She found her mother’s journals when she sold the house. She’d graduated from Emerson by that point and was leaving Massachusetts for graduate school in New York City. The old Victorian in South Hadley where she and her mother had lived since Rachel was in third grade contained few good memories and had always felt haunted. (“But they’re faculty ghosts,” her mother would say when the unexplained creak snaked out from the far end of a hallway or something thumped in the attic. “Probably up there reading Chaucer and sipping herbal tea.”)
The journals weren’t in the attic. They were in a trunk in the basement underneath carelessly packed foreign editions of The Staircase. They filled lined composition notebooks, the entries as haphazard as her mother had been ordered in her daily life. Half were undated, and her mother could go months, once even a year, without writing. She wrote most often about fear. Prior to The Staircase, the fear was financial—she’d never make enough as a professor of psychology to pay back her student loans, let alone send her daughter to a decent private high school and on to a decent college. After her book landed on the national bestseller lists, she feared she’d never write a worthwhile follow-up. She feared too that she would be called out for wearing the emperor’s new clothes, for perpetrating a con job that would be discerned when she published again. It turned out to be a prophetic fear.
But mostly she feared for Rachel. Rachel watched herself grow in the pages from a rambunctious, joyful, occasionally irritating source of pride (“She has his appetite for play . . . Her heart’s so lovely and generous that I’m terrified what the world will do to it . . .”) to a despairing and self-destructive malcontent (“The cutting troubles me a bit less than the promiscuity; she’s only thirteen for Christ’s sake . . . She leaps into dark waters and then complains about the depth but blames me for the leaping”).
Fifteen pages later, she came upon “I have to face the shame of it—I’ve been a subpar mother. I never had any patience for the underdeveloped frontal lobe. I snap too much, cut to the chase when I should model patience. She grew up with a brusque reductionist, I’m afraid. And no father. And it put a hole at the center of her.”
A few pages later, her mother returned to the theme. “I worry she’ll waste her life searching out things to fill the hole, transitory things, soul-baubles, new age therapies, self-medication. She thinks she’s rebellious and resilient, but she’s only one of those things. She needs so much.”
A few pages later, in an undated entry, Elizabeth Childs wrote, “She is laid up right now, sick in a strange bed, and even needier than usual. The persistent question returns: Who is he, Mother? She looks so frail—brittle and mawkish and frail. She is a lot of wonderful things, my dearest Rachel, but she is not strong. If I tell her who James is, she’ll search him out. He’ll shatter her heart. And why should I give him that power? After all this time, why should he be allowed to hurt her again? To fuck with that beautiful, battered heart of hers? I saw him today.”
Rachel, sitting on the second-to-last step of the basement staircase, held her breath. She squeezed the edges of the journal and her vision shimmied.
I saw him today.
“He never saw me. I parked up the street. He was on the lawn of the house he found after he abandoned us. And they were with him—the replacement wife, the replacement children. He’s lost a lot of his hair and grown spongy above the belt line and below the chin. Small comfort. He’s happy. God help me. He’s happy. And isn’t that the worst of all possible outcomes? I don’t even believe in happiness—not as an ideal or as an authentic state of being; it’s a child’s goal—and yet, he is happy. He’d feel that happiness threatened by this daughter he never wanted and wanted even less once she was born. Because she reminded him of me. Of how much he grew to loathe me. And he would hurt her. I was the one person in his life who refused to adore him and he’d never forgive Rachel for that. He’d assume I told her unflattering things about him, and James, as we all know, could never abide criticism of his precious, earnest self.”
Rachel had been bedridden only once in her life—freshman year of high school. She’d contracted mononucleosis just as she was heading into Christmas break. The timing turned out to be fortuitous. It took her thirteen days to get out of bed and five more to regain the strength to return to school. In the end, she missed only three days of classes.
But that would have been the window when her mother saw James. Which was also when her mother was a visiting professor at Wesleyan. She’d rented a house in Middletown, Connecticut, that year and that was the “strange bed” Rachel had been confined to. Her mother, she recalled now with a disconcerted pride, had never left her during the illness except one time, to get groceries and wine. Rachel had just started watching Pretty Woman on VHS and was still watching it when her mother returned. Her mother checked her temperature and opined that she found Julia Roberts’s toothy grin “cosmically grating,” before she brought the grocery bags into the kitchen to unload them.
When she returned to the bedroom, glass of wine in one hand, warm, wet facecloth in the other, she gave Rachel a lonesome, hopeful look and said, “We did okay, didn’t we?”
Rachel looked up at her as she laid the facecloth across her forehead. “Of course we did,” she said because, in that moment, it felt like they had.
Her mother patted her cheek, looked at the TV. It was the end of the movie. Prince Charming, Richard Gere, showed up with flowers to rescue his Hooker Princess, Julia. He thrust the flowers forward, Julia laughed and teared up, the music boomed in the background.
Her mother said, “I mean, enough with the smiling already.”
That put the entry of the diary at December 1992. Or early January 1993. Eight years later, sitting on the basement steps, Rachel realized her father had been living somewhere within a thirty-mile radius of Middletown. Couldn’t be any more. Her mother had visited the street where he lived, observed him with his family, and then picked up groceries and stopped off at the liquor store for wine in under two hours. That meant James was teaching somewhere nearby, most likely at the University of Hartford.
“If he was still teaching by that point,” Brian Delacroix said when she called him.
“True.”
But Brian agreed that there was enough to go on now so that he could take her case and her money and still look himself in the mirror in the morning. So in the late summer of 2001, Brian Delacroix and Berkshire Security Associates launched an investigation into the identity of her father.
And came up with nothing.
No one by the name of James taught in higher education in northern Connecticut that year who wasn’t already well accounted for. One had blond hair, one was African American, and the third was twenty-seven years old.
Once again, Rachel was told to let it go.
“I’m leaving,” Brian said.
“Chicopee?”