“Oh, Mom,” I managed to say.
“Well, here’s the thing. I don’t think your father was a bad guy. I think, in his own mind, he wasn’t programmed for happiness, so he didn’t look for it and he didn’t expect it. And then he suddenly was happy, and when that happened it had absolutely nothing to do with me or any of our children. Well,” she shook her head, “there’s a revelation to take the wind out of your sails.”
It had taken something to get this said, I realized. A massive something. I tried to feel resentful on my own behalf, that my father hadn’t wanted either to have me or to stay with me, but I finally just couldn’t. This wasn’t new information, what my mother had just said. Not really. But getting it into words and out into the world—that was new.
“We know about the accident,” I told her, and she said nothing. In fact, she barely moved. “We know about Stella being there, in the car with him. I can understand why he never told Sally and the boys, but I can’t understand why you didn’t tell them. Or me. It might have helped us understand, you know, who he was and why he made the choices he made. I feel as if my first clear picture of him was after I found out. He must have been in so much pain, and felt so guilty.”
“I hope you’re not implying I was unsympathetic to that,” Johanna said sharply.
“No,” I said, slightly taken aback. “I don’t think that at all.”
“Because I spent years of my life obsessing about your father’s pain and his guilt, and everything I was powerless to alleviate for him.”
“Okay,” I said, carefully.
“And I might not have done that if I’d known about Stella. Everything about Stella. I had no idea. I just thought she was some struggling filmmaker who’d gotten her hooks into him, and destroyed our family. I even talked to our attorney about protecting us, financially, but he advised me not to do anything. After your father died, of course, we had to make a settlement with her, but now I can see how much better it would have been if I’d known from the beginning who she was in his life and what she meant, but he only told me that last night, before he died.” She shook her head. “He should have told me everything when he met her again. Certainly before we brought you into it.”
“What?” I said, catching up.
“But then you wouldn’t have been born. So I can’t be sorry, because we had you. And I loved you. I’m sorry you never got the functioning, happy family. You should have had that. To be honest, I’m not sure the others got it either, and they deserved it just as much. And I’m also sorry you ever felt you were born too late, but I think you were wrong about that. I think you were born at the exact right time, and I have a feeling your sister and brothers would agree. You’re not some random person we were all saddled with, you know. You were their missing piece, and they owe you a lot. All of them. All of us.”
I drank the rest of my tea. I could not think of one more thing I didn’t know that I wanted to know. That was an unprecedented and extraordinary feeling.
“Thanks,” I finally said.
“You’re welcome,” my mother said. Then, a moment later, she said: “Something else I want to get off my chest.”
Well shit, I thought. So close. I had no idea what might be coming now.
“I threw my wedding dress away. I’ve been thinking about it ever since Rochelle told me she was wearing her mother’s dress. I got rid of a lot of things like that. Photographs, some of your father’s belongings. I did get very angry at one point, and also, that was around the same time I was probably thinking Sally would never need a wedding dress of any kind.”
I smiled with relief. “Actually, I think you might get the whole shooting match with Sally. Wedding, babies, everything. But I don’t see her in a wedding dress, you’re right.”