“Judy.” May tries to get off the sofa, but it’s saggy, and she can’t push to her feet, so she stretches out her arms instead. Trent, who was about to help her up, backs away.
My grandmother crosses the room. I let her make the journey alone. May’s eyes fill, and she lifts her arms, her fingers opening and closing, beckoning her sister to her. Grandma Judy, who is so often unsure of people now, shows no hesitation. As if it is the most natural thing in the world, she leans over the sofa and into May’s arms. They share the shaky embrace of old age, May’s eyes closing as she nestles her chin on her sister’s shoulder. They cling to one another until, finally, my grandmother sinks exhausted into the armchair beside the sofa. She and her sister hold hands across the end table. They gaze at one another as if there’s no one else in the room.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” May admits.
My grandmother’s buoyant smile seems innocent of all the obstacles that have kept them apart. “You know I’ll always come. On Thursdays. Sisters’ Day.” She motions to the rocker by the window. “Where is Fern this afternoon?”
May lifts their joined hands, shakes them a bit. “Fern is gone, sweetheart. She passed in her sleep.”
“Fern?” My grandmother’s shoulders slump, and her eyes grow watery. A tear squeezes out and trickles alongside her nose. “Oh…Fern.”
“It’s just the two of us now.”
“We have Lark.”
“Lark died five years ago. The cancer, remember?”
Grandma Judy sags a little more, wipes another tear. “Goodness, I’d forgotten. I only have a little of my mind left.”
“It doesn’t matter.” May stretches to cover their joined hands with her other one. “Remember when we spent that first week on Edisto?” She nods toward the painting over the fireplace. “Wasn’t that a fine time? All four of us together? Fern loved it there.”
“Yes, it was,” Grandma Judy agrees. I can’t tell if she really remembers or is just trying to be polite, but she smiles at the painting, and suddenly there’s a look of clarity. “You gave us the dragonfly bracelets. Three dragonflies to remember the three we never saw again. Camellia, Gabion, and my twin brother. We were celebrating Camellia’s birthday the afternoon you gave them to us, weren’t we? Camellia was the dragonfly with the onyx.” The light of memory shines in my grandmother’s eyes. The love of sisters warms her smile. “My, but we were lookers back then, weren’t we?”
“Yes, we were. All of us with Mama’s lovely hair, but you were always the only one who had her sweet face. If I didn’t know that was you in the painting, I’d think it was our mama standing there with us.”
Behind me, my mother whispers through her teeth, “What is going on here?” I feel the heat radiating off her body. She’s sweating, and Honeybee never sweats.
“Maybe we should step outside.” I try to gather my parents and move them back to the porch. My father seems almost reluctant to leave the room. He’s busy staring at the photos, trying to make some sense of all this. Is there a part of him that remembers his mother’s unexplained absences? Does he recall being in the background of that photograph taken on Edisto? Has he always suspected that his mother is more than just the woman he knew?
Trent nods across the room at me just before I close the door between the porch and the cottage. His encouragement makes me feel strong, capable, confident. He’s a believer in letting the truth be what it is. He and Hootsie have that in common.
“You’d better sit down for this,” I say to my parents.
Honeybee reluctantly balances on the edge of a rocker. My father takes the two-seat glider and assumes a posture that lets me know he’s expecting something grave and unpleasant. He leans forward with his feet firmly planted, elbows resting on his knees, fingers steepled together. Whatever the situation is, he’s ready to analyze it and do damage control.
“Just let me tell you all of it,” I plead. “Don’t ask me anything until I’m finished, okay?” Without waiting for an answer, I gather a deep breath and begin the story.
My father listens from behind the usual stoic mask. My mother eventually sinks against the rocker with a wrist braced against her forehead.
When I’m done, the air hangs silent. No one knows what to say. It’s obvious that even my father had not an inkling of this, although there’s also something in his expression that tells me a few details about his mother’s behavior have begun to make sense now.
“How…how do you know all of this is true? Maybe…maybe this woman…” My mother trails off, looks toward the cottage window. She’s thinking of what she heard in there, of the photos on the walls. “I just don’t see how it’s possible.”
My father breathes over his joined fingertips, graying eyebrows gathering together. He knows it’s possible; he just doesn’t want it to be. But I’ve told him what Trent and I have learned about the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, and I can see that most of it wasn’t new information to him or my mother. No doubt, they’ve heard of the scandal, perhaps seen the TV shows that have reenacted events at Georgia’s notorious children’s home.
“I can’t…My mother?” Dad mutters. “Did my father know?”
“I don’t think anyone knew. Grandma Judy and her sisters were grown women by the time they were reunited. May told me they didn’t want to interfere with each other’s lives. Considering that the paper trail was set up to keep birth families from finding one another, it’s a miracle that even four of the siblings were brought back together.”
“My God.” He shakes his head as if he’s trying to rearrange the thoughts there, to put them in some workable order. “My mother has a twin?”
“She was born a twin. She did search over the years, but she was never able to find out what happened after that—whether her twin died or survived and was adopted.”
My father rests his chin on his hands. He looks upward through the trees. “My dear God in heaven.”
I know what he’s thinking. I’ve been turning the same things over in my mind since the day I learned the truth. All week long, I’ve gone back and forth between taking the secret to the grave with me…and setting the truth free, come what may. In the end, it boils down to this: My father deserves to know who he is. My grandmother deserves whatever time she has left to spend with her sister.
The five little river gypsies who suffered at the hands of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society deserve to have their stories carried forward into the future. But for a strange twist of fate, my father’s mother would have grown up on a riverboat, among common folk, surrounded by the poverty of the Great Depression.
She wouldn’t have been of the class to have met my grandfather, much less married him.
We wouldn’t be Staffords.
My mother regains herself a bit, lifts her chin, and reaches across to unfasten my father’s hands and hold one of them. “It’s ancient history. There’s no sense in agonizing over it now, Wells. There’s no reason to be bringing it up at all.” A glance slides my way—a warning.
I resist the urge to wilt. For me, there’s no turning back. “Dad, what you decide to do from here is your choice. All I ask is that Grandma Judy be able to have time with her sister…for however long they have left. They’ve spent their whole lives hiding away from the world, for our benefit. They deserve to be at peace now.”
My father kisses my mother’s fingers, folds them between his, and nods. Silently, he’s telling both of us he’ll mull this over and make his own decisions.
Honeybee leans closer to me. “What about this…the man in there? Can he be trusted not to…well…to use this information? With the Senate run coming up next year, there’s nothing Cal Fortner would like more than a personal scandal to distract from the issues.”