The Ties That Bind

by Lexi Landsman

  He lay in bed, arms crossed, staring at the ceiling. ‘Did you get it?’

  ‘Get what, sweetie?’

  ‘The medicine, my medicine. To make me better.’

  Courtney looked out the window so he wouldn’t be able to read the raw, piercing pain of failure that shot through her. She swallowed and turned back to him.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said softly.

  He sighed and rolled over so his back was facing her again. But you promised, she could almost hear him say.

  ‘I waited for you,’ he whispered. ‘I didn’t want to have more chemo. I thought you’d bring the medicine that you promised to.’

  There it was: the truth that she had failed her son. ‘I thought so too. But I haven’t stopped looking for it. I needed to go there to start the search.’ When he said nothing, Courtney climbed into the bed beside him and rubbed his back. After a few minutes, she could tell from his heavy breathing that he had fallen asleep.

  ‘We’ll find it,’ she whispered.

  She took in the boyish, baby-powder smell of his skin. She felt again as she had when she was pregnant, as if she could protect him in her womb, shield him from everything. She wanted desperately to believe that she could shelter him in the same way now and keep him safe in her arms. Courtney had always thought she would protect her child from things in the outside world. She never expected his greatest threat would be the one she couldn’t see coming. The one that was raging inside his body. And for that she had no ammunition, no antidote, no means to fight.

  57

  COURTNEY knew now that a secret was like a piece of clay in a potter’s hands. It could be carved and moulded, constructed and pulled apart, and then could suddenly morph into something else entirely. It could shape a life.

  Courtney was that secret, crafted in her father’s hands. Did Frank ever consider how it would shatter her if the secret were revealed?

  Matthew had fallen asleep, so Courtney was now headed down the long corridor to the adults’ wing of the hospital, ready to confront her father. The walls on this end were white and hung with neat paintings. People spoke in hushed tones as if silence were better than noise.

  When she entered his room, her father was sitting up, staring out the window. Forever the perfectionist, all his things were neatly packed, he’d thrown his rubbish in the bin and made his bed as if he were leaving a hotel. ‘Will you take me to see my grandson?’ he asked, hearing Courtney’s footsteps and mistaking her for a nurse.

  ‘Dad.’ She felt a chill run down her spine. This was the first time she was seeing her father as he was – her real father.

  Frank turned to face her. He seemed to have aged in a week. His face looked more haggard, his eyes were puffy, his forehead sealed with frown lines.

  ‘Courtney.’ He smiled and then looked down as if he knew that the truth had revealed itself. He pushed himself off the bed and went towards her. ‘I’m so glad to see you. I thought you’d never come to get me.’

  This is not how Courtney wanted to see her father for the first time since the revelations. Not like this, not weak and fragile. She wanted to see him as the man he was in her youth – strong and fearless. A man who had competed in countless marathons to raise money for animal shelters. A vet who had carried an injured 200-pound mastiff across the length of two football fields.

  He hugged her and she hugged him back, even though she felt fire rise through her for the cruelty of his lie. She had spent her life not knowing that her real father had been in front of her all along. And now his memory was drawing back and she might never know the truth.

  When they pulled apart, Courtney couldn’t hold the anger in. She had seen him and held him close enough to know he was okay. Now she would say what she had to.

  ‘Will you take me to Matthew?’ he asked, his eyes cast downward.

  ‘Not yet,’ Courtney said. ‘I need to talk to you first.’

  She sat down and gestured for him to do the same. She wasn’t going to tread carefully now; she needed the truth laid bare. She looked him in the eye. ‘I need to know why you lied to me.’

  He lifted his eyes to meet hers. ‘I had to,’ he said, his voice coarse and low.

  She was surprised he hadn’t tried to deny it. Perhaps he could detect her condemnation in the fierceness of her voice. Did he notice the way she looked at him afresh, trying to see the similarities between them for the first time?

  ‘You didn’t have to do anything. You had choices. You had three decades to tell me the truth.’

  He looked out the window at stony grey clouds gathering across the leaden sky. His body was hunched over with shame. ‘I wanted to tell you so many times,’ he said softly, with sincerity. ‘But you would never have understood. You would never have forgiven me.’

  ‘Well, you were right about that. I don’t forgive you,’ Courtney snapped. ‘You built our entire relationship from a lie. And now I don’t believe anything. Not even my own memories.’

  He slumped lower as if preparing himself for blows.

  ‘Just tell me why,’ Courtney demanded. ‘I need to understand why you thought pretending to be my adoptive father was better than the truth.’

  ‘It wasn’t an easy choice to make. Please trust me when I tell you I did what I thought was best for you.’

  ‘Trust you?’ Courtney scoffed. ‘That’s one thing I will never do ever again.’

  ‘Corks, please don’t,’ he stood up. ‘I never wanted you to find out like this.’ He went to stand by the window, facing away from her. She could see his reflection on the glass, frustration and anguish imprinted on his face, his eyes searching for an exit. ‘I would have told you before you left but I couldn’t damn well remember her surname or where she lived.’ He banged the heel of his palm against the window frame. ‘I can remember almost everything else; it’s just the small details that have escaped me. The details you needed to find her. And without them, telling you about her would only have hurt you.’ He took a deep breath and gathered himself. ‘Did you …’ he said, struggling to get the words out. ‘Did you find her?’

  ‘Find who?’ she said, testing him.

  His breath made a circle of fog on the window. ‘Asha. Your mother.’

  Courtney went to stand beside him, forcing him to look her in the eye. ‘So, you remember her,’ Courtney remarked mockingly, not believing that his memory had clouded over her beginnings.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  He avoided meeting her cold, accusing stare. ‘Do you remember the name you gave me?’

  ‘Rose,’ he said simply, as though it had been her name all along. ‘Like the colour of your cheeks when you were born. Like the scarlet rose bushes of your mother’s garden.’

  ‘I found her,’ Courtney said, studying her father’s face for that flicker of realisation that she had caught him out. ‘She’s nothing like the mother who raised me. In that you were right. I could never have loved that woman the way I loved Mom.’

  She could see he was listening intently as she spoke, desperate for details.

  ‘She’s beautiful, much more beautiful than I ever could have imagined,’ she said, wanting her words to hurt him. ‘But she’s a coward. A liar. A dreamer. She’s completely unreachable. Even when she was right in front of me, I felt like she was somewhere else.’

  He scratched his nail at the chipping paint on the frame. ‘Did she tell you …’

  He didn’t need to finish his sentence.

  ‘She told me everything. How she fell in love with you,’ Courtney said. She could see her father hold his breath as if she might stop speaking. ‘So, in all those stories where you had told me about my mother, you weren’t referring to Emma, you were talking about Asha. Did you think saying “your mother” would make it less of a lie? Is that what you told yourself to feel better about your nasty secret?’ Her father opened his mouth to speak but she didn’t let him. ‘The photo of the woman I found in the shoebox, you knew exactly who was in it. You knew it was her. Th
e pearl necklace that I thought was my mother’s was hers all along.’ Courtney took it out of her pocket and threw it on his hospital bed. ‘How could you let me wear this? This evidence of your deceit. All this time, I’d treasured it because I thought it was Emma’s. And you let me believe it was hers. How could you? I had it around my neck like a display of your affair.’

  There was so much rage in her voice that she could feel her pulse throbbing in her ears. ‘That whole shoebox was a goddamn shrine to that woman. The same woman who pretended I was her husband’s child. She told me how you wanted her to come clean to Paul. And when she refused, you went along with her vile plan.’ Courtney steadied herself before she continued. ‘Dad, please tell me she’s a liar. Please tell me it isn’t true. That you didn’t stage an abduction. An abduction.’

  He gazed up at her, frowning, his wrinkles like lines around bark. His lips quivered. He put his head in his hands. ‘It’s true,’ he said finally, drawing his hands away so she could see the shame on his face. ‘All of it.’

  ‘You let another man think he’d lost his daughter,’ she said with disbelief. ‘Dad, how could you? That goes against all the morals, ethics, everything you’ve instilled in me.’

  ‘I was young and stupid and in love,’ he admitted. ‘She could have told me to run through fire and I would have. It was like I was under her spell. I’m not trying to make excuses for what I did. But at the time, it was the only offer she gave me to be with you. To be with my child,’ he said with force, his emotion palpable. ‘It was the only choice I had. I wasn’t just going to leave you to be raised by her and Paul, a complete stranger. And I wasn’t just going to walk away from my child’s life and the woman I loved.’

  His body trembled as he continued. ‘I wanted her to tell Paul. I wanted her to tell him the truth. But she refused. She thought it would kill him. The abduction was her idea. And I foolishly went along with it. I was so desperate to be with her and to have you, that I did what she told me to do.’

  Courtney felt like she was holding her breath underwater. ‘That’s insane. Surely she knew that having him believe I was abducted was no better than discovering I wasn’t his.’

  Frank chewed the edge of his nail. ‘She was going to tell him she got an anonymous call one day to say the child was safe and being well cared for.’

  Courtney stared in disbelief. ‘I should call the police right now. I should pick up the phone and tell them everything. And the two of you can spend the rest of your lives together … in a jail cell, thinking about how pathetic you are.’

  ‘You can do what you choose. I won’t stop you,’ Frank said calmly, as if he had already accepted his fate. ‘But you must know how I’ve suffered because of that one decision. I’m so sorry, Corks. I wanted to protect you,’ he pleaded. ‘I did what I thought was best for you.’

  Courtney shut the door to his room, enclosing them in the cramped space. She turned back to him. ‘What happened when you got to Fiji with me?’

  ‘I had met a forger on my travels around Australia who boasted to me about the fraudulent passports he created to make extra cash. I got in touch with him and he modified my passport to include you on it with your middle name, Courtney, and of course, my surname. When we boarded the flight to Fiji, I remember trying to keep my hands from shaking when I handed my passport over to them but the customs officer just smiled and stamped it. I couldn’t believe it. The plan was for Asha to come two weeks later. For those two weeks, I got everything ready. I found a place for us to live. I found a reliable babysitter to care for you in the hours I couldn’t. I found work as a vet at an animal shelter. I really thought we were going to have the perfect life. That what we’d done would never catch up with us.’

  He stood up again and paced around the room. Outside, nurses and doctors moved through the hallways. She could hear the faint beeps of heart monitors, keys jangling and drips needing to be replaced. ‘I waited for her. And then I got her letter.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  He looked at her, his eyes small and grey. Translucent. ‘Do you really want to know? For your whole life it’s that letter I’ve been trying to shield you from.’

  ‘Dad, I’m a grown woman. I need to know.’

  He swallowed. ‘She said that she wasn’t coming. That she couldn’t. She wouldn’t leave Paul. She wouldn’t leave her home. That she had never wanted to be a mother and she didn’t think she could care for you.’ He rubbed his eyebrows and squinted as if trying to stem his tears. ‘She told me never to contact her again. She didn’t want to know where I would take you. She said she never wanted to see you again.’ He said it softly, delicately, as if she might break.

  Courtney realised she was holding her breath as she listened to each cruel truth.

  ‘And at that point, I had no choice. I couldn’t take you back there. I would have been arrested and never see you again. And you would have been left with a mother who wanted nothing to do with you.’ He scanned her face. ‘Do you understand now why I did what I did?’

  ‘What I still don’t understand is why you pretended you adopted me.’

  He looked out the window again and she tried to imagine him as a young man, with a baby to care for and a decision that would change the rest of his life. ‘I had to weigh up everything carefully. I couldn’t return home and say you were my child because questions would immediately be asked after your mother. And what would I tell them? People would have been far more suspicious of my story. So, I decided to stay in Fiji to buy myself some time to think things through. And then I met Emma.’

  ‘Where did you meet her?’

  ‘At the animal shelter. Emma was volunteering there as a vet nurse. She was young and kind and full of life. You were only six months old. She was drawn to you straightaway. She would look after you for hours while I worked. She was besotted with you. At first, she didn’t ask questions. I think she assumed something awful had happened to your mother and she could tell I didn’t want to talk about it. She gave me silence and I was grateful. But then, of course, she had to ask. And I don’t know why I trusted her enough to tell her the truth.’

  ‘What did she do when you told her?’

  ‘She didn’t judge me. If anything, she reached out more to help me. She could soothe you when you cried in a way I couldn’t. She’d take you in her arms and she’d rock you to sleep. You seemed so happy with her, so content. Months passed and eventually our friendship grew into something more. By then, she was completely attached to you. One night she told me the secret that she struggled with: she couldn’t have children. That’s why she’d come to Fiji – to escape the pain of being told she was infertile. She had come to believe that you had been sent to her. That we were meant to cross paths.’

  Courtney felt a flutter in her chest. Her mother was a wonderful woman, and Courtney would never have chosen another person to teach her what it was to be loved.

  ‘I miss Emma every day,’ he said. ‘I loved her, truly. Although, if I’m honest, not like I loved Asha. It was a different kind of love. The love you feel for someone who is so good at heart, who is a kind and gentle person. Someone you’d want to share your life with. But she didn’t make my heart race like Asha did.’ He paused. ‘Emma knew that. I never kept anything from her. Eventually we decided to get married and start our life together far away from where you were born. Far away from the truth. And that’s when we chose to return to Miami and say you were adopted. That way no one would ask either of us any questions. We made a pact that night that we would never tell you the truth, that we would do whatever we could to raise you with all the love you would need. And because of that decision, I’ve had to live with a lie my whole life. I thought this way you would only know love. You would only know that you were a gift to two people who desperately wanted you. Two people who wanted you more than anything in this world.’

  Something tore inside Courtney. She sat down quickly, sure she would fall if she stood. So, there it was. The truth in all its rawnes
s. Her anger receded and in its place she felt a pang of sadness for her father as she looked at him now. The father who had put chillies in her lunchbox sandwiches so the school bullies would stop stealing them, the father who learned to braid her hair for school because that’s how she liked it, the father who proudly hung every painting she’d ever done, the father who taught her how to be fearless. The father who told her she could be anything she wanted to be.

  ‘What happened when you got back to Miami?’

  ‘It had been a year since Emma had gone to volunteer in Fiji and when she returned with a nine-month-old baby, she told her friends and family we had adopted you there after finding you abandoned in an orphanage. Her friends knew she couldn’t have children, so they weren’t suspicious at all. Because my name wasn’t on your birth certificate and no one ever knew of my affair with your mother, there was nothing connecting us, so no one came to look for me. The authorities never had any reason to question anything. You had a passport and to them we were just like normal parents. For a few months after we settled in Miami, we worried constantly that someone would knock on our door and take you away. We were afraid that I would be arrested and you would be sent back to Australia. We had sleepless nights thinking that we’d missed something and hadn’t covered our tracks properly. But the knock never came, and as the months went by the anxiety fell away. You were ours and we were so happy. That’s why you couldn’t find any record of your adoption – because you were never adopted. We thought then, as I did until Matthew got sick, that the truth would never need to be revealed. I was wrong,’ he admitted.

  Frank cried silently, his body heaving with years of regret. Courtney went to her father and hugged him, feeling his trembling body beneath her arms. She felt like the parent to her own father, holding him, protecting him from the shame of his secrets. She understood the choice he had made for her, and for that she was grateful.