When We Meet Again (21 page)

My father stopped and turned to me. We were alone in a dark stairwell leading back to the ground. “I know, honey. I’ve been to her grave.”

I felt a lump in my throat. “You have?”

“Several times.”

“But—” I paused, struggling to understand. “But I thought you hated her.”

“I didn’t hate her, Emily,” my father said softly. “I hated myself, and I thought Monica was the way out. It was too late by the time I realized what a mistake I was making. I owe your mom a million apologies.”

I didn’t know what to say. “I haven’t been back since the year she died, you know. I just finished high school and left.” I felt like an idiot as I blinked back tears. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

My father put a hand on my shoulder and kept it there. “I’m sorry, Emily. I didn’t know you hadn’t returned. This must be very difficult for you.”

For a split second, I almost told him about the pregnancy. I almost told him that the real reason I left was to have my baby far away from the eyes of those who knew me, far away from Nick, far away from the memories that haunted me. But my father spoke before I had a chance to.

“Is that why you don’t want to go to Atlanta?” he asked. “Does it have to do with your mom?”

“How do you know I don’t want to go to Atlanta?”

“I could see it in your eyes at Franz Dahler’s place.” He hesitated. “And I can see it now.”

I regarded him warily for a moment. “It’s not because of Mom,” I finally said.

“Okay,” he said after a while, when I didn’t elaborate. He took his hand off my shoulder, and suddenly, I felt exhausted. When he began walking down the stairs again, I followed, feeling strangely incomplete.

That night, after dinner at our hotel bar, my father and I had ordered after-dinner drinks—Laphroaig fifteen-year scotch on the rocks for me, and Rémy Martin cognac for him—and were talking about what time we’d meet in the lobby the next morning for our ride to the airport when my father stopped midsentence and put a hand on my forearm. “No pressure, Emily, but do you want to tell me about Atlanta before we’re there?”

“No.” But that wasn’t true. I wanted to share the story of Catherine with him, if only to lessen the weight on my own shoulders. Myra was the only one who knew, which left me carrying the burden alone most of the time. The search for my own grandfather—who had missed my father’s childhood in the same way I had missed my daughter’s—was bringing it all to the surface.

“Okay.” There was something about the look in my father’s eyes that told me he wouldn’t judge me. “But whatever it is, I’m here if you ever want to talk.”

Was I being foolishly optimistic? Maybe. But the words were already rolling off my tongue before I could stop them. “I had a child once,” I said.

“A child?” Time seemed to freeze for a moment. I watched his face, tensing for a sign that my words had shocked him enough to make him retreat. But his hand stayed on my arm, and his expression didn’t grow judgmental. It grew sad. “Oh, honey. What happened?” he asked after a long silence.

I looked down at his hand, thinking for a minute that it felt like a tether to reality. “Not long after Mom died, I . . . I moved to Florida with Grandma Margaret and gave the baby up for adoption.” I paused and added, “I just walked away from her like she didn’t matter at all.”

“Oh, Emily.” His eyes filled with tears. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“It’s not like
you
made me give her away,” I said.

“But I wasn’t there for you, and I can never change that.”

“No. You can’t.”

He was silent for a moment. “The baby was a girl?”

I nodded.

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“No.” I took a deep breath. “She just turned eighteen, and I’ve been posting on all the adoption sites and looking for posts that might be from her. But maybe she doesn’t want anything to do with her birth mother. Why would she, right? Maybe she feels like I didn’t want her. Maybe she thinks I never thought of her again.”

“I’m sure she’s not thinking that, Emily.”

“I thought it of you,” I said before I could stop myself.

He stared at me for a moment before looking away. “Emily, I’ve told you that you were on my mind every day.”

“Yeah, well, you had a funny way of showing it.” I sighed. “I built up all these stories in my head about you. I was convinced you hated me. What if my daughter feels like that about me?”

“No,” he said firmly. “You felt that way because I knowingly hurt you. What you did was different from what I did. You had the courage to do what you felt was right for your child. I, on the other hand, only had the weakness to do what felt right for me. You made the choice to give your child a better life. I’m sure she can see that.” He paused. “You shouldn’t be carrying around this kind of burden. I can see it in your eyes. But you made a responsible choice. You made a choice out of love. You can’t feel guilty about that.”

“Yes, I can. I can feel guilty because I did it for the wrong reasons. I did it because I was lost and scared and alone.”

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry you were alone, Emily. If I’d known . . .”

“What, you would have miraculously rematerialized? When you couldn’t be bothered to come back for me after Mom died?”

“I was having a lot of problems with Monica by then,” my father said haltingly. “She—she wouldn’t let me come back for you. She said if I did, she’d leave me. And instead of fighting her on that, instead of standing up for you, I just caved. It was easier that way.”

“Well, gee,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “It makes total sense now that you’ve explained.”

“I can never expect you to forgive me for that. And I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know. In the end, all you have are the people you love, and I . . . ” He trailed off and bowed his head. Neither of us said anything for a few minutes, until he broke the silence. “Have you tried hiring a private agency to find your daughter?”

I sighed and shook my head. “I can’t afford it, but even if I could, it’s not my place. I gave up the right to know her when I let her go, didn’t I? And what if her life is going perfectly, and I throw her off balance by intruding in it? No, I’m dying to know that she’s okay, but I can’t risk disrupting her life. So I’m waiting. If she wants to find me, I’m here. I’m findable.”

“Do you think that maybe it might help to let her know you love her and still think about her?” my dad asked after a pause. “But in a way that leaves the ball in her court and lets her come to you if she wants to?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think I’d know how to do that. I gave her up, Dad. I don’t want to hurt her any more than I already have.”

“The records are sealed?”

“Yeah. It was a closed adoption.”

“Have you tried the agency that facilitated the adoption?”

“They went out of business years ago. And the owner died. I’ve tried every way I can think of to access the records, but they’re just not there.”

“And you’re on all those adoption search sites?”

“Every one of them.”

“Then when your daughter is ready someday, she’ll come looking for you. And in the meantime, all you can do is to be the best person you can be, to make the best choices you can make, and to try hard to fix the things that are broken.” He paused. “We make mistakes along the way. We all do. That’s life. You have to do your best to correct any damage you’ve done. But then, you have to forgive yourself.”

I surprised myself by bursting into tears, and then I shocked myself even more by letting my father pull me into his chest and hold me tightly until I stopped crying. “I don’t think I’ll ever feel at peace until I know that my daughter is okay,” I murmured. “Is that crazy?”

“No,” my father said softly.
“That’s what being a parent is: loving someone so much that they’ll be a part of you forever, no matter what. Knowing that your happiness is forever tied to theirs.”

“But
you
don’t feel that way,” I said. I didn’t mean it as an accusation, and I felt a little guilty when my father’s eyes filled again.

“Of course I do, Emily. I’ve just screwed everything up so badly that it’s hard for you to see it.”

I nodded, looking away. When I turned back to him, he looked like he was struggling to say something, but finally, he sighed heavily and said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty exhausted. Should we head to bed so that we’re fresh in the morning for our flight?”

“Sure.” But there was a part of me that was disappointed. I hadn’t felt this kind of connection with my father in years, and I was afraid that in the morning, it would be like it never happened. I stood and gave him an awkward smile. “Good night, Dad.”

I couldn’t sleep that night, whether because of the time change, my conversation with my dad, or my anxiety over our trip to Atlanta the next day. I got up around four in the morning to log in to the adoption sites I frequented, thinking how poetic it would be if my daughter had finally responded while I was across the ocean, searching for her great-grandfather. But my search strings continued to dangle unanswered, and so I refreshed most of them and reposted on some of the boards.

I turned off the light around five and tried to will myself back to sleep, but I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing the face of my daughter.

Because we’d booked our travel so late, my father and I were separated on the plane the next morning. I dozed a bit during the ten-hour flight, but when I was awake, I was thinking about what he had said about forgiving myself. Still, by the time we touched down in Atlanta just before three in the afternoon, I felt unsettled to be back. We rented a car and set out on I-85, but as we passed familiar exit after familiar exit and saw the skyline that I knew so well, I felt myself coming quickly undone. It was one thing to try to find peace over the decision to give up Catherine. It was another to find closure over the way I’d dealt with Nick. He still lived here; it’s where his advertising agency was located. With every mile I drove, I felt like I was getting closer to my past.

My mother was here too, in every sight and sound. I remembered going to Turner Field with her for Braves games a few times a season. The last time she took me to the Coca-Cola museum, when I was twelve, felt like just yesterday. There was Centennial Olympic Park, where we’d both volunteered during the 1996 Olympics, and the Georgia Tech campus, which we’d visited my junior year of high school while I was trying to decide on colleges. The world passing by outside was so familiar, but it all belonged to a previous life.

“You okay?” my father asked as we got off the highway at exit 251A and took a right.

“Mostly.” We turned right on Peachtree, passing the High Museum of Art, where Nick had once taken me for what he jokingly dubbed a “grown-up date.” I swallowed hard as I tried not to remember the way it had felt when he kissed me that Saturday afternoon in front of my favorite Monet. It was all still vivid in my mind, perhaps because I’d made such a conscious effort to lock it away.

We turned right again a quarter mile later onto a side street, and a half block down, we drew to a stop in front of a squat, gray building with a metal statue of a ballerina out front. “This is it,” my father said as he put the car in Park. “The Ponce Gallery. We should have a half hour before it closes. Let’s go.”

Inside, the lighting in the entryway was dim, and there was no one at the reception desk. While my father went off in search of the owner, I gazed around at the art on the walls.

I’d only been here once—at a Christmas party for my mother’s office, back when I was sixteen—but it looked the same. Tall, white walls. Black-framed monochromatic photographs. White-framed modern art with bold pops of color. It felt more like a wealthy person’s apartment than an art space, but that was the gallery’s charm. It apparently survived—and thrived—on donations from some of Atlanta’s wealthiest families, who considered it more exclusive and personal than the High Museum. As my father returned, I looked behind him at the dapper, middle-aged man in a perfectly cut navy suit and silver bow tie following him and did my best to pretend that I wasn’t as uncultured as I was.

“Greetings,” the man said in an accent I couldn’t quite place. “This gentleman here tells me you were the recipient of the lovely painting I sent to Munich.”

My eyes widened, and I glanced at my father, who smiled. We had found the painting’s source.

“
You
sent the painting?” I studied his face, trying to figure out who he was.

He nodded. “Well, I was the one who shipped it, in any case. I’m Walter Pace. I own the Ponce. Would you like to come with me to my office? Perhaps we’ll be more comfortable there.”

My father and I followed Walter down a narrow hallway to a sprawling office in the back of the building. The walls featured floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked a small, meticulously kept garden in the back. “Please, sit,” Walter said, gesturing to two stiff upholstered chairs that faced his desk. “Now where were we? Ah yes, the painting.” Walter rifled through a few papers. “Now, you see, we don’t do restoration work here at the Ponce. And though the painting was in beautiful shape, the owner was insistent on having it restored to perfection. Admittedly, it did appear that it had been damaged slightly by long-term exposure to moisture in the air.”

I leaned forward. “But who was the owner? Who gave you the painting?”

“Oh, I’m really meant to keep that piece of information confidential.” He laced his fingers together and propped his elbows on his desk. “Yes, she was most insistent on discretion.”

“She?” I repeated. I realized I’d been assuming that the sender was a man.

He nodded. “She wanted this done in total anonymity. Then again, you
are
the one she had the painting sent to, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” My heart was pounding wildly. “She must have been reaching out, right? Why else would she send the painting?”

Walter studied me for a moment. “The problem is, I have no way to contact her. She wrote that she would check in with me to ensure that the painting had been properly delivered, but I haven’t heard from her since I received it.”