From This Day On

He had the momentary sense of standing on the edge of a dark, terrifyingly deep abyss. He didn’t like thinking about Amy, because those thoughts always brought him to this place, one that felt more like fear than he wanted to admit. As always, he found himself mentally backing away from it.

No point in revisiting their relationship. Fact was, he’d never acted like a brother did to a dearly beloved, or even barely tolerated, sister, and she had every reason in the world to resent him at the very least. The wonder was that she’d actually accepted his offer to accompany her to Frenchman Lake.

If something did upset her, why would she turn to him? She probably had good friends, maybe even a guy she was seeing.

Yeah, but then why hadn’t she asked that guy or her best friend to go with her this weekend? She could have said “Thanks but no thanks” to Jakob then and even gotten a little secret pleasure out of rebuffing him.

Maybe she didn’t have any good friends who lived nearby. Yeah, she’d gone to college here, but then moved away. Amy had only been back a few months.

He reluctantly admitted to himself that she had needed him because she didn’t have anyone else.

And because she needed family? He winced at that word in reference to Amy and him.

Nope, he told himself, not going there.

She’d promised to call him. He took another impatient look at the clock on the microwave. 8:39 p.m. Over two hours since he’d dropped her off.

Call, damn it.

* * *

IT TOOK SOME doing, but Amy found her baby book in a box on the shelf in her mother’s closet. She didn’t even know what she hoped to learn, but she was desperate. Anything. A clue. Somehow she was holding her fear and horror at bay. She’d taken a huge leap by assuming her mother had lied to her all her life.

Please let me be wrong.

The closet was vast. When Mom and Ken bought the house, it had had four smallish bedrooms upstairs, and in common with many houses of this era the few closets were grossly inadequate. Especially for a woman who loved shoes.

So the first thing they did was have walls torn out, and the floor space that had been two of the bedrooms was used to enlarge what had been the only upstairs bathroom up here, along with creating a second bathroom and a giant walk-in closet. The remaining small bedroom was for their very occasional guests. Like Amy. So far in her stay, the only reason she’d stepped foot in Mom and Ken’s bedroom was to run the vacuum cleaner around and whisk a feather duster over the blinds and the top of the end tables and dressers.

And yes, she’d known her mother had a thing about shoes, but not the extent of it. In her search to find anything about her childhood or origins, she’d been excited to find underbed rolling containers. Not so much when she pulled them out to find all four of them held shoes.

Wow, Mom. What a waste of money.

Amy didn’t bother with the dresser. Like her mother would keep daily reminders of her unwanted daughter among her socks, jeans or lingerie, where she’d see it every day.

Oh, ugh. Don’t wanna think about Mom’s lingerie.

She also ignored Ken’s section of the closet, which took up about a quarter of it. She could see the gaps where he’d removed clothes and shoes to take to Australia for the two-year stay. It was harder to spot gaps in Mom’s side, because she owned a truly ridiculous amount of clothes as well as the shoes.

Banker-style cardboard boxes marched along a high shelf. Amy dragged a chair in and took them down, one at a time.

Tax returns and files about expenses on the house. Slap the lid on, heave box back onto shelf.

Next.

Bank statements. Credit card slips. Receipts. Amy had always known her mother was obscenely well-organized, but this was ridiculous. Did she keep every scrap of financial information forever?

Amy had reached a corner. She could only remove this box because she hadn’t put the previous one back in place. It weighed less, she realized right away as she lifted it down, which meant it wasn’t packed with dense files as the other ones had been.

She stepped carefully to the floor, set the box on the seat of the chair and lifted off the top.

For a long moment she stared without comprehension. Then an involuntary sound escaped her and she reached out.

Her blankie. Oh, my God, she thought, I’d forgotten it. How could I? How she’d loved this blanket—no, really more of a comforter, with batting inside. The back side was flannel, worn thin by her childish grip. The front was a cotton fabric in swirled lavender and darker purple imprinted with white horses leaping over puffs of white clouds. Some machine quilting kept the three layers together.

She lifted it out of the box and held it close, burying her face in the soft folds the way she’d done as a child. Her smile shook as she remembered the major temper tantrums she’d thrown when she couldn’t find “horse blankie.” How funny that she couldn’t even recall when she’d lost interest in it. She’d had no idea what had ever happened to her much-loved blankie.

Mom had kept it? Amy was knocked off balance by the unimaginable.

After a minute she set it aside and took out another of her childhood treasures, a stuffed puppy that wasn’t as white as it had once been. She wound up the key on the bottom. Tears dripped down her cheeks when it played the familiar tune, “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?”

Oh, Mom. Had she felt anything when she packed these things away? Or had she briskly assumed Amy might want them someday when she had her own children, and never given them another thought?

There were other toys here, too, including a couple she didn’t remember at all. One was a plastic rattle with tiny tooth marks in it. Hers. Finally, at the bottom of the box, were the baby book and a photograph album. Those, she decided to take downstairs to the kitchen table.

She had trouble making herself open the cover of either book or album. Seeing the contents with new eyes was going to hurt.

Baby book first. There was a time she’d thought the fact that her mother had filled it out so carefully meant she must love her daughter. By the time Amy was a teenager, she knew better; the precise entries, the school pictures glued to appropriate pages, were only another manifestation of Mom’s anal personality. Give her a form to fill out, and she was a happy woman.

The details were undeniably all there.

The card from the hospital was attached to the first page. Yes, Baby Girl Nilsson had indeed weighed six pounds fourteen ounces.

Before she went further, Amy booted up her laptop and went online to a site that had a chronology of child development. Then she compared the dates Mom had noted for “first smile,” “rolled over,” “sat up alone” and so on with the chronology. Amy had been early each step of the way. Perhaps because she was little and wiry, she’d barely bothered with crawling, instead walking at eight months and running not much later.

She closed her eyes momentarily. How could she ever have believed she was premature?

She flipped back to the first page, where her mother had written her name, the hospital where she was born, her birth date. Amy’s gaze snagged on two lines that were blank. Mother. Father.

Yet another thing she’d never noticed. A huge thing, given Mom’s personality.

She was almost numb by now. Not entirely; a tsunami was building somewhere deep inside, ominous in its power, but it was still subterranean enough to be ignored.

There were lots of photos of her in the album, mainly, she knew, because her father—oh, God, not my father—had enjoyed taking pictures and had adored her.

A few included Jakob, fewer still Mom or Dad himself. Those were the ones she stared at the hardest, with eyes that burned. She didn’t look like anyone else in the family. A part of her had always known that, but justified it. There was the aunt with red hair. She did have brown eyes, like Mom...only they weren’t at all the same shade of brown as her mother’s. Kids didn’t always look like their parents, she had told herself.

She bore absolutely no resemblance to anyone else in her family, including her only biological relative, her mother.

The tsunami lifted, as if launching itself. She must look like him. The horror was more than she could hold inside. Amy shoved away from the table, staggering to her feet when the chair crashed backward. She felt filthy, contaminated, ugly. Why hadn’t her mother aborted her?

But she knew that, too. Mom wasn’t a regular churchgoer, but she still wore a gold cross on a fine chain around her neck. She had been raised Catholic. Abortion wouldn’t have been on the table as an option.

The part of Amy that was still thinking understood what her mother had gone through, how she had reasoned. She couldn’t take her disaster to parents who had been stern and strict. The only truly acceptable choice to her was marriage. So she had latched onto the first guy who came her way, slept with him, lied to him, let him think the monstrous thing she was going to bear was his.

And then she got lucky, because Amy was small enough that Josef hadn’t guessed the baby wasn’t his. But somewhere along the way he had begun to wonder.

Or had he? Amy asked herself with near-clinical detachment. Perhaps instead something had happened. Blood type would have been a dead giveaway. Amy had given blood and knew she was B positive. She was willing to bet that Mom wasn’t...and neither was Josef Nilsson. Yes, that would have done it. So then came the yelling that the adults had silenced when she came into a room, the intense, hissing arguments that she could almost hear clearly through her bedroom wall at night. Only a kindergartener, she had pulled her covers over her head and huddled, not wanting to make out words.

No wonder the man she had believed to be her father had gradually lost interest in her! Looking back, she knew he had tried. Really, he had been kind. It was for her sake that he’d maintained the facade. But even then, at six and seven, at ten and twelve and fifteen, she had known something was wrong.

She had known that neither parent truly loved her.

And her brother Jakob sure as hell hadn’t.

Oh, God, she thought in shock. He knew. He must know.

He’d endured her weekend visits, and she wasn’t even his sister. No wonder he’d resented her. Despised her.

She stood in the middle of her mother’s kitchen, almost catatonic. A soft, keening sound came from her throat. Her very existence felt like an abomination. She wanted to wipe herself out.

Every time her mother looked at this child born of rape, she must have felt violated all over again.

Able to move again, Amy backed away from the table that held the baby book with all those careful notations, the album filled with pictures that reinforced how different she was. Empty stomach or not, sickness rose inside her, pushed by the huge swell of emotions she couldn’t let herself feel.

This time when she ran, it was for the shower, where she scrubbed herself over and over, not stopping even when the water ran cold.

* * *

JAKOB CIRCLED THROUGH the alley and saw Amy’s small white car parked beside the garage that he assumed held Michelle’s and Ken’s vehicles.

So she was home.

He had started calling yesterday. Her phone rang, but he always ended up at voice mail. She ignored messages. He tried email. No response. He hadn’t gotten a damn thing done at the office yesterday or today, worrying about her. By last evening, he’d been pissed. To hell with her. He’d offered his support, she didn’t want it. Her privilege. No skin off his back.

That didn’t keep him from trying to call his father. Who didn’t answer, either.

Jakob kept remembering the way Amy stared down at the women’s panties in her hand, and anger vaulted back into worry and then into something even more compelling. He was going to feel like an idiot if she was absolutely fine, didn’t need him. She might have been busy, that’s all, entertaining friends or working.

Feeling like an idiot was a risk he was willing to take.

He rang the doorbell and got no response. After an interval he rang it again, then started pounding. An old guy was out in the front yard next door, using hand clippers to nibble away at a hedge that was already trimmed to perfection. He straightened and glared. Jakob didn’t care.

“Amy,” he bellowed. “I know you’re in there. Open this door.”

He heard noises inside at last. Fumbling with the locks. Then the door opened a crack.

“What?” she snarled.

Oh, man. She didn’t look good, even though he was seeing only a slice of her face. What he could see was wan, freckles he’d hardly known she had standing out like splotches of paint.

Jakob planted a hand on the door and pushed her inexorably backward despite her obvious alarm.

“What are you doing?” she cried in panic. “I told you, I want to be alone.”

“And I’ve left you alone,” he said grimly. “Apparently, for longer than I should have.”

He slid inside the opening and felt a new jolt of shock. “You’re sick.”

Her glare was surly. “I am not.”

He bit off an expletive. “You look like hell. Damn it, Amy...!”

Her hair, that beautiful mass of red-brown curls, was a thicket of tangles, flattened on one side, kinked on the other. Amy’s eyes were huge in a face that he would swear had lost flesh in only two days. It was six in the evening and she wore wrinkled flannel pajama bottoms and a tank top that was faded and stretched out. Her arms, long and skinny, were wrapped around herself as though they were all that held her together.

The defiant stare stayed in place, but as he watched she swayed on her feet.

He swore again and reached for her. She scrambled backward.

“Don’t touch me!”

Was she afraid of him?

“You’re ready to keel over.”

“I’m not. I’m fine. I’m...” She apparently derailed. Her eyes became increasingly glassy. “I’m...”

“Sick.”

“I’m not! I’m fine, I’m...”

“Either sick or in shock.” So what if she was afraid of him? Jakob grabbed her arm. “Where’s the kitchen?”

“What?”

He made a decision and marched her toward the back of the house. She stumbled beside him but seemed to have run out of protests.

The kitchen, he saw, had been entirely remodeled at some point with white cabinets, granite countertops and a copper rack for pans. A table sat in a breakfast nook in front of French doors. He pulled out a chair and let Amy drop into it.

“When’s the last time you ate?”

Her face held no comprehension. “Ate?”

Answer enough. Jakob opened and closed cupboard doors and the refrigerator until he had the ingredients for a primitive and quick menu. Soup and sandwiches. He dumped a spicy corn chowder he liked himself into a saucepan and started it heating while he assembled cheese sandwiches and heated a small frying pan to grill them.

“You can’t make me eat,” Amy said sulkily.

“Watch me,” he told her.

“Why are you here, anyway?”

“You promised to call. I got worried.” He stirred the chowder.

“I didn’t want to talk to you.”

“Yeah, I figured that out.” A fire was burning in his belly. He kind of hoped some food would put it out. “Tough shit,” he added after a moment.

Apparently that silenced her. Her head bent and she stared down at her hands, clasped childishly on her lap.

Jakob got out bowls and plates, flipped the sandwiches and stirred the soup one more time, not once looking at Amy, but aware of her with every cell in his body. He was mad again, and self-aware enough to guess it was a cover for everything else he felt.

Finally, he dished up and set her food in front of her. “You going to tell me what you want to drink, or should I decide for you?”

Her chin shot up. “Wine.”

“Milk,” he decided, and poured them both glasses. Thank God she didn’t buy skim. He could live with two percent.

He sat down kitty-corner from her with his own sandwich and soup. Maybe it would help if they weren’t looking right at each other. “Eat,” he ordered her, and started in on his food. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her stare at the food as if she didn’t know what it was, then finally pick up the spoon. After some hesitant sips, she began to eat faster and faster until she was all but gobbling.

Good.

The meal settled him down some, too. Without a word he got up and set the coffeemaker to brewing, then sat again.

“Okay,” he said. “Now we talk.”

She’d worked up enough spirit to glare. When she opened her mouth, Jakob interrupted.

“It’s not going to do you any good to say ‘I don’t have to.’”

“I don’t understand why you care.”

He fell back on the old standby. “We’re family.”

And finally she quit fighting. The pain in her big brown eyes was so vast, his stomach clenched.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think we are. And you know it, don’t you?”

* * *

SO, WHY DO you care? she wanted to beg him again.

But maybe she didn’t want to know. Because...he was here, and whether she was willing to admit it or not, she’d needed someone. Anyone at all.

“Tell me what you learned,” he said, not addressing her accusation. There were lines on his forehead that hadn’t been there. Despite the neutral tone, she thought he wasn’t only here out of obligation.

Maybe she was kidding herself, but she was going with it for now.

“I’ll show you,” she said, after a minute. Two days ago, she had swept the manila envelope and its contents along with her baby book and the photograph album into a reusable shopping bag—Mom had a whole drawer full of them, neatly folded—and hid it at the back of the coat closet under the staircase, which she went to retrieve.

She returned to find he’d piled the dirty dishes in the sink and was pouring coffee. Amy dropped the bag with a thud in the middle of the table. She pulled out her mother’s datebook.

“Cream? Sugar?” Jakob asked.

She put in her order and he brought both mugs to the table, then retook his seat. Amy shoved the datebook toward him. “I read the whole thing. You can go right to the end. It pretty much tells the whole story.”

He looked down at it for a minute, as if reluctant, then opened it to the back. The pages for April, May and June were blank, of course; by then, the datebook had been entombed in the time capsule. He reached the page that held Michelle Cooper’s final statement, read silently.

Amy knew what it said by heart. The part about how the old me is dead. And finally, This is what happened to me at Wakefield College. This is what I choose to say: Steven Hardy raped me.

Jakob muttered an obscenity and looked up, a storm of emotions in his eyes. Anger was the only one Amy was certain she’d picked out.

“You think this—” he glanced back down at the open page of the book “—Steven Hardy is your father.” The emotions had roughened his voice, but it was also astonishingly compassionate.

“Yes.” The single word sounded so small, so stark. She couldn’t look at him anymore. Instead she gazed, as she had done most evenings since she had moved into her mother’s house, at the garden and the roses she hadn’t watered since she left for eastern Washington.

“Do you have any other evidence?”

“Yes.” She had to clear her throat. She pulled out the baby book. “I was born small enough that no one questioned Mom’s claim that I was premature. But I went through this and compared my milestones with the standard charts. If I really was premature, I should have been behind. I wasn’t. If anything, I was ahead from the very beginning. If my birth weight was evidence that I was premature, I should eventually have gained on my contemporaries, but I didn’t. The truth is, all through school I was in the bottom twenty-five percent in weight. I still am. I’m skinny.”

His gaze flicked over her and he nodded. “You’re small-boned,” he said slowly. “Slim.”

She appreciated his kindness in making skinny sound a little more appealing.

“And then there’s the family album.” She opened that next, turning pages until she found a picture taken, at a guess, not long before the divorce. All four of them were in it. She scooted the album over so he could see the picture.

He looked in silence for a long time. Without looking herself, she knew exactly what he was seeing. Not only the fact that she didn’t fit, but also the tensions that were visible despite smiles for the camera. There was something anxious on her face, bewilderment in her eyes. The adults might be smiling, but they weren’t touching. Josef’s hand lay on his son’s shoulder. Jakob’s expression was stony. Michelle stood behind Amy, but wasn’t touching her, either. There was a distinct distance between the two children, too. Body language all but shouted the news that this family was splintering.

“Not a good moment in our lives,” Jakob observed at last.

“Funny, I remember looking at the picture and not seeing that. I think I’ve been guilty of a lot of self-deception.”

“Maybe.” He waited until she had to turn her head and meet his eyes, closer to gray right now than blue. “But you don’t know, do you?”

“I do,” she said sharply.

“You’re still guessing.”

She narrowed her eyes. “But you already knew, didn’t you?”

He hesitated. “No. I heard things that made me wonder, that’s all. Remember, I wasn’t very old. Mostly, I put what I heard out of my mind.”

The slightest change of intonation in his voice there at the end suggested he was lying, although she didn’t know why he’d bother. After a minute, though, she nodded, as if in acceptance.

“You were only eight. No, I guess nine at the end.”

“Their yelling freaked me out.”

“Me, too,” she admitted. “I pulled the covers over my head at night. Sometimes the pillow, too, when they got especially loud. I knew I didn’t want to hear what they were saying. I was so scared.”

Jakob laid a hand atop hers on the table. His was big and warm and comforting. She stared down at it until, to her disappointment, he removed it.

“I didn’t like your mother,” he said gruffly, “but change is always scary for kids. I felt safe when we were a family. Sometimes I worried Dad would leave me behind if he moved out.”

“Like he did me.” Amy swallowed. “I wanted to go with him so bad.”

“I think he believed your mother needed you, that she loved you.”

She snorted. Not with a lot of authority, but still... “Sure. Right. Get real. He didn’t want me, because I wasn’t his kid. And yes, he was nice enough to keep pretending for my sake, but even then I could tell. He didn’t look at me the same. I knew, but I didn’t want to know. Now, well...” Amy shrugged. “I guess denial only takes you so far.”

Jakob sat there frowning at her. “What have you been doing the past two days? Hiding out?”

She tried a smile, even if it didn’t come off very well. “Yeah, I suppose. I felt...” A huge lump clogged her throat. Felt was past tense. Feel. I feel. “Sick,” she finally acknowledged. “I always knew that Mom...” She gave something like a laugh. “I was going to say, Mom didn’t love me. But it was worse than that. Especially when I was little. It was as if she couldn’t stand to touch me. She’d shy away from me if I tried to cuddle. I learned not to try.” Oh, that sounds pathetic. She managed a shrug. “It’s not like I didn’t survive. Maybe I’m tougher because she wasn’t touchy-feely. In all honesty, I don’t think she would have been even if I’d been a planned pregnancy. Her parents were rigid and cold.”

Jakob nodded. She’d forgotten that he had, of course, met them.

She sighed. “I’ll bet they didn’t do a lot of cuddling, either.”

Jakob’s expression was troubled. Looking at him, she felt as if a band was tightening around her chest. He was a really beautiful man, with that lean face and strong, prominent bones. His hair was disheveled, even spiky tonight. It seemed darker in this light, but the hint of stubble on his jaw glinted gold. As a child, she had so wanted them to be close. She’d taken comfort in knowing he was her brother, that however funny she looked she still shared his blood. Maybe if she had kids of her own, the Scandinavian genes would reassert themselves. Nope, she thought sadly, no such genes here. Hers were...who knew?