CHAPTER 17

Chapter 17

My entire life I believed that I was shunned by my biological father and his family, but the truth is much stranger.

“When you were born,” my uncles stopped and considered the tops of his hands for a moment before continuing, “you were quite clearly not his. He could tell from the first look and when he questioned Mary she didn’t keep up the ruse.”

“But, she did with me.”

“But, she did with you. She insisted on it.”

“Why?”

Ray raised his hands slightly into the air, with the palms up, as if to say, “The hell if I know…”

“It’s just mind-boggling how much of my life is a fabrication.”

“I am so sorry, Jo. I am sorry that there were so many secrets and lies. I am sorry everything just fell apart the way that it did. You deserved better.”

I was quiet for a while. I felt bad admitting that I had, indeed, deserved something better because it implied that my life after my adoption had been less than great. But, I also understood what he meant. And, agreed. 

“Alice used to tell me stories at night. Sometimes she would read to me out of a book and other times she would just tell one out of her head. She had a vivid imagination. She could do all the voices and she would use her hands, arms, legs, hair and whatever random props she could find in the room to act out the story.  She used to tell me that you can be anything in the whole world if you just close your eyes and imagine it hard enough.”

“She sounds lovely,” Ray said sincerely. I wrote “lovely?” with a little smiley face beside it on my pad. He often surprised me.

“She was. She had a way of creating whimsy and wonder wherever she went. She was lit up from the inside… not weighed down by the things that seem to hold the rest of the world back… the things that have always held me back.”

“What things are those?”

“I don’t know exactly but I know that I have lots of dim little caverns inside of myself that she did not carry.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Darkness…. That is what it is. I possess a darkness that simply did not exist inside of Alice de Gaulle.”

“I’m so glad she was good to you. You have no idea what comfort that brings me.”

He looked up through the tops of his eyelids and the pale blue of his eyes shimmered below. It’s difficult to really imagine the amount of darkness that resided behind those sparkling baby blues.