It wasn’t until after she’d given Emily her bath and put her to bed that Judy remembered to return her mother’s phone call. Her mother lived alone in the house outside Philadelphia where Judy had grown up. When her mother’s voice came on the line, Judy closed her eyes and imagined she was back there again, sitting at the kitchen table over a cup of tea, listening entranced to her mother’s stories of the land of her birth and of Judy’s, a country and time and place Judy no longer remembered. Every detail of that house was etched sharply into her heart. The sound of the winter wind in the trees, the smells of cooking, the sight of her father—young and alive in her memory, tall and strong as he mowed the lawn in summer or pushed her on the swing. One day, she knew, the big old house would become too much for her mother, and it would have to be sold. She hoped that day was a long time off, but she knew every year brought it closer.
“How is your husband, the writer?” her mother asked.
“He’s fine. He has an essay coming out in the next issue of Newsweek.”
“That’s not bad,” Tuyet said grudgingly. “I suppose that’s good enough for now, until something better comes along.” Judy suppressed a laugh. “And my granddaughter?”
“She’s wonderful.” Judy glanced down the hall to Emily’s bedroom. “Except that today she told me she won’t be eating any more green food.”
“What? Green food—you mean, moldy food?”
“Of course not,” Judy said, laughing. “I wouldn’t feed her moldy food. I mean green as in peas, lettuce, broccoli.”
“Oh.” Tuyet was silent for a moment. “Tell her that I said she should eat whatever you serve.”
Judy smiled. “Okay, I’ll tell her.” Not that it would make any difference. “Ma, Steve said you received a letter for me today.”
Her mother went silent.
“Ma?”
“I’m still here.” Her mother sighed, and Judy heard a chair scrape across the floor. “I don’t know how to tell you this gently, so I’ll just say it. The letter is from your father.”
“What?”
“It’s true. I’m holding it in my hand this moment.”
Judy’s heart seemed to skip a beat. The moment she had always dreaded had come. Her wonderful, vibrant mother, who had endured so much so bravely, was in decline, and more seriously and suddenly than Judy had feared. “Ma,” she said carefully, “Daddy’s dead.”
“No, no,” Tuyet said impatiently. “Not him, not your real father. Your other father.”
Her other father. For a moment Judy’s mind whirled as she tried to make sense of her mother’s words.
Then she understood.
“Do you mean my biological father?” That had to be it, and yet it couldn’t be. Judy had never heard from him, not once in all those years. His only contact with them had been through a lawyer more than thirty years ago, when he agreed to give up his parental rights so that her father could adopt her. Her father—that title belonged to the man who had raised her, who had married her mother. He had been her father in every way that mattered for as long as she could remember.
“Yes, your biological father. That is what I meant.”
Judy took a deep breath and sank into a chair. “What does he want?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t open it. The letter is addressed to you, not me.”
“Would you—” Judy swallowed. She felt ill, dizzy. “Would you open it and read it to me, please?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“If he wanted me to read this letter, he would have put my name on it, too. You can read it yourself when it arrives in Waterford. I will mail it to you in the morning.”
Judy sighed, exasperated. She recognized that stubborn tone in her mother’s voice. She would have to wait for the letter to arrive.
She told Steve about it as soon as she hung up the phone, but she said nothing to her friends. They knew little about her history; they knew she was the child of an American serviceman and that her mother had brought her from Vietnam to the United States when she was very young, but they knew nothing of the struggle to get here, nothing of the fear, that sense of being hunted. That was what Judy remembered most of their flight—the fear.
Since Tuyet had no money to pay for bribes and exit permits, she struck a bargain with an older woman and her family, who saw in the young Judy a ticket out of Vietnam. In exchange for gold, Tuyet claimed these people as her mother, her brother, and her niece, so they would be allowed to accompany them to America. Their money paid the way, but without Judy, they knew they had no chance of making it to the DP camps, let alone the States.
This family of convenience lasted until they were all safely in New York, when Tuyet and Judy were cast out. They took refuge in the small apartment of a distant relative, three rooms crowded with frightened, weary, bickering adults, waiting for a man Judy had never met to come rescue them. Months later, they instead received a letter denying his responsibility for Judy, his daughter, the child named after his own mother.
Judy remembered that, too, her mother crushing the letter in her fist and saying, “We do not need him. Remember that. We do not need him.”
She said it with such determination that Judy believed her.
Since the man who had promised to marry her had changed his mind, Tuyet found work, first in a restaurant kitchen, where she met the woman who found her a better job in a hospital in Philadelphia. Some time later Tuyet moved them into an apartment of their own, a small place, with two rooms—a kitchen and a living room where they shared a sofa bed. Judy later realized that it must have seemed shabby and cramped compared to her grandparents’ home in Saigon, the one her mother had fled in shame when the dashing army doctor’s child in her womb became too obvious to ignore. But to Judy, the new place seemed bright and spacious. For the first time, she had felt safe and happy—except at night, when shadowed figures came out of the dark, spitting at her, striking her, shrieking in her native language con lai, my lai, names she did not understand.
Then Tuyet met John DiNardo. Like the man who had abandoned them, he, too was a tall American doctor, but this time the story ended differently. John DiNardo was kind and gentle, and Judy adored him, especially after he married her mother and adopted her as his very own child. After that, all the old fears had dissolved into the past.
What would the man who had denied her so long ago want with her now?
Tuesday night and Wednesday passed. She taught her classes at Waterford College and her workshop at Elm Creek Manor by rote. Her undergraduates were too preoccupied with their upcoming finals to notice, but the quilt campers sensed her distraction. She knew she must seem wooden and dull after Sylvia’s crisp efficiency and Gwen’s humor, but she couldn’t snap out of it. Steve told her she had no reason to worry, but his words were no comfort. It wasn’t worry she felt—in fact, she felt nothing. She was numb, as if her heart and mind had been encased in stone.
When she returned home from work on Thursday afternoon, she could tell from Steve’s expression that the letter had arrived. She picked up the thick envelope from the table near the door and carried it into the kitchen. The return address was her mother’s. She opened the envelope and found a second one inside.
She took a deep breath and sat down at the kitchen table. This envelope was addressed to Judy Linh Nguyen DiNardo—covering all bases, she supposed, with the first stirring of emotion she had felt since her mother’s phone call. The name in the return address was Robert Scharpelsen of Madison, Wisconsin.
Wisconsin. She pictured rolling hills dotted with red barns and cows. So that’s where he had been all these years. If he had married her mother, if he had come to New York for them as he had promised, she would have grown up in Wisconsin instead of Pennsylvania. She would have become a completely different person. She would not have met Steve; she would not have borne Emily.
Thank God Robert Scharpelsen had not come for them all those years ago. Thank God he had denied her. Her mother had b
een right. They did not need him. They had not needed him then and they did not need him now.
She sat there staring at the envelope for so long that eventually Steve spoke. “Are you going to open it?”
“Later.” Judy stuffed the envelope into her purse and stood up. “Maybe.” She went down the hall to Emily’s room to read her a story, to play a game—anything to make herself forget.
Steve said no more about the letter that evening, and not once was Judy tempted to retrieve it from her purse and read it. Late that night, though, long after Steve had fallen asleep with his arms around her, she lay in the darkness, thinking. Robert Scharpelsen had blond hair, her mother had told her, blond hair and blue eyes. Judy saw nothing of him in her, and yet he was a part of her as much as her mother was. She pictured him, aged now, thin, the blond hair long gone to gray, sitting at a table, pen in hand, writing to the daughter he had abandoned a lifetime ago. What had he been thinking as he put the words down one by one? Why write now, when he had never needed to before? Was the letter an apology? An explanation? Was he dying, and wanted now to seek absolution? If so, he should have written to her mother. She was the one he had wronged.
She had a father. She did not need this man. She did not need his letter. She would destroy it unread—rip it up and burn the pieces. Let him wonder what had happened to her. Let him be the one abandoned. Let his words go unheard; however desperate he was to contact Judy now, her mother had been a thousand times more so as she waited for him to fulfill his promises. Let Judy’s silence be his punishment, a small measure of justice seized on her mother’s behalf, recompense for the many ways he had made her suffer for loving him.
She stole from bed, quietly, carefully, so Steve would not be disturbed, so he wouldn’t ask her what she was doing, so he wouldn’t stop her. In the kitchen, she took the letter from her purse and held it, feeling its weight, its thickness. He must have had a lot to say, and no wonder, after thirty years of silence.
Or perhaps he wanted to be sure that she would open the letter, so he had written page after page until he knew the letter would be too thick to tear. She could tear it up later, but she would have to open the envelope first. And once the envelope was open, it would take superhuman strength not to read at least one line of it.
She would read one line—just the first line—to see how he addressed her. That would tell her a great deal. There was a world of difference between “Dear Miss DiNardo” and “My dear daughter.”
She took a deep breath and slipped her finger beneath the flap and opened the envelope. A single sheet of folded paper was tucked in front. Judy removed it, left the rest of the contents in place, and set the envelope on the kitchen counter.
Her hands trembled as she unfolded the paper and began to read the typed words. “Dear Judy,” she read aloud, and the words seemed to stick in her throat. She forgot her resolve and read on:
Dear Judy,
I put my father’s name on the outside of the envelope because I wanted you to have the choice to throw this letter away unread. My father’s name alone would indicate the nature of this letter, and if you wanted no part of him, or of me, you wouldn’t have to read any further than the return address before tossing it in the trash. That is, as long as you know who my father is, and what he is to you.
You see, I wrote “my father,” but I should have written “our father.” I am your sister, your half sister. My father tells me you already know about him, though not about me. I hope his memory is accurate, and that this is not the first time you are hearing this news. If it is, please accept my heartfelt apologies. No one should have to receive news like that in a letter.
I’ve tried to write to you so many times. I’ve tried to imagine what it must be like to be you, and whether you would even want to hear from me. You have a life of your own and maybe you don’t want a sister—a stranger—coming into it after all these years. I finally realized that I can never know what it’s like to be you. I can’t know whether you would want to hear from me. But I do know that if our places were reversed, I would want to hear from you. I would want to know I had a sister.
I would have written to you sooner, but I only learned of you two months ago, after my mother’s death. Before then my father never spoke of you—out of respect for my mother, I guess. I’m trying to understand things from his point of view, but it’s hard not to be angry at him. All my life I’ve had another sister and I never knew it.
My father has told me little of his relationship with your mother, but it is enough for me to infer that they did not part amicably. I would understand if you hate my father and do not want to see him. However, I hope you will be willing to see me. I really want to meet you.
Because of my father’s declining health, he is unable to travel to Philadelphia and I am unable to leave him. It is my hope that you will use the enclosed voucher to purchase a plane ticket to Wisconsin. You might wonder why I sent it—I admit I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do or if it would be offensive. I finally decided to send it to show you how much I want you to come, and so that you can do so without any cost to yourself.
If you can’t come, I hope you will at least write back to me. I am more eager to hear from you than I can express in a letter.
Your sister,
Kirsten Scharpelsen
P.S. You have other family here, too. I have a brother and a sister.
Steve had come into the room while she was reading, and now he stood behind her, rubbing her shoulders and waiting for her to finish. Judy read the letter again, this time aloud. Her voice shook, but whether from nervousness or anger or something else entirely, she wasn’t sure.
“I have a sister,” she said at last, without emotion, spreading the letter flat on the counter.
“Two sisters and a brother,” Steve said. He picked up the envelope and fingered through the remaining contents.
Anger surged through her. She snatched the envelope and flung it down on the counter. “She sends me a travel voucher, like I’m—like I’m some kind of refugee.”
“You were, once.”
“Not anymore. I don’t need her charity.”
“She doesn’t know that.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Don’t be angry with her. I think she means well,” Steve said. “All she knows is that her father abandoned you in Vietnam. She probably feels a lot of guilt for what he did, for what he didn’t do. It sounds like she’s trying to make up for his mistakes.”
Anger still roiled in the pit of her stomach. “ ‘If our places were reversed,’ she says. As if she could ever understand my place. ‘I can infer they did not part amicably.’ What a joke. He abandoned us. We could have died for all he cared. If we hadn’t got out before the VC took Saigon, I can’t even imagine what would have happened to us. They weren’t exactly kind to the children of the enemy and the women who bore them.”
She was shaking. Hot, angry tears blinded her until she couldn’t read the letter anymore. Steve put his arms around her and murmured soothingly. She clung to him, and his strength bore her up until she could calm herself. She had never been so angry, so hurt, in all her life. It bewildered and alarmed her. In the back of her mind she knew the letter should not hurt so much. She should be joyful. After all these years, she had a sister, a sister who wanted to know her.
“He couldn’t even write to me himself,” she whispered, stunned by how much that pained her.
“Maybe he’s not able,” Steve said. “He doesn’t sound like he’s in the best of health. If—” He hesitated. “You might not have much longer to meet him.”
“Do you think I should?”
He stroked her cheek. “I think you should consider it very carefully and then do what you feel is best.”
His expression was so compassionate it made her heart ache. Steve loved her so much, and yet Robert Scharpelsen could not bring himself to love her even a little.
But she had two sisters and a brother.
&
nbsp; “I wish she would have given me more information,” Judy said. She picked up the letter and scanned it, hungry for details. “I don’t know how old she is, the names of her brother and sister—there’s so much she doesn’t say.”
“My guess is she’s younger than you.”
“Oh. Well, of course, she would have to be. He was with my mother for two years before he went back to the States and remarried. Married,” she corrected herself. Her mother had considered Robert Scharpelsen her husband, but they had never officially wed.
“You’re right, but that’s not why I thought so. It’s her style of writing. She’s obviously educated. She has a solid grasp of grammar and access to a laser printer. I’d say middle-class, possibly upper-middle-class, or aspiring to be. She’s young, though, maybe in her mid to late twenties. Notice the way she uses overly formal diction sometimes and other times she sounds like an anxious teenager?” He pointed to the fourth paragraph. “ ‘But it is enough for me to infer that they did not part amicably’ is soon followed by ‘I really want to meet you.’ She’s trying to be formal and dignified but her youth keeps sneaking through, probably because she’s furious at her father for keeping you a secret.”
Judy stared at him. “You got all that from two sentences?”
An Elm Creek Quilts Sampler Page 42
