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A sudden, unexpected sadness swept over me. As mentally ill as she was, Tanya was my daughter and much more. I had loved her and now I’d lost her. She would never know who her father was. That secret would remain mine alone until the day I died.
I hugged Paige and Will closer to me. After Anabel’s death, I had lost them, too, in some way, but here they were hugging me back. My beloved children.
I was far from being the perfect mother, but at this moment, I felt like the luckiest mother in the world.
SIXTY-THREE
PAIGE
Ten months later: October
Dearest Grandma,
I love RISD! I’m one month in and it’s even more than I expected. The student body is as extraordinary as the faculty. For the first time, I feel like I fit in, like I’ve found my tribe. And Providence is really cool too—with its thrift stores, art galleries, and coffee shops—such an eclectic blend of colonial and cutting-edge architecture. Thank you, Grandma, for the BEST gift of my life!
I’m taking a big course load, a mix of art history classes and fine arts. I have an advisor who thinks I’m a really gifted sculptor, and he’s already put me in an advanced sculpting class. I’m working with marble! At the end of freshman year, one of my creations will be exhibited at the RISD Museum. I hope you will come here and see it.
And guess what? I have a new boyfriend. His name is Aiden and he’s from New York City. He grew up in the West Village (his parents are both artists) and he’s really cool. Plus, he’s a vegan. He wants to be a fashion photographer and can even make me look like a supermodel.
Lance (remember him?) has texted me numerous times, begging me to get in touch with him, but I’ve not responded. He’s ancient history now. He didn’t get into Brown or any of his top picks. He’s going to UC Davis, and in one of his texts, he said he hates it. That’s karma for you. You get what you deserve. Just like what my best friend, Jordan, always says.
I miss Will terribly and FaceTime with him daily. He’s doing great despite Mom and Dad’s separation, juggling weekdays with Mom and weekends with Dad. Right after Dad moved out of the house, Mom got Will another dog, a super-cute black Lab rescue, which Will named Pixel; she’s a girl and loves Bear. Will says she reminds him of me because she can leap five feet in the air to catch a ball. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you…I’m starting up a girls’ basketball team!
More exciting news! Will’s team won a gold medal in the national high school robotics competition. Oh, and one more thing… Will has a girlfriend… an Asian girl on his team named Lisa. I’m so happy my brother is going for smart, unusual girls.
Well, that’s it for now. I can’t wait to see everyone and hear all about your trip over Thanksgiving break.
I love you so much!
xoPaige
A smile blooms on my face as I fold the letter and seal it in a stamped envelope. Grandma despises emails and texts; she’ll be so happy to get my handwritten note, a lost art form, she says, when she and Grandpa get back next week from their three-month around-the-world cruise. Draining my latte, I gather my backpack, dash out of the campus coffee shop, and drop the letter in a mailbox en route to my favorite class.
The class takes place in a massive studio in a building known as Memorial Hall. There are only ten kids in the class and we each have our own workspace. Today Professor Fratianne, a renowned sculptor himself, is playing classical music—Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons—a piece my mom played at her black-tie gala, which now seems like ages ago.
So much has happened since then. As I sit at my drafting table and chisel the slab of marble before me, I think about the paths my parents’ lives have taken. Paralyzed from the waist down from his skiing accident, my father is now living in a one-floor apartment and gets around in his state-of-the-art power chair. Will and I are both glad he pulled through, though Mom seems ambivalent. She says things happen for a reason. She’s still in the house, though likely not for long once their divorce is finalized (“irreconcilable differences,” whatever that means), but seriously, who would want to live in that house with all those bad memories? Will thinks Dad has a girlfriend—his round-the-clock blonde nurse. That wouldn’t surprise me.
My mother, I must say, has surprised me. Given all that happened, she pulled through. I think she still takes Xanax and drinks a couple of glasses of wine nightly—maybe an entire bottle—but if that’s all it takes to get her through another day, that’s fine by me. Her break-up with my father came as quite a shock to her highfalutin friends. It was the talk of the town, so she stopped volunteering with all those catty women and got a real, paying job as the Director of Development for Girls Like Us, a nonprofit that helps abused girls find loving families and meaningful jobs. Instead of planning galas, she now spends her time creating marketing materials and reviewing grants. I’m so proud of her.
We’ve refrained from talking about what happened in Big Bear. The police ruled it an accidental drowning and were glad none of us was hurt. It’s something we all want to put behind us. Once, however, I asked my mom who Bree’s father was. She told me it didn’t matter; he was dead. She was also closed off when I asked about her childhood and the night her parents were murdered. Showing no emotion, she told me she had an uneventful childhood and couldn’t remember a thing about that night. “PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder,” she said. It must have been beyond awful for her to watch her parents get stabbed to death and then get taken by the madman. I can’t even imagine.
My brother doesn’t know all the sordid details. That Tanya is—or should I say was—our half-sister. He was too far away to overhear Mom’s startling revelation with the wind gusting and Bear barking. My mom wants to keep it that way—“our little secret”—at least until he’s older. Like my mom, I’m a great secret keeper, but often wish I could confide in him. And ask Sherlock if he thinks her parents’ murderer held her captive and raped her. And fathered a child. I often wonder how she and the baby managed to escape him. I can’t help thinking…did she kill him?
Grandma says some questions are better left unanswered. I guess I’ll never know. For my mom, Billie Rae Perkins no longer exists. In her mind, she’s dead.
Despite who Tanya-slash-Bree was and what she did, I believe my mother truly loved her.
Sometimes I’ve wondered what Tanya would have been like had she not been abandoned and had instead grown up with us in our house. Maybe she would have been sporty, sassy, and caring. The big sister I’d always wished for but never had.
Though her body was never found, my mother gave her a memorial that only she and I attended. She erected a resting place, right next to her half-sister, my sister, Anabel. Both tombstones are inscribed with the words:
An extraordinary daughter, sister, and friend.
Let the sunshine in.
While my mother covered the side-by-side gravesites with sprays of indigo-blue forget-me-nots and sobbed, I held her hand. It’s the closest I ever felt to her.
The marble sculpture I’m working on—the one that I plan to exhibit—is called Sisters. It’s a dark, twisted, complex abstraction.
