Skylight Confessions

by Alice Hoffman

  The Glass Slipper, when Blanca came to it, was bright, blindingly so on this summer afternoon. Blanca parked her rental car and walked up to the door. The drive was still made of little white pebbles, round stones that crunched under Blanca’s flip-flops and threw her off balance. Today, John Moody’s will would be divulged. Funny, Blanca had never thought of the second meaning of the word: what he wanted, desired, yearned for.

  When she opened the door, Cynthia hugged Blanca and drew her into the hall. It was the only dark, windowless place in the house.

  “This is not a happy day,” Cynthia said.

  “No.”

  Had the house always had an echo? As they walked down the hallway, there was the slap slap of Blanca’s flip-flops against the wood and the brisk clip of her stepmother’s heels.

  Lisa and the attorney were waiting in the living room. It all felt very formal. Too formal for a loose dress and white flip-flops. They all said good morning, except for Lisa. She was still tall and awkward, washed out with grief. She looked at Blanca, then quickly looked away.

  “Let’s get to it, shall we?” the lawyer said. “As you can imagine, John left the house and half of his estate to Cynthia. The other half of the estate has been divided equally. It’s quite a good amount. A third to Lisa and a third to Blanca.”

  “There are only two of us,” Lisa said.

  “Who is the third person?” Cynthia asked.

  David Hill handed Blanca a manila envelope. “You’re supposed to take care of it. Your dad asked if you would.”

  “There must be some mistake,” Blanca suggested.

  “No mistake.”

  Cynthia and Lisa were quiet, but they shifted closer together. Surely they were thinking the same thing. Why Blanca? Did John Moody have a cause they didn’t know about? Perhaps he’d paid the expenses for his first wife’s aged aunt in a nursing home? Or was it something worse? A mistress or a love child?

  “You can open it here or privately,” David Hill said. “However you wish to handle it. Once the estate is settled, bank accounts will be set up for all three individuals. Lisa also has a separate college fund, which at this point will be more than enough for any further education.”

  Blanca slipped the envelope into her purse. He’d stapled it closed, then Scotch-taped it. There was some sort of meaning in all those measures. Don’t let the cat out of the bag. It bites, it scratches, it eats mice whole, tail and ears and all.

  “You’re not opening it?” Lisa leaned forward. She was wearing the same black blouse and skirt she’d worn to the funeral. She was tall like John Moody, but she had her mother’s delicate bone structure. It was an odd combination; difficult to tell if she was fragile or strong beyond belief.

  “Maybe later,” Blanca said. “I don’t think this is the best time.”

  “We have a right to know who this other person is,” Lisa said to her mother. “Don’t we?”

  “I thought we’d have lunch.” Cynthia stood and suggested they follow her into the kitchen.

  “Mom! Blanca wasn’t even here to visit Dad. She never came back.”

  “She was here before you were born,” Cynthia said. “I learned everything I knew about babies taking care of her. She was only eight months old when I moved in. So hush.”

  “Gee, Cynthia, I never knew you had so much concern for me and Sam.”

  You moved in for convenience’ sake, Blanca stopped herself from saying. That way our father didn’t have to sneak across the lawn in the middle of the night. Blanca felt especially cold. Maybe it was the pearls at her neck. Maybe it was the way Lisa was glaring at her. Cynthia, on the other hand, chose to ignore her comment.

  “I made egg-salad sandwiches,” Cynthia said. “Dave, are you staying for lunch? I’ve got Bloody Marys, too.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” David Hill said.

  The attorney was a big, friendly man with whom John Moody had played golf for thirty-five years. A widower who was more than happy to have an egg-salad sandwich and a good Bloody Mary and was already trailing after Cynthia.

  “Well, you got what you wanted,” Lisa said. “You upset my mother.”

  “Did I?”

  Blanca felt a bit of remorse; Cynthia had been married to her father far longer than her own mother had been. Blanca now remembered a ballet performance that she’d practiced for nonstop. She was six or seven. After a while Sam knew half her routine and did it with her on the lawn, in the living room. She’d had a horrible brief thought: I hope he doesn’t come to the performance and ruin it. Before they left for the performance, Cynthia had pulled her aside. Don’t worry, she’d said. Sam’s asleep. He won’t be there.

  “I’m sure you’re thrilled that my dad left you more than he left me,” Lisa said.

  “Actually, he didn’t. You’ll inherit whatever your mother got and this extra third goes to someone else, not to me. So you’re wrong there, Lisa. Get your facts straight.”

  Lisa came right up to her. For an instant Blanca thought her half sister might haul off and hit her full in the face. She deserved it, really.

  “What did I ever do to you?” Lisa said.

  “Nothing.”

  “You never even talked to me! You acted like I wasn’t here.”

  “Actually, I was the one who wasn’t here. Or so I prayed.”

  “It doesn’t really matter. I was his favorite,” Lisa said.

  At that moment, Blanca hated her own sister. She was jealous of this leggy, unhappy girl her father had indeed loved.

  “Well, hurray for you,” Blanca said coolly. “You should have that written on your own gravestone: Daddy liked me best.”

  “Why should he have loved you? He wasn’t even your real father.”

  Lisa had bitten-down cuticles and there was a line of blood under each nail. She was the nervous type. Down the lane someone was mowing the grass; there was the muffled whir of the motor. Blanca felt sick. Everything stopped right then.

  “You knew that, right?” Lisa was studying Blanca for a reaction. Lisa herself had heard it from a friend’s mother; as it turned out, many people in town had figured out Blanca’s parentage. When Lisa had come home to ask her own mother if it was true, Cynthia had clammed up; then Lisa had known for certain. Now she dug deeper, looking for a nerve. “I mean, everyone knew.”

  “I made a good decision not to have anything to do with you,” Blanca said. “You were a miserable child.”

  Not at all true. Lisa had been a placid, willing-to-please girl who would have followed Blanca anywhere, had she but been allowed. Still, she deserved to be slammed if she was going to start telling lies.

  “Your real father was a janitor or something in town,” Lisa said. “He sold dogs.”

  All at once, Blanca felt some sort of truth; she saw it in Lisa’s face. This is bad. Stop talking to her. Walk out the door.

  “Ask my mother.” Lisa looked pleased with herself. “Ask anyone. It’s true.”

  “Lisa!” Cynthia had come looking for them. She had a tray of celery and olives. Her face was blotchy. Lisa ran to her mother.

  “Tell her.”

  There were cumulus clouds today and they were racing across the sky. Anyone could look up through the atrium in the living room and see them, faster and faster.

  “Yes, tell me,” Blanca said. “Go ahead.”

  “Blanca, she’s a child.”

  “Don’t make me out to be a liar!” Lisa said. “Tell her!”

  “Yes, tell me, Cynthia.”

  Cynthia looked apologetic. Blanca stared at her stepmother, shocked by her hesitation.

  “Cynthia!”

  This might be true, Blanca found herself thinking. He wasn’t even my father. She felt a line of sweat down her back, even in her summer dress, even though the house was air-conditioned.

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  When Cynthia said nothing, Blanca grabbed her purse and went out. The birds in the hedges were deafening. There was a jet overhead. She couldn’t hear
anything. Her ears actually hurt. Cynthia came out after her. Blanca turned to face her.

  “It was George Snow. Your mother was in love with him. But your father was John Moody. Make no mistake about that. And he loved you.”

  Blanca turned her back on her stepmother and went around to the rear of the house, following the stone path. It felt as though there was glass inside her lungs. Had it ever been so difficult to breathe? Her summer dress was too hot. Her skin was on fire.

  There was the patio where John Moody had died. There was the lawn where Blanca had danced with Sam one evening. Where she’d watched him shoot up drugs on the night Meredith first brought Daniel to the house and found them sitting at the table in the dark. It doesn’t even hurt, Sam told her. One pinch and it’s all over.

  Fuck it, Blanca thought. Nothing was what it seemed. Not even her own blood and bones. This was where the red map led, to a place she’d never imagined, to the house where she’d grown up, to the center of who she was. Blanca put her purse on the edge of the patio and walked to the pool. Green and cool. Meredith told her once that she’d found the truth about herself in a pool, floating in the dark water. Blanca slipped off her white flip-flops and sat beside the edge. It was the last day of something. She might never come back here. More than anything, Blanca wished she could remember her mother. She unclasped the pearls from around her neck and held them in the water. If she let them slide into the pool, would they float or fall? Would they spell out the name of her mother’s true love, her blood father, or would they simply drift, then fall to the very bottom, like stones?

  She opened her hand and let go. The pearls immediately began to sink; in no time they were submerged. Blanca dove in after them, still wearing her new dress. Amazing how quickly you could lose something. Blanca made her way across the very bottom of the pool, forcing herself to go on though she had barely any air left. She groped along the concrete until she had the pearls in hand, the only thing she had left, the one remaining piece of evidence that there was something that was solid and real and worth searching for.

  BLANCA WAITED TO OPEN THE ENVELOPE UNTIL SHE WAS IN the yard behind the inn. It was early evening and the sky was hazy and pink. She had taken off her soaked dress, hung it in the bathroom to dry, then put on shorts and a T-shirt. Her hair was wet and smelled like chlorine. She still felt chilled. The shadows in Connecticut were so deep and blue that the temperature could change drastically in a few moments. Blanca placed the envelope her father had left for her on the wrought-iron garden table and watched some bees in the rhododendrons. Loves me, loves me not. She was glad to be alone. Everything was so green. Everything smelled like grass.

  She had absolutely no idea what was in the envelope. It could be anything at all, a snake, a ruby, an admission of guilt, a key, a lump of coal. The letter was handwritten, dated nearly five years ago, not long after Sam’s death. John Moody had kept it in his desk drawer, and then a few months before dying, he’d sent it to his lawyer’s office. On his last day on earth the fact that the letter existed brought him comfort, as he’d hoped it would. He imagined it inside his head, the envelope, the thin paper within, the blue ink, the words he’d written.

  There was something else inside. Blanca pulled out a photograph of her mother. The photo was faded and worn; John Moody had kept it in his wallet for thirty-seven years. Arlie was on the deck of a ferryboat, her back against the railing; she was smiling at the camera, her red hair flying out behind her, wearing a white dress. She was seventeen, young but brilliant with her huge smile. On the back of the photo, in ink, John had written Arlie on the ferry, the day after marrying me.

  Blanca opened the letter. She felt as though she were unwrapping skin from bone. It crinkled and she thought of the sound of fire.

  I should have spoken to you, but I don’t think I knew how. I wanted to tell you about George Snow.

  While she was at the cemetery with Meredith, Blanca had noticed three graves beneath the tree. Her mother’s, with its small square marker set into the ground, which Blanca remembered. Sam’s, with only his name and dates of birth and death, meant to be plain as well, but decorated instead with a hodgepodge of stones, as though the earth he rested in knew Sam needed more than a slab of gray granite.

  Look, Blanca had said to Meredith. Sam would have loved this. Rock art.

  The third grave was in the rear; Blanca had quickly decided it belonged to another family, set close by circumstance. She had ignored it. Now she realized why her father had been buried elsewhere. Another man had taken his place.

  Young men are stupid, and I was stupid for a long time. Your mother turned to George Snow. He never married and had no other children. He died three years ago — leukemia. I went to see him in the hospital and I brought photographs of you. He asked if he could keep them.

  I told him he’d be proud of you. He said he already was. He’d gone to dance recitals and school assemblies; he’d followed your life. I didn’t tell you because I was afraid I would lose you. I’m sorry I was a terrible father.

  You seemed to have understood Sam, so maybe you will find it in your heart to understand me, too.

  Sam has a son. I saw him one time. I want to leave him what I leave to my daughters. On the back of this letter you’ll find his address.

  This is something I never told anyone: I wasn’t with her when she died. I was out in the yard. The sky was blue and the weather was fine. I couldn’t believe she was really going. I refused to believe it.

  George Snow was upstairs in her room and I could hear him crying. A man I didn’t even know. But when I looked up, there she was, standing in the grass with me. In the same dress she wore in the photograph. She didn’t say a word, she never did, but I knew what she was saying to me: Let me go.

  I tried, but I couldn’t. I didn’t realize until that moment when I saw her. It was her all along. She’d been the one, and I’d never known.

  I tried to do what she asked, but I couldn’t do it. I never let her go.

  Your Father

  BLANCA SAT AT THE TABLE AS THE EVENING GREW DARKER. There was a party going on inside the dining room of the inn. Someone had graduated or gotten engaged. She thought about George Snow in love with her mother. She thought about her father writing a letter and keeping it in his desk for years. She thought about Sam on the roof and John Moody standing on the lawn, lost.

  When she went upstairs Blanca burned the letter in the bathroom sink; it left a pale blue film on the porcelain, which she then had to scrub. She didn’t want anyone to be hurt by its contents. No wonder it had been stapled and taped: this letter was not for Cynthia’s eyes. She and John had had a good marriage, and some things were better left unspoken. People had been hurt enough. Blanca kept the photograph, though. She slipped it into her wallet.

  She thought she remembered George Snow sitting in the back row at the ballet school performances. A tall, blond man who applauded for her. Perhaps she should have been angry that she’d been so misled; instead, she found herself missing John Moody. Even if he had been a terrible father, she missed him more than she ever would have imagined, here in Connecticut, a place she’d avoided for so many years.

  That night as she was packing, there was a knock on her door. Lisa. Blanca stood in the doorway, surprised.

  “I would understand if you didn’t want to invite me in,” Lisa said.

  Lisa didn’t have her driver’s license yet; she’d walked several miles to reach the inn. Now she stood scratching at her mosquito bites. She looked younger than sixteen.

  “You wanted to hurt me and you did,” Blanca said. “Since it’s done, you might as well come in.”

  Blanca went back to her packing. There really wasn’t much. She hadn’t expected to stay here any longer than absolutely necessary.

  Lisa followed her inside the room. She was cautious; she smelled like citronella and smoke. “You’re leaving now?”

  “I’m going to New York tonight. My plane takes off the day after tomorrow. To tell you
the truth, I just want to get the hell out of Connecticut.”

  “Me too,” Lisa said sullenly. She dropped into a wing chair and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “By all means.” Blanca got a water glass from her bureau to use as an ashtray.

  “He didn’t love me best,” Lisa said. “I think that was the meanest thing I ever said.”

  “No, telling me he wasn’t really my father was probably meaner.”

  “You’re right. Maybe I just wanted your attention.”

  Blanca laughed. “You got it.” Lisa took a deep drag of her cigarette. “That’s bad for you,” Blanca told her.

  “Did Sam smoke?”

  “Sam did whatever was bad for him.”

  Blanca pushed the water glass toward Lisa, who took one last drag, then stubbed out the cigarette. Lisa pulled her legs up and sat on them. She was tremendously self-conscious about being so tall. “Everybody just took off and disappeared. It was just me and the dog. Which was really supposed to be your dog. That George Snow guy gave him to you, but when you went off to college you left him so I pretended he was mine. I loved him. Do you even remember his name?”

  “Of course I do,” Blanca said.

  “Dusty.” Lisa started crying. She put her hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t sob.

  “I know his name. I just forgot for a minute. What happened to Dusty?” Blanca asked.

  “He died eight years ago. See what I mean? You never even thought about us.”

  “All I was thinking about was getting out.”

  “I think about the same thing! I hate that house. It’s like a birdcage. Thirteen months till I escape to college. And four days. But that’s only if I attend graduation. I presume Cyn would have a shit fit if I didn’t go.”