“Hi, Mom,” Anna said. “I’ve brought someone who—”
Blanche went completely pale. She wiped a hand over her face. “Rick,” she said. “Rick!”
“Mom?” Anna asked.
Blanche looked up at Anna. “Where did you find him? How did you find him?”
“Who, Mom? Do you know this man?”
Blanche held out her hands to Phillip Winston. “Did someone tell you? I called your mother but she said she hadn’t heard from you. If she did, she would give you a message. Did you get the message? Did you?”
Phillip came forward, taking both her hands in his. He sat on the side of her bed and looked into her old rheumy eyes. “I didn’t get a message,” he said.
“I thought so,” she said. “I thought you’d find a way to get in touch if you had. That’s what I thought.”
“Where did you think I’d gone?” he asked.
“The army. That’s what you said.”
“Mom, do you know this man?”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s Richard Allston.” She looked back at his face. “You don’t look a day older. I knew you’d age well. Not all of us did.”
“Do you remember what year it was?” he asked her.
“I’m not sure but...I was eighteen. It was a boy. What happened to him? I was eighteen. You should not have left like you did.”
“Eighteen,” Anna said. “Nineteen fifty-four.”
“Did you give him up?” Phillip asked.
“What else could I do? I thought you’d come back and we could start over. Are you mad? Because I was eighteen.”
Anna and Joe stood helplessly in the room, Phillip sitting on the bed, feeding Blanche careful questions, asking her for names and dates and other information, but it wasn’t long before her mind wandered off. She stopped remembering or answering, one or the other. Anna knew for elderly people with dementia that it wasn’t unusual for them to have vivid memories of things that happened fifty, sixty or even seventy years before, sometimes things they’d never spoken about, sometimes things they wished they could forget, while events that happened the day before were long gone.
After just a few minutes, when it appeared Blanche was losing her focus, Joe went to the car to get Anna’s briefcase. She spent a few minutes helping Phillip find his ancestry account, pulled up the names that had been sent to him as people with whom he shared DNA, people who might be relatives, both living and departed. There was a Richard Allston Jr. who was registered. He was sixty-three, four years younger than Phillip. His picture was posted and the resemblance was astonishing.
There was a picture of Richard Allston Sr. in an army uniform and it could have been a younger Phillip, the resemblance was so strong.
“I’ll be damned,” Anna said.
Phillip Winston stayed for a week. For two nights following the recognition that Blanche was his mother, he stayed in the hotel, researching on his laptop and visiting Blanche during the day. She was able to repeat the same things over and over again—it was 1954, she was eighteen, she had a baby and gave him up—but she really couldn’t elaborate. She had other very old stories—there was a girl named Carol who had lied to her and stolen money out of her purse, there was an incident at a dance club when the police rounded up a lot of young people, there were protest marches going on in San Francisco. There was a baby, this time a girl who she couldn’t give up, and she did not know the baby’s father’s name. It could be she couldn’t remember or it could be she never knew.
Phillip discovered that Richard Allston Sr. had died at the age of fifty-five. Heart failure was named the cause but there had been no autopsy. However, Richard Allston Jr. was alive and well, so another reunion would soon be in the works.
Phillip was invited to Anna’s house to stay a few more days and given Michael’s room. Joe stayed, too. Just because Phillip was a long-lost brother and had been carefully researched by Anna and her clerk didn’t mean he was beyond any possible suspicion. They talked and talked and talked, drawing for each other life histories and sewing the details together.
After a week it was time for Phillip to get back to his family, his kids and grandkids. His parting was bittersweet; he had found his mother but he was unlikely to see her again. He’d plan another trip for the early spring, but Blanche was failing.
As for Blanche, she seemed to have come alive a little with Phillip’s visit. For a while she believed her long-lost lover had come back to her. Her health seemed greatly improved, though it was a brief improvement.