Not This Time
22
It’s All Different
“THERE’S A MR. SCOVAL here to see you,” Renata said. I still used the South Minneapolis office at least two days a week. I was in charge of all Loring Properties sales and couldn’t just sit at The Mill every day. I usually came into this office in the morning on the days I had class in the afternoon. It was my last semester and I was feeling like I would actually get a degree this spring. Emily was in preschool at a Unitarian Church in our neighborhood. I volunteered there one afternoon a week, as well. “He says he is an attorney from Fargo.”
The color drained from my face. Scoval. I remembered the name now. He was the attorney who handled my parents’ estate and turned everything over to my husband. But my parents had died in an auto accident over two years ago, hadn’t they? Willa was just thirty months old.
“Send him in,” I said as neutrally as I could. This was the first time that anything from my former life had intruded on this life. I’d cut all ties to Fargo. No one knew I was here.
Scoval was younger than I remembered. Late thirties, I guessed. When I’d met him at the reading of my parents’ will, I remembered him as being much older. I realized it was my perception that had changed. In my former life, I always felt young and inexperienced until I started selling real estate. Even then, I fought feelings of insecurity in what I was doing. In this life, I was young, but had experience. I worked as an equal with two men who were this guy’s age or older. That made him somehow less threatening.
We greeted each other and he sat opposite me. Unlike Jim, I had found that a desk between me and my guests could be beneficial.
“I have the unfortunate and sad responsibility to inform you of your mother’s passing,” he intoned.
“My mother? Not my father, too?”
“Oh, shit,” he muttered. “I take it you were unaware that your father was killed in an auto accident almost three years ago. Your mother passed from cancer just six weeks ago. I’m sorry it has taken this long to let you know, but we had to do some investigation before we were able to track you down.”
It couldn’t be right. My parents had both been killed in that accident. But he was telling me that only my father had died. This was crazy. I felt things shifting. My sense of reality. My memories of another life. The bitterness and anger I’d felt toward my parents as a teen and had carried with me into this new life.
I’d argued with her that day. Fought. It was Sunday morning and Willa was fussy with a mild fever. Mother insisted that she was taking Willa to church even if I was rotting in hell. I’d told her exactly what I thought of her and her church. My father heard me and slapped me. Even then he wouldn’t speak to me. I ran downstairs and locked Willa and myself into my room. My mother pounded on the door, but I barricaded myself inside. Eventually, they left.
They never returned.
As soon as I figured my parents were in church, I unblocked my door and took Willa to the kitchen to make her soup. The ringing doorbell startled me. I almost ran back to the basement apartment, but I knew my parents wouldn’t be ringing the bell. Even Jesse’s mother usually just walked in. The two officers at the door gave me the words of death.
We’d had a freezing rain. The streets were covered in ice. Witnesses said they saw Dad’s brake lights but the car had slid right into the intersection and the path of a semi that couldn’t stop either. It was a low-speed collision of two vehicles sliding toward each other with no control. But the impact had been enough to kill both my parents instantly. That’s what the police had said when they came to the door.
I tried to hide my elation. What a demon child I must be to be happy my parents were dead. But I was. Ding-dong, the witch is dead. My head was immediately filled with plans to divorce Jesse, sell the house and move far away. Those plans, of course, were dashed when I found that my parents had left him their house, cars, and accounts.
What Scoval had just said blanked my memories; they were inconsistent with reality. I had to find my way back to how it was before. I felt myself getting dizzy as I stood and then the world spun and went dark.
I pulled myself together by dinner time. Spring Semester had just started at the U and I wasn’t about to leave to go to Fargo Fucking North Dakota. I told Scoval I’d come up during spring break in March. He agreed to maintain the house until I got there to dispose of it and take control of the rest of the estate. Now that I’d been found, he had to file estate tax reports. At least it wouldn’t affect my taxes for ’96. I had time to figure out a strategy for this year after I found out what the damages were. I later learned that the inheritance wouldn’t affect my taxes for any year, since any estate tax was supposed to be paid from the estate, and the residue was not treated as income to me.
I cut class in the afternoon and picked up Emily from preschool. She had a lot to say about counting. I listened to her count to twenty and then start over because she couldn’t remember what came after teenses. We went to the grocery store on Xerxes and then walked home in the freezing cold. I made her hot chocolate and gave her a cookie as we warmed up and I started dinner for my family.
“What making, Mommy?”
“Comfort food, baby,” I answered. “Meatloaf and baked potatoes. You like that.”
“No icky beans,” she declared.
“Okay. How about raw veggies and ranch dressing?”
“Yum!”
I made up the meatloaf and put it in the oven with the potatoes. There was time to sit with Emily on the sofa and read. Bruce had brought an entire set of Mother West Wind stories when he moved in with us. He said they’d been his favorites when he was little. Emily had grown to love them and we were well into our second time through the series. She knew the stories so well that when I started a story, she would tell it to me before I could continue. Then she would listen to make sure she had it right as I read about Grandfather Frog and the Merry Little Breezes. I was amazed that stories so old still held up so well, though occasionally I corrected something I felt was a little too socially unacceptable.
We were still reading when Lily came in from work. She sat with us after she’d opened a bottle of wine. Bruce joined us about half an hour later, complaining about the traffic on 35E tonight. We put dinner on the table and everyone exclaimed over how good the meatloaf was.
“Mommy sad,” Emily interjected into our conversation about the day. “I keep her happy today.” Bruce and Lily stopped in mid-bite and looked at me. I tried to keep looking at my plate, but suddenly there were splashes of water on it and I realized I was crying.
“Excuse me,” I said. I scooted away from the table and ran to the bedroom.
I still had the letter clutched in my hand when my family surrounded me and Emily wormed her way into my arms. I let Bruce pull it out of my hand and read it silently with Lily.
So, they’ve found you. I refused to look for you after your father died. Your note was so clear. I realized what a terrible parent—what a terrible person—I was. I’m afraid your father never understood that. After his ‘accident,’ I even sympathized with how much you must have hated us—how hypocritical we were. In case you ever run into your friend Marcie, you should know that her mother was killed in the same accident. The only good thing I can think about her is that she bit the bastard’s dick off when he hit the bridge abutment.
I understand why you turned your back on us and felt you had to run away. We were hypocrites, more concerned with how people in the church thought of us than how things really were. If you hadn’t left, it wouldn’t have improved.
I’m writing this after having been told that I won’t recover from this cancer that is eating me. But I’m giving instructions to Eric Scoval that he is not to try to find you or deliver this letter until after I am dead. I don’t want you to feel an obligation to comfort me when I was so poor at protecting and comforting you.
There isn’t really much else I can tell you, except this. One day, God may grant you a child. You will know the moment you hold her—or him—in your arms that there is nothing more precious in the world. Don’t ever lose sight of that fact like I did. Treasure your child. Do as I say, not as I did. I have never regretted anything more than losing you.
Blessings on you, my precious daughter.
Love,
Mom
It took a lot of convincing over the next several days, but eventually, Bruce and Lily agreed that I needed to go to Fargo alone. That included leaving my precious preschooler in their care while I was gone. It wasn’t like either one of them hadn’t taken care of Emily before, but I’d never been away from her overnight. I was leaving her in the care of the two people I trusted most in the world and I still worried myself sick about it for two months.
I finally convinced them with the same argument they’d used with me. While we hadn’t been secretive with the neighbors about our relationship, Lily and Bruce both still maintained an aura of secrecy and privacy in their own workplaces. Bruce had been living with us for four years and neither Lily nor I had met his parents. Lily and I had seen her former lover Nancy at a lesbian bar one night and rather than talk to her, we left and never went back. Discrimination based on personal lifestyle was still very much a reality, even in liberal Minneapolis. I knew it would get better, but even twenty years from now states would be fighting against equal rights based on gender and sexual preference. I simply explained to them that I didn’t want anyone back in my hometown to know about where I lived, what I was doing, or who I was with. Especially about Emily.
I wasn’t really gossip-worthy. I was sure there were others from my graduating class who left and didn’t come back. It was almost six years ago. But if my dad slammed his car into a bridge abutment while Marcie’s mom had her lips wrapped around his dick, the family would be of interest and by extension, me. I hoped to get into town, give everything in the house away, put it up for sale, and get out before anyone actually knew I was there. No matter how my mother said she had changed after I left, I hadn’t. The parents and life I’d known before were what existed in my memories. I was sorry for the woman who had died of cancer, alone in a hospital. Cancer sucks. Being alone sucks. I knew that. But that wasn’t a woman I was related to.
What bothered me was the whole butterfly effect thing. When I was in high school, it was something stoners talked about in deep philosophical discussions. A butterfly bats its wings in South America and six months later, there’s a typhoon in the Philippines. It was all very interesting until I had a baby and didn’t have time to think about that shit.
Had my leaving caused my father to be unfaithful? Caused my mother to recognize the kind of person she was? Caused her cancer? What had become of Jesse and his mother? Of Allen? Had my actions really changed the course of history? Maybe there wouldn’t be a market crash or airplanes flying into the Twin Towers.
There was one thing just like last time. I had a daughter—a whole family—and I didn’t have time to masturbate my mind with philosophical questions. I was no Jimmy Stewart. Ending my former wonderful life wouldn’t send North Dakota into depression.
I went to Fargo in March.
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