Dear Daughter (14 page)

But it was Tessa and Eli my eyes returned to again and again. They were alone: no parents, no grandparents, no nothing. And they were standing so close to one another that it seemed impossible that they wouldn’t somehow be touching. But they weren’t.

I tapped my mother’s face. Why had she run? I mean—apart from the obvious. Even I couldn’t fault her for not wanting to stay in Ardelle.

Did you hate everyone in your family, or was it just me
?

My mother never talked about her family. This hadn’t struck me as particularly unusual when I was younger. In our circles the subject of family was a delicate one. If, on the one hand, you came from money or beauty or power, you wanted people to know it. On the other hand, having to advertise those connections was an admission of their inadequacy—no one’s ever needed to ask Nat Rothschild about his genetic provenance. I could see now how well this had worked in my mother’s favor.

Marion Jenkins, as I’ve been told, came to Zurich in the fall of 1985 in a swirl of silky hair and Yves Saint Laurent, the estranged daughter (she said) of a wealthy American family that was whispered to be connected with the Chernyshev-Besobrazovs of New York. She was in Switzerland as part of a rebelliously old-fashioned Grand Tour, but once she came, she never left, and within weeks of her arrival she had won over the finer people of Zurich with her gentle manners and good heart. To this day the city’s hostesses still refer to her as
Seelewärmerli
: “little soul warmer.”

I’m not even fucking kidding.

She met my father at a New Year’s Eve something-or-other in St. Moritz. She was the only one of her party who couldn’t ski (didn’t know how), and he was the only one of his who couldn’t (older than dirt). While everyone else was tackling the slopes of Corviglia, she kept him company and made him laugh and snuck him all the brandy his grandchildren told him he shouldn’t be drinking. The next morning he whisked her away to his château outside Sion, where they lived together until his death the following Christmas, barely a month after they had me.

My mother maintained to her dying day that she never,
ever
would have guessed that dear sweet Emmerich was actually a minor member of the house of Hapsburg-Lorraine.

. . . Yeah, his family didn’t buy it, either.

And so my father’s family would have nothing to do with either of us, and since my parents had never married, there was no reason they had to. But they couldn’t keep her from inheriting a piece of his estate—my mother was good at picking lawyers too—and after that she didn’t ever have to worry again about the inconvenient opinions of petty nobility. She set herself up in Geneva, established a foundation or two, and soon enough even my illegitimacy was considered part of her charm.

Like she always said, “You can get away with anything if you wear great clothes, throw great parties, and give money to kids with cleft palates.”

She would have made a great pope.

So no, my mother didn’t talk about her family, and if anyone else did, they never said anything to me. Sometimes, though, I let myself wonder—usually about her parents. Mémé and Pépère, I called them. I liked to picture them sipping scotch and scowling at Dominican nannies from the window of their Upper East Side classic six. But really, I knew my grandparents were dead. Whenever anyone else talked about their own parents, my mother got this lazy, supercilious look on her face, like a newlywed playing wingman for a sadly single friend. She knew she’d never have to suffer through that stage of her life again.

I always imagined I’d feel the same way.

When you look into your family’s future, it’s loss you anticipate, not gain.

And yet, here I was, newly possessed of an uncle and a cousin. Twice as many blood relatives as I’d ever had. Would I recognize something of myself in them—of them in myself?

Would they recognize me?

What the fuck have I gotten myself into?

It took me ten minutes to convince myself to set the picture aside and crawl out of the bathtub. A slather of soap and the raw scrub of a washcloth later and I was ready to defile myself again with polyester blend—this time a sweater I’d ordered from a maternity catalog and a pair of pleated-front slacks. (That’s right: motherfucking
slacks
.)

I cinched a belt around the too loose waist and walked to the pretty little escritoire by the window (which if you craned your neck just so afforded a glimpse of the road that led out of town). I ran a finger along its edge. It was an elegant enough piece of furniture that when I first saw it I’d wished, however briefly, that I had correspondence to complete so that I might put it to good use. Gentle communications to a devoted older sister, maybe, or a response to an invitation to an upcoming ball.

My mother would have laughed herself sick at the very thought. I knew exactly what she would say:
You’re no English Rose, Jane—you’re an American Aphid.

My phone vibrated on the bedside table and I grabbed for it, grateful for the distraction. I checked the display: another text message from Noah.

I’m going to try this one last time.

I sank down on the bed. I knew it was a terrible idea to write back. I always gave too much away when it came to Noah, no matter what form the communication. And he was probably pissed I’d ignored him the night before—which was precisely why I’d ignored him. If he was angry, maybe he wouldn’t come after me.

No, I couldn’t text back. Complete radio silence. It was the only way. I tossed the phone on the bed.

It vibrated again.

Oh, fuck it. I snatched up the phone.

Are you alive?

I’m not dead anyway

How’s Wisconsin?

My thumbs stilled. Had he already figured out I wasn’t there?

Fine

You should know they’ve tracked you to Sacramento.

I heard
How

Sounds like housekeeping.

Guess I should’ve tipped more

His next text took nearly a minute to come through.

Not the response I expected.

What did you expect
Where the fuck is the punctuation
Oh
What did you expect?

Concern?
Urgency?
Irritation?

:(
:o
:<
Better?

Not really.

Tough

This time he didn’t text back. Mission accomplished. I guess.

I rubbed at my nose. The skin had begun to chap.

•   •   •

I trudged out of my room, trying to think happy
We Can Do It!
thoughts. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. Breakfast used to be my favorite meal, you know, and not just because my mother was never awake for it.

Downstairs the festivities were in full swing. Nearly eighty people had crowded around the ten or so tables, and the room was gurgling with overindulged digestive systems. More than one person had his hand resting on his stomach. Kelley waved at me from one table; next to her, Rue scowled. I ignored them as politely as I could as I studied the room. I counted three dozen men who were old enough to have been in my mother’s bedroom that night. One was Stanton. One was Leo.

But Eli was the one I was heading for.

No—
my uncle
was the one
I was heading for
.

God, I should’ve brought some stronger drugs.

Eli barely looked up when I approached. I took a seat between him and another guest, a dark-haired man with a square jaw and over-it eyes who was nursing a cup of coffee, his glower deeper than could be explained away by mere morning crankiness. When I sat down, I accidentally kicked the stranger’s chair.

“Pardon me,” I murmured.

“Uh huh,” he said. He was dressed indifferently, in jeans and a rumpled gray Henley. The hatband on his blue and orange cap was stained white with sweat. He lifted his chin to facilitate the largest possible yawn.

I kicked his chair again, on purpose this time.

I watched Eli out of the corner of my eye. He was shoveling away at a plate of beans that could’ve fed an entire mining camp. Cora sat down next to him and scooped another mound onto his plate.

Maybe he killed my mother for her food?

“Good morning,” I said.

Eli mumbled something around his fork.

“Did you sleep well?” Cora asked.

“Like the dead!”

I smiled at Eli and opened my mouth.

Speaking of the dead—

The door to the kitchen banged open and a plump woman with the sparse fuzzy hair of a newborn emerged with a tray, her fleshy chin wobbling as she walked toward us. She dropped two plates of eggs and cornbread in front of the sullen-mouthed man and me. “Out of beans,” she grunted. Cora’s lips thinned as she watched her leave.

The man looked at his food like a death-row prisoner who’d just been delivered the wrong last meal.

I turned back to Eli—

“I was hoping to have the chance to introduce you,” Cora said to me, drawing the nameless man closer. “You two are the only ones here by yourselves, and I thought that, in case you wanted company, it might be . . .” She trailed off at the man’s blank expression, then rallied. “Rebecca, this is Peter! Peter, Rebecca. Rebecca’s a historian.”

She faltered again when he made no move to shake my hand. “Peter,” she continued, too brightly, “is a writer with a
magazine
, and he’s covering the festival for them—isn’t that exciting?”

Peter waved his hand in front of his face as if clearing a stench. “I’m thrilled to be here.”

I gave him the least attractive smile I could muster. “Likewise,” I said.

Next to Cora, Eli was eating furiously. Better to hold off on conversation with him until his mouth isn’t otherwise occupied.

I smoothed my napkin over my lap and examined my own food. My knife was mislaid. I flipped it blade side in. I wondered if it might make things easier if I just went ahead and stabbed myself in the side of my neck and was done with it. A reporter. Christ.

An even more blood-curdling thought:
What if he wasn’t the only one?

I eyed the other guests at the table. There were two couples and a family of four. One couple ate with their heads bent close together, their motorcycle jackets slung over the backs of their chairs. The woman was reaching for another piece of cornbread, and the tendril of a tattoo peeked out from under her sleeve. I cringed. Tattoos—one of the few things my mother and I agreed on: We both thought them vulgar. Of course, my mother’s reasons were cosmetic, whereas mine were tactical. You should never saddle yourself with something so hard to change.

The other couple was quite young, just out of college, maybe, and shabbily dressed. On a budget holiday, I’d guess. The family, meanwhile, was uncannily proper: They had matching white shirts and perfect posture and didn’t even look at their forks as they raised them to their mouths.

They were all clearly from out of town—no one was eating much.

I let out a breath. Harmless, the lot of them. I was sure.

“Will anyone else be arriving today?” I asked Cora.

“No, this is it. But of course you never know who’s going to decide to stop by on the spur of the moment.” She stirred cream into her coffee. “Though I tend to think these things are so much nicer when they’re cozy like this, when we can all really get to know each other.”

“Well, it suits me perfectly,” I said. “I love meeting new people.”

Cora smiled—and I did, too. Mostly because I was pleased to discover she was so susceptible to praise.

I looked back at Eli, and then at Peter.
Who should I tackle first?
I took a long sip of water, because as Sun Tzu said, the general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand, and also the general who hydrates has a nicer complexion.

The cook dropped another plate in front of Eli and he set to work, deciding things for me. I turned to Peter.

“So, you’re a writer?” I asked.

“A journalist.”

“What’s the distinction?”

“Journalists don’t get to choose their assignments.” He turned to look out the window, missing the reflexive pitch of my eyes toward the ceiling.

“Well, who knows?” I said. “Maybe you’ll get more of a story than you bargained for.”

His shrug was so impressively Gallic in its contempt that I couldn’t quite figure out if he was a threat or a joke. Either way, I suspected he’d need more coffee to be of any use to me.

I turned back to Cora. “So what do we have to look forward to today?”

She picked up a yellow brochure from a pile next to her plate and handed it to me. “Here’s a schedule. The tour of Adeline is up next, and the shuttle leaves from the inn at ten-thirty. But in the meantime, I think you might like to swing by Kelley’s bookstore. She knows even more about Ardelle and Adeline than I do—plus you can take a look at the museum and the town archives.”

“So Kelley was born here?” I asked.

Cora laughed. “
Everyone
was born here.”

“Except you,” I guessed.

For a moment her perpetual smile wasn’t really a smile at all. “I guess I’ve always wanted to live in a place with some history,” she said. “The closest we have to a cultural monument in Panama City is the Bon Temps bingo hall.”