Parker
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat for the thousandth time, feeling my stomach muscles clenching as I once again thought of the length of the ride. It hadn’t seemed this long when I went with Isaac and Zac to visit my grandmother. It hadn’t seemed nearly this long at all. Had the road somehow been lengthened between the time I had originally been there and now? Were we taking a longer scenic route? Or worse, were we lost? What if we never found it? What if I was forced to sit in a moving vehicle with Taylor and Annie for...forever?
I shook my head. That was dumb.
“You okay back there?” Annie asked, looking at me in the rearview mirror, sounding no better about this than I felt.
What if, in her nervousness, she wrapped us around a tree?
“I’m fine,” I replied uncertainly, subtly moving over to the other side of the car where she couldn’t as easily see me in the rearview.
Oh, I hated this. How I hated this. What could possibly have been running through my mind last night? What could it have been that had swayed me to offer to do this?
I wanted to bang my head against the window several times. Maybe even put it through the window.
Even the drive to Annie’s on the day of the picnic, sitting on Taylor’s lap and falling across Isaac’s, hadn’t been this bad. Because I hadn’t known then. I had had an inkling. But I hadn’t known.
God I didn’t want to do this.
I swallowed audibly as we pulled into Riverside Cemetary, the place where the “unwashed heathens” were buried, as Isaac had jokingly said upon entering the last time, across the street from the good Christians. But there was the sign and here we were.
We even circled around the flagpole before parking in front of a still fresh grave with still fresh flowers on it. On the headstone was my father’s name, Collin Joshua Windsor, the date he was born, the date he died, and a line from a Robert Frost poem I couldn’t help but guess he liked:
So this was what the man in the picture whom Taylor and I resembled like children often resemble their parents had become. This was where he was. I had missed him by only a few weeks. And I hadn’t even been invited to the funeral.
Not that I would have felt particularly comfortable there, thinking back on Taylor’s description of it over breakfast that morning, talking about Hannah and her children and Maggie and how she had talked to him, probably knowing who he was. I hated the fact that I hadn’t been invited, but if I had been, I’m not sure I would have had the guts to go like Taylor did. Either that or I would have gotten up and left halfway through the service. I didn’t often feel comfortable in a house of God and mourning a relative I had never known among the relatives and friends who had known him would probably only make it that much worse.
But now here we were. No wife and children, no sister present. It was just the three of us. Me and Taylor standing on one side of the headstone. Annie standing on the other. She ran her fingers over the side, almost lovingly. No, my father had not just been some nameless hellraiser junkie somewhere. He was someone my mother must have been very much in love with. I was convinced of it as I watched her affectionate gesture.
“So,” she said, turning away from my father and to me, “why are we here, Parker?”
She didn’t say it impatiently or condescendingly. Only nervously and uncertainly curious. The way she sounded in the car.
I sighed. “I wanted to prove to myself that this was real,” I said. “I wanted to prove to myself that everything Taylor told me that day was true. And if this is here, then it all must be.”
She nodded, confirming that it was true.
“I...,” I started, then stopped. “I don’t really know what to say. To any of you,” I added, gesturing toward the grave, knowing that somehow I was speaking for his benefit as well.
“I’m sorry...” she began by I held up a hand to stop her.
“Not to sound harsh, but I didn’t come here for apologies today,” I said. “I got enough of those before and trust me, I’ve worked it out enough in my mind that you are sorry. I can’t completely justify in my mind what you did, but I know that you’re sorry for it, so you don’t need to say it.”
She nodded, giving in.
We stood in silence for a long moment, Taylor shuffling his feet nervously every once in a while.
I was the one who broke the silence, as I think was only right, saying something before I had even realized that I was going to say it. Launching into a story that I hadn’t thought about in a long time.
“When I was in second grade, my teacher, Mrs. Chapin, gave us an assignment. We were supposed to make family trees. She showed us how to do it. How to make the branches and all that. We all found it quite fascinating and not a few of us had trouble actually doing it,” I said.
Annie and Taylor were both watching me now as I spoke, curious as to where this story was going.
“By that time I knew I was adopted,” I said. “Gina had told me a year or two before that, biologically, she wasn’t really my aunt. She told me about my brother and just sort of repeated the story that my parents were some place far away with families of their own. It never really mattered to me, though. She was my mother and my family, as far as I was concerned. So this was the first time that I really ever thought about it. I brought the project home and she sat down with me at the kitchen table that night and I remember asking her if it was right that I put her down as my mother. Like if my teacher would fail me if she found out that I was really adopted and all that.”
I paused, taking a deep breath, looking up to see how Taylor and Annie were reacting to this story.
“And?” Annie prodded me.
“And she told me no, nobody would get mad. Nobody would be able to tell,” I said. “But the problem was that I would be able to tell. And that was really when I began to wonder about who my mother was and who my father was and who my brother was. I didn’t know my family like the rest of the kids in my class. I only had Gina and Gina wasn’t my mother. Not really. And that went on for a while, but by the time I first saw Taylor on television, I had pretty well convinced myself that I didn’t really care. That I didn’t really think about it all that much. But it’s not true. I thought about it a lot. I didn’t even know your names until recently. None of you.”
This fact visibly surprised both of them. Annie’s eyebrows shot up in surprise and she tried to hide a slightly grudging look that Gina had never even told me her name. Taylor, though I was pretty sure I had told him somewhere along the line that I hadn’t known the name of my brother until my last birthday, looked a little hurt as well. But then his hurt faded into curiosity as my monologue continued.
“And now here we all are,” I said. “Seven years later. I was stuck for seven entire years wondering about all three of you and now here you all are. All three of you were practically right under my nose for the last year and a half. Every single one of you. And I didn’t know. Partly because I didn’t want to admit it and partly because no one even bothered to tell me. I have come to terms with the fact that I am not the only one this is happening to. As much as I’ve forgotten it in the past few months, that Taylor, you’re especially part of all that’s happening, too, but that still really sucks that I was the last to know. It didn’t have to be that way. I had seven years to think about it. I wouldn’t have reacted all that badly if you had told me right off. Or as soon as I got off the plane at least. I would have understood better if I didn’t have to be left to figure it all out myself and then feel like an idiot when the truth finally came out. I waited seven years.”
“I waited twelve,” Annie spoke up as I paused again to collect my thoughts. “Longer for you.”
I nodded, knowing what she was saying.
“I’ve taken that into account,” I said. “I know that it couldn’t have been easy and the fact that you could have told me seven years ago and didn’t really isn’t all that different from the fact that you could have told me three months ago and didn’t. It’s all for the same reasons. It’s just that one tends to feel worse than the other. I want you to know, though, Annie, that I never hated you for what you did. Occasionally I felt bad when I thought about it, but Gina made it pretty clear, even without telling me the whole story, that you did what you had to do. I won’t hate you now, either. I’m angry, but I won’t hate you. I’ll even thank you right now for deciding to give me to Gina when you decided you couldn’t keep us anymore. Because Gina is, by far, one of the best people I know. And she’s a really great mother besides. I love her and I don’t know if I can feel the same way about you as I do about her, but...I don’t hate you. I want you to know that.”
She nodded and smiled feebly.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Gina didn’t exactly volunteer for the job, but I’m glad she did a good one. You turned out really well, Parker. Both of you did. And I owe that to your parents. And your siblings.”
She looked at Taylor at that last line. He stayed as silent as ever.
“What do you think he would think about all this?” I asked, gesturing to the headstone with my father’s name on it.
“He’d probably just be happy that we were all together again,” she said. “Well, no, for the first time, I guess. He would have gotten a kick out of the fact that both of you look so much like him.”
Taylor and I looked at each other then and smiled, turning away.
“Do you think we would have made it as a family?” Taylor spoke up finally.
She shrugged. “I don’t know if I can dwell on something that didn’t happen. Not something like that. But I think we would have made an interesting family,” she said.
We all grinned at that.
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Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Five