Page 1 of What You Never Knew

MAY

One hour before I died, I was sitting in a stuffy lawyer’s office dealing with the probate details of my mother’s will. It figures I was dealing with her mortality right before facing my own. Very little happened in my life that wasn’t in some way connected to her. She’d passed away seven months earlier, which meant my time of freedom from her had been brief and fleeting.

Lung cancer. It was long and drawn out, with great suffering, and cause for constant, round-the-clock care. During the months of her illness I often thought she’d finally gotten what she’d wanted all along—our undivided attention, daily displays of love, and deep concern for her well-being. She couldn’t have chosen a more suitable and satisfying exit from the world.

I’d gone to the lawyer’s that day confused. My mother had insisted that all her assets be divided while she was alive. She’d signed the house over to me (I’d sold it promptly upon her death, splitting the proceeds with my younger sister, June). She’d gifted her savings, jewelry, and antiques to me and my sister and my nieces—more efficient than waiting for lawyers to do it, and it meant she was present for the proclamations of gratitude that came with it.

I’d thought all her affairs had been wrapped up nice and tidy while she was alive. How very naïve of me. I should have known that my mother would leave something messy for me to deal with. One last reminder of what I’d spent my life trying to forget.

The lawyer casually passed the envelope across his desk to me, as though it were light as a feather. “The only asset willed from your mother’s estate,” he explained.

I kept my hands in my lap. “What is it?”

He pushed the document half an inch closer to me, as though he didn’t want it either. “Just a deed of some kind. Property your family has owned for years. An island, I believe it said. Somewhere in Vermont?”

“You mean Avril Island? On Lake Champlain?” I shook my head. “That can’t be right. My mother sold that place years ago.”

The lawyer gave the envelope one last push toward me. “Yes, that’s the place.”

Avril Island. The words boomed around the room, bouncing off the heavy wood paneling and crashing back against my skull, making my head throb. I took the envelope from the desk and placed it on my lap. I didn’t need to look inside.

My father had bought Avril Island for my mother as a wedding present. Her very own island, complete with a five-bedroom cottage and acres of land. Where we spent every single summer until the summer I was fifteen years old. That year we left in a hurry, never went back, and a couple of years later my mother told me and June that she’d sold it.

Staring down at the envelope, I could feel the lawyer’s watery blue eyes on me, see the arch of his white hairy eyebrows out of my peripheral vision as he waited for my response.

“I’m just a little bit confused,” I managed to get out.

He nodded sympathetically. “If only the dead could talk, I always say. Would make my job easier.” He chuckled to himself, unaware that he’d just handed me a grenade that could blow up my life.

I tucked the manila envelope into my purse, thanked him politely, as I’d been taught to do, and then left his office. The world narrowed into a slim, silent tunnel, only expanding again with the beep of my car door unlocking. Inside smelled of the banana I’d eaten on the way to the appointment and was hot and stuffy from the early spring sun beating through the windshield.

The leather upholstery was warm against the back of my thighs as I sat in the driver’s seat staring straight ahead—a little vessel of the familiar, which slowly helped to bring me back to reality.

I had to work hard to hold back the violent rage that was building. My mother had said she’d taken care of it. She’d lied. She often lied. I really couldn’t understand why she hadn’t told me about Avril Island before she died. It was like some sick joke she’d waited to play on me—waited to unleash until she was gone and didn’t have to deal with any of it herself. I’d spent years trying to escape that part of my life, and she’d dropped it right back into my lap.

The smell of rotten banana, combined with the heat of the car and my roller coaster of emotions, brought on a surge of nausea. I opened my door and swung my legs out, taking deep breaths of fresh air. I grabbed the banana peel, threw it onto the black pavement, and rolled my window down before shutting myself back in the car.

Funnily enough, there were no tears. Me, who cried at the drop of a dime—I felt only empty inside. It might have been my fight-or-flight impulse. I wanted to protect June from everything she didn’t know about our parents, but mostly from what she didn’t know about me. I’d never hated my mother more than in that moment.

I reached for my phone, glad when it went to message. If my sister had heard me, she’d have known there was something I was hiding, just out of sight, tucked sloppily somewhere around my rib cage. She’d have heard the flutter in my voice, felt the restraint of my vocal chords, and then demanded to know what was keeping the real me from her. June never accepted anything but all of me.

I’m going to be a bit late for dinner. The appointment went longer than I thought, and I have to do a few things before I can come by. Should be there by seven instead of six. Love you.

I hung up before she could hear the catch in my voice, before the fake lilt faltered and she heard the darkness underneath. It didn’t dawn on me to cancel the dinner plans we’d made only the day before. We were going to discuss my meeting with the lawyer over wine and some takeout. A light, airy plan that we’d thought would include a bit of reminiscing—some jokes about the good and the bad. Some healthy sorrow for the loss of the woman who at times had made our lives hell but was our mother still. But that was before the final parting gift of Avril Island.

I took a deep breath to settle my nerves and turned the key in the ignition. Slowly I pulled out of my parking spot. The world was fractured and unsafe all of a sudden, and my every move had to be in accordance.

I drove only a block before the urge forced me to pull over. Taking the deed from the manila envelope, I tore it into many pieces, then hopped out of my car and scattered it into a trash bin at the end of somebody’s driveway. A garbage truck would be by soon, and my last tie to Avril Island, and all the horrible things that had happened there, would be swallowed up by pounds of other people’s trash and driven far away from me. The thought was the only thing that allowed me to put the car in drive and carry on.

Once I was on the highway, moving with the flow of traffic, my grip on the steering wheel began to loosen. I had a two-hour drive and one hour at home to figure out a plan before I’d see June. What would I tell her the appointment had been about? Could I lie right to her face? Could I tell her the truth?

A flock of birds, black ones—I think they were crows, so then it would have been a murder of crows; very fitting—rose up from a farmer’s field to the left of me, offering a quick distraction from my heavy thoughts. They looked like ink blotches on the gray sky, only their wing tips standing out with any definition. They soared upward, weightless, and swirled like a circus of acrobats, grabbing my attention, pulling it away from the road.

It would have been fine if it weren’t for the white van, which changed lanes too quickly—impatient with the slow driver in front of him and unaware that I was bird watching.

I looked away from those fluid black spots too late. There was a wall of white, my foot on the brake, metal eating metal, glass smashing. The air bag inflated like an angry balloon, punching me in the chest and snatching my breath away.

Then the spinning started. For a second I thought I had turned into one of those black birds—free and twirling through the sky—but it was my car bouncing off the guardrail and dancing across the four lanes of highway.