December 14, 2018
As a flight attendant reminded the man beside her to tuck his bag beneath the seat for take-off, Polly tightened her seat belt and made sure her phone was switched to airplane mode. It was only a short trip—a little over an hour—and the weather was fine today down the east coast of Australia. Nothing to be nervous about, yet her stomach was in knots. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d flown. Usually, Polly drove the coast road south to Sydney, but her car was at the garage this week having its transmission replaced and, with the funeral on Monday, she’d had no other choice.
Polly had never liked flying; she’d even done a course once, in which an ex-pilot instructed white-knucklers on the basics of aerodynamics, an attempt to counter fear with reason. Turbulence? Nothing to worry about; just a change in air temperature. But learning such facts had done little to quell her anxiety when the plane she was trapped inside started shaking at thirty-six thousand feet.
Fear of flying wasn’t the problem today, though. Ever since the hospital rang to tell her that Nora had died, Polly had felt herself cast adrift. She couldn’t concentrate, her thoughts were clouded, she was suffering from a pervasive sense of disconnection from her own life. She’d been lying awake the night before, listening to the wind slapping the fronds of the palm tree outside her bedroom window, when she realized that the creeping, gnawing feeling that had wrapped itself around her like a pair of dark, damp wings was loneliness. A deep and profound loneliness.
Polly wondered why she should feel such a thing. She and Nora seldom spoke; they rarely saw one another anymore. Her mother’sdeath made no demonstrable difference to her daily life, yet something inside her had plunged since receiving the news. She had come to the conclusion that being lonely wasn’t the same thing as being alone. Polly had been alone for decades. She didn’t mind it. Even as a young girl, she hadn’t been the sort to crave company. But loneliness was different. One could be lonely in a crowded room.
Polly glanced through the plane window to where the men who’d been loading luggage were finishing up on the tarmac. It was normal, she assumed, to feel an absence after the death of one’s mother, but with Nora it was something more. The world felt less stable without her in it.
She was an orphan now, Polly realized as the flight attendant started the safety briefing. That was part of it. For she had lost more than Nora. With her mother’s death, she had also lost her father.
Polly was five years old when she realized that she was different from the other children. As with so many things, it was starting school that enlightened her. Until that point, she had passed a blissful period at Darling House with her mother. She had been spoiled, completely indulged. She had heard the stories many times of how wanted she was, and that was precisely how she’d been treated. She had never doubted how much she was loved.
But when she began year one and was brought into regular communion with a large group of peers, like all children Polly began to define herself by comparison. The other girls had fathers, and if they did not have them living at home, they were out in the world somewhere, with names and faces and relationships with their daughters, good or bad.
Early on, before Polly came to realize that the topic was off-limits, she had asked her mother outright, “Do I have a father?”
“No, my darling,” Nora had said, without skipping a beat. “You’re all mine and I’m all yours.”
This had been in accord with Polly’s life to date and she had accepted the answer. She had also, when called upon to do so, repeated it at school. The derision of the other children had brought her straight back to Nora.
“Where is my father?”
“I told you, my love, it’s just you and me.”
“But Ruth and Susan said that everyone has a father.”
“Did they?”
“They said that you can’t be born without one.”
“Well,” Nora said airily, “that might be true for Ruth and Susan, and I’m sure they meant well when they said it, but little girls don’t know everything.”
“But if I don’t have a father, how was I born?”
It was not like Polly to push, and briefly she saw exasperation in the flash of her mother’s eyes. But the moment passed quickly, and Nora smiled conspiratorially, her eyes twinkling now as they always did when she was about to suggest something fun. “Well, I don’t often tell the story, because one must be careful with magic. But the truth is, I longed for a little girl so deeply, and for so long, casting every wish I could into every wishing well I passed, until one day, when I least expected it, there you were, at the bottom of the dahlia patch.”
“Here at Darling House?” Polly had played in the dahlia patch many times, and the idea of magic being transacted there was of great appeal.
Nora, sitting in the chair beside Polly, warmed to the telling. “I had headed out to do a session of weeding, gloves on my hands and a basket on my hip, when I knelt near the thickest patch of flowers and what should I hear but the softest of cries. I thought at first it was a kitten, but what I found was even more of a surprise: the sweetest little baby I’d ever seen. The very daughter I had wished and hoped and prayed would one day be mine. A gift from the garden fairies.”
Later, Polly had run the story over in her mind, picturing herself in the midst of the dahlia patch. It was one of her favorite parts ofthe garden, which is no doubt why her mother had chosen it, and the story made her happy, but she hadn’t repeated it at school. When Ruth and Susan asked about her father, which they had taken to doing on an almost-daily basis, she told them that he was an explorer whose ship had been lost in a great storm at sea as he approached the Arctic Circle and he had not been seen again since.
But no matter how much she enjoyed the idea of being left by fairies, or how well her mother loved her, a little hole had opened inside Polly where the answer to her question should have been. And, like so many of life’s blights, it grew in the shadows without her realizing it.
As she got older and stopped believing in fairy tales about babies in dahlia patches, the situation became more vexed. “What does it matter?” Nora would say, or, “I told you, you’re all mine,” or, if Polly happened to catch her in a hurry, “I really can’t remember.” Once, she had even lost her temper, her manner anguished: “Why are you carrying on like this? Have I not been enough for you? I’ve given up everything to be your mother. You are my life, Polly.My whole life.”
That much was true. Polly had often heard the stories of how devoted her mother was. She began to wonder whether perhaps the reason her mother wouldn’t discuss the matter was because the truth was too terrible to confess. Was her father a criminal? A thief? A pervert? Was her mother trying to protect Polly with her silence?
And then, just after she started high school, Polly overheard a conversation that changed everything. Like all those starved of information, she’d become practiced at pilfering scraps of illicit intelligence, and her ears pricked up when the voice of one of her mother’s friends drifted through an open door, insisting on what a wonderful mother Nora was, even to the point of having sacrificed her marriage.
With those words, several seemingly unrelated gleanings came together, and for the first time ever Polly realized that her mother had once been married. She was aware, of course, that strangers referredto her as “Mrs.” Turner-Bridges, but Nora had so effectively removed “Mr. Bridges” from her life that it had not entered Polly’s mind that the title might reflect an historical marriage. Now, at last, she had her answer: her father was Mr. Bridges, the man whose name she, too, had been carrying all of this time.
But whowasMr. Bridges? She scoured the house for evidence of him, yet although they had apparently been married for a decade, Nora had managed to excise every hint of the man from Darling House. Even the single image she’d kept from her wedding day was a framed portrait of a young, wide-eyed Nora, captured in profile as she gazed from the library window, out across the harbor.
Growing desperate, Polly asked Mrs. Robinson for help, but the housekeeper wouldn’t be drawn. “Don’t ask me questions I can’t answer,” she said. “There wouldn’t be a luckier girl in the world than to have a mother like yours.”
