If You Hear Me

by Jenn LeBlanc

  I hold her tighter, not wanting to ever let her go again. “I do. I always have. I didn’t realize just how much until this. I thought I’d lost you forever, but here you are.”

  “Did you lose me?”

  “No, I…”

  She starts to pull away, and I know I need to let go, so I squeeze her one more time then drop my arms to my sides. It’s possibly the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. “I always knew you’d find me,” she says. “Mom and Dad always told me stories about how wonderful and beautiful you were. They said it wasn’t your fault that you couldn’t be with me. They always said they hoped you’d come back, and then my brother found you.” She smiles and my hands tighten against the comforter at the realization that she may have figured out how we’re connected, but she has no idea how she’s connected to Daniel—not in truth—and I’m not about to break that eggshell right now. Baby steps.

  “Yes, Daniel and I have always had something special. I have missed him very much.”

  “Daniel said he’s only ever loved you. And he said you only ever loved him.” She wrinkles her nose as she thinks about it, and I can see the wheels turning in her head and I want to reach out and slow them down or stop them. If he’s talked about me the way I’m sure he has, she’s going to figure out who he is pretty quickly. Her eyes trail away and her hand comes up to pinch her lower lip. I hold my breath. “He’s always talked about you. Always. He’s always loved you, he said so. He said he’d find you again, he was always sure it would happen, and then it did. Why am I here?” she asks suddenly and her gaze swings back to mine, so earnest and searching. The words are like a vise around my lungs, preventing me from taking a deep breath. “Camellia?”

  I nod and hold one finger up because I need a moment, just a moment to figure out what to say to this brilliant little girl who’s of my flesh and blood, but also of Daniel’s. It isn’t my place to tell her these things. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t want to hurt anyone with what I could say. I don’t even know what I should say.

  “Cam?” I look up to find Daniel standing in the doorway and I can finally let out a breath. I lift my hand to him because I need him so very much right now. I need him touching me, close to me, supporting me. I need help keeping myself together, because right now I can’t do it for myself.

  He comes to the bed, his hand sliding over Iz’s shoulders as he sits next to me, wraps one hand around my back, then takes my hand in his.

  “Hey, Iz can you give us a minute?” he says, and she takes a step back, but I shake my head because she needs to stay, and he needs to know what happened. She stops. She looks at him, then at me, then at her fingers.

  “Our fingernails don’t match because of magic,” she says, and Daniel’s attention swings to me.

  “What did you tell her, Cam?” he asks quietly.

  “She didn’t say anything. I’m smart,” Iz says dejectedly, and Daniel’s gaze swings back to her. I nod.

  His hand releases my own and takes hers. “Are you okay?” he asks. “I promise you, Iz, I had no idea about any of this until yesterday. I didn’t even know I was a father until a few days ago.”

  She sucks her breath in so suddenly that I realize she hadn’t quite made that final connection, and I reach for her, but her mouth turns into an angry frown and her eyes narrow as she backs away.

  “Iz?” he says.

  “No!” she replies and runs from the room.

  He turns to me. “What happened?”

  “She just came in here. She’d figured out that I was her mother and I think she was coming close to figuring out that you were her father, but then you came in and distracted her. She wasn’t quite there yet, so I think it came as a bit of a shock to her when you said that,” I tell him and I feel this urgency, this need to chase her down and tell her the truth, but I stop myself because I don’t think I’m the one she’s upset with.

  “Oh God, I just blurted it out like a complete idiot. Are you alright?”

  Am I? I stop to consider, because so much has happened already today and I haven’t really had time to consider any of it. “I think I am, but we should find Iz. You should. I think she’s upset with you because you knew and didn’t tell her.”

  “I know she is. We’ve always had this…” He shakes his head, and I don’t know if it’s because he’s only just realizing the reality of everything or he’s trying to keep from thinking about the reality of everything. I wonder what it would be like to raise a child without any of the pressure of being a parent. “I’m sure she’s in her treehouse out back. I’ll go. You should come with me,” he says and he looks so frightened. I want to, but—

  “No, I think you need to talk to her alone first. You find her while I try to eat something. Text me when you want me to come out.”

  “Okay. I was just on my way up to tell you that my parents wanted to tell Iz today. They didn’t think it was fair to her. They…well, it doesn’t really matter now. Except they think where Iz should be, for now, is wherever Iz thinks she should be, and we’ll figure out the rest as we go on. Since it’s summer break, school isn’t a question at the moment, but her friends are… I mean, we’ll figure it out, with Iz.”

  “That sounds fine. I haven’t met many ten-year-olds. I wasn’t expecting her to be quite this intelligent.”

  “She is my daughter,” he says with a crooked smile, and I just can’t help but to laugh.

  “Yes, this is true, and just think of how much smarter she would have been if she didn’t have your genes to contend with!”

  “Camellia!” he says with as much indignation as he can muster.

  “Go find Iz. Let me know when I should join you.”

  “I’ll walk you down. Mom made pancakes,” he says, and my belly growls rather unceremoniously in response.

  Fifteen

  Daniel

  I stare up the ladder to the treehouse Dad and I built for Iz. I know she’s up there. I can hear her shuffling around. I’m not sure I’m ready for all of this. I think about all the things my dad forced me to help him with, for her, because she was my sister and family was important. I think of all the ways my parents forced me to be a bigger part of her life than I wanted to be. Two days ago I wasn’t much of anything beyond myself. I mean, I was happy, I had a job, I could make money, but I didn’t feel much like an adult. I was just me. Then Meli came back and I was suddenly a “we,” and I was determined to stay that way. Everything changed so rapidly after that that I don’t know where I am anymore, or who.

  I feel like an older, more stable version of myself, but I don’t know how I got here. Is that what happens? When a baby is born, do you just instantly transform into an adultier version of who you were?

  I hear a sniffle and I know she’s crying, and even that familiar tug at my heart feels different than it did the last time I heard her cry. It feels so much more significant. None of this makes sense to me. Before yesterday I could have gone to get my mom to take care of whatever made her sad, but now I’m halfway up the ladder, popping my head through the hole in the floor before I’ve even finished the thought. “Iz?”

  “You didn’t tell me. You knew and didn’t tell me.”

  “That’s right,” I say and crawl into her space and sit cross-legged next to the pile of pillows she’s curled up in.

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t know how, and Mom and Dad asked me to wait until they could figure out how to tell you. Nobody knew what to say. But Iz, I only found out yesterday.”

  “You said you found out this week.”

  “I found out that Meli had a baby. I found out I was a father. I didn’t know that the baby was you until we got here yesterday.”

  “In the study. That’s when you found out?” she says and shifts to sit up, and I know I’ll be forgiven, but now she wants answers.

  “Yes, in the study.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “It’s such a long and complicated story and I don’t even know most of it y
et, sweetie. That’s the thing. I don’t even know how it all happened. What I do know is that Mom and Dad loved me enough and Meli enough and you enough to make sure you were safe. That’s really all I know right now.”

  “Okay.”

  I nod and try to think of something else to say. I look in her eyes that are so serious right now and I don’t know how to think of her. “I’m not sure how to… You still feel like my little sister, but not,” I say finally.

  “Yeah. This is weird. I can’t call you Daddy,” she says, and a small thread inside my chest snaps and stings a little, even as I understand completely.

  “You can call me whatever you want to. Cam, too. We’ll figure this out.”

  She nods as she looks at me, and there's a sharp longing in her gaze that softens slowly, melting into a smallest hint of a smile as she says the word “Daddy,” but looks away, trying to hide it from me. “Wait!” she says and her eyes get really big, and I know she’s just figured out something major but I have no idea what else there is to figure out so I’m kinda concerned.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Mom and Dad are actually Grandma and Grandpa! Daniel! Daniel! Mom is a grandma! She’s my grandma!” She’s yelling and looking around the room like the whole place is about to start spinning, so I crawl over to her and bundle her up in my lap.

  “Hey, yeah, that’s super creepy, isn’t it?”

  “He’s a grandpa. That explains why he’s so weird at school and so much older than the…the real dads.”

  "Hey, he's a real dad." I laugh. “Dad does kinda fit the grandpa vibe a little better than dad, though, huh?”

  “Yeah. ‘Specially when he wears the overalls for gardening. It’s embarrassing.”

  “Hey, overalls have a…a place in this world." Her lip curls at my words. "Okay, yeah, it’s like he was born to be a grandpa.”

  “Grandpa,” she says, and I look down into her big glassy eyes as she stares out the window. “What about my friends?”

  “Well, they aren’t your cousins, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  She pushes away from me and sits cross-legged, facing me. “Don’t be silly.”

  “Oh, sorry. I’m a boy though. We aren’t as smart as girls, remember?”

  “Yes,” she says, and I love the way she's so confident about it. "What I mean is, what will my friends think when I tell them that my mother is my grandma and my dad is my grandpa and my brother is my…” She stops and her gaze locks mine and she doesn’t finish.

  “I think they’re going to think you’re the coolest person in the world and everyone is going to want to be friends with you. It’s almost like you’re living a country music song except for the dog.”

  “Oooooh. Can I have a dog?”

  “Why are you asking me? You know you need to ask Mom and Dad.”

  “Right, but…”

  “Yeah, um…” I shake my head. “Let’s just get through today, okay? No dogs for now. And don’t go playing me against Mom and Dad more than usual. It’s not fair.”

  “Okay,” she says but I can tell she’s a bit dejected, which only means that she’s going to try to milk this to get something else. My guess, besides the dog, would be the “grownup” bedroom set she’s been pushing for. “Where is, mm…where…where is Cam?”

  “She’s having pancakes with Mom.”

  “My mom is having pancakes with my grandma. I haven’t ever had a grandma!”

  I laugh. “Do you want some pancakes?”

  “That is a stupid question, Daniel.”

  I watch as she scurries across the floor then swings through the hole and down the ladder. She runs across the yard and goes right into the kitchen bar, where she sits next to Cam. Mom puts a plate of pancakes in front of her, and the three of them start chatting and laughing.

  I watch them for a minute through the giant picture window that overlooks the backyard. This isn’t going to be easy. I'm sure there are a million things I haven't even considered yet, and I don't want to think about them either. Right now I just want to concentrate on helping Meli and Iz.

  This is going to be difficult, but helping her has always come natural to me, so this won’t be so hard if I follow her lead.

  Meli

  What I thought would be an awkward conversation with his mom turned into the easiest conversation I’ve had since arriving yesterday. I’m doing my best to put aside the anger and just survive these first moments with my head intact, because if I start thinking about it all too much I won’t stop and I’ll… I just can’t. It’s literally too much to deal with it all right now. First things first. I want my daughter.

  I was concerned that his mom would resent me, or some part of me would resent her, or some form of whatever this was between us would come out. But she's just the same mom she’s always been for as long as I’ve known her. Maybe that, in and of itself, feels awkward, but the words between us aren’t at all. It’s so easy.

  She flips another pancake, something I’ve always wished I could do, then watches it for a minute before sliding it on the stack next to the stove and putting a pat of butter on it. I love the way she put butter between each pancake so they were buttered up and a little gooey just in the very center.

  “Shall we?” she says, and I turn for the table as she follows.

  “I’m not sure what to say.”

  “Neither am I. I’m not sure I ever knew what was going to happen once you found out, or came to us, or… It’s all a lot to process. I do apologize for not contacting you as soon as we’d heard your parents had passed.”

  “I understand why you didn’t. You’re right, their reach was far and invasive. I still fear that I’ll do something to trigger some thing they put in place years ago. I can’t imagine what, I can’t imagine how, I just know the things they used to do to control me—to control the people we knew… I understand. It’s why I’ve been moving things from my inheritance to private investment accounts. I don't care about the tax implications, and luckily I don’t really have to. The peace of mind is worth it. So…I want to say thank you for raising my daughter. I know Daniel told you that now that I’m back, I don’t ever want to let her go. And I know we need to figure out a lot of things and this may be difficult, but she is my daughter, she was taken from me wrongfully and against my will—”

  I stop when she wraps her warm hand around my wrist and I look at her fingers. “Camellia, we’ve raised her as though she were our own child, but…I've always thought of her as yours and I’ve thought about us as caretakers. We’ve just been waiting for your return. I knew one day you’d find us outside the reach of your parents, somehow. I just knew you’d be reunited with her. It’s another reason why we didn’t change her name. Your parents weren’t exactly happy about that, but the birth certificate had already been ordered and was part of the record of adoption. I wasn’t going to change your daughter’s name without your permission, and there wasn’t really any reason to. Daniel had no idea. Nobody would ever know.”

  “You aren’t going to…fight me?”

  “Absolutely not. We’ve been placeholders in your daughter’s life. We love her as our own but we’ve always known this day was coming. She’s yours—there’s no argument here from us.”

  I have to stop and look anywhere but at her for a minute, allowing my fear to slide away somewhat. I acknowledge what she said, listen to it in my head like it was a mixtape, then find a way to ease back into the conversation. “I insisted her birth certificate be recorded. They must have thought me crazy."

  "If it matters at all, I don't think you were crazy. Even if she hadn't lived long, she'd have lived for a moment and that's enough to make her a very real person, and she should have been treated as such. You shouldn't have had to fight to be able to sign the paperwork for her birth."

  "It does matter. I always knew you were lovely people, which is so unreal to me, and I feel very blessed to have you in my life.”

  “We’re the ones who are blessed. We’
ve been blessed with raising our granddaughter. We’ve been blessed with a woman who’s been like a daughter to us. We’re blessed that you’ve grown up to be such a wonderful young lady, and now we’ll be blessed to watch you pick up where we leave off, to watch as you raise our grandchild, whenever you're ready to take over.”

  I nod, and suddenly I no longer feel the rush to get her out of their house and to my own. I still want her with me, but the sheer urgency I woke up with, at least, has lessened. “How is it so easy for you to go from mother to grandmother with her?”

  “I don’t know that it’s easy, just that it’s always been there in my head. I’ve always known who I really was to Izzy, and I’d never try to change that. If she were truly an adopted child without a mother, it would be different. But the paperwork calling me her mother is just paperwork. She is who she is, just as I am, as you are, as Daniel is.”

  “What happens next?”

  “I don’t know. We have time to figure out everything—school, living situation, all of it. We should also be able to file documents with the courts effectively nullifying the adoption.”

  “Was the adoption French?”

  “It was, but it had to be done here as well to be recognized by the American courts. So we effectively adopted her twice. You're a dual citizen as well though, aren't you?”

  I nod. “I want to do whatever she’s comfortable with, but I worry that maybe she won’t be comfortable with me. I’m a stranger to her.”

  “But you aren’t a stranger to her at all because of Daniel. He’s talked about you with Isabeau for as long as she’s been here. You’re a part of her life—you always have been. We always encouraged him to talk about you because we wanted her to feel the love between her parents even if she didn’t know what it was.”

  I’m stunned once again because…when you’re raised by control freaks, extreme by any measure, dealing with reasonable people tends to be shocking. I’ve been walking through life shocked since the minute they died, and sitting here with Daniel’s mom is driving home how awful they really were. There’s only so much denial you can accept when it comes to your parents. You can wish all you want, but in the end there are facts and it becomes rather black and white. “I just can’t believe…how amazing you are.”