The rest of it, surprisingly, comes easily. I tell Reid about my parents’ constant fighting: how for long, lonely years of my childhood I didn’t know any different, I thought it was how all parents were. I tell him about how it worsened as I grew older: more distant but also more snide, the passive-aggressive barbs they would trade with each other through a veneer of politeness. I tell him about how I’d tried to be their arbiter and their adhesive; how I’d always been good at stopping them from fighting; how even in spite of their unhappiness with each other, they had at least seemed to share a happiness with me.
And then I tell him about my birth certificate.
“I was supposed to have it for school,” I say. “Really, I was supposed to have it even before classes started, but my parents kept putting me off about it. My mom called the school, somehow talked them into letting me start without it. And my dad—he said he’d lost it, had thought it was in a safe he kept at work. We’d have to order a new one, he’d said, but every time I’d ask about it, worrying about registering for the next semester, he’d put me off.”
Just leave it alone, Meg.
Reid’s jaw tightens, and he moves, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear.
“Anyway, I guess I should’ve known—or I don’t know, suspected—earlier. There’d been some difficulty when I got my driver’s license, too, but I guess I hadn’t really paid much attention. I don’t know if I got old enough, or curious enough, or what. So I requested a new one.”
I still remember looking at it. Fourth line down,.This is a mistake, I’d thought, staring down at the letters there, precise and mechanically made. Who was Darcy Hollowell?
My mother’s name is Margaret,I’d thought.My mother’s name is the same as mine.
But even as I’d thought it, I’d known. I’d felt it click into place as if it were a puzzle piece, a thousand tiny inconsistencies from my childhood suddenly making a painful sort of sense.
Those letters weretrue.
This part of the story, of course, is the worst: the revelation and what it led to, my parents presenting a unified front in the face of my sobbing outrage, the way they’d gently condescended to me as they’d presented their explanation. My father and an “indiscretion.” A woman who’d decided to carry her pregnancy to term, but would place the baby up for adoption. My mother, who had struggled with her own ability to get pregnant, who had wanted to have a child for years and years.
And me, an imperfect solution.
More and more imperfect as the years went on, apparently: my dad still full of indiscretion, and my mom increasingly full of resentment—at him and, I suspected, at me. Iwastheir adhesive, but in the worst possible way.
They’d been stuck together foryears.
“Meg,” Reid whispers at a certain point, all sympathy, and that gives me the strength to finish it cleanly, no more tears.
“It was a relief for them, in the end. Sort of a . . . ‘the truth will set you free’ situation, I guess. They told me that night they’d be divorcing. I’d never seen them get along better, when they told me. Like peas and carrots.”
It had been, ultimately, what had hurt the most. That I’d been some kind of excuse for them, for staying together in a household that was poisoned by their fighting. That they’d used me, in a way, to keep themselves from having to make a decision about their marriage.
I hadscreamedat them. The worst night of my life. I left for New York the next week. Six months later, overwhelmed with curiosity, I’d contacted Darcy Hollowell and had gotten a very short, very polite reply that ended with a wish for me to “reconcile” with my parents and to “have a happy, healthy life.”
It hadn’t been difficult to see the hidden message there, and we’ve never been in touch again.
When I finally sag back against him, my cheek resting on his broad chest, I notice that there’s no more swirling, rising steam from the teacup. I feel guilty for not drinking it, Reid’s heart-in-hand offering, but his body has been the best kind of comfort, even though it feels stiffer now. Even though he hasn’t said anything in a long time.
Too soon to tell him, probably.
But finally, he speaks again, his voice soft. “Did you ever forgive them?”
I close my eyes, thinking. It’s taken years between us, to get back to a decent place, a place where I call each of them regularly. Longer with my dad, and it’s still only the weather and the Buckeyes when we talk, and of course the occasional slip when I’m sending him a hand-drawn message of congratulations. With my mom, it’s the weather, too, but also garage sales and trips she goes on and a man named David she calls her “companion,” which is somehow both slightly gross and not-so-slightly adorable. I go home for Christmas, and I bounce awkwardly between their new houses: my dad and Jennifer and Jennifer’s three bichon terriers in a house so similar to the one I grew up in that I hate sleeping there. My mom and her tidy, tiny-gardened townhouse, a few things of David’s tucked away discreetly in her closet, happier than she ever was when I was still at home.
“I understand them,” I say, after a minute. “I think they love me. I think they were trying to protect me.”
“And themselves,” he adds.
I nod, and feel a fresh press of tears behind my eyes. It feels impossible that I have any at all left, but it’s a reminder of what brought me here in the first place.
“That’s what Sibby’s been trying to do. Protect herself. And I couldn’t let it go. I—”
“She shouldn’t have said it,” Reid says. “There’s no excuse.”
I close my eyes and nod, and I’m not sure if it’s because I agree or because I’ve entirely exhausted myself. That fight with Sibby might as well have happeneddaysago,yearsago, for all the strange, sad distance I feel from it. When I try to think of what I’ll do next to try to repair the damage, nothing comes to mind. My brain is a slate that’s been wiped entirely clean—dull black and not a piece of chalk in sight.
I think fleetingly about my sketches, my deadline, dreading the thought of trying to return to them when I feel this way. I’m so tired that I suspect I could fall asleep right here, with this too-soon man I like so much holding me.
