I did something I knew I'd regret. While waiting in the Freezer for the tea-theatre to start, I clicked on Karen's e-mail. I'd blown it off for the past week as part of my plan to avoid all things negative. Since the meeting on the stair landing when Willis gave me up without a fight, I'd struggled to keep my promise to myself not to go to him, avoiding stairways and detouring around any place Willis might surface, throwing myself into the tea-theatre and avoiding potentially depressing activities such as bad news from Karen. Idle moments such as I experienced just before clicking on Karen's e-mail undid my resolve.
To: Lillian Berry [email protected]
Sent: July 16, 2:12 A.M.
From: Karen Adams [email protected]
Subject: Wedding Pictures
Lily,
I survived the wedding. Here are pictures to prove it. I didn't know anyone except Uncle Jim who was able to make it on the short notice. The rest of the guests were complete strangers although they seem to be very old friends of Nelson and Sue. (I don't feel like calling him Dad anymore.) They all knew each other and I begin to feel like there has been a parallel world existing all through our lives where these people got to know each other while we went to school and celebrated holidays, oblivious to the fact that we were sharing our father with a whole different dimension. Nelson's Other Life.
I tried to meet and greet, introducing Nelson's grandchildren to the strangers, but I finally quit trying and sat by the wall until I could go home. It was Sue's party, and her friends didn't want anything to do with me, or my children. I didn't exist for those people. Even Greg felt it. Greg has a terrible theory about Sue's daughter that I refuse to acknowledge. Check out the pictures and call me. Please.
Your whole sister,
Karen
I clicked on the first attachment just as a volunteer popped her head in the door.
"Lily, where are the programs?" The downside of the tea-theatre's success was to be constantly running out of things. Everybody wanted to come see the husband who played the baron. He was so good at gently roasting our guests, and patrons clamored to be chosen for the skit. Omar revised the script, adding roles he'd initially cut so that we could increase audience participation. But we had a job keeping up with the details.
"Top drawer of the ticket table," I said, willing her to go away.
"Are they folded?" she asked.
"No," I said. "See if Mrs. Russell and Stephen can fold them." They needed something to do with their hands.
The photograph dominated my entire screen, starting at the top and slowly working its way down, filling in hair before foreheads, noses before mouths, loading so slowly I feared it would not finish before I had to go. Finally, I recognized individuals. My father and Sue looked like themselves in an older version of the restaurant picture. But the person standing with them looked confusingly familiar. She looked like me. But I was an ocean away and the picture had been taken without me. It couldn't be me. And it wasn't me. But I saw my father in her face. I zoomed in to focus on the eyes, nose, and mouth, isolating the features as I had isolated my father's features in the rearview mirror when he drove me to school. I'd positioned my own face, without my hair, in the small mirror imagining I was my father. I looked just like him even then, with hair. And this person looked just like me, and just like him. At first, the discovery struck me as funny, an odd coincidence. I wanted to run and tell my mother and sister what I'd found, almost relieved, as if the doctors had finally, after a lifetime of tests and trials, isolated the mysterious cause of my ailment. "Miss Berry," they said gravely, "we have ruled out cancer, personality disorders, and missing organs. Your problem is a half sister." What relief!
I reread Karen's e-mail. She would be sleeping; still the middle of the night in Texas, with Greg to comfort her if the news of a half sister distressed her. I had to admit it was beginning to distress me and I felt the approach of an internal storm, thunder growing distinctly closer.
Mrs. Russell stepped in, waving folded programs. "Lily, we're waiting for you."
"Amelia, you have a brother," the baron spoke the same line I'd heard many times, but today it resonated.
"I have just heard so, my lord," I said, thinking of all the years I'd felt something was wrong with me, when in fact my father had split his attention between two families, building half of his life with people I didn't know.
"What return can I make to you for the loss of half your fortune?" the baron asked.
"My brother's love will be ample recompense," I said. Sue could finally have the husband she'd been denied all those years.
The baron and Anhalt delivered their lines, after which the baron handed me over to Anhalt to be his wife. It felt good to lean on Sixby. "Oh my dear father," I said. "What blessings have you bestowed on me in one day." If this discovery was such a relief, why did I feel so sick? The wave that had brought a bounty of truth to my life began to recede, taking as much as it brought. As if in delivering a half sister, it demanded my own self in exchange.
When the skit ended I did not stay to autograph programs for the children in the audience. Temporarily willing to disregard the entire issue of Pippa, I ran to the attic, desperate to see Willis.
"Hello," I called up the stairwell. All the years I'd spent pondering my affliction, searching for what was lacking in me, and it wasn't me at all. The half sister filled in so many blanks. Like the missing letter in a game of hangman, when finally inserted, suggests words, and those words associate instantly, causing an entire phrase to fall effortlessly into place. The absent father, the wistful mother, and the proprietary appearance of the mysterious woman: I didn't have a zillion unrelated problems; I had one.
"Hello," I called up the stairs. But the attic was silent; no clicking of the keyboard. "Hello," I called again, running up the stairs to the landing where I'd first met Willis. His chair was gone and his table lay bare, pushed against some boxes. My green cushions sat in the window but they'd been turned on their sides as if someone had checked beneath them for stray belongings. The books were gone. Every last volume of theology as well as 1000 Places to Visit Before You Die and all its lighthearted friends. Only my half-read copy of Anna Karenina remained.
Pushing the cushions back into place, I sat in the window seat, inhaling the musty attic air, feeling the damp chill. Willis hadn't been avoiding me. He'd moved out. My Jane Austen sat in a dark corner making a list of her heroines and I felt grateful for her company, although I'd never make it onto her list. There was something wrong with me. A freak of nature, destined to be alone forever because of something deep down wrong with me that made me unlovable. No man ever stayed in my life for long.