Page 16 of What You Never Knew

Placing a glass of wine in front of him, I sit down at the table. “I actually wanted to talk to you about some things, Ezra. Some things I read in that scrapbook.”

MAY

June is sitting at the kitchen table with a man I don’t recognize. They both have glasses of wine, and June is showing him some newspaper clippings in a scrapbook. There’s a new kind of intensity about June. She wants something from this man; I can feel it.

I zoom in, and the man looks away from June and into the space where I am. Like he senses me there. His eyes, they tell me who he is. Ezra—West’s son. Memories of him suddenly flood me. He, June, and I spent a lot of time together on this island. We used to play hide-and-seek, have diving contests, and play epic games of Monopoly. I can’t for the life of me remember the last time I saw him.

“So let me understand this,” Ezra says to June. “You had no idea about the search for your father, about his disappearance?”

She gives an exaggerated shrug. “My mother told us they had an argument and then he ran off in the middle of the night. All her life she maintained that our father abandoned us.”

A bitter-sounding chuckle escapes Ezra. “Funny, those are the same words my mom uses about my dad—‘abandoned us.’ ”

“So West disappeared as well?”

Ezra gives his head a shake. “He disappeared ten days after your own dad disappeared.” This bit of news surprises me. I actually remember how much West loved Ezra and this lake, and I can’t imagine any reason that would make him leave either of them.

“And he hasn’t been back since?” June asks, and Ezra shakes his head. “Like, you haven’t even heard from him?”

“Nope. No sign of him in thirty years.”

“My god, Ezra. I’m so sorry. I had no idea at all about any of this.” She taps the scrapbook with one finger. “This is the first I’m hearing about any of the things that went on back then, and I feel like my whole world is turning upside down.”

I move in to have a look at the open scrapbook and see that it’s a collection of articles about my father disappearing. I try to remember the time around them, to call forth some memories, but strangely, nothing comes up.

“So,” June says, leaning in even closer to Ezra, “just let me get this timeline right. My father disappeared”—she air-quotes the last three words—“there was a search, and your father was called in for questioning about it, since he was our caretaker and here all the time. Then he went missing just over a week after my father did?” Ezra gives a slow nod, and there’s hesitancy in his expression. June notices it too. “What aren’t you telling me?”

He takes a sip of his wine. “Well, you know it was more than just the fact that he was the caretaker here?” June shakes her head, sincere confusion in her eyes. “You don’t know?” Ezra’s words make the space I hang in buzz. “About the affair?” He pauses to study her reaction. She stares back at him blankly. “Between my dad and your mom. It went on for years, apparently.”

June glances over at the scrapbook and doesn’t say anything for several seconds. “I saw something about an affair mentioned in an article, but I just assumed it was small-town gossip.”

“It wasn’t just gossip, June.” His words are blunt, and there’s a trace of anger behind them. It’s obvious that he’s still hurting from all of it.

“I had no idea,” she says, before mechanically lifting her glass and draining every last bit of her wine.

A memory breaks free from the depths and slowly rises to the surface. I questioned my mother about the affair only once. I was thirteen, that age when the mind is naturally drawn to things like love, attraction, and the illicit. When gray areas appear where once everything was black and white. When parents become fallible.

I asked her if she was in love with West. She acted affronted, told me I should be careful of what I accused people of. She said that after everything she’d done for me and my sister, it was just cruel to think so low of her. Something was thrown in there about all the sacrifices she’d made for us girls before she dropped the dishcloth in the sink and retreated to her room.

I followed her, apologizing profusely, as we’d learned to do, but she shut the door in my face. An hour or so later she came out, looking wounded but stoic. She made us a dinner of eggs on toast and somehow managed to get herself dressed and over to the resort for the evening. We didn’t speak about it again.

My suspicions hadn’t come from catching them in the act or anything like that. I’d caught moments of something that, when added up, were hard to dispute. I was the one who roamed the island with a camera round my neck, sitting for hours on a rock hidden by trees so that I could get the perfect shot of a bird or the sunlight—or my mother and her lover. And I’d kept it from June. Believing I was protecting her from something. That she didn’t need to know that side of my mother.

Maybe it was a mistake to do that. In the end, I haven’t protected her from anything. And finding this truth out for the second time feels just as bad as it did the first time.

Ezra visibly winces. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought the affair was common knowledge.” June gives a quick shake of her head. Ezra goes to say something, then stops, thinks about it, and says, “You never even suspected?”

She stares into her empty wineglass, pondering the question. “I guess now that I think about it, I’m not totally shocked.” She looks up at him with a tight smile on her face. “I actually feel a bit stupid that it never dawned on me.” She rolls her eyes at herself. “My mother said we couldn’t tell my father how often West was coming here to do work. She said it was because my father didn’t want to pay a lot of money. That she needed his help more than my father realized, which in itself should have set off alarm bells. I just never thought of them that way. Of my …” She trails off.

She gets up from the table, emptying what remains of the white wine into her glass, opening a whole new bottle and then bringing it back to the table with her. “Now, is this just rumor you’re going on, or did you actually witness something?”

“Both, I guess. There was one time that made me think there might be something going on.” He wipes the condensation off his wineglass, trying his hardest not to meet June’s eyes.

“What happened exactly?” she pushes.

“Are you sure you want to get into this now?”

“No,” June answers. “But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tell me.”