“We did a whole unit on memoirs in my English class last year.” I dig my fork into the walnut cake. “I really liked it. We read a bunch of them and had to analyze their structure and stuff. One of things we learned is that the author is the main character. So maybe you should think of it that way. Start with you.”
He doesn’t look as if that’s helpful, but he doesn’t reject the idea outright either.
“I still have the worksheets and articles we read in class,” I say. “I can give them to you, if you want to see them. Maybe they would help.”
“I’d appreciate that, thanks. Did you have a memoir writing assignment?”
“An essay. I wrote about my mother’s cooking.” A shadow falls over my heart, and I take another bite of the pastry.
“She was an excellent cook.” He smiles faintly. “Didn’t have the patience for baking, though.”
“I’m getting better at cooking too. I still have most of her recipes, but she didn’t write a lot of them down.” The recipes are one of the few things I have left of my mother. Even our photographs of her are almost nonexistent—during one of her bad episodes, she tore up and burned most of our family photos.
“Hey.”
I glance up.
“You okay?”
“I was…” I pause to take a sip of coffee. “Thinking I don’t have any photos of my mother. Just that one of us that you took at Volkov Bay. She destroyed all the rest. Do you have any others?”
“She and Odette kept all the photos and mementos.” He frowns slightly. “Did you ever see the photo album your mother put together with pictures of us when we were kids? There were quite a few of both her and me, and more of her and Odette.”
“No.” I look up, my heart catching. “I didn’t even know she had an album like that. I never found it in any of her things.”
“It was one of her favorite possessions.” His frown deepens. “I figured she’d taken it with her after she and Odette moved out of my father’s house. Maybe she didn’t.”
“Do you know where it could be?”
“Unfortunately, no.” Something black flashes behind his warm brown eyes. “My father wouldn’t have kept it.”
The mention of Conrad Hawke feels like a sudden cloud. Though part of me wants to ask Darius more about his father, another stronger instinct warns me not to. He’d answer whatever questions I asked, but I don’t think I want to know more about the big, mysterious figure who seems to have thrown such darkness over Darius’s and my mother’s lives.
“I’ll ask around, see if I can locate it,” Darius says, as if sensing my sorrow over the loss of something I hadn’t even known existed.
“Never mind.” I shrug, trying to sound nonchalant. “If she’d really wanted to keep the album, she would have. She probably destroyed it too somewhere along the way.”
His eyes cloud. “Katherine had a lot of problems, no question. But she loved you so much.”
“She was also crazy.” I stab my fork into the walnut cake.
“Nell, she had a mental illness. She wasn’t crazy.”
“Is there a difference?” I tighten my jaw in defiance. “Sane people don’t kill themselves.”
“She lost the battle. But she fought as hard as she could.”
“It wasn’t hard enough, though.”
Shame rustles at the knowledge that I’m putting a damper on a lovely evening, but I’ve kept so much bottled inside me for so long that the pressure is sometimes unbearable. And I know—I know—Darius is the one person in the world who will understand, except I could never talk to him about this with my father nearby.
“My father won’t talk about her anymore.” I lift my gaze to his. He’s put his fork down, focusing his attention on me. “He stopped talking about her right after the funeral. It’s so frustrating sometimes, like when I want to ask him something or remember a recipe she used. At first, I tried talking to him about her, but he shut me down. I think he might have been relieved she was gone.”
“Nell, he—”
“I don’t mean that as an accusation.” Guilt sticks in my chest. “Because I felt that way too.”
“Nell.” He puts his hand on my arm and squeezes. The weight of his palm and pressure of his fingers ease some of my prickly feelings. “Your mother was wonderful in many ways, but she was also a challenge. I know how hard it was even to reason with her sometimes. Your father was under a lot of stress trying to protect you when she became…difficult.”
I pick at the cake crumbs with my fork. My mother had never physically hurt me, but there had been episodes when I’d been scared of her. She’d been terrible about taking her medication, and my father had struggled to even get her to the doctor.
“Did you try to convince him not to marry her?” I drop the fork and ease my arm away from his touch.
He shakes his head and stands, picking up our plates. “He loved her, and she was pregnant with you. He would have done anything for both of you. Even risk estrangement from his own family.”
He turns away to put the plates in the sink.
I rub my finger over a crack in the table. The air feels brittle. My father’s parents had cut him off after he’d both refused their offer to pay for an abortion and announced he planned to marry Katherine.
Aside from not being “good enough” for their son, my grandparents had been appalled at the idea of a daughter-in-law who might introduce mental illness into the Fairchild DNA. They’d made good on their threat and never spoke to him again. I’d never met them before they both passed away several years ago.
My father had been twenty-one when I was born. For the next six years, he’d worked three jobs to put himself through graduate school and provide for his wife and daughter. He’d refused Darius’s offer of help and graduated with honors from Stanford.
Though my father was offered several prestigious university positions, Katherine’s episodes had gotten increasingly worse and he’d taken a job at Evergreen College so they could stay close to her San Francisco doctors. The downward spiral continued after Katherine’s mother died. I still remember the sound of my mother’s hysterical grief.
“Nell.” Concern weights Darius’s voice.
I look up. He’s standing by the sink, his gaze on me. He’d been a comet in my life—a brilliant, dazzling star shooting through the darkest of nights.
“Why didn’t you come back sooner?” I rise to pick up our mugs. “After she died.”
Regret and guilt fill his eyes. Though I don’t want to hurt him, the memories of how things used to be are such a sharp contrast with how they are now that I can’t help wondering how they might have been. If he’d come back more often. If he’d stayed.
“I mean, I know obviously you couldn’t over the past few years,” I add hastily, reaching past him to put the mugs in the sink. “But before that…”
He rubs the back of his neck. Brackets of tension line his mouth. “I didn’t come back to the States at all during those four years. The world was a mess, and assignments kept piling up. Every time one ended, another one began. I was constantly on the move. It’s no excuse, but for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”