Finding Georgina

by Colleen Faulkner

  “Remy.” I exhale. “You worked late three nights this week and even when you were here, you weren’t really here. And we haven’t had sex in”—I think back—“more than a week.”

  He picks up the bottle of wine and pours two glasses. I accept the one he offers. Give him a minute. Then another. He sits there silently and watches his cabernet swirl in his glass.

  Now he’s beginning to tick me off. He says nothing is wrong, yet clearly there is. When he’s acting like this, he usually has something to tell me that he doesn’t want to tell me. “Did you find your gym bag?” I ask. I’ve been wanting to ask for days.

  “I’m sorry?” He sips his wine.

  “Last week, you couldn’t find your gym bag. You thought it might be at your apartment.” I try to keep my mind from going there, but it goes there anyway. “What made you think your bag might be there?”

  He’s staring straight ahead. Shadows are falling. I wonder if it’s the sun setting or it’s only happening on this porch.

  “What were you doing at the apartment?” I ask. Then I voice what I really want to know. I know I shouldn’t say it, but it comes out as ugliness sometimes does. “Were you there alone, Remy?” I take a sip of the wine, but don’t really taste it.

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Remy, I know we’re not married anymore, but if you think you’re going to live in this house with our girls . . .” I turn in my chair to face him. “If you think you’re going to sleep in my bed and bang some—”

  “That was ten years ago,” he says quietly, still staring straight ahead. “A mistake. I told you that. I apologized. I confessed, I did all the things I was supposed to do, Harper.” He strokes his beard with his thumb and index finger. “I was there alone.”

  And now I feel guilty for saying it. For thinking it. For suspecting him for even a moment. I love Remy. And I forgave him a long time ago for his infidelity. We went to marriage counseling and we talked with our priest. Forgiveness is essential to a marriage. I know that. And so is trust. And I do trust him. I do. I don’t know what made me say it. Think it.

  Fear?

  “Remy, I’m sorry,” I say. “I just—” I look down at the floorboards. “I don’t have a good excuse.”

  “I had to let somebody in to fix the hot water heater.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that, Remy.” I look at him, feeling guilty as hell. “You really don’t have to—”

  “And one night, I just went there for a couple of hours to eat a Hot Pocket and read.”

  Under different circumstances, I would have laughed about the Hot Pocket. I think they’re gross, but he likes them. A couple of weeks ago he asked me if I would buy him some and I told him they were bad for his cholesterol. But this isn’t about me not buying the snack foods he likes. “You needed to be alone?”

  He glances at me and I realize he doesn’t just look shaggy, he looks tired. “I needed some down time,” he says. “Without anyone needing anything from me. Okay?”

  I shift in the chair and sit back. I rock and think that over. I sip my wine. I’ve always thought of Remy as being so together. A superman. Maybe because so much of my life has been a mess over the years. Maybe because he’s been my superman time and time again. “What can I do to help?”

  “For one thing, you can make some decisions on your own,” he says, surprising me with his eagerness to tell me what I’m doing wrong. “I don’t care what kind of pizza we order. I don’t care if you wash my shirts today or tomorrow. And you could stop going over and over things. Dissecting Lilla’s every sentence. Her every move. Always trying to analyze her motivation.” He presses his thumb and index finger to his temples as if he has a migraine. As if I’m causing his migraine. “Harper, if you could stop talking things to death, that would help. Seriously, how many times do we have to talk about Jojo going for a sleepover? It’s just one damned night.”

  He raises his voice. Remy never raises his voice. I want to remind him that it’s for two nights, but I don’t.

  “And this whole religion thing, with Georgina?” He gets to his feet and points toward the front door. “She thinks she’s Jewish. She was raised Jewish. You can’t take her from the person in her life who loved her most, bring her into a house full of strangers, and then try to introduce her to a man who supposedly died, nailed to a cross for her, two thousand years ago!”

  I’m taken aback by the anger in his voice. And hurt by his smart-ass summation of my beliefs. His. “I just wanted to go to Mass as a family.” I throw up my hand. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask, Remy. Do you think that’s too much to ask?”

  He turns his back to me and rests his hands on the porch railing. He’s quiet. “No,” he says finally. But he doesn’t turn around to look at me. “It’s not too much to ask, Harper.” He’s quiet for a moment and then goes on. “Look, as far as this thing about religion. I don’t think this is something we’re going to solve overnight, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you asking Lilla to sit in the pew with us once in a while.”

  I set down my wine and get out of the rocker to go stand beside him. “Remy, what’s going on with you?” I reach up to stroke his cheek. “Really?”

  He presses the heel of his hand to his forehead. “It’s me, it’s not you.” He says it in an exhalation. “You’re doing so well, Harper. With the girls. With Lilla. I just—” He halts midsentence, either unable to express himself or unable to tell me what he wants to tell me.

  I meet his gaze. “You just what?” I ask softly. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m afraid this isn’t working.” He scrapes at a chip of paint on the railing with his thumbnail. Something always needs painting on an old house in New Orleans. “I wonder if I should move out.”

  I stare at him, feeling the tiniest crack in my heart. “What isn’t working?” I whisper. “We have our family again. We have our girls and we have each other.” I search his handsome face, the face I’ve loved since I was old enough to love a man. “Is it me? Don’t you . . . Remy, don’t you love me anymore?”

  He puts his arm around me and pulls me against him and I exhale with relief.

  “Of course I love you. You’re the mother of my children.”

  Not exactly what I was hoping for.

  “It’s just that . . .” He looks down at me and then out at the park that is now suddenly heavy in shadows. “Harper . . . this is harder than I thought it was going to be. With Georgina. With being here. With trying to do my job, and be a husband, and be a father, and . . .” He sighs loudly.

  I press my lips together, willing myself not to start crying because he used Georgina’s name. Her real name. “But you’re so good with Georgina. She adores you, she . . . I think she already loves you, Remy. It would break her heart not to have you here.” I hesitate. “She doesn’t even know we’re divorced.”

  “Not one of our better parenting decisions,” he says, still holding me against his side.

  “Maybe not,” I agree. “I know we need to tell her. I think she has a lot to deal with right now, though.”

  “Right,” he says.

  I slide my arm around his waist and rest my head against his chest. I say a silent prayer and then I feel a little better. “We’re going to be okay, Remy,” I say softly, thinking about what Ann had said. About knowing I was going to be okay. “Life isn’t supposed to be easy.”

  “I know.” He kisses the top of my head. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” I look up at him.

  “I don’t know. For not . . . for not being who you need me to be.”

  “You’re my husband. You’re the father of my children. That’s all I need from you.”

  He looks out into the darkness that’s slowly enveloping the park, the house, our porch. “That’s all you need, is it?”

  31

  Lilla

  I sit in the attic on a cardboard box marked “textbooks” in Sharpie. I wonder if there are really textbook
s inside, or if there are baby toys from when Jojo and I were little. I remember all the mismarked boxes in the house in Bayou St. John and the thought makes me smile. But it’s a sad smile.

  I’m studying two photographs in my hands. Baby pictures of me. One of baby Georgina I took out of the family photo album downstairs. One of baby Lilla from a box Dad had brought here from the house in Bayou St. John. He meticulously labeled the boxes; I’ve only opened one, the one that said “photos,” but the contents reflected the label.

  I stare at the photographs, one in each hand. I guess I’m not really a baby in them. A toddler would be a more accurate description. The photo of Georgina is dated two days before Sharon kidnapped me. I’m wearing leggings and a long-sleeved green Tulane T-shirt. I’m laughing, a blue balloon in my hands. It looks like it was taken in the back of the house near the crepe jasmine bush. The other photograph is of Lilla, taken two weeks later, according to the date on the back. I can’t believe Sharon’s gall. She abducted me, took me to another state, and then she dressed me up in what looks like a party dress and snapped a photo of me. Pretended I was hers. I’m not smiling. I look sad.

  Why can I not remember her stealing me? How did I grow up to like her so much? To love her. How did that happen? Being here now, I realize how small my life with her was. With no family, it was only ever the two of us. We didn’t have anyone else, which I suppose made us closer.

  She said we had no family. The grandparents died in the Holocaust. She said she was an only child and that her parents were, too. She said they died when she was twenty. In a car accident. She always told me, when I asked questions, that she didn’t want to talk about them because it made her too sad. Now I wonder if she didn’t want to talk about them because everything she told me was a lie. Is she really Jewish? Maybe she has a brother and a sister. Maybe her parents are still alive. Do they know their daughter is in prison for abducting and holding a minor?

  I hear footsteps on the attic stairs. “Georgina?” It’s Harper Mom. “You up here?” She appears at the top of the stairs, first her head, then her body. “Whatcha doing?”

  “Just looking at stuff. Dad said it was okay.”

  “The things he had brought from the house?” She points to another box; I can’t read from where I’m sitting what it says. “Okay if I sit?”

  I nod. “I found some pictures Sharon took of me when I was little.” I hold the one in my left hand tightly, not sure if I want to show her. Little Lilla looks so sad. It almost seems wrong to invade her privacy this way, to share her sadness. It seems even more wrong to show the baby’s mother. I offer it to her.

  She studies the photo for a long time. I watch her. Her eyes tear up. She flips it over and I see by the look on her face that the date registers. She flips it back to look at sad Lilla again. “The police said you lived in Alabama first.”

  “Mobile, I think. Less than three hours away.” I say it softly as if that will somehow ease the blow.

  “I can’t believe you were so close,” she muses. “Pretty dress.” She hands back the photo, which surprises me a little. I thought there might be a good chance she would rip it up. Or at least confiscate it.

  “And me before—before,” I say in an exhalation. I hand her the other photo. “I found it downstairs, in one of the family albums.”

  She smiles, but her smile, like mine had been, is sad. “I remember taking this. Your dad offered to walk with Jojo so I could get out of the house. She’d been screaming bloody murder all day.” She gives a little laugh. “You kept putting your hands over your ears and telling me to ‘make the sister stop.’”

  She presses her lips together. She’s pretty, my mother. Her blond hair is sleek and golden and she doesn’t have any wrinkles on her face. Shouldn’t a woman her age have wrinkles? Sharon had wrinkles. I know Harper Mom wears makeup, but you can’t tell. And her green eyes, they’re really green. Like Jojo’s . . . and Granddad’s.

  “You and I went outside,” she goes on as if it’s a bedtime story. “You’d gotten the balloon at a birthday party that Saturday. A little girl from church. I thought for certain you’d pop it before you got home, but you didn’t. That day, we batted it around in the garden and you laughed and laughed. I could hear Jojo crying, but it was okay because you were laughing.”

  I’m staring at her and not the photo. “Why don’t I remember?” I whisper.

  She keeps looking at the photo. I can tell she’s trying not to cry and I feel bad. She’s been crying because of me for fourteen years. And now Sharon’s crying. In her prison cell. How can I only be sixteen and already have caused so much unhappiness?

  “Why don’t I remember her taking me from you?” I ask her.

  “You were so little, Georgina, and . . .” She meets my gaze and though her eyes are watery, she’s not crying. It’s weird, but ever since I got here, I’ve been thinking of Dad as the strong one, but looking at her face, I think she’s strong, too. Just a different kind of strong. The kind of strong moms seem to be.

  “A lot of people don’t remember being two,” she goes on.

  “But I remember being two with Sharon,” I argue.

  She does that thing again where she presses her lips together, making them thin lines. “Maybe you didn’t remember as a way of . . . protecting yourself. The human brain is an amazing organ, the most complex in the body. I think maybe your mind blocked those memories.” She’s smiling again, that sad smile. “So you could be happy in the circumstances you found yourself in.”

  I stare at the photo of Lilla in my hand. “With the woman who kidnapped me from my mother? Who lied to me and told me she was my mother?”

  Harper Mom doesn’t say anything and we’re both quiet for what seems like a long time. Then I say, “I think I remember the cake baby.” I glance at her. “I think I remember it in my hands. How it felt. I thought it was bigger,” I muse. “I liked it. Did you let me play with it?”

  “I did. When we were out and you would get restless, I’d pull it out of my handbag and give it to you. In line at the market, the bank, in slow traffic. You’d be in the backseat in your car seat and you’d ask for it and I’d give it to you. My mother kept telling me I shouldn’t let you play with it. She said it was a choking hazard. I told her you were smart enough not to try to eat it. She said you would lose it, an antique given to me by my grandmother. But you never did.” She hands me back the photo and stands up. “I’d like to see some more pictures of you sometime. If you’d let me.” She hesitates. “I won’t come up here and look on my own, although I’ll admit to you I’ve thought about it. But I won’t do it. I’ll respect your privacy. And hope that . . . that someday you will want to share them with me.”

  I nod. I’m not ready to look at any more photos today. I’m already too upset. I feel like crying. Or screaming. I feel like crying and screaming at the same time. I keep thinking about Sharon. I purposely avoided being home this Tuesday. I don’t know if she tried to call. I keep going back and forth between never wanting to speak to her again and feeling like I need to talk to her. Because she owes me an explanation. As stupid as it seems, I think she owes me an apology. But I almost feel as if I want to see her. Need to see her. One last time. Because I know I need to be a Broussard now, become one, but I feel as if there’s something holding me back. Like tugging on my sleeve every time I manage to take a step forward. I think she’s the one holding me back. My anger toward her is holding me back. My love for her. Because no matter how hard I try to hate her, how many lists I make of the reasons I should hate her, I can’t do it. Because she really did love me. And I’m reminded of that every time I use one of her knives.

  I look up at Harper Mom. “I want to ask you something,” I hear myself say. “And . . . I don’t want you to answer me right now. I want you to think about it. Talk to Dad.”

  “Okay.” She stands there waiting.

  “I want to . . . I feel like . . .” I exhale. Maybe this isn’t a good time to bring this up. Maybe I should
bring it up with Dad, sometime when we’re by ourselves. Or maybe . . . at a family meeting, or maybe when we go together for counseling. We’re supposed to go again Friday. Well . . . we were supposed to go. That’s up in the air now because Jojo finally got Harper Mom to agree to let her go camping for the weekend with her friend and then found out she had the wrong date. They’re going this coming weekend, and it turns out they won’t be back until Wednesday because they go to avoid Mardi Gras every year.

  I look at Harper Mom, then at my old flip-flops on my feet. I found them in one of the boxes Dad packed at the house in Bayou St. John. He did a good job, choosing which things to keep for me.

  “I want to see her. I need to see Sharon,” I blurt out.

  Suddenly she looks pale.

  “I . . . I feel like I need, I don’t know, closure.” I stand. “She and I, we never got to talk about what she did. The police came into our house, asked her if I was really her daughter, and she just . . . confessed. And then they took me out of the house and they never let me speak to her again.” I make myself look at her. I’m feeling that anger again. I’m angry at Sharon. At the cops. At Harper Mom and I don’t even know why I’m mad at her. “They should have let me talk to her. One last time, at least.”

  Harper Mom stands there looking at me. “I can’t let you go to a prison and see her.”

  “Why not?” I demand. I open my arms, a photo in each hand. A distinctly different life in each hand. And here I am, stuck in the middle. “Don’t you think I have a right to ask for a . . . an explanation from her?”

  “I don’t think it would be a good idea. I don’t . . . I don’t know that it would be healthy, Georgina.”

  “What right do you have to make that decision for me?” I’m not hollering at her like I did that day in the living room, but I’m sure she has no doubt I’m pissed.

  “What right do I have?” she asks me, sounding surprisingly calm. “I’m your mother. That’s what right I have.” She turns around and heads for the staircase. “Your dad asked me to tell you to come down for dinner. It’s almost ready.”