What did you do before this?
I ran a beauty care products business out of my house. Hairsprays. Facial creams. Body lotions. (A friend of mine had done that back in Merrick, so I knew something about it — enough, anyway, to get by.)
Are you married?
Yes. And no. (This was the tough one. There were no wife and children with me in Chicago now, but if things went according to plan, soon there would be. Suddenly they would just appear. Why? Because we’d suffered the great malaise of the twentieth century — marital difficulties — and we’d separated for a time. But just for a time. We were working at a reconciliation — we were hopeful it would happen and that they would join me.)
Do you have any children?
Yes. One. A daughter.
I stayed close to the truth in almost everything. It made it easier when my mind went blank, when someone cornered me with a question I wasn’t prepared for. The life of Lawrence Widdoes was different from the life of Charles Schine, yes, but not that different, and those differences slowly and haltingly became second nature to me. I became familiar with them, nurtured them, trotted them out and took them for strolls around the park, and finally adopted them as my own.
“She’s begun dialysis,” Deanna said.
I was standing at the public pay phone two blocks from my Chicago apartment. It was October now. Wind was knifing in off the lake and rattling the phone booth. My eyes teared up.
“When?” I asked.
“Over a month. I didn’t want to tell you.”
“How . . . how is she taking it?”
“Like she’s taking everything else these days. With this horrible silence. I beg her to talk to me, yell at me, scream at me, anything. She just looks at me. After you left, she just closed up, Charles. She’s holding it in so tightly I think she’s going to explode. I took her to therapy, but the therapist said she didn’t say a word. Usually you can wait them out — the silence becomes so uncomfortable they become desperate to fill it. But not our Anna. She looked out the window for fifty minutes, then got up and left. Now this.”
“Jesus, Deanna . . . does the dialysis hurt her?”
“I don’t think so. Dr. Baron says it doesn’t.”
“How long does she have to sit there?”
“Six hours. More or less.”
“And it doesn’t hurt her? You’re sure?”
“Your being gone is what’s hurting her. It’s killing her. It’s killing me not being able to tell her. I don’t think I cannot tell her anymore. Charles . . .” Deanna started crying.
I suddenly felt as if every useful part of my body had stopped working. Someone had just plucked out my heart and left a hole there. It was waiting for Anna to come and fill it. Anna and Deanna both. I began to calculate. It had been, what . . . four months?
“Have you put the house up for sale yet?” I asked her.
“Yes. I told anyone I’m still talking to that I have to get away. There are too many memories. I have to start fresh.”
“Who are you talking to?”
“Hardly anyone. Now. My aunts and uncles have given up on me — I had another fight with Joe. Our friends? It’s funny . . . at first they give you the song and dance how nothing’s going to change — you’ll still get together for Saturday night dinners and Sunday barbecues. But it does change. They’re all coupled up and you’re alone and they feel awkward. It becomes easier to just not invite you. We were worried how we’d manage to cut ties with them, and it’s happening on its own. Who do I talk to? My mother, mostly. That’s it.”
“The first decent offer you get on the house — sell it,” I said. “It’s time.”
FORTY-EIGHT
I found a house outside Oakdale.
It wasn’t much of a house, a modest ranch built sometime in the fifties, but it had three bedrooms and a small garden and lots of privacy.
I rented it.
And waited for them to come join me.
Deanna sold the house.
It wasn’t the best price we could have gotten, but it wasn’t the worst, either. It was expedient.
When Deanna told Anna they were going to be moving, she had to weather a storm of protest, however. Deanna was ostensibly moving to be rid of the memories — Anna wanted to hold on to them. Deanna said it was done; there was no going back. Anna retreated into stony silence.
She left most of the furniture. We didn’t want a moving company having an address of delivery.
They packed up the car and left.
Somewhere between Pennsylvania and Ohio, Deanna pulled the car over and told Anna I was alive.
We’d agonized over this.
How exactly do you go about telling your daughter that her father isn’t dead? That he didn’t die in that hotel explosion after all? I couldn’t just pop out of the woodwork when she got there. She had to be prepared for something like that.
We’d also wondered what should be told to her. Why was I alive? Or, more to the point, why had she been allowed to think I was dead all these months?
She was fourteen — half kid and half not.
So we decided on a story that was half true and half not.
Deanna pulled the car into the parking lot of a Roy Rogers along Route 96. Later, she told me how it went.
“I have something to tell you,” she said to Anna, and Anna barely looked at her. She was still on a kind of speaking strike, using silence as a weapon, the only one she had.
“It’s something you’re going to have a hard time believing, and you’re going to be very, very angry at me, but I’m going to try to make you understand. Okay?”
And now Anna did look at her, because this sounded serious.
“Your father is alive, Anna.”
At first, Deanna said, Anna looked at her as though she’d lost her mind. And when she repeated it, as if Deanna were maybe playing some kind of sick joke on her. A look of near disgust passed over Anna’s face and she asked her mother why she was doing this to her.
“It’s the truth, darling. He's alive. We’re going to meet him now. He’s waiting for us in Illinois.”
And it was at that point that Anna finally believed her, because she knew her mother hadn't lost her mind and wouldn’t have been cruel enough to joke about it. She broke down, finally and completely and spectacularly broke down. She cried rivers of tears, Deanna said, cried so hard and so much that Deanna didn’t think the body could contain that much water. She cried out of happiness, out of sheer relief.
Then, with Deanna stroking her hair, came the questions.
“Why did you tell me he was dead?” Anna said.
“Because we couldn’t take the chance you would tell somebody. Maybe that was wrong — I’m so sorry you had to go through that. We thought it was the only way. Please believe me.”
“Why is he pretending to be dead? I don’t understand. . . .”
“Daddy got into some trouble. It wasn’t his fault. But they might not believe him.”
“Theywho? ”
“The police.”
“The police? Daddy? ”
“You know your father, Anna, and you know he’s a good man. But it might not have looked that way. It’s hard for me to explain. But he got into trouble and he couldn’t get out.”
Deanna told her the rest. Their names would be different. Their lives. Everything.
“I have to change my name? ” Anna asked.
“You always said you hated it, remember?”