Soon after, we hung up.
* * *
But there is also this:
Once, after my first book came out so many years ago now, when I was still with William, I had an event to do in Washington, D.C., and I do not remember the event, except that I went down and did it alone—I am sure I was frightened by it as I was by all those things back then—but here is what I want to say: On my way home the weather got bad, there were thundershowers that would not stop and wind and so the airport became increasingly filled with people, and I ended up sitting on the floor next to a young couple from Connecticut. She was pretty and hard and he was nice but reticent. The point is this: As the night went on my fear grew, and I called William from a payphone whenever I could—there was a line for the payphones—and he was trying to help me find a place to spend the night; he called different people he knew in D.C., but no one could do anything, we just had to wait out the weather, and I was really frightened. And then the pretty woman from Connecticut had one of the （at that time） very new cellphones and she brought it out and I watched her call the train station and she and her husband decided they would try and get a train to New York, and I asked if I could go with them, and they said all right. Mostly I wanted to go with them because I was terrified of being alone all night in that vast and packed-with-people airport, and so we went and got a taxi and drove to the train station, and there were just a few seats left and I got on the train, and what I remember is watching New Jersey as the sun came up, and feeling so grateful for my home, so deeply, deeply grateful to be going home to New York, to my home with my husband and my girls. I will never forget it. I loved them all that much—oh desperately I loved them.
So there was that as well.
* * *
And then the two things happened to William.
The first thing I heard about was on a Saturday in late May. It was the anniversary of David’s finding out about his illness, and when William called me I （so stupidly） thought he was calling me about that, and I was surprised and touched that he remembered the exact date. I said, “Oh Pillie, thank you for calling,” and he said, “What?” And then I said it was the first-year anniversary of David’s illness, and he said, “Oh God, Lucy, I’m sorry,” and I said, “No, it’s okay, tell me why you called.”
And he did say, “Oh Lucy, I’ll call back another day. It can wait.”
And I said, “Who cares about another day? Tell me now.”
So William told me how that morning he had finally gone onto the ancestry website that Estelle had gotten him a subscription for, and then—sounding as though he was having a conversation about a tennis game he had just seen that was interesting—he told me.
* * *
—
This is what he found:
* * *
—
His mother had had a child before he was born. With her husband Clyde Trask, the potato farmer in Maine.
* * *
—
This child was two years older than William, and the website stated her maiden name as Lois Trask and the child Lois had been born in Houlton, Maine, near where Catherine had lived with her first husband, the potato farmer husband Clyde Trask. The birth certificate stated Catherine Cole Trask as her mother and Clyde Trask as her father. Clyde Trask had married someone else when Lois was two years old; there was a marriage certificate for that as well. William could find no death certificate for Lois, only a marriage certificate from 1969, her name was now Lois Bubar—“I looked up how to pronounce it, and it’s boo-bar,” William said with some sarcasm—and the names of her children, and grandchildren. Her husband had a death certificate from five years ago.
William asked what I thought of that and then said, almost casually, “It’s ridiculous, of course, it can’t be true. I bet these sites have all kinds of misinformation on them.”
I got up and moved to a different chair. I asked him to take me through the steps again; I knew nothing about these websites. So he did, patiently, and as I listened—and I mean this literally—I got chills down my side. “Lucy?” he said.
After a moment I said, “I think it has to be true, William.”
“It’s not true,” he said, firmly. “God, Lucy. Catherine would never have left a child, and even if she ever did—which she wouldn’t have—she would have spoken to someone about it.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because that’s what these places do—they rope you in, and—”
“What places?” I asked.