Chapter 98 - The Pages I Gave Them
I began writing because the boys asked.
They wanted the family story in my words.
Not every detail.
Not yet.
But enough that the nursery, Elena, Margaret, Lena, and the years afterward would not depend entirely on what I could remember when a question occurred to them.
The first pages were difficult.
I kept making myself sound more reasonable than I had been.
I deleted those sentences.
Then I made Lena sound as though she had arrived knowing exactly what to do with all of us.
She read the draft and frowned.
“I didn’t.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I looked at her.
She placed the pages on the desk.
“I was frightened. Sometimes I stayed because I loved the boys. Sometimes I stayed because I couldn’t see another way through the day. Those things happened together.”
I nodded.
“Write that.”
So I did.
I wrote about Elena as a person who had laughed, complained, wanted things, and expected me to listen.
I wrote about Caroline’s anger and the grief beneath it.
About Daniel’s work.
About Marco’s loyalty and the harm loyalty had sometimes helped him excuse.
About Jonah Reed.
I used his name.
I wrote what I had done, what I had failed to ask, and what could never be repaired simply because I finally wanted to repair it.
Then I wrote about the ordinary years.
Bad sandwiches.
School forms.
A dog asleep beside a door.
Children who needed different kinds of help.
A woman who wanted to study and had waited too long to believe she could ask.
When the boys read the first complete version, they did so separately.
Nico brought his copy back with questions written on a sheet.
Noah waited until evening.
Then he sat beside me.
“You were going to hurt her.”
I knew which page he meant.
“Yes.”
He looked at the book in his lap.
“But she was protecting us.”
“Yes.”
For a long moment, neither of us moved.
Then he asked, “Does Mama know you wrote it?”
“She read it.”
He nodded.
“I’m glad she told you the truth.”
“So am I.”
At the end, I left several pages blank.
Isabel noticed.
“Why?”
“Because you’ll remember things differently.”
She took a pen.
On the first blank page, she wrote a heading.
Things Daddy Forgot.
May you like
Lena laughed until she had to sit down.
I moved the pen closer to our daughter.
