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And my life story is no exception. I have been the subject of several magazine articles and TV news shows, but I have carefully managed all of it. I have spoon-fed people my past. Through the magic of TV I have turned a bad childhood into a Cinderella fairy tale. Poor Tully, abandoned by her evil mother, becomes an American success story.
My audience wanted the fairy tale, so I gave it to them, and ours is an age of Disney tales, not Grimm’s; evil has become animated lions and singing octopi.
These new fairy tales are perfect for me. How many times did I say that it had been a blessing of sorts, how often I’d been abandoned? The lack of a mother’s love made me try harder; this was the truth as I packaged it. Ambition, I say, saved me.
In a memoir, for once I will have to tell the truth. That is what George asked me. I blithely said yes, but can I? Really?
I have to. Maybe I even need to.
A bestselling memoir could give me my life back.
I don’t have much from my early years, but what I do have is in my storage unit downstairs in the parking garage. I haven’t been in the unit for years, let alone looked into the boxes within. It has not been an oversight, either. I have made a point of not looking through the boxes.
I am going to do it.
But the decision is a weak one, like all made-in-desperation decisions are, and I can’t make myself begin. Instead, I go to my window and stand there, drinking one glass of wine after another until the sky begins to cloud over and darken.
“Do it,” I say to my reflection. I force myself to turn away from the window. On my way out of the condo, I grab a pen, a pad of paper, and, of course, a glass of wine.
In the parking garage, it takes longer than expected to find my unit.
I unlock the metal door, flick on the interior lights, and step inside.
It is about twelve feet square. I have never been in any of the other tenants’ storage units, but I am pretty sure that most of them would be full from floor to ceiling with stacked plastic bins and cardboard boxes marked with words like Xmas, Holiday, Winter, Summer, Baby Clothes, etc. In those boxes would be evidence of lives, the boxed trail that leads one back to the beginning.
My unit is practically empty. There are my skis and tennis rackets and golf clubs—equipment for sports I have tried and given up but hope I might someday try again—and my extra luggage and an antique mirror I’d bought in France and forgotten all about.
And two boxes. Two. The evidence of my life doesn’t take up much room.
I reach for the first box. Across it is written: Firefly Lane. The second box says: Queen Anne.
I feel a shiver of dread. These two boxes represent the two halves of my former life, my grandmother and my mother. Whatever is hidden within, I haven’t seen for decades. At seventeen, I’d become the executrix of my grandmother’s estate. She’d left me everything—the house on Queen Anne and the rental property on Firefly Lane. Alone, abandoned again by my mother and headed into foster care, I packed up the house on Queen Anne and kept only these few things, whatever could fit in this single box. The Firefly Lane box contains the few things that my mother and I collected in our brief time together. In my entire life, I lived with my mother only once, in 1974, in the house on Firefly Lane, until one day when she simply disappeared. I have always told people it was a blessing, that short time with my mother, because I met the girl who would become my best friend. And that’s true. It was a blessing. It was also another abandonment.
I grab an old coverlet and kneel on it. Then I pull the box marked Queen Anne toward me.
My hands are shaking as I peel back the flaps. My pulse is washer-on-spin-cycle fast, heartbeats tumble over one another. I have trouble breathing. The last time I opened this box I was in my grandmother’s house, kneeling in my bedroom. The social services lady had told me to be “ready” when she arrived to take me away from the house. I had packed carefully, but even after all the terrible years with my mother, I expected her to save me. I was seventeen, I think. All alone and waiting for a mother who wouldn’t save me. Again.
I reach inside the box. The first thing I find in the shadowy interior is my old scrapbook.
I had forgotten all about this.
It is oversized, and slim, with Holly Hobbie on the cover, her profile hidden by a huge pioneer-girl bonnet. I run my fingertip over the white cover. Gran had given me this album on my eleventh birthday. Not long after, my mom had shown up, drunk and unannounced, and taken me to downtown Seattle.
I never knew what my mother intended to do that day. All I know is that she abandoned me on a doorstep in Pioneer Square in the middle of an antiwar protest.
Your mom has problems, Gran had said later, while I sat on the floor, crying.
Is that why she doesn’t love me?
“Stop it,” I say to myself. This is old news, old pain.
I open the scrapbook and see a picture of myself at eleven, posing for the camera already, leaning over a cake to blow out the candles.
Pasted on the other side is the first of hundreds of letters I’d written to my mother and never mailed. Dear Mommy, today is my eleventh birthday—
I close the scrapbook. I have barely looked through it, hardly glimpsed what is here, and already I am feeling worse than when I began. These words bring her alive, the me I have spent a lifetime outrunning, the girl with the broken heart.
If Katie were here, I could go through this box, pull up my pain, and examine it. She would be there to say, Your mom, what a loser, and Look how pretty you are in that picture, and all the other little things I need to hear. Without her, I don’t have the strength.
