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“I don’t mean to overwhelm you,” she said when they sat at the table. There were white tulips on the counter, dipping in a crystal vase. Everything was clean, surfaces shining.
He noticed the stack of photo albums then, other notebooks, some files. Detective West said that his aunt was an amateur genealogist, tracing the roots and branches of her family tree back into history. The idea of that, that there was all that data about her family, abouthisfamily, was as exciting as it was frightening.
“I want you to know, Henry, that we would have taken you after she passed. I would have raised you as my own. But Margaret—she didn’t want us. Her family. She just, I don’t know, always wanted to get away.”
“Margaret.”
“You knew her as Alice, that’s what Detective West said. But that wasn’t the name our parents gave her. She always loved that book—Alice in Wonderland. She went down the rabbit hole, didn’t she?”
His aunt had started crying again. He wanted to comfort her but he didn’t know how. He reached out an awkward hand and she took it.
“By the time Detective West and I connected, you were grown, heading off to college. And you didn’t answer my emails.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just—I don’t know why I didn’t. I should have.”
“It’s okay,” she said. Her smile was warm, understanding. “There’s no rule book for dealing with a mess like this one, is there? We’re all just trying to get through, aren’t we?”
She got up and came back with a cup of tea and a plate of cookies.
“Detective West says that I had the birth certificate and social security number of a dead child. Do you know anything about that?”
She sat with a long exhale, rubbed at her eyes. “Margaret...we called her Maggie...got pregnant in her senior year of high school. It was a big deal. Our parents were devastated, you know. They wanted so much for her, for us. But they planned to help her raise the baby so that she could finish school.”
She opened the first stack of photo albums, slid it between them. They flipped through the thick pages. A picture of Alice as a child—holding out the skirt of a yellow dress, smiling, coquettish. Then as an adolescent, lithe and striking, if not pretty, in the embrace of a younger girl, Henry’s aunt. There was a family portrait, everyone stiff and smiling against a gray backdrop. Alice wore a blue dress, eyes sullen. Picture after picture of the girls—Christmas morning, Hawaiian vacation, riding on horseback, playing tennis. His aunt paused at each, sharing memories.Oh, my, Maggie hated horses—everything about them. But Dad wanted us both to know how to ride. The fights!
Our parents fought every Christmas. Dad was always on Mom for spending too much.
There was a picture of Alice, her hair cut short in a pixie cut, wearing a skintight striped dress.Oh, the Pat Benatar look. My parents were furious that she cut her hair. But she did what she wanted. Always.
Then, finally, the photograph of a baby wrapped in a blue blanket. Not Henry. This child had strawberry blond hair, light eyes.
“Honestly, for a kid, it was kind of exciting, to have a nephew and a baby in the house. I was four years younger than Maggie.”
She smiled at the memory, but the happy expression darkened. “But the baby, also named Henry, he died. SIDS.”
She traced a hand over the picture of the infant.
“It just blew us to pieces. Maggie took off after that. We’d get a postcard from this town or that over the years. But I never saw her again.”
She shook her head, was quiet a moment. Henry heard a clock ticking somewhere, a chime for the quarter hour. Then,
“Our parents passed—young for these times. My dad had a heart attack; all the men on his side of the family died young. My mother, well, she had a car accident. But if you ask me it was more that she’d just given up on life. She didn’t really recover after the loss of Margaret, the baby, my dad. She had been depressed and drinking heavily the night she died.”
They were just sentences. A flat recount of the decline of a family. But he could see the pain and loss in the older woman’s face.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. And he was. Sorry for her, for himself. It seemed like Alice had hurt a lot of people.
“Life,” she said. “It beats you up, doesn’t it?”
“Not everyone,” he says. Some people seemed to live charmed lives, even if they didn’t know it. Intact families, the privilege of heritage, an expectation of a certain kind of future, a safety net beneath them.
Her smile was kind. “Yes, everyone. Eventually.”
Henry pointed to the baby photograph. “That’s not me.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not.”
“Then who am I? Where did I come from? I think maybe I didn’t really want to know. But my wife and I, we’re having a baby.”
