result of a genetic mutation that Casey might have inherited. In fact, he had offered so much mind-boggling information in a ten minute conversation that Rosetta was still reeling. And of course all Casey wanted to talk about was how Jason was an idiot.

  “She was dead to me a long time ago,” Casey said, when Rosetta was silent.

  “You need to talk to a doctor, Casey,” Rosetta said.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You need to find out what your risks are, what you can do—”

  Casey interrupted her. “Everyone’s going to die some day. Do I really need a countdown timer?”

  Rosetta felt her face flush with frustration. Why couldn’t Casey see that genetic testing could give them both of peace of mind? It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that Casey had inherited the mutation. She could get tested and learn that she was no more at risk than anyone else, and they could breathe a sigh of relief. Or she could learn that she was at risk and she could do things to minimize that risk. Take vitamins or start eating seaweed or any number of things that could supposedly prevent or reverse cancer.

  “Don’t be stupid. It’s the twenty-first century, not the dark ages. There are things they can do,” Rosetta said.

  Every time Rosetta learned about some new breakthrough in diagnostic technology, she thought of Phil, and she thought of all the other people who wouldn’t have to watch their loved ones die miserable, early deaths thanks to new, early detection tools. He’d only been 57 when he died. If there was one thing Rosetta didn’t understand, it was how young, smart people like Casey thought they could take their health for granted. If Phil had gone to routine physicals each year, they might have caught his cancer in time. He might still be with her now.

  “I’ve made up my mind,” Casey said. She closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair.

  Rosetta reached down and ruffled Bentley’s fur behind his ear. Then she studied her great-niece, who was beautiful despite her hungover state, despite that massive bruise of a tattoo on her arm, despite the ridiculous color she dyed her hair. Then again nothing she did could diminish her beauty to Rosetta, even if Rosetta would never say as much to her. But if only she let her hair be natural, if only she covered up the tattoo—she would be stunning. A little bit of mascara maybe, some blush, a dress, perhaps, in place of her uniform of jeans and tank tops. She could be breathtaking. She would also look like her mother, which Rosetta supposed was the entire point of the changes she’d made to her appearance.

  Rosetta could remember Casey as a skinny preteen, her light brown hair streaked with golden highlights from the summer sun, showing off her back dive at the Wild Rose Inn’s pool. By her last summer on the island, she wasn’t such a little kid anymore, at least physically. She turned heads everywhere she went, and she hated it. She wore baggy t-shirts and long shorts that summer, walked with her shoulders slumped. Rosetta supposed it was normal, the awkwardness of a girl growing into a woman’s body, but she blamed Maureen and that born-again, Jesus-freak, second husband of hers, too. They criticized Casey too much, made her afraid to be herself. They should have let her continue to summer on the island. Rosetta could have balanced out their particular brand of insanity. Maybe she could have prevented whatever it was that caused the final rift between Casey and her mother.

  Even now, all these years later, Rosetta knew there was more to the story, more to explain how Maureen could kick her seventeen-year-old daughter to the curb without two pennies to her name. Maureen had her struggles with mental illness, it was true, but Ed was a smart, educated man. He should have helped her and supported his step-daughter. He should have stopped Maureen’s righteous nonsense. Although to hear Casey tell it, Ed was the real reason her mother kicked her out. Dirty bastard.

  Well, now they were both dead. Maureen had written Rosetta several years back to say that Ed had passed, and all Rosetta could think was good riddance. Maureen’s death, though, that one was harder to make sense of. As a child, Maureen was a good girl. Rosetta had always been happy to the play the role of the fun, childless aunt, spoiling her niece and doting on her. But by the time she got the diagnosis of bipolar, Rosetta couldn’t deny the signs that had begun to show themselves when she was still in her teens. Looking back, recalling the temper tantrums and mood swings Maureen had been prone to as a child, she only wished she’d recognized the problems sooner. Poor Casey, growing up with a mother who could barely care for herself, let alone for her child.

  Rosetta suspected that Casey had been living for years with the fear that one day she’d start to show signs of bipolar disorder herself, that she had inherited her mother’s mental illness. That, Rosetta assumed, was the reason the girl insisted on closing herself off from the world. But here she was—sound of mind—and as far as they knew sound of body.

  “It could be worse, you know,” Rosetta said.

  Casey let out a derisive snort.

  “You don’t have any children, so you don’t have to worry about having passed it on.”

  Casey opened her eyes and looked hard at Rosetta, and Rosetta raised her hands as if to say, “Don’t shoot.” Casey had always been very clear: She had no intention of becoming a mother. Rosetta hadn’t brought up her childlessness as a dig. But as Jason had recounted the contents of the letter, he’d said something that didn’t make sense. He said Casey’s mother urged Casey to consider her child. Why had she written that? Casey had no children. Rosetta supposed Maureen was writing hypothetically, covering her bases or taking into account that Casey might have become a mother in the years since Maureen had last seen her. But the idea kept tugging at Rosetta. She hadn’t pressed Jason on that point because she had had so many other things to think about, but now she thought of it again. She’d always hoped Casey would have a family someday. It would bring her so much joy to be a mother, and if anyone needed joy it was Casey.

  She said, “I mean, if you think you’re ever going to have children, you should find out, because you don’t want to pass on—”

  “No, you’re right. If I had children, this would be much wor
se,” Casey said, standing up. She walked to the kitchen and Rosetta could hear the water running in the sink, the sound of a cabinet being opened and closed. She came back with a couple of aspirin and a glass of water. She sat down beside Rosetta, sideways on the futon to look at her, and said, “But since I have no kids, I have even less incentive to get the test, don’t I?”

  “As Shakespeare said, my dear, ‘At length the truth will out.’ This time you get to decide when and how the truth comes out.”

  The look on Casey’s face changed then, and she swallowed hard. At last she sighed and said, “I have to tell you something. I had a baby when I was seventeen.”

  Chapter 31

  St. Nabor Island, South Carolina

  The desk hadn’t contained any documents to corroborate Marilyn’s story, but it had contained the information about her mother’s safe deposit box, so when Randy went home in the morning to catch up on some work, Angela took Marilyn to a hotel—the woman might be her blood relation, but she was also a total stranger—and then drove to the bank. She brought with her all the paperwork regarding the safe deposit box, as well as a copy of her mother’s death certificate.

  She was the first customer in the door that morning, and she wasted no time in explaining her circumstance to the clerk, who seemed skeptically sympathetic. A manager was summoned, and she repeated her case—her mother’s sudden and unexpected death, her need to access certain missing documents, and so on. The manager nodded politely, sighed sympathetically, and then said that only the executor of her mother’s estate could access the box in these circumstances as there were no signatories on the account aside from her mother.

  Angela was not the executor; her mother’s lawyer was. Astonishingly, given her father’s circumstances, and the fact that her lawyer was a family friend who should have advised her on the matter, her mother had left no will, so the lawyer was now making sense of her parents’ affairs. When she met with him last week, he had confided that, upon seeing her mother’s finances, he thought he understood why she hadn’t made a will. Perhaps, he had guessed, she was embarrassed by how house-poor she was, and how little she had to bequeath to anyone.