Maybe her mother hadn’t believed he’d actually leave. Maybe once he had, she’d assured herself he’d return. When he didn’t, her dismay turned to hate and her hate grew depthless.
“He’s gone,” she said when Rachel was about five and had begun asking persistent questions about his whereabouts. “He wants nothing to do with us. And that’s okay, sweetie, because we don’t need him to define us.” She got down on her knees in front of Rachel and tucked an errant hair behind her ear. “Now we won’t speak of him again. Okay?”
But of course Rachel spoke of him and asked about him. At first it exasperated her mother; a wild panic would find her eyes and flare her nostrils. But eventually the panic was replaced with a strange, tiny smile. So tiny it was barely a smile at all, just a slight uptick of the right side of her mouth that managed to be smug, bitter, and victorious all at the same time.
It would be years before Rachel would see the onset of that smile as her mother’s decision (whether conscious or unconscious, she’d never know) to make her father’s identity the central battleground in a war that colored Rachel’s entire youth.
Her mother promised to tell her James’s last name on her sixteenth birthday, provided Rachel showed a level of maturity that would suggest she could handle it. But that summer, just before she turned sixteen, Rachel was arrested in a stolen car with Jarod Marshall, whom she’d promised her mother she was no longer seeing. The next target date was her high school graduation, but after an Ecstasy-related debacle at the semiformal that year, she was lucky to graduate at all. If she went to college then, a community college first to get her grades up, then a “real” one, her mother said, maybe then.
They fought continuously over it. Rachel would scream and break things and her mother’s smile would grow colder and smaller. She would repeatedly ask Rachel, “Why?”
Why do you need to know? Why do you need to meet a stranger who’s never been a part of your life or your financial security? Shouldn’t you first take stock of the parts of you that are bringing you such unhappiness before you journey out into the world to find a man who can offer no answers and bring you no peace?
“Because he’s my father!” Rachel screamed more than once.
“He’s not your father,” her mother said with an air of unctuous sympathy. “He’s my sperm donor.”
She said that at the tail end of one of their worst fights, the Chernobyl of mother-daughter spats. Rachel slid down the wall of the living room in defeat and whispered, “You’re killing me.”
“I’m protecting you,” her mother said.
Rachel looked up and saw, to her horror, that her mother believed that. Far worse, she defined herself by that belief.
Rachel’s junior year in college, while she was in Boston, sitting in Introduction to British Literary Studies Since 1550, her mother blew a red light in Northampton, and her Saab was T-boned by a fuel truck driving the speed limit. At first there was concern that the shell of the fuel truck had been pierced in the accident, but it turned out not to be the case. This was a relief for the fire and rescue crews who came from as far away as Pittsfield: The fuel truck had just topped off and the intersection was in a dense area by both a senior citizens home and a basement-level preschool.
The driver of the fuel truck suffered mild whiplash and tore a ligament in his right knee. Elizabeth Childs, once-famous author, died upon impact. If her national fame had long since subsided, however, her local celebrity still burned bright. Both the Berkshire Eagle and the Daily Hampshire Gazette ran her obituary on the front page, below the fold, and her funeral was well attended, though the gathering back at the house afterward was less so. Rachel would end up donating most of the food to a local homeless shelter. She spoke to several of her mother’s friends, mostly women, and one man, Giles Ellison, who taught poli-sci at Amherst and who, Rachel had long suspected, had been her mother’s occasional lover. She could tell her assumption was correct by the way the women paid special attention to him and by how little Giles spoke. A normally gregarious man, he kept parting his lips as if he wished to speak but then changed his mind. He looked around the house like he was drinking it in, as if its contents were familiar and had once brought him comfort. As if they were all he had left of Elizabeth and he was taking stock of the fact he’d never see them, or her, again. He was framed by the parlor window that looked down Old Mill Lane on a drizzly April day and Rachel felt a tremendous pity rise up in her for Giles Ellison, rapidly aging toward retirement and obsolescence. He’d expected to go through that rite of passage with an acerbic lioness by his side, but now he’d go through it alone. It was unlikely he’d find another partner as radiant with intelligence and rage as Elizabeth Childs.
And she had been radiant in her own officious, acerbic way. She didn’t enter rooms, she swept into them. She didn’t engage friends and colleagues, she gathered them to her. She never napped, rarely seemed tired, and no one could ever remember her falling ill. When Elizabeth Childs left a room, you felt it, even if you’d arrived after she’d gone. When Elizabeth Childs left the world, it felt the same way.
It surprised Rachel to realize just how little she was prepared for the loss of her mother. She had been a lot of things, most of them not positive in her daughter’s opinion, but she had always been so utterly there. And now she was so utterly—and so violently—gone.
But still the old question persisted. And Rachel’s clear access to the answer had died with her mother. Elizabeth may have been unwilling to provide that answer, but she had unquestionably been in possession of it. Now, possibly no one was.
However well Giles and her friends and agent and publisher and editor had known Elizabeth Childs—and they all seemed to know a version of her that differed slightly but crucially from the woman Rachel had known—none of them had known her longer than Rachel’s lifespan.
“I wish I knew anything about James,” Ann Marie McCarron, Elizabeth’s oldest friend in the area, told Rachel once they were sufficiently lubricated for Rachel to broach the subject of her father, “but the first time I ever went out with your mother was months after they broke up. I remember he taught in Connecticut.”
“Connecticut?” They sat on the three-season porch at the back of the house, just twenty-two miles due north of the Connecticut border, and somehow it had never occurred to Rachel that her father could just as easily have taught not at one of the Five Colleges or the fifteen other colleges on the Massachusetts side of the Berkshires but just half an hour south in Connecticut.
“University of Hartford?” she asked Ann Marie.
Ann Marie pooched her lips and nose at the same time. “I don’t know. Could be.” Ann Marie put her arm around her. “I wish I could help. And I wish you’d let it go too.”