The Prize
2016
Sunday evening
By the time Alex finished talking it was nearly dark. The story was sad, but then I’d always known my mother’s story was sad.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Alex said, wiping her face. “Sorry I brought her here. Sorry I couldn’t help her. I’ve wanted to say that for so long.”
She paused, but neither Casey nor I spoke so she went on. “Your grandmother. Daniel’s mother. She hadn’t lived around here for years, but her old church friend arranged for you to be adopted by a nice older couple in Coeur-de-Lune. Private, closed adoption.”
Old church friend. Barbara Macon. My stork.
“Your parents didn’t know anything. Your grandmother had given me money over the years and when she died, when Casey was eight, she left me more. And The Shipwreck. For years, I stayed away. But I knew you were there, Laura. So close. I thought, if I could make sure you were happy, if we could make the house our own... And we did make it our own. The three of us. Didn’t we?” Alex’s voice cracked at the end, pleading.
Casey, sitting perfectly still, eyes closed and cheeks wet, didn’t acknowledge Alex.
I was supposed to cry, too. To say something profound, heart-wrenching.
But I couldn’t. I was remembering the strangest thing. “The lavender.”
A word so odd, so apparently random that Alex looked alarmed, and even Casey opened her eyes.
“Lavender?” Alex crept close, cupped her hand around my cheek, clearly worried that her story had pushed me over the edge. “Honey?”
I pulled away from Alex, speaking only to Casey. “I’m not crazy. I was remembering that vase of lavender on the mantel. At The Shipwreck. It was always sliding in front of the picture my dad gave you of the Collier boys on the dock, and I could never figure out why. It was like...like a poltergeist kept moving it.”
Casey nodded slowly, remembering this subtle haunting.
But the ghost was Alex. “You didn’t want to look at the Colliers.” I turned to Alex, challenging her.
Alex took a deep breath. “No. I couldn’t.”
Casey finally spoke. “Was he in the picture?”
“Daniel was the little one in front with the flag,” Alex said. “The two-year-old, the one you thought was so sweet.”
A sweet little boy, who’d grown up and done a monstrous thing to two sweet young girls.
Casey stood and paced around the room, settling by the window. She leaned against the wall, staring at the picnic table.
“I wanted you to know each other, even if I couldn’t explain why,” Alex said. Rushing now. “How could I have told you? What your father was like, that me and Katherine were so young. I couldn’t even say the word out loud until I was twenty-five. Rape.” She said it clearly, not lowering her voice, so that Casey and I didn’t have to say it first.
She went on more gently. “And the odds that one of you would get sick... But after they isolated the gene, and I read how families were getting tests, I thought, if I could only make sure you were okay, maybe I could tell you someday. When you were old enough. You were both seventeen when I found out I could test you. So I—”
“I told her,” Casey said.
“I thought it was the answer to everything. So clever. I hoped you’d both get lucky.”
She added quickly, touching my knee, “You don’t have the gene, Laura. I got your results two months ago.”
“But my blood spilled, I saw it.”
“Then you needed blood. Now you can use other tissue. Like hair.”
“Mom, what the hell?” Casey whirled from the window to face Alex.
I knew Casey was picturing a covert op, someone dispatched to pluck my hair on Market Street. It wasn’t beyond imagining, after everything else Alex had pulled off.
“Your hairbrush,” Alex said. She closed her eyes in shame, acknowledging the absurdity of what she’d done. “Elle was rooting around in a box of stuff from your drawer and asked who it belonged to. It was in winter, right around when Casey first got symptoms.”
“Jesus,” Casey said.
“And that’s why you invited me now,” I said. “Because you knew I was okay.” And because Casey knew she wasn’t.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Alex said, opening her eyes. “It’s as simple as that. As simple and complicated as that. I always thought you’d come back. I was... I’m sorry, Laura, but I was angry with you, for how you left Casey. I knew she’d need her best friend.”
“I thought...” I said.
Alex looked at me, anxious, desperate.
“I’ll tell you someday what I thought.”
“It was your idea to foster Elle.” Casey jumped in. “You’re not going to say she’s a Collier, too? Some goddamned orphaned Collier?”
“No. She’s just a little girl whose mother was not so different from Katherine. Or me.”
For a few minutes the three of us didn’t speak. Casey paced, and Alex fiddled with the ponytail holder securing the goody bag, looking nervously from me to Casey.
I started to whisper something, then stopped myself.
Casey crossed the room, sat on the floor by my side, and touched my arm. “Laur wants to ask something else but she’s scared.”
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“Anything,” Alex said. “Ask anything.”
“The music box song,” I said softly. “It’s meaningless, then? She didn’t even know what it was?”
Alex took a long time to respond, casting about for a gentle answer. So I knew before she spoke that I was right. “She loved it. Does it matter why?”
I shook my head. Though the tears came, finally. I’d wanted it to be a message from her. I’d wanted that more than anything.
I pulled my knees to my chest and hugged my elbows, resting my forehead on the bridge of my arms, letting the tears go inside this dark, private shelter. Neither of them spoke, but after a minute I felt someone’s warmth on my back, a comforting weight that seemed barely heavier than the red wool blanket, and I knew it was Casey who had draped herself over my shoulders.
* * *
When I raised my head, the room was in shadows and Alex was gone. “Where’s your mom?”
“Waiting downstairs.”
“Well,” I said, wiping my nose, looking up at her. “Some prize.”
I couldn’t say it out loud yet: a sister.
“I like the prize.” Casey smiled, almost shyly, for her, eyes darting around the room before connecting with mine. Then her smile ebbed. “But Daniel. I always imagined...”
“Someone different. Someone good.”
All those years of fantasizing about why my mother had given me up. “Poor Alex. The two of them, they were kids.”
“She’s still a kid,” Casey whispered slowly. She shook her head slightly, disbelieving.
It explained so much. Part of Alex would be forever frozen at thirteen.
Casey tilted her head at the doorway to the hall. “So do we forgive her?”
We could punish Alex for her secrets. Refuse to speak to her. Add more hurt and wasted time to the pile, the tangled result of her good intentions. I knew that Casey wouldn’t have posed the question if she wasn’t going to at least try to forgive Alex. And I knew I would try, too. Alex had done her best in an impossible situation.
“It’s not her fault I left, Case,” I said. “Do you forgive me?”
“I will if you don’t run away again.”
I shook my head. Never. “Casey. I wish—”
A little girl’s laughter floated up through the open window. J.B. was outside entertaining Elle, giving us time.
We rose and walked to the window, but couldn’t see them. Their voices were coming from the front.
Together, we breathed in the night wind side by side, staring out at the swaying dark arms of the tree.