Substitute for Love (18 page)

Holly covered Audra’s hand with her own. She might not remember specifics but she had an image of her tiny hand, so white against Audra’s.

“You said plain as day, and seriously, that I was your mother.” Audra cleared her throat. “Two things, it was two things that came to me. First that I loved you so much. We had always told you to call me Audie, so you had never called me anything else. I realized that I wanted it, I wanted you to call me your mother.”

She patted Audra’s hand and then let it go so she could blow her nose. “And the other thing?”

“Panic. Because the clerk was looking so confused, and Lily — she knew it frightened me. So she acted like you were the one who was confused and we left. But I knew — I was wrong, but those were the times. I was a teacher, and teaching meant everything to me. It is my calling in life, teaching grade school. I was respected and admired, so much more than where I began in life. But being black, one whisper would have been enough. There were still moral turpitude clauses in teaching contracts. There were people running about trying to make it a state law that no gay person could be a public-school teacher.”

“I do understand that,” Holly said gently. “In some ways it’s no better now.”

“Oh it is. Never believe that things haven’t gotten better,” Audra said firmly. “But back then, what I knew was that in another year no one would ever believe you were confused about who I was to you. You would push your mother and me right out of the closet. Now, Lily was ready.

But I wasn’t. Not telling you for so long, she did that for me.”

“You had your reasons, risks she didn’t have.”

“Don’t be so easy on me.” Audra patted her knee and rose. “I’m going to make some tea. Would you like some?”

“I would, thank you.” Holly followed her to the kitchen, brimming with dizzy elation.

Words seemed to come easier to Audra as she filled the kettle and set it on the stove. “After that, Lily and I agreed we’d have to be more circumspect around you. Rather, I told her how I felt things had to be, though it broke my heart, and she supported me. So, gradually, I just wasn’t there as much, not while you were awake. We found these houses, side by side, and it seemed like a good compromise. Even so, I was amazed at how quickly I lost track of your every word, your every achievement. It hurt.” She turned from the cupboard with a box of tea bags and two mugs. Her mouth was trembling again with painful memory.

“It must have.” Holly reached for the mugs and set them on the white-flecked Formica-topped table.

Audra slumped into a chair and Holly sat down opposite her. “The years seemed to slip by. You just kept getting older. I — I—” She swallowed hard and tears sprang anew in her eyes. “Sweet Jesus. I watched your tenth birthday party through the fence.” She sank her fingers into her short hair and pulled it in self-admonishment. “It was so foolish, wasting all that joy out of fear.”

Audra seemed lost in thought and Holly didn’t disturb her. When the kettle whistled she poured the boiling water over the tea bags. Audra took her mug absently.

“Aunt Zinnia told me that my mother was going to tell me about herself.”

Audra nodded, seeming a long way away. “Yes, that’s true. She wouldn’t have told your aunt of all people about me. We were going to tell you first. Lily and I, we were growing apart because of my stupidity. Losing track of days, sometimes going a week without connecting seriously. And in those six years times changed. I had not believed that as a black woman I could get another job worth having, even if we moved, but by then I was sure that if I had to, I could get one up north, San Francisco or Oakland, I could have done it. Times had indeed changed. So I told her I wanted to be a family again.” She sighed.

“And then the accident.”

Audra sipped her tea and seemed to come back to the present. “The accident. That stupid, stupid accident. Do you remember what day of the week it happened?”

“A Thursday. Aunt Zinnia came to get me at swim practice. I remember that she told me Mother was dead and I thought at first I was cold because my suit was wet.”

“We were going to tell you about us on Saturday.”

That close. She had been that close to the truth. The might-have-been was painful to contemplate. Two more days and she might never have launched herself across Clay’s office into his arms, swept off her feet by the merest hint of encouragement and approval. It wasn’t fair that her mother had died. She dashed away angry tears like the eleven-year-old she had been, then found a thought outside her own miseries. “Who told you?”

Audra’s breath caught. “No one. I wasn’t unduly concerned when the two of you didn’t come home, but I was grading papers — my lord, grading papers. Later I couldn’t remember the last thing I said to her. The next morning I made coffee and started my eggs, then went out to the porch for the paper. The next of kin had been notified, you see, so … so … her name, her picture… right there …”

It was Holly’s turn to offer her shoulder and she did so without reservation.

After a long while, Audra murmured, “There was no one I could tell. Another price of hiding who I was. I had no friends who knew about Lily.” She pushed Holly gently away and drew herself up with dignity. Holly had a sense then of how she might have turned out had Audra been in her life — she would know how to stand tall, how to hold her head up.

“You had to get through it alone?” My God, Holly thought. To suffer the loss of the love of your life and not be able to tell a single soul about the devastation it caused. To watch other people moving around in your lover’s home, taking things, throwing things away that had meaning. “It’s over,” she murmured. “The hiding is over.”

The elation was still there, and it grew as more pieces of her past settled into place.

Audra dabbed at her eyes with a fresh tissue. “I apologize. After all these years —”

“Don’t apologize. I think I would have gone crazy.”

“I almost did. Because there was no way I could see you, to find out if you were handling it okay. Your aunt —” Audra’s mouth settled into a firm, unyielding line.

“My aunt was less than… tender in her parenting,” Holly said slowly. This part of the story could wait for another time, one not so fraught with regrets and hesitant joy.

Audra nodded, and her stiff spine seemed almost brittle. “After all this I think I need a drink. Will you join me?”

Holly accepted because of the symbolic nature of it, and watched as Audra moved the books and knickknacks that blocked the front of the liquor cabinet. There was dust on the lock. She realized abruptly that the dust was another dart, another clue. Audra didn’t drink casually, and Holly had the vaguest impression that even after all that had transpired in the last hour, it was only now that Audra needed courage, because there was more to tell.

There was the last question, after all, and after offering so much truth, and so easily, Audra had not volunteered the answer. Holly knew she would have to ask, certain that the answer was why Audra needed a drink.

They touched tiny crystal aperitif glasses and sipped. Holly wasn’t sure what to call it, but the sweet red wine was very soothing.

She didn’t know quite where to begin. With Aunt Zinnia she had planned her questions to triangulate on the truth. She had never expected an Audra to exist, an Audra who had loved her and knew so many answers. Triangulate, she told herself, but most of all do the math. “How long were you and my mother together before I came along?”

Audra gave her drawn look, then briefly closed her eyes. “We met when she guided my class through a field trip to the university’s research lab. That was before she went into the private sector. I had never in my life seen someone so happy with who she was and what she was doing. Both of us were single, dating, and not sure why nothing seemed to work out with men. We met and it was like the collision of stars between us. You came along three years later.”

Three years. Audra had been there to cut the cord. Had been in her mother’s life when the egg that became her was fertilized. It was the last question.

“Three years,” Holly echoed. “You know what I’m asking, don’t you?”

Audra nodded.

“Can you tell me?”

“She made me promise I wouldn’t. A promise I thought I would have no trouble keeping. But she didn’t know that we’d be here, like this. And that you would need to know. And that, that witch would do what she did.” The brief flare of anger seemed to drain her. “I don’t know if I have the strength.”

Sweet Jesus. Holly could almost hear Audra thinking it. There were a limited number of possibilities to explain her conception. Eliminated was the explanation of an accident as a result of an affair with a man. Eliminated, by Audra’s reluctance to discuss it, was the explanation of a planned conception the two women had undertaken together. What was left?

The anguish in Audra’s eyes, the promise not to speak of it — Holly drained her glass and steeled herself. She had not known she would have to be this strong.

“I’ll tell you, but it won’t be easy, child. For either of us.”

Holly waited, knowing the answer now, or some of it at least.

“Your mother was vivacious, lovely — you know that.”

“I remember that, yes.”

“You’re very like her. Her hair had red glints in it. Her eyes were lighter gray.”

“She had a smile like morning,” Holly added. “I remember that most of all.”

Audra’s tone became clipped and anxious. “After we were together, she was still constantly turning men away, citing lack of time, heavy career demands, anything to put them off. There was one man who persisted. He worked at the same company and found ways to drop into the lab. She finally agreed to go out so she could tell him privately that she wasn’t interested. They’d gone to high school together, you see. She thought she knew him.” ‘

She wanted to tell Audra to stop, but there was no courage in continuing the silence.

“She was always gentle and kind, but with him she was very firm, she told me later, and even then he wouldn’t listen. He kept insisting she’d change her mind if only she’d give him a chance. He’d always wanted her, and he’d even pretended to like Zinnia to be closer to her. When she wouldn’t relent, he told her he didn’t believe what Zinnia had hinted at. Lily never thought he would do what he did, even as he did it.” Audra pressed her tissue across her eyes. Her voice rasped out the agonizing truth. “He did it to fix her. All the time he did it he told her he was making her normal.”

Holly’s head was spinning. She rested it on her leaden arms crossed on the table. The roaring in her ears finally receded and she realized that Audra hadn’t stopped talking.

“—charges, but she’d taken a shower. I had helped her take it, I held her, and I wanted him to pay. But she knew him, and the cops wouldn’t care. Just a misunderstanding on a date, that’s what they would have said. Most of them would have thought she deserved it, had they found out about me. It was the — it changed my views on capital punishment, because I wanted him to die. Painfully, and all the while screaming no.”

It echoed inside her head, Aunt Zinnia’s oft-repeated statement about her mother turning away perfectly good suitors. Aunt Zinnia thought her mother had gotten what she deserved, but then condemned her for getting pregnant from it. And would have condemned her if she had had an abortion, and most certainly did condemn her for having the baby. The baby… her. Having her.

Audra’s hands were shaking, but she wasn’t done yet.

I can’t, Holly thought, I can’t take any more. Not right now. But there was more. Her mother had known him, and so had Aunt Zinnia. She might have known him, too, not knowing he was a rapist — no. Oh no, no, God. She could not stop her mind from solving for the simplest answer.

Audra was just looking at her. Barely above a whisper, she said, “You’ve figured it all out, haven’t you?”

Holly nodded. Realizing how she no longer felt about Clay had been an earthquake, then the desire for women like being struck by lightning. What could this feeling be, then, on top of the others? The thunder of the past rolled over her.

She didn’t want to say his name, but found no way to avoid it. “Uncle Bernard.”

Audra nodded and reached for the bottle of wine. Holly was flooded with rage. It washed away to emptiness, then she felt as if she burned with molten heat. Her heart pounded, then missed beats. The answer was untenable, unthinkable. Aunt Zinnia had brought the man who had raped and impregnated her mother into their home and made Holly call him Uncle.

What kind of twisted reasoning was that? How had she compelled him? How could she have rationalized it? How had she thought Holly would feel when she knew the truth?

He was dead. She was glad.

Mother, she thought… dear Mother.

“She loved you. The moment she found out about you she was joy itself.” Audra was perceptively following her thought process. “She felt that she won, in the end, because she had you and all your love, and all that wonder and joy. Nothing else mattered. She never told him about you, but Zinnia knew — she knew. And she did what she did.”

When Holly didn’t answer, Audra looked up from her study of the wine. “Come to the sofa,” she said sharply.

The lights seemed to be flickering out as Audra helped her lie down. Then there was only oblivion.

Even after coffee and eggs the next morning, Holly felt empty. The feel of silverware in her hands was remote.

Shock, she supposed. Even considering why she felt this way was a faraway thing, too.

They looked through the rest of the photo albums together. There were math tests and report cards, all ending abruptly just before her twelfth birthday.

“Thank you,” was all Holly could say. “You were right to take them. My aunt would have destroyed them.” She could not bring herself to say her aunt’s name.

“I want you to have them,” Audra urged. “Take them because they were always meant to be yours. I have my memories.”

“May I come to see you again?”

“I would love it if you would. I —” Audra stopped, looking lost. “I didn’t think I deserved that. We’ve hardly talked about what’s happened to you since she died, and I do so want to know.”