Finding Me (5 page)

She reached for the next article. This one was written a week after the first. The search had been called off in spite of the fact that no bodies had been found. The photograph this time showed a mother, her lips turned down at an impossible angle, puffy eyes drooping, as if the weight of grief had pulled down and elongated her entire face. She had her right arm around the shoulder of a young girl, her left arm around a slightly older boy. The caption beneath the photograph said, “Alison Waters, shown with her two
children, says that she will not give up hope that her husband and daughter may yet turn up alive.” Kelli leaned forward and took a closer look, then she reached into the pile of pictures she’d already looked through. She picked up a couple in particular and set them beside the newspaper clipping.

He had grown, but there could be no doubt about who she was seeing. This was the boy named Max from the other photos. The girl was Beth.

Kelli skimmed the article. One particular paragraph gripped her. “When asked about a memorial service, Mrs. Waters declared that she would schedule no such service while she had even a small hope that her husband and daughter were still alive somewhere. She noted the contradiction that the Coast Guard called off the search, but the coroner’s office refused to issue a death certificate until bodies were found. ‘What kind of wife and mother gives up hope before some government agency?’”

Kelli stood and started to pace. She put her right hand around the gold cuff bracelet on her left wrist and began to spin it around and around. Over and under. Over and under. Its scratchy surface pulled at the skin on her wrist.

Denice. She had to talk to Denice. She pulled out her cell phone and saw that she had missed three calls from her friend because the phone was on silent again. She pressed the button to return the call and tried to hold herself together.

“’Bout time you called back. I was about to send out a search party.”

“Denice, I . . .” The words choked her. She took a deep breath. “I’ve found something awful.”

“Where are you?”

“Dad and Mimi’s house.”

“I’ll leave work as soon as the afternoon crowd dies down. In the meantime, tell me what’s going on.”

“I can’t talk about it over the phone. Can you just come here, please? As soon as possible.”

“I don’t like the way you sound right now.”

“I don’t like the way I feel right now.” She looked at the piles of papers and photos on the floor. “You’re not going to believe this, you’re just not going to believe it.” She pushed the disconnect button and sank down to the floor, where she curled up in a tight ball and closed her eyes. That did nothing to stop the shaking that had begun in her hands and now worked its way through her entire body.

By the time she heard Denice’s car in the driveway, the shakes had stopped, but she couldn’t find the energy to sit up. The door screeched open, and footsteps pounded down the hall. “Kelli? Kelli!” Denice rushed into the office and dropped to the ground beside her. “What’s happened? Are you hurt?” Denice leaned over her in concern. “What’s going on?”

Kelli sat up, drew her knees to her chest again, and buried her face in her hands. “It’s my dad.”

“What about him?”

She pointed to the piles of various photos and pictures. “I don’t think he was who I thought he was—who he claimed to be.” She looked toward Denice, knowing she could help her make sense of all this.

Denice looked down at the photo of the family vacation, studied it, then nodded her head. She took a deep breath. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what you’ve found out?”

Kelli reached for the picture. “I’m not really sure what it all means yet, but it seems pretty evident to me that his entire past is something different than what I’ve always been told it was.”

Denice put her arm around Kelli’s shoulders and drew her close. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” She waited a few heartbeats before she followed it up with, “Does that completely surprise you? Honestly?”

“Of course it does! What would make you even ask that?” Kelli pulled away from her, stunned.

“It’s just that, deep down, I’ve always believed there was something he was hiding. I never knew what it was, but I always felt it.”

“What would make you say that?”

“He avoided the subject of anything from the past like Ebola, no matter how insignificant it seemed. Remember that time Jones asked him if he’d played any sports in high school? You’d have thought he’d been asked to reveal a national secret from his reaction.”

Kelli found her strength in a surge of anger and stood up. She began pacing the room. “Of course he never talked about his past. What man alive would want to talk about something that tragic?” Even as she asked the question, Kelli’s anger began to dissolve into the fog of doubt. She knew about the accident she’d been told about all her life—the tragic fire that happened in Louisiana. Yet now she was confronted with newspaper articles about a different kind of accident altogether, in a different state, with different victims.

Denice held up her hands in truce. “Hey, I’m on your side here. I’m just saying that I am not surprised that you’ve found something unusual. He was a good dad, and you had a happy life—of course you didn’t think anything about it. Those of us who were raised in a bit less conventional families, who have a bit less . . . faith . . . in others, well, it’s people like me who notice there are things not quite copacetic about people like your father. Now, why don’t you tell me what it is you’ve found and let’s talk about it.”

Kelli started from the beginning and showed Denice what she’d discovered. “Unbelievable.” Denice just kept mumbling the word. Finally, she said, “Let’s take all this back to my place. We can keep looking through it, and Jones should be home by now, so we can get his input.”

Half an hour later, they were once again seated around the little kitchen table in Denice’s house. Kelli locked her hands behind her neck and slumped forward. “This can’t be real, it just can’t.” But she knew, even as she said the words, that all of it was true, that her father had had another family. She sat up and rested her elbows on the table. “Except, when I think about it, there were all these little clues, like the way my father always avoided downtown Santa Barbara, especially during tourist season. He blamed it on hating crowds—which was true enough—but was the fact that he was in hiding a bigger part of the reason? He was afraid he’d see someone from his old life and they would recognize him? My own father, my best friend for all of my life, constantly looked over his shoulder, and I never suspected a thing.”

“These pictures, then—they are of your mother and your sister and brother?” Jones looked up from where he’d been methodically going through a stack, one photo at a time.

“That’s my assumption. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen any of them.”

“You’re kidding. Your father didn’t have any pictures of them around the house?”

“Not a one—not that I knew of, anyway. I’d always been told that all the old pictures burned in the fire, and there was absolutely nothing left.”

“But I mean, online. Didn’t you ever try to look them up?”

“Sure. Lots of times. But I was always looking for Maria and Preston and Kaitlin Huddleston in Louisiana. Apparently I should have been looking for Alison and Max and Beth Waters in either South Carolina or Tennessee. I’m still not clear where they actually lived. I’ve spent my entire life wondering what my family looked like, and he had these pictures all the time.”

Kelli moved to the chair beside Jones and traced the photo with her hand. “Why wouldn’t he have shown these to me? He still
could have told me they died, but why would he be that cruel, to have these pictures and not share them with me, knowing that I wanted to know?”

“I can answer that question for you, without even thinking about it,” Denice said from across the table. “Mimi.”

Even as she started to deny it, Kelli knew it was the truth. Knew it beyond a doubt. “You’re right. Had to be.”

Jones looked up. “Why Mimi? Wouldn’t she have wanted you to have a picture of your family?”

Kelli shook her head. “Mimi took the word
jealous
to a whole new level. Any time Dad even spoke to another woman, she’d pitch a fit, and if the woman was pretty, well . . .”

“Which is ironic, considering she’s the one who caroused around all night. I always wondered why your father just took it when she was out at some club, why he never got mad. Seeing all this, it’s obvious.” He flipped to the next picture.

“Really? What’s obvious? Because quite frankly none of this makes sense to me.” Between the new information, and partial information, Kelli now possessed, none of it added up to answers for anything.

“It was guilt. Your father must have felt so guilty about what he’d done—to his kids at least, if not to his own wife, that it must have eaten him up. He deserved what he got, and he knew it. Then, he looked at you, the only remaining child he hadn’t betrayed and abandoned, and the last thing he wanted to do was get a divorce. Besides, he was probably afraid Mimi would get mad and tell his secret—surely she knew it.”

“Why wouldn’t he just have divorced Kelli’s mother back at the start of all this?” Denice asked. “That’s what doesn’t make sense.”

“There would be custody issues, financial settlements. This way, he got Kelli free and clear.”

“But why would he take only me?”

“Your siblings were older, right? Too old to believe some cock-eyed story, and even if they did, they were definitely too old to change their names without eventually spilling the beans to someone.” Jones stroked his beard, nodding thoughtfully.

Kelli had to agree that the pieces seemed to fall into place just a little. “You may be right. Maybe knowing all this is what drove Mimi to drink as much as she did.”

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it.” Jones was looking at a picture of Alison. “If your dad put up with Mimi all these years without a bit of fuss, it makes me think your mother must be a real piece of work. I mean, your dad is a pretty docile guy, so there has to be a reason he was desperate enough to do something like this.”

Denice reached over and shoved his shoulder. “Watch what you say, you big lug. We’re talking about Kelli’s mother. You can’t just insult her like that.”

“I’m just saying, it makes me wonder. But then again, why would he have left your brother and sister to face that all alone?”

Kelli rubbed her forehead with her thumb and middle finger, the way she’d watched her father do all his life when he was overwhelmed. She pulled her hand away. “It doesn’t make sense. None of it does.”

“These are answers that you are going to need to find. You need to figure out and accept what happened before so you can start moving forward to the life ahead of you.”

Jones looked up. “You mean she should call her mother and tell her who she is?”

“Are you crazy? Of course not. She might be a raving lunatic, for all we know. It is imperative that the secret stay in this room only.”

“Agreed.”

“Agreed.”

They did an around-the-circle handshake in their own little custom of promise-making.

“It’s a good thing you have that journal I gave you, because you need to focus all your energy on getting through this. Don’t you even think about anything else. We’ve got you covered as far as anything at the restaurant goes, right, Jones?”

“Absolutely. You do what you need to do, Kelli.”

“Thanks, you two. Figuring out what happened in my past is the black bog I’m about to have to wade through. Opening our restaurant in the fall, well, that is going to be the solid ground ahead where I keep my eyes fixed. As long as I have that, it gives me a reason to keep going. To tell you the truth, I’m concerned that for a while, it might be the only thing that does.”

7

M
y dad took me camping every summer when I was growing up. It was always just the
two of us—Mimi wasn’t much of an outdoor
girl—and we’d spend a week at El Capitan
Beach.

By the time I rolled my groggy little self out of my sleeping bag each morning, he would have the camp stove burning full tilt. I’d unzip the
tent and follow my nose toward the smell of bacon and scrambled eggs, my mouth watering in anticipation. He’d
have a spatula in one hand, and he’d gesture toward the sky with the other. “’Bout time you got
up. We’re burning daylight,” and with that, the adventure
would begin. Days spent hiking the cliffs, digging in the
sand, and playing in the waves. He never grew tired
of building sandcastles and pretending for hour after hour that seashells were magical chariots with pebble princes and princesses riding them all around the moat.

By the time the sun started to set across the ocean, Daddy would throw me on his shoulders and carry me up the hill to the campground. The whole way up, he made neighing sounds
and bucking motions, like he was a renegade horse. People
looked at us like we were idiots, but we didn’t care. We were happy. Completely happy.