[Part 3 in a series.  Read Part 1 and Part 2.]

My father remarried soon after the divorce, married the woman he’d left my mother for (this piece of information my mother does not deny, nor does my stepmother, through my father denies it, vigorously).  They tried to have children in the ensuing years, but were unable.  I assumed that the child-bearing parts of their lives were over.  Fourteen years ago, when my father was 47 and my stepmother 42-ish, they had S.  The next year came H.

There was something weird about all this, something I either couldn’t put my finger on or didn’t want to question too far.  When my stepmother told me in February that she was pregnant with S., she said that the doctors had no idea how far along she was.  They did some calculations and decided that the baby would be due in early August.  S. was born in April, on Palm Sunday, and looks like she’s three months old in the picture I have of her taken on Easter.  H. was born almost exactly nine months after S.  My mother, who kept up with the story like she was watching a soap opera on TV, told me over and over that something wasn’t right about all this, that S. was not a newborn in that picture, that a 43-year-old woman could not have two babies in just under nine months with no complications.  I was shaken, horrified, infuriated.  I thought I had finished putting all my past problems with my father behind me, and now there was this.  I finally made up my mind that there was no good reason why my father would lie to me, nothing that made sense at least, that S. and H. looked a lot like their parents, and that stranger things have happened.

But then, one September, when S. was four and H. was three, my sister ran into a friend-of-a-friend whose father used to work with our father, who asked my sister what she thought about the new babies.

My father had packed up wife and kids and moved to Saudi Arabia two years before.  He and I had communicated sporadically at best when he was in Texas, and that had dramatically fallen off since his move.  My sister, who was still having crawling trouble when our parents split, had even less of a connection to him than I did.  Neither of us had heard from him in months.  And neither of us had heard anything about any new babies.

But according to this distant acquaintance, my father and stepmother either had had or were about to have twins.  Someone in the crowd of girls standing around my sister asked her, with just the right note of horror, how she could not know something like that.  D. and I, after a panicked conversation, decided not to do anything, to wait and see how long it took the story to get to us.

Two weeks later, D. ran into our stepmother’s sister’s son at school.  He asked her about the babies too.  He’d talked to my father on the phone the night before and had found out that my father and stepmother were adopting two newborn Australian girls.

This was in October.  In early November I finally got a letter from my father, announcing the arrival of R. and R., born in September.  They weren’t sure it could happen, medically speaking, he said, so they hadn’t told anyone.  But the babies and my stepmother were doing fine.  No mention of Australia.  No mention of adoption.  No real mention of my stepmother actually giving birth, though that was the implication.

A few days later, my stepfather’s father died.  At his funeral, a woman who had worked with my father before he left my mother came up and asked me whether the babies were girls or boys.  “He told us she was expecting last time he was in town,” she said, “but I never found out how it turned out.”

I spoke to my father briefly at Christmas that year, and didn’t mention any of this.  I didn’t tell him how furious I was that he did tell his colleagues about the impending babies, that he did tell his in-laws, but that he simply failed to tell his daughters.  I didn’t tell him how much it upset me that I had to question everything he said, that there were always multiple stories surrounding everything he did, that I couldn’t even be sure that his four youngest daughters were his children by blood.  I didn’t tell him how hurt I was that I was clearly not part of his family, and hadn’t been for years.  I just lied and told him that I was in the middle of a letter to him, a letter in which I intended to make all of my feelings clear, a letter that ten years later I still haven’t written.

I’ve never met R. and R., who I think are now ten, and I haven’t seen S. or H. since they were in diapers.  Who they are—much less who my father is—is something that, as it turns out, I’ll likely never know.

[Part 2 in a series.  Part 1 is here.]

I have erased my father from my memory.  Or memories.  My mother tells me that when I was a child, quite young, he was the most important thing in my life, and I in his.  We were devoted to one another.  I have no memory of any of this.  It says horrible pop-psychology things about me, I’m sure, but all I remember is being left.  There are big black holes in the past where my father used to be, like he’s been cut out of all my mental photographs.

But then, my memory plays tricks on me.  I know this.  I remember things that can’t possibly have happened.  Things that my mother denies.

There are the crawling lessons, for instance.  I remember quite definitely that my sister had a very hard time learning to crawl.  Many of the particulars escape me, though, and when I last asked my mother about this incident, she denied it entirely, denied that D. had ever faltered in her hands-and-knees coordination.  But like the few other flashes of my childhood that I retain, I take it as real, despite the fact that it doesn’t fit in with everything else I know.

D. couldn’t, or wouldn’t crawl.  Take that as a beginning.  Mom was worried about this, afraid that if D. walked before she crawled, it would produce some insurmountable developmental disorder.  What this specifically boded for a child, I’m still not sure.  I was six or seven at the time, and I was convinced that walking before she crawled would leave her permanently confused, without any foundational support.

This was the year that we went to New Jersey for Christmas.  My parents were in the beginning stages of what was ultimately a very bitter divorce, and Mom had brought my sister and me to stay with my aunt for the holidays.  She was determined to get my sister to crawl before the trip was over.

Which is where the memory begins to fall apart, as all of my memories eventually seem to.  My sister was born on October 2, 1973.  If this was Christmas 1974, my sister had greater problems than that potential walking-before-crawling confusion.  If this was Christmas 1973… well, why would my mother be worried about a three-month-old child who wasn’t crawling yet?

Somehow two memories have gotten intertwined in my head.  Maybe this was the following summer, during our usual visit.  Maybe that Christmas passed uneventfully, except for the absence of my father.  I can’t speculate too far on the actual events surrounding the crawling lessons.  There’s no one to compare notes with since no one else remembers it at all.  I have no choice but to treat the memory as whole and true, if contradictory.

I sat watching as my aunt and my mother crawled around on the floor, my pudgy little sister looking on bewilderedly.  They tried everything.  At one point, my mother had my sister by the wrists and my aunt had her by the ankles, and they’d alternate picking them up and putting them down, moving her around the room, hoping she’d get the idea.  D. went along with it, but once they’d let go and sit back, waiting to see if she’d do it on her own… nothing.  She’d sit there on her hands and knees, rocking back and forth slightly as if revving her engines, but she wouldn’t go anywhere.

Finally, either my aunt or my mother (I have no memory-sense as to which, and if I did, I’m not sure I could trust it) bought a mouse.  A small grey wind-up mouse, complete with long felt tail.  I don’t remember how it was introduced, whether they let her see it or touch it or anything at first.  But then my aunt or my mother, whichever it was, wound up the mouse and let it go, right in front of my sister.  She took off like a shot, hands and knees flying, chasing after the mouse.

That’s the moment I remember, the mouse skittering along the floor and my sister trying to catch it.  I also remember thinking that she just hadn’t had anywhere important to go before that.

The rest is too slap-stick, too colored by my later knowledge of my mother, loving and wildly attentive, but always much too concerned about precisely the wrong thing.  It’s too filled-in, as though my memory is creating a patch-job, hoping that I won’t notice the mismatched fabric and the holes underneath.

[Part 1 in a series.  Read Part 2 and Part 3.]

While in Prague this summer, I got the following email message:

From:  [DLB]@[company].com
Subject: [GF]’s Address & Phone Number
Date: June 5, 2003 1:53:35 PM PDT

If this is repeat information, please forgive me.

If you would like to stay in touch with [GF], you may
contact him at the following address and number:

[GF]
[address deleted]
[suburb of Salt Lake City], Utah [zip]
[phone number deleted]

Thank you and God Bless.

In Him, Sincerely,
[DLB]
[company]
[phone number]

The shortest distance between a problem and a solution is the distance between your knees and the floor….

I have no idea who DLB is.  GF, on the other hand, is my father.
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