It was raining hard that day, the sky indistinguishable from the sea, and I remember the anger I felt growing inside me. But it wasn’t only about her, I was angry at a lot of things. My career had suffered in the previous year, several kids had gone missing, run away from home in search of the underground—the fictional place I had written about in my books. My stories were too dark, many said. And they were inspiring children to trek into forests and backwoods, hoping they might find the place where Eloise had followed the fox and become the monster. But the worst had happened only a month before I stood on the wharf with my mom—a boy had died. Markus Sorenson was only fourteen years old when he walked into the Alaskan wilderness not far from his home, the first book in the Foxtail series tucked into his backpack along with a thermos of hot apple cider, a flashlight, a small shovel, and an extra pair of socks. His body wasn’t found until a week later; hypothermia had taken his life only a couple days after he vanished. And the guilt that tore through me was enough to make me start drinking at a rate that began to drown out the days.
When I came to Whidbey Island to see my parents, I wasn’t in good shape. I hadn’t had a sober day in a month, and hearing my mom say that my father was not my real father felt like a brick slamming against my bones. I hated her for it, hated her for the lies she had told me my entire life. And I hated her for finally telling me the truth.
She told me how she had married too young, how she had had an affair with a man who had only been visiting friends on Whidbey Island, a few houses down from my parents’ home. How when she learned she was pregnant, the man told her she could come live in a community where they would care for her and the child after it was born. So she left her husband, packed her things, and went to Pastoral. But after I was born, she began to realize she couldn’t stay there—it wasn’t the kind of life she wanted for herself, or her child. She fled Pastoral and retreated back to her husband. She lied and told him that the baby was his, and he believed her—or at least pretended to. And I was raised by a man who I thought was my father.
My mother told me all this that day, waiting for the ferry, and I understood why she had always treated me like she did—kept me at arm’s length—I held her secrets inside my very existence. When she looked at me, she saw my real father, she saw the mistake she’d made, and she feared that someday her husband would look at me and see it too. I was a bomb waiting to go off—to break apart her entire world. I could ruin everything.
With the rain streaming over us, I asked her the name of my real father. I asked her about the place where I was born. His name was Cooper, she had said.
I need to see it, I told her. I pleaded with her. I need to go there.
She refused at first, but she also must have known that there was no turning back now. She had given up her secrets, and I deserved to see the place where I took my first breath, to know if my real father was still alive. So she told me how to get there: the route into the mountains and the old red barn and the path through the woods.
Now, facing my mother in this hotel room, a new betrayal begins to surface. “You knew where I was this whole time?”
Her head moves slowly, nodding.
“You could have told someone, said something.”
I think of my father who raised me, waking each morning for the last seven years, not knowing where I was. His only daughter.
“I couldn’t,” she answers.
I press a hand to my side where the incision has started to throb, the pain meds wearing off. I need to sit down, but I don’t—not yet. “You wanted to protect yourself, you mean,” I say. “You didn’t want my dad to know the lie you’ve kept from him after all these years.” She would rather let him suffer, than tell him the truth—than tell him how she had had an affair, how I wasn’t his real daughter.
I bite down on all the things I want to say to her, all the vile thoughts swirling inside me.
“Is he still alive?” she asks.
“Cooper’s dead,” I tell her bluntly. “He died before I arrived. I never got to meet my real father.”
“But you stayed there all these years. There must have been some reason you never left.”
“I didn’t have a choice.” Pastoral is not the same place it was when my mother lived there, when Cooper was still alive—when members came and went as they liked. The borders were open then, and there was nothing to fear.
“I told Travis how to find you,” she says, as if this makes it all okay.