Enright Family Collection (84 page)

Delia sighed heavily. “I met your father when I was in my senior year in college. It was love at first sight. We married immediately after graduation, much to the
relief of Reverend and Mrs. Hampton. We had Nicky right away, then you came along, then Georgia . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“And then Dad left us.” Zoey said, knowing there was a connection, but not sure just what it was.

“Oh, my fault, darling.” Delia shook her head vehemently. “I should have told him long before I did.”

“You mean about the baby?”

“I should have told him sooner—before we were married—or not at all.” Tears welled in Delia’s eyes again. “There were complications with Georgia’s birth. The doctors said I would not have other children. But it was okay, they kept saying, you have three beautiful children, and I kept telling them no, I had four, and they all thought it was some postpartum nonsense. But I knew that I could not go on pretending that it had never happened. I had a child somewhere in the world and I could no longer pretend that she wasn’t out there. I had to tell someone. I had to talk about her.” Delia sighed again. “Unfortunately, the person I chose to tell was your father.”

“Dad left because you told him . . . ?”

“Almost immediately.” Delia shook her head. “He simply could not accept it, could not understand how I could have deceived him for so long. He felt betrayed, Zoey, and he could not forgive me.”

“For keeping it a secret?”

“A woman who could keep a secret like that, he said, was a woman who was capable of anything. Who knew what else she might lie about? He wanted nothing to do with me. He packed his things and left.”

“I remember when he left.” Zoey sat on the edge of the sofa. “It was early in the morning and you were crying. I heard you. I went into the hallway and saw Daddy going down the steps. I called to him.”

“You never told me that.”

“He didn’t turn around. He stopped, but he didn’t turn around,” Zoey told her. “Over the years, every time I started to think that I missed him, every time it started
to hurt, I remembered that moment, when he had heard me calling him, but he would not turn around to say good-bye. And then the hurt would go away again, every time.”

“Oh, darling, I am so sorry.” Delia met Zoey’s eyes from across the room. “For everything. I am so sorry. And I will understand if you can’t forgive me, either.”

“Mother, how could you even think . . .” Zoey’s eyes filled and she crossed the room to embrace her mother, and the floodgates opened as both sobbed like children.

“Sweetie, you haven’t left little wet circles on my shoulders since you were teething,” Delia said when it appeared that the worst had passed and that somehow, they had both managed to have survived it.

“Mother, pass the tissues.” Zoey swabbed at her face.

They both attacked the tissue box, sniffing back the last of the sobs.

“Tell me how you found her,” Zoey coaxed her mother to continue.

“All those years, I had wondered about her, what had happened to her. Was she still alive? Had she been raised well? Had she been loved? Was she smart? Was she happy? Did she know about me?”

Delia stood and began to pace again. “So a few years back, I hired a private detective. At first, I just wanted to know if she was alive. I told myself that that would be enough. And for a while, it was. Oh, it had taken a while to find them. Laura’s adoptive father died when she was two, and her mother remarried. It complicated things, but my detective was good.”

“So you called her?”

“Oh, no. I didn’t have the nerve to do that. I had checked with the agency, and found that Laura had made only cursory inquiries after her birth parents, so I wasn’t certain if she had any interest in finding me. But through the detective, I learned a lot about Laura. One of the things I learned was that she was a member of the local historic society here. So I decided to set a book here, on the island, and I contacted the president of the
historic society. One thing led to another, as I knew they would, and I managed to get myself invited as a guest speaker for one of their monthly luncheons.”

“You’re a clever devil, Mother.” Zoey shook her head.

“Yes, well, I was a terrified devil that day, let me assure you. Terrified that she would come, terrified that she would not. I had decided that if she did not come that day, it wasn’t meant to be. I would drop the whole thing.”

“But she came.”

“Oh, yes. I knew her the minute she walked into the room. As a matter of fact, my first thought was, what is Zoey doing here? She looks so much like you.”

“There is a resemblance.”

“It was uncanny, Zoe. She even walks like you. My heart just stopped in my chest, and for a moment, I thought I was going to pass out.” She reached for another tissue and added, “I had never been that scared.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I couldn’t very well walk up to her and say, ’Excuse me but I believe that you are the daughter I gave up for adoption thirty-some years ago.’”

Zoey smiled. Delia’s sense of humor was slowly beginning to creep back.

“So you said . . . ?”

“I very cleverly managed to work my maiden name into my talk. I figured if she had looked at her birth certificate, she would know.” Delia said simply, “She had, and she did.”

The door flew open and a small flash of white buzzed past Zoey and flung itself onto Delia’s lap.

“You promised to tell me a story tonight, Nana.” The white flash landed long enough for Zoey to identify a little girl of perhaps three wearing a long nightshirt that identified her as the Princess of Quite-A-Lot.

“Why, is it your bedtime already?” Delia looked at her watch, pretending to be shocked. “Oh, my, it’s well past your bedtime, Ally.”

“Momma said I could stay up a little bit longer but . . .”
She stopped and studied Delia’s face, then traced an errant tear with one small finger. Delia gathered her into her arms and rocked her, but the small body was not long still. She twisted around to face Zoey and pointed, asking, “Who are you?”

Before Zoey could answer, Laura called from the doorway, “Say your good nights, Allison. It’s very late.”

“Nana said she’d tell me a story.”

“Nana has company, Ally. She can stop up later.”

“But I’ll be asleep then. And I want to tell her all about the fun stuff we’re going to do at school for Grandparents’ Day.” She turned to Delia. “You didn’t forget about Grandparents’ Day, did you?”

“Not for a minute,” Delia assured her. “You couldn’t keep me away. Now run along to bed.”

“But . . .” she protested.

“It’s okay.” Zoey stood up. All of a sudden, she was suffocating. It was all too much, had been too much for one night. “I have to leave.”

“Would you like me to fix a room for you?” Laura offered.

“No!” Zoey answered, too quickly, she would later realize. “I have to work tomorrow. I need to go.”

“Zoey . . .” Delia turned a worried face to her.

“It’s okay. I just have to go.” Her voice pleaded with her mother to understand. “Please, Mother, go with her.” Zoey gestured toward the little girl, who was looking from one adult face to the other as if trying to read them all.

“I’ll be here for another day or so, Zoey.” Delia took Ally’s hand.

Zoey nodded and gathered her purse.

“Zoe.” Delia called to her from the doorway. “Are you sure you are all right?”

“I’m fine. I just have to go,” she repeated.

“Nana, who is that lady?” Ally whispered. “She has hair like Mommy.”

Laura followed Zoey into the lobby.

“Are you sure you won’t change your mind?” Laura
asked. “It’s getting late. There are some rooms available.”

Zoey shook her head, knowing she should say something—at the very least, a simple
thank you
would be nice—but she could not speak. There were too many emotions fighting within her at that moment. As she passed into the hallway, she caught a glimpse of Laura in the mirror at the foot of the steps. Fascinated, Zoey’s stride missed a beat and unwillingly, she studied the face of the woman who so strongly resembled her.

We have exactly the same eyes. And her daughter was right. We have the same hair.

Flustered, Zoey all but fled through the front door.

“Zoey . . .” Laura called to her from the top step.

Already halfway down the sidewalk, Zoey turned back.

“Please don’t judge her too harshly,” Laura said softly.

“She’s my mother.” Zoey stiffened, as if offended by the suggestion. “I don’t judge her at all.”

She had taken a wrong turn and ended up at a dead end, but Zoey knew that she was near the ocean. She could hear the rhythmic pounding of water upon sand, over and over. To her right were rocks. To her left, the road trailed off into the darkness. She parked her car under the faint glow of the lone streetlight and climbed over the rocks until she felt the soft shift of the sand beneath her feet. She walked until she knew the ocean was right there, and then she sat down, just beyond the touch of the waves.

She thought about her mother and the heartache she had kept hidden for so much of her life, and she thought about Laura. She thought about her father, who had been unable to see Delia’s truth as anything less than a betrayal of his love for her. Of the years she and her siblings had missed their father, of all the years Delia had missed her child. Their faces all seemed to weave into a sort of blur, one into the next, until they were no
longer distinct. All in all, it seemed like a long time before she stood and brushed the sand off the back of her jeans and walked back over the rocky ledge to her car, still thinking of the tangled web of
family,
and how strong that web was.

Zoey was hardly mindful of the drive home. It seemed she had gone into automatic pilot somehow, and before she knew it, she was coasting through the dark stillness of Brady’s Mill, past the lake where sleeping ducks huddled on the banks and the long bare arms of weeping willow—just a few short late-spring weeks away from unfolding into green fronds—dipped into the water. The crunching of the stones in her driveway sounded loud enough to wake the dead, so complete was the silence behind her bungalow, and she almost regretted having to shatter the quiet by slamming the door of her car. The night was the color of pitch, the sky an enormous starry quilt, and the moonlight scattered itself here and there, on the white tips of the tulips that bore the luster of pearls, the pale trumpets of the daffodils that glowed like burnished gold, the heavy clusters of white lilac that hung like opaque clouds from the spindly branches.

The warmth and calm gentleness of the night garden were welcome after the turbulence of emotions that had threatened to tear her apart over the past several hours, and she picked a small white daffodil—Thalia, Wally had called it—and twirled it between her fingers. The peace of her surroundings soothed her, and she felt the tension that had settled in the back of her neck began to ease. She leaned her head back to inhale the heady fragrance of lilac, then smiled. There was another scent in the air.

Wally’s pipe.

She leaned over the gate and peered into the garden, where Wally sat on the stone bench, the faint spark of the ashes in the bowl of his pipe glowing like a tiny flashlight.

“Work late?” he asked casually.

She shook her head, then realizing that he may not have seen the gesture in the dark, said, “No.”

“Late for you to be out,” he commented.

“Now, you weren’t waiting up for me, were you?”

“Naw. Watched a movie on cable, then thought I’d enjoy a pipe before I turned in.”

“Which movie?” Zoey smiled to herself. He could have enjoyed that pipe anywhere.

“Jurassic Park.”

“Did you like it?”

“Would I stay up until two in the morning watching a movie I didn’t like?”

“Is that what time it is? Two?”

“Yep.”

They each wrestled with the silence, Wally not able to bring himself to ask, Zoey not having the strength to tell him. Not tonight, anyway. It was still all too jumbled.

“You going in soon?” he asked.

Zoey knew it was his way of asking her if she was all right. “Yes,” she replied.

“Yep,” he said, looking up. “A night sky like that is sure something to see. Makes you realize how inconsequential most things are.”

“Yes,” she said because she didn’t know what else to say, but wanted him to know she got his drift.

“Well, don’t be staying out here too long. Those raccoons have been wandering. Wouldn’t want them to think you’re a threat to their babies. They can be mean buggers.”

“Okay. I’m going in now anyway.”

“Me, too, in a minute.”

“Thanks, Wally,” she called to him.

“Don’t mention it.” His voice drifted through the dark much as the smoke from his pipe had snagged a ride on a passing breeze. “Sleep well, Zoey.”

“You, too,” she called back over her shoulder, wondering if she would sleep at all.

Chapter
20
 

Ben stood up and for what seemed like the fiftieth time that morning, walked to the window that overlooked the parking lot. The little red sports car had yet to find its way to its designated spot. He pulled the cord that controlled the drapes until he had the glass pane totally exposed. That way, he figured, he could watch for her without getting up every thirty seconds to peer out the window like the nervous father of a sixteen-year-old who was long past her curfew.