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“No. No. Mom and Dad divorced. She never dated anyone when I was little. It was just the two of us. How could she have been—”
“Before,” Alexis explains. “Mom had an affair before she and Dad got divorced. Actually, her affair is the reason Dad left.”
The little airplanes in my head explode. My face is hot, but the rest of my body is ice.
Is this what people mean when they say, “my blood ran cold”? Because my entire body feels like a glacier. Frozen in place.
“It went on for years,” Lana continues. “The box is all of the letters and pictures Mom kept. I think Dad found it, which is how the truth came out.”
Alexis nods. “The only reason I even know the truth is because I heard them yelling about it one night. Mom was saying that Dad shouldn’t have gone through her things. She tries to tell him that these were from years ago, when she was a teenager. But the letters were stamped and dated.”
“Dad didn’t want to tell us. Even when we asked him flat out,” Lana says. “He told me he didn’t want us thinking of Mom differently.‘She’s still your mom,’he said.‘She loves you.’But Mom gave me the box.”
“What did she say when she gave it to you?” Alexis asks. “She said that she wanted you to—to what?”
Lana clenches her jaw, frustration plain on her face. “Mom gave me the box and said, ‘Here. You can read these and see what real love looks like. If you don’t feel this for someone, don’t marry them. Or you’ll end up just like me.’”
I open my mouth and then close it. I have thoughts—too many to keep straight—but no words. Finally, I shake my head. “I had no idea.”
Lana nods. “She didn’t want you to know. She asked us not to tell you.”
“And you listened to her?” I reply. “You could have told me, anyway.”
“We could have, but it wouldn’t have changed things,” Alexis says. “You lived with Mom. Dad was hours away. Even if we did tell you and you hated Mom for it, what good would it have done?”
A montage of memories flickers through my mind. Scenes of Mom and me eating dinner in front of the television. The two of us cleaning the house on a Sunday morning with all of the windows open. Mom tucking me into my bed at night, making sure to pull the blankets to my chin.
Would I have hated her for what she did? Do I hate her now?
“We were never going to tell you,” Lana continues. “Mom asked us not to, and Dad didn’t want to dredge it all up again. As far as he was concerned, things ended how they were meant to and he could live with that. But I couldn’t live with it.”
“Couldn’t live with what?”
“The way you looked at us every time the topic of Mom or Dad came up,” she explains softly. “It was obvious you were angry. Things were only getting worse.”
I want to deny it, but she’s right. My bitterness had begun to fester.
“Well, part of that is because you are always telling me I wasted my life,” I say. “It didn’t exactly draw us closer.”
“I know. I shouldn’t have, but… well, it was hard not to feel like you’d been duped.”
“You think Mom duped me?”
Lana shrugs. “Kind of. Don’t you?”
My instinct is to defend my mom. It was always the two of us against the world, even where my sisters were concerned. But now, she isn’t here. It’s just me. Without her, I have no idea how I actually feel.
“I’m not sure. She clearly didn’t tell me the entire truth, but Mom was good to me. She loved me. Honestly, she was my—my best friend.” I swallow back emotion. “It’s not like she lied and told me Dad cheated and abandoned her. She just left a lot of gaps. I filled them in with my own version of the story.”
“You never asked Dad?” Alexis asks.
I shake my head. “It didn’t seem like a good use of time. If he wanted to be there for me, he would have been there for me. Even this new information doesn’t change the fact that he moved hours away. He could have stayed closer, been a bigger part of my life. He didn’t.”
“No, but it does change the fact that you refused to go visit him on school vacations or in the summers. Alexis and I went and spent a few weeks at a time with him when we were on break from college, but you refused to come.”
I remember getting pictures of them all in the mail. Photographs of Alexis and Lana standing next to our step-siblings and our even younger half-siblings. Dad scrawled me messages on the back in his messy little boy’s handwriting:“We love and miss you, Raynie!”
“I guess I never really gave Dad a chance.” I wrap a finger around my necklace, nervously sliding it back and forth across the chain. “Maybe I should have…”
