“It wasn’t, Mama, but I could’ve handled it. I did handle it. It’s him I can’t handle. The disgust that rolls off him every time he looks at me. The refusal to acknowledge that I exist. Why? Why does he hate me? I just want the truth. That’s all I came for.”
Her mother’s eyes closed so tightly they creased at the corners. “He doesn’t hate you. He hates himself. And it’s all my fault.”
Stella sighed. “That isn’t really clearing anything up for me.”
“I know.” Her mother nodded. “I know it’s not. Sit tight.”
Stella watched as her mother left the room and stepped outside.
“Hugh,” she heard her mother say evenly. “It’s time.”
“A mistake,” was all she heard her father mutter as he came into the house.
Her heart turned inside out. She’d known he’d felt that way, but she’d never heard him voice it out loud. And all these years, she’d thought she wanted him to speak. She’d been wrong. She moved to stand, but as her parents entered the living room, her mother motioned for her to remain seated.
Her father looked twenty feet tall from that angle, angry and tense and avoiding her eyes. It was her childhood all over again.
A fleeting need possessed her. She wished Van were there. Wished he could hold her through this excruciating experience. Promise to make it all better once it was over.
Her parents sat together on the loveseat across from her.
“Stella. Before we discuss this, I want you to know, your father did what he did because I was inexorable. I was overcome with the obstinate desire to have a child, and while I wanted a daughter, I would’ve taken whatever the good Lord saw fit to give me. But at twenty-nine, I was tired of waiting on the good Lord.”
Stella nodded, feeling completely off kilter and confused as to where this was going.
“Maybe you should tell her, Hugh.”
“Like hell,” he said without looking up. His cold green glare focused on a point in the distance.
Stella turned to look. It was the blue lamp she’d accidentally broken as a child. Without a word, he’d glued it back together. Neither of them had ever told her mother— that she knew of. It was the one secret they shared.
“Okay then.” Candace Chandler turned her attention back to her. “Stella, if you want to leave when I finish, we will understand. But please, please, wait to hear the whole story. And promise me that you won’t cut us out of your life forever. I understand needing space, darling. But these past few years have been so hard.” Her mother’s voice faltered.
“I can’t promise anything until I hear what you have to stay. But I will listen and try to understand.”
Candace shook her perfectly coiffed blond head. “I don’t expect you to understand. Some things… Some things you can’t understand. I just need you to accept it. Accept that I am a flawed individual who made a whole slew of choices based on pain and regret.”
Stella nodded.
The story her mother told came out evenly, despite the sobs that lifted her shoulders periodically. She seemed to literally be pulling strength from her father’s solid presence beside her, leaning on him when it became particularly difficult to speak.
“I was raped by a ranch hand when I was a teenager. Brutally.” The words stabbed at Stella’s heart. “The doctors said I would never have children. And they were right.”
Time seemed suspended in the moment as she tried to think of something, anything, she could say to console her mother.
“I’m so sorry, Mama,” was the best she could do. Shock and confusion had a stranglehold on her thoughts and tossed them back and forth recklessly to oblivion.
Her mother just nodded, and Stella realized the woman was a stranger sitting before her. Both of her parents were. Her mouth gaped uncontrollably and she did her best to keep it closed and just listen. Her mother seemed to be waiting for her to gather her composure to continue. Once the faraway ringing in her ears lessened, Stella nodded for her to continue.
“Your father was the one who found me. He saved me. That day and many times since then.”
Stella struggled to hear the words over her own breathing and the questions rising rapidly in her mind.
“I put it behind me. My family wasn’t the type to seek counseling. They were the ‘suck it up and get back to work’ type. They worked themselves and me to the bone until the day they retired. Once they both passed, the ranch was given to me. I wanted nothing to do with it, as you can probably imagine and empathize with.”
Stella swallowed hard, hearing the pop in her ears as she did.
“But Hugh reminded me that we had met here, that we could have a beautiful life, make our own memories here, and let go of the painful ones. He was right. So we got married here and began trying every possible way to conceive imaginable.”
Stella’s stomach tightened as she listened. She’d never been told much about her parents’ life before her. She wanted to know their story, but she was beginning to see why they hadn’t shared it.
“Nothing worked,” her mother told her with tear-filled eyes. “I’d nearly bankrupted us and driven your father away with my frantic need to have a child.”
Stella watched as her father murmured something in her mother’s ear that seemed to calm her.
Her mother’s shoulders straightened. “Then Grace Whitman showed up on our doorstep. She was the young woman who’d agreed to be our surrogate. She was pregnant and had an abusive boyfriend who knew her baby wasn’t his.”
Stella bolted upright without having meant to.
“Please,” her mother pleaded. “Please just let me finish.”
Stella eased herself shakily back onto the couch. Her stomach pitched and rolled. Wherever this was going, it was somewhere fucked up and ugly. She could feel it.
“I thought she was a gift from God, and in many ways, she was.” Candace sniffled. “But she hadn’t gotten pregnant by her boyfriend, nor had she gotten pregnant by herself, or by using the In Vitro methods we’d been trying.”
Stella tried to make sense of what she was being told. “I don’t understand, I mean, if she was—”
“Your mother was out of her mind with the need to have a child. I just wanted to make her happy. To protect her from the pain of feeling less than whole. I wanted to take care of her, give her what she deserved.”
The shock at hearing her father saying so many words all at once rendered her speechless.
“I’d nearly destroyed him, destroyed us. I can’t begin to tell you how badly I wanted you, Stella Jo. Wanted to be a mother, the perfect mother. The kind I’d spent my life wishing I had.”
She just shook her head. This was all so convoluted and messed up. The story was out of order and missing the most important parts. Nothing made sense. “So whose daughter am I then?”
“Ours,” her mother said, while her father answered, “Mine.”
“I am so lost,” she whispered helplessly. The world she’d thought she knew swirled out of her reach and disintegrated.
Her father stood and began to pace like a caged beast. She watched him, waiting for him to clarify.
“Grace wanted to be a part of our family. She’d never had one. We took her in and…” He paused to take a loud breath. “Your mother wanted a child. Grace wanted to give her that in exchange for helping her escape her abusive boyfriend.”
“Did you?”
“Yes and no.” Her father stopped pacing. “The IVF worked the first time. Her boyfriend pushed her down a flight of stairs and she lost the baby. After that, none of the procedures took.”