Frankie was barreling out of the garage like she always did, but then she checked her rearview and saw me and stopped abruptly, the back end of her car rising and falling, the taillights glowing. She got out, and she was smaller and more bent than I remembered. She approached me tentatively, her head tilted to one side. When she saw me she gasped, and she reached toward me with trembling fingers but then pulled back. “What happened? Never mind, come inside, we’ll get you some ice!” And she turned and rushed toward the house, tripping and almost falling on the steps.
The house inside was a wreck, the laundry room full of clothes that smelled of mildew, the kitchen counters covered with dirty dishes and empty cracker boxes. Which was ironic because my whole life, Frankie had made it seem like we were the ones to blame for the messy house. If weren’t for us, the place would be a palace of order and cleanliness. A part of me believed that, and there was always this guilt that went along with it, like I wasn’t doing enough. But it turned out she was the problem, not me and Pill.
Frankie was digging into the freezer, filling a plastic bag with ice. She sealed it and then handed it to me.
“What happened to you?” she said.
“It’s a long story.”
“Where’s Priscilla?”
“With a friend. I want to know who my father is. That’s the only reason I’m here.”
“Why do you need to know that?”
“I deserve to know.”
“Deserve.” Her face became stony. “You and Priscilla just up and leave. No explanation. I get a text: We’re living our lives without you. That’s what you said. Do you have any idea what that’s like, Sam, not knowing where your kids are, worrying about them every minute of every day? And then a few weeks later you show up—surprise! Here I am! No apology. No explanation. You just show up out of the blue and start making demands. Talking about what you deserve. You deserve nothing, sir.”
“I have a right to know who he is, Frankie. Tell me or—”
“Or what? What will you do? Go to the police?” She laughed, and that fueled my anger. I made a fist and cocked my arm, and it felt like someone else was doing it, like I wasn’t in control of my body, and she must have seen that in my eyes, that I wasn’t me. She freaked out and threw the ice pack at me, which hit my belly and dropped to the floor and exploded, the cubes skittering everywhere, and then she ran out of the kitchen. I heard her bedroom door slam shut and the lock click. I decided to wait her out.
Newspapers and wine bottles covered the coffee table, and the couch was strewn with clothes. I swept them off to the floor and lay down, easing my throbbing head back into a pillow. I drifted off in seconds, and when I woke, I didn’t know whether it was morning or evening, winter or summer, whether I was back in my old life or still in the new one I had started. Or maybe that was all a dream. My head was throbbing and when I touched my face, I could feel it was swollen and raw. When I sat up, something slid off of me and dropped to the floor. It was the plastic bag of ice, only the cubes had mostly melted—there were just a few of them left, bobbing in the water. The coffee table was empty except for a sheet of folded notebook paper that lay in the middle, Samuel written across it in big letters. When I opened it, a Polaroid picture fell out, the white edges gone yellow with age. Three people were sitting on a park bench—a big hulking guy with blonde hair, a small black-haired woman, and in the middle, a red-headed Frankie, her belly enormous. She was pregnant with me, I guess, and she was smiling timidly at the camera. The woman next to her was small but, in contrast, not smiling, not timid. She looked straight at me with a kind of pissed determination, and I realized then that it was Yukiko.
Yukiko, with Frankie. In a photo from so many years ago.
I opened the letter.
Sam—
You scared me, and for that you owe me an apology. Whatever mistakes I’ve made, I am your mother. I don’t agree that you deserve to know who your father is, but I can see you are determined, so I will tell you.
Nineteen years ago, I was a poor graduate student trying to finish my dissertation. I applied for fellowships and grants, but funding was tight and I couldn’t get anything. Faced with the prospect of working at some awful restaurant to support myself, I answered an ad for a couple who were seeking a surrogate mother. It’s illegal to pay surrogates in Illinois, but this couple was willing to pay in secret, and they offered to pay a lot. They badly wanted a baby, or at least the woman did. I’m not sure about the man.
The hormone shots and the procedure itself were not fun, but I got pregnant right away. At first I was happy with the arrangement, and so were they. But then one morning when I was walking up the steps to the library, you kicked, a butterfly wing against my rib, and I fell in love. I knew at that moment that you were my child, not theirs. The fact that you came from his sperm and her egg meant nothing. You were growing inside me, nourished by my blood. They had contributed tiny bits of DNA, while I was doing all the real work of parenthood, the hard work.
I considered asking them if I could keep you. But that seemed too risky—what if they said no? So one night, a few days before I was due, I packed everything into my car and started driving west. I thought I might move to Oregon. But the contractions started an hour after I left Chicago, and by the time I crossed the Mississippi River, they were coming too fast and hard for me to drive. I stopped in a hospital in Dubuque, Iowa, and you were born. They put you in my arms and you were magnificent with your thick black hair and your silky almond skin. So gorgeous. And you were mine.
I was afraid the couple would come after me, but they never did. I never heard anything from them.
You believe I’m a terrible person. But I’m no more terrible than anyone else. Eventually, you hurt someone, either by accident or on purpose. We all do. The only difference with me is that I accept it and move on. I don’t wallow in fake guilt.
I have no regrets. I have always loved being your mom.
Your biological father was named Lyle, though I can’t remember his last name. He should be easy to find because he was some kind of celebrity, a wrestler-turned-talk-show-host. Total idiot, but rich. He lived in Oak Park. And his wife was a wispy little Japanese woman, or maybe Korean, I don’t remember. Yuko, I think. She was a professor at the University of Chicago and she thought she was smarter than me, but in the end, I turned out to be the clever one, ha.
We can talk about all of this later, whenever you are ready, and we can talk about schools next year. It’s not too late.
Your mom,
Frankie
I stared at the letter, and then I looked at the picture again. Yukiko, that determined stare. And there was my father. Lyle, apparently. Who was dead, because Yukiko’s husband had died in an accident.
At the time, I didn’t realize he was the man whose wrecked car I had climbed into, and whose mashed-up face I kept seeing whenever I closed my eyes. I didn’t make that connection, and I believe this was a kind of grace. God or fate or some instinct of self-preservation had kept me from putting that together. Because if I had known the whole truth—that the dead guy I encountered in the SUV was in fact my father—my head would have exploded.
On that day I only knew that my father was dead, that Yukiko was my biological mother, and that Frankie was the architect of this mess. She had stolen me from my parents, and she had lied to me for all those years for no good reason. And she wasn’t sorry. She still thought she was clever for getting away with it. I was furious. I got up and kicked the coffee table and it screeched across the floor. I flipped it on its side and I started stomping on a leg, trying to break it off. Frankie came out, her hair disheveled like she’d just woken up.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Why did you lie?”
“I didn’t lie. I just didn't tell you everything.” I stomped on the leg as hard as I could and it broke off and hit the floor. “Stop that!” she said.
“He’s dead! My father is dead! All because you lied. You told me you were my mom!”
“I am your mom! I raised you and gave you everything. And what do you mean he’s dead? How is he dead?”
“You stole me and you lied and now my dad is dead and I never got to know him!” I lifted the leg above my head and she shrank back, her eyes huge. I threw the leg at the window, cracking the glass, and then I started stomping on the other leg.
“Stop that!” She shouted. And she grabbed me, trying to pull me away. I pushed her off and threw her down. Her head thumped on the wood floor and her glasses flew off. At first she lay motionless, and I was scared I had hurt her. But then she turned to her side and sort of whimpered. She groped around for her glasses, and she found them and guided them onto her face with trembling hands.
Suddenly I felt terrible. I hated her, but I didn’t want to hurt her. I pulled my keys out of my pocket and grabbed the Polaroid and started toward the door.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
I went out to the car and got in, and as I pulled away, I saw her standing in the doorway, leaning into the frame for support. That was the last time I saw her.
Augustine says that evil doesn’t exist. God created everything, and God couldn’t create something bad. Therefore, evil is not a thing. What we often perceive as evil is in fact the absence of good. Or it’s the result of something good going rotten through neglect, like a piece of fruit sitting out on the counter too long. Eventually I came to think of Frankie that way. She lied, she controlled, she hurt people, and she never apologized for any of it that I can remember. But she wasn’t evil. It’s just that the good in her had been neglected and left to rot. There were traces of good remaining, like her putting a bag of ice on my mashed-up face while I slept.
If I could, I would go back in time and sit down with her. I would apologize for my roughness that day. But I went a year without seeing her. We communicated a little through email, working out logistics about my education and about Pill, who was eventually adopted by Yukiko. But I never saw Frankie again in person. About two years later, just when I was starting to think about trying to reconcile with her, on the day I was moving into my dorm at the University of Chicago, I got a call from Weed, of all people. He told me that Frankie had died of pancreatic cancer. Had died alone, he said. And I felt guilty, but more than that, I felt a tremendous loss.
Comments
Post a Comment