You Only Get So Much (22 page)

Chapter 45

It's morning now. Ella
hands me a cup of coffee at the vintage red and gray Formica kitchen table. I
don't even care that it's that cheap blonde roast that older people drink. I
just need coffee because I'm running on fumes. I hadn't slept a wink last
night. Before going to bed Libby and I went through every photo album and every
paper we could find in the house that wasn't behind a locked door, trying to
discover more information about Jane. This did nothing to ease my sleep that
night. It only raised more questions.

Last night, I noticed
the house didn't look like it had changed one bit since the 1970s or early 80s.
Orange curtains and wood paneling. Large mirrors with ornate brass frames.
Glass coffee tables. And those were the updated areas. The kitchen looked like
a scene from the 1960s. Straight out of Mad Men. The house was like a time
capsule.

"My girl was a
sweet girl, you know," Ella says sitting down at the table next to Libby
and myself. "Just confused sometimes. Been that way since the beginning.
Confused I mean. Well, sweet too."

I don't hesitate to
start the interrogation. I've waited long enough and been fooled too many
times.

"I have no desire
to play games with you and I know you're not Libby's aunt. You're her
grandmother. Let's just get that piece of news out of the way up front," I
say. "So, I'm going to be very direct and ask you specific questions about
Jane because her daughter and I are more confused than ever about her."

"Jane was it?"
Ella says, but she's not surprised. And she didn't deny she is Libby's
grandmother.

"She told me her
name was Lisa," Libby chimes in.

Ella nods her head and
blows into her hot coffee.

"She picked those
names, not me. They weren't her God-given names, that's for sure. You're
talking about Esther. Esther Mae. That was my momma's name and I gave it to my
oldest. But if she's Jane or Lisa or Esther or whatever else, that's my
girl."

Esther Mae Mackey. I can
hardly believe it. It was Jane who crossed out our initials at the Carving
Shelter. She just signed it with her real initials—EMM. But why?

Ella looks at Libby.

"You, my dear, are
the spitting image of your mother. Prettiest thing," she says. "And I
dare say you look like your daddy too."

She pauses and glances
at me.

"I knew someday one
of you, or both of you, would come knocking at my door. I did not expect it
last night, not one bit. I thought you were the plumber I called," she
says.

Something about that
doesn't sit well with me. No plumber ever showed up and Ella didn't call to
cancel one.

"How did you know
we'd come here?" I ask.

"Because Esther Mae
said you would. I just thought it'd be sooner. When Libby and Esther Mae left,
I thought it'd be no time at all before they'd pop up somewhere and you'd find
them, Bill."

"I didn't know I
was supposed to be looking," I say.

But I also know that I
spent 12 years alone in Montana, avoiding everyone I knew and if there was
something to be found, I hadn't see it.

"Why did you come
to see us in Port Orchard?" Libby asks her grandmother.

"Because your
mother asked me to," Ella replies. "Surprised the hell out of me
getting that call after so long. I was thankful she was still with us, but
surprised. She wanted me to spend some time with her fella, Frank. But I told
her that man was no good. I could tell with that one. The way he looked at her,
I could tell."

Libby shakes her head.

"Frank was
OK," Libby says.

"He's the one who
told me about Libby," I say.

"Well, he done
right by you then," she says. "Good thing. I just didn't get a right
sense about him and I told her as much."

"Why did Jane do
this? Why did she fake her death in that fire in New York? Why did she come
here?" I ask.

"A daughter should
come here," Ella says. "It's home. I've always kept it just the way
she remembered it."

"Did Jane live here
before? Was she raised here?" I ask.

"Of course. Where
else would it be?"

This explains why the
house looks like a 1960s period drama.

"I thought she was
from Colorado," I say.

"Me too,"
Libby says.

"No, she
wasn't," Ella says.

"And you keep your
house decorated this way because this was how she remembered it? Why?" I
ask.

"They said it would
be good for her," Ella says.

"Who?" Libby
asks.

"The doctors . . .
but that's her business. I don't want to talk about this anymore," Ella
says. "I've said more than I want to."

"You haven't told
us anything. And it's our business too. Our lives," Libby says, her voice
rising in frustration. "Why did you pretend to be my aunt?"

Ella pauses and
straightens out the sleeves of her white blouse. She takes in a big breath and
continues.

"I didn't decide to
be your aunt, dear," Ella says. "Your mother decided that for me. I
played my part and you should be grateful for it. She loved you with all her
heart. When she showed up here with you, when you were just a little one, I
hadn't seen her in a very long time. I didn't know where she had been or why
she suddenly needed me, but my baby was back home and I had a
granddaughter—you—and your mom said she needed me to be Aunt Ella.
So I was. No questions asked."

"No questions
asked? That's ridiculous. Did you know she faked her death to get here?" I
press further.

"Not at first. Only
later on when she started talking about leaving again."

"Did you also know
that I was alive and well and that Jane took my daughter away from me?" I
ask.

She nods her head and
looks ashamed.

"Later, yes. She
told me. But I just wanted my baby back home. She'd been gone for so
long," she said. "I didn't want her to leave. I know that's not
right. What she did wasn't right, but a daughter needs her momma and I did what
I could to take care of her. She needed me so much. It was her condition that
did it."

"What
condition?" I ask.

"Oh, my, Bill, you
really didn't know, did you? I thought that maybe you might, but she was so
good at hiding it, even from me when she was younger. That was a symptom that
she tried to fight it, you know."

She takes a sip of her
coffee and fiddles with the paper napkin it's sitting on.

"When she was
little, maybe 12, she locked herself in her bedroom," Ella says. "No
eating. No talking. All day. She just shut off the rest of the world and stayed
in bed for a few weeks. I'd try to get her to talk to me. Tried to get her to
go to school, but it didn't make a difference. She'd just stare at the wall,
you see. I'd never seen that before in a child. Either of my children. She just
went dark. I asked the doctors, even had one come to the house here, and they
didn't have any right explanation for it. Said it was something inside her. In
her head. Mental. Then one day she snapped out of it. Her brother—"

"So, I have an
uncle?" Libby interrupts.

"Yes, dear, you do.
Let me finish. Her little brother Alex—he was maybe 9 then—was
outside climbing that tree," she points outside to a large oak tree.
"He fell, you see and busted up his arm and shoulder real bad. He was
wailing like the dickens, he was. But I wasn't here to help. I'd gone down the
road to the Avery's house to return the lawn mower I'd borrowed. For whatever
reason, her brother's screaming knocked something loose in her head and she
came down to help him. She got him cleaned up and inside, then ran and got me.
Then she was better for a long while."

"It happened
again?" I ask.
 

"Occasionally she'd
go dark again. That's what I called it. Going dark. All through her school time
it happened maybe four or five more times. Then she'd be right again, like
nothing had happened, until the last time she left here and I didn't hear from
her again till she came back with Lib and I became Aunt Ella."

She pauses and looks to
Libby.

"I don't want you
to think badly of your momma," she says. "She only wanted the best
for you. Always. She tried. There was just something that she had that made it
hard for her and she needed something to change. She didn't like sticking too
long in one place."

"What was it?"
Libby asks. "What did she have?"

"They called it
bipolar disorder, but back then people didn't really understand it. Not like
they do today," she said, confirming my suspicion. "Some people get
really depressed and then they have serious episodes. They call them manic
episodes and they do really odd things and they don't act like themselves. It
can be treated with medication."

"The pills,"
Libby says.

I nod my agreement.

"She was a good
woman," Ella says. "She was just sick and she hid it."

"If she was so
good, then why did she do all this? And why did you let her?" Libby says,
her face turning red.

"She left when she
was 18 years old and I didn't hear from her again for 20 years.
 
What was I supposed to do? Get her
locked up some place? No, I wouldn't do that. I thought that if she stayed here
then I could watch her. She could take her medicine and be all right. And she
was. Don't you see that? She just went dark sometimes . . ."

Going dark. It's painful
to admit that the signs of her having a condition—or going
dark—were there for me to see. She did take time to herself. She did stay
locked in our bedroom, but I didn't know that it was part of a larger issue.
She never told me. And I was preoccupied myself. When she was dark, I was writing,
locked in a little room in the attic. I'm not making an excuse for her, but I
was probably the worst person for her to be with when this happened. I mirrored
her actions and locked myself away.

Maybe she pushed me away
to save me from her illness. Maybe that's why I started my relationship with
Monique. But that's making an excuse for me too and that's not right.

"But why did she
hide it?" I ask. "Why didn't she tell me? I could have helped. I
would have understood. This happens to people."

"I can't dare to
know the answer to that," Ella says. "I agree with you. Fighting this
alone . . . maybe that's why. If she didn't discuss it with you, it wasn't
real. Other than me, she never talked about it with anyone. But I really don't
know. It's not right no matter what; I know that for sure."

I let this news soak in.
She had something wrong with her all along and I didn't know it.

"So, I have an
uncle?" Libby says.

"Yes. Alex. Lives
in Colorado—maybe that's why she said she was from there. He's got a nice
wife and two boys. Alex and I aren't on the best of terms you see, so it's his
wife who keeps me updated on my grandsons."

"I have cousins
too?" Libby says, excited.

"Yes," Ella
says. "They're both in elementary school. I'll show you a picture.

She pulls a box from a drawer
in the kitchen. She removes a stack of photos, which are wedged between several
silver envelopes. Ella scoops up the envelopes and tosses them back into the
drawer before returning to the table.
 

"They went on a
vacation to Disney World and sent me these pictures. I don't do that Facebook.
I like the real thing," she says, holding up a picture to Libby.
"This here's Alex and his wife Brenda and the boys, John and Robert."

Libby nods and takes the
picture for a closer look. She smiles at me.

"I think the boys
look like me," Libby says.

"They are family
after all," I say, without looking at the picture.

"Look," she
says, handing me the photo.

A family of four stands
in front of Sleeping Beauty's Castle. Parents and two kids. They're wearing
rain slickers and the sky behind them is dark gray. Puddles have formed at
their feet. The boys are still smiling though.

I do not see a
resemblance to Libby, but I won't tell her that. The woman in the picture is
not familiar at all. But it's the man—Alex—who stands out to me.
He's chubby and short with a gray goatee. It doesn't matter that he's wearing
Mickey Mouse ears, a blue polo shirt and tan shorts under his slicker. Or that
his arm is affectionately wrapped around his wife. I see those things, but they
don't register with me.

Because I already met
the man in this photo—Alex. He's the man who attended my dad's funeral,
told me Libby was in jail in Seattle and called himself Frank. But based on
Libby's non-reaction—this isn't the Frank she knows.

I've been lied to.
Again.
 

Chapter 46

I don't hide my reaction
well. The sip of coffee that had just entered my mouth goes down the wrong pipe
and I choke, spiting coffee all over the table. My involuntary response must be
my body's way of dealing with this strange turn of events, but it forces me to
rush into the bathroom where I vomit into the toilet like a high school kid who
drank too much of his parents booze.

"You OK in
there?" Libby says through the door.

"I'm fine," I
spit out. "Just need a second."

"Alright," she
says. "If you're OK, we're going downstairs to look at the flood damage.
Come down when you're cleaned up."

I say a silent prayer
when she goes away. I need time to process what I just saw and to figure out
who this Alex person is and why he told me he was Frank. I'm getting damn sick
and tired of being lied to. I look at the sink and wonder to myself if I could
rip it off its foundation and throw it against the wall. Maybe that would make me
feel better. I give it a little tug, but it's in there pretty good so I
refrain.

I think back to what I
know about "Frank." He went to my father's funeral. He called me and
we met at a diner. He showed me a picture of himself and my Jane by a
semi-truck. Then he told me about Libby, so I could get her out of jail. And I
believed everything he told me. Up until this point it had all been true.

But what I can't figure
out is if he is really Alex—Libby's uncle and Jane's brother why didn't
he just say that? Why would Jane's brother pretend to be her boyfriend? It's
creepy and weird. Couldn't he have just told me what he needed to tell me
without making up some elaborate story?
 
His goal was to get me to help Libby. That was it. What is it with this
family that they need to lie and create fantasies to dupe people?

 
Frank said I'd never see him again and I
never really questioned it. I thought that he just didn't want to deal with it
anymore. If he wasn't the guy who lived in Port Orchard, wouldn't I see that the
two men were different people at some point? If Libby decided she wanted to
stay in Port Orchard, I would have met the real Frank—the one she knew.
Again, a lie for no apparent reason. Now, I'm even more curious about the real
Frank—the guy who lived with my wife.

It's not as if the
chances of me finding out about him were slim. It was almost assured. Libby
knows Alex's mom, even if she thought Ella was her aunt. Adding me into this
equation had to cross his mind. How could he not expect that I'd want to connect
those dots, and that it would all eventually lead to him?

Since Alex and Ella
aren't "on the best of terms" maybe he didn't know that Jane and
Libby lived here at one point. Libby was surprised to learn that she had an
uncle, too. So he obviously didn't come around here when they were living with
Ella. Yet that seems far-fetched. A mother and son never talk about their
missing sister?

I looked Alex straight
in the eye that night in the diner. I believed everything he said. And with the
exception of who he was, it was all true. I remember thinking that my gut told
me to trust him. That he wasn't spinning a tale for my benefit. I don't
question that. But there must be some other reason that he pretended to be
Frank and didn't tell me who he really was.

I decide to keep my
questions to myself or at least not be obvious about it. Ella wouldn't have
shown the photographs to us if she was in on some wacky conspiracy, so I have
to take her at her word that she just wanted to help her daughter who was
afflicted with a mental illness. It's understandable at some level.

So if I fly off the
handle and rip the sink from the wall and demand answers, she could alert Alex
and any chance I had of getting to the bottom of this whole mess would be gone
for good. Better to hold it in, while slowly chipping away at the truth.

Libby doesn't need to
have more turmoil in her life created by her mother and me. And telling her
what I just learned, without confirming it first, would crush her. So I'm
keeping my mouth shut until I know more, which eats at me.

Libby deserves to have
answers too, but it's not fair to send her emotions through the grinder while I
blindly stumble through this family's lies.

*
* *

The next few days are
excruciating. I want to jump out of my skin because we're just wasting time
here. Libby volunteers us to do repair work in the basement, which you'd think
would give me more time to talk with Ella without raising any suspicion, but
she's keeping her distance. I don't know if that's intentional or not, but it's
frustrating nonetheless. She's aloof and considering everything that's
happened, I'd have expected her to want more time with us. While we bag up
soggy blankets, grimy Mason jars and plastic knickknacks in the humid, squishy
basement, Ella is upstairs nursing her "bad back." I suspect the old
bat just wants free labor too. That plumber she claimed was coming over that
first night still hasn't shown up. It makes me again wonder who she actually
expected at the door when we arrived.

The plumber wasn't even
necessary anyway. I was able to use some old tools and a pipe from the hardware
store to fix the leak.

"You're a handy guy
to have around," Ella says after inspecting the repair. She'd emerged from
her room for the first time all day.

"If only your
daughter had thought so," I say, just as harshly as I'd intended.

"I can't explain
her, dear," she says. "She did what she did for her own reasons.
Don't take it personally."

"Really? Don't take
it personally? That's bull," I say. "It's nothing but personal."

"Here's how I see
it," she says. "Life is very little about what happens to you, but a
lot about how you react to it. You see terrible things happen every day and if
we allow them to, they will grind us into the dirt. We'll be defeated and
helpless. But we have the right to choose how we respond to terrible things,
you see. It's how you react to it. That's a choice."

"That doesn't
change the fact of what she did," I say.

"No, but you can
either wallow in pity or overcome," she says. "What do you choose?"

"You didn't
overcome," I say. "You pretended like what she did was OK by ignoring
it. You enabled her to do what she did. If you have the right to choose how you
react, you should have reacted differently."

"Maybe so,"
she mutters. "Maybe so."

Libby appears from the
other room as Ella starts her slow climb upstairs and back to her room alone.

"You're being very
hard on her," Libby says.

"Yes, I am."

"Why? Is she the
one you're mad at?"

I have to think for a
minute.

"Partially,
yes," I say.

"Well, I think your
anger is misplaced," she says. "Ella didn't tell the truth, sure, but
she did what she could for me when I was here. She didn't ask Mom to be someone
else, she just wanted the best for me, even if Mom didn't see it or notice she
was doing it. I don't remember every little thing about my time here, but I
thought of Ella. Aunt Ella—as family. I remember that."

"You didn't lose
two people like I did," I say. I'm bitter and I know it.

"No? How about
losing you? Did you forget that? How about the fact that I lived with a mother
who was here one day, gone the next? Yeah, I know what it feels like to lose
someone."

"That's not what I
meant," I begin to say.

"I'm sorry you've
been dragged into this, but you're not the only one who is having a hard time,"
she says.

"I know, I
just—"

"Enough," she
says. "I need a break."

She stomps through the
wet towels on the floor and up the stairs, leaving me alone in the damp
basement surrounded by buckets of water and my own inflated sense of
self-importance.

*
* *

I make the decision to
go straight to Colorado as soon as possible. I'll get Libby checked in to her
flight to Spokane and have Michelle pick her up at the airport. I'll leave
Minnesota and be in Denver in just a few hours. I'll confront Alex and get the
answers I need. Then I can finally let Jane rest in peace—and move on.
Michelle and our life together is waiting for me back home. I need to finish
this.

I lay awake on our final
night in Minnesota, trying to figure out what I'm going to tell Libby at the
airport when I send her in one direction while I go another. Her flight jitters
are not forgotten. I decide to tell her that I need to meet with someone about
my books. She knows Kendall was trying to get me to publish them, so maybe
she'd buy that story. I hate to lie to her. She doesn't deserve that, but I
tell myself that it's for her own protection. Who knows what Alex will say
about Jane?

It's best to keep her
away from this unknown for now. If, at some later date, I think she needs to
meet her uncle and it won't do her any harm, then I'll consider it. But
tomorrow, I'll confront him and see what I can find out.
 

But I never get the
chance.

My phone vibrates on the
table next to me. I glance at the time on the phone's digital display. It's
past 11:00 at night. The number doesn't come up as one of the very few contacts
I have saved in my phone, but the 509 area code matches Spokane. I push the
answer button.

"Hello," I
say.

"Billy, it's
me," a familiar female voice says. "I know you don't want to talk to
me and I get that. And I know I haven't done anything lately to earn your help,
but I'm in trouble and I need you, Billy. When are you coming back to
Spokane?"

"What do you need,
April?" I ask, knowing that anytime my drug-addict sister wants help, she
needs money for drugs or bail.

"I don't want to
say it over the phone," she says. "Not here."

"Just ask me for
the money," I say, scolding her like a child. "That's all you ever
do."

"No, it's not like
that this time, Billy, I swear."

"That's what you
always say," I say, then wonder out loud, "How did you even get this
number?"

"I got it from
Kendall. She gave it to me."

"You talked to
Kendall? Why?"

"Because I'm in
trouble, Billy, and I need my brother. That's why."

"I'm not giving you
money, April. I'm just not going to do that. So there's no point in even
asking."

There's a long silence
on the line as neither of us speak.

"It's not like that
. . . that's not why," she finally says.
 

"Then what? What's
so important that you can't tell me over the phone?

And then she says in
almost a whisper, "I'm pregnant and someone is trying to hurt me."

Looks like my trip to
see Alex will have to wait.